The secret of happiness (research)

Researched by: Rachel John & Nirmal Bhansali

A brief history of happiness research

For centuries, happiness was viewed as an abstraction—best left to philosophers. Then came modern psychology—which at first was more interested in why human beings were miserable—rather than what would make them happy. Think: Sigmund Freud who famously remarked that he hoped to transform “hysterical misery into common unhappiness.” But in the early 60s, humanistic and existential psychology redefined the purpose of the field—to “reaching one’s innate potential and creating meaning in one’s life.”

Birth of ‘positive psychology’: Then it was just a short jump to happiness research—whose origins can be traced back to a precise historical moment in 1998. That’s when Martin Seligman was appointed as the president of the American Psychological Association. The father of ‘positive psychology’ was interested in the “new science of human strengths”—with the emphasis on ‘science’:

The new sub-discipline would aim to be a “science of positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions,” seeking to “improve quality of life and prevent pathologies that arise when life is barren and meaningless.”

Seligman helped place the study of happiness “squarely at the centre of psychology research and theory.”

The happiness industry: Soon, the science of happiness was no longer the monopoly of psychologists—as economists and neuroscientists joined the party. Social psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains:

All these disciplines have distinct but intersecting interests: Psychologists want to understand what people feel, economists want to know what people value, and neuroscientists want to know how people’s brains respond to rewards. Having three separate disciplines all interested in a single topic has put that topic on the scientific map. 

Papers on happiness are now published in leading scientific journals. Behavioural economists like Daniel Kahneman win Nobel prizes. And policymakers are rushing to figure out how to improve their country’s ranking on the World Happiness Report. That doesn’t include the thousands of books churned out by self-help gurus and wellness mavens. All of them are engaged in the gargantuan task of answering that simple question: what makes us happy?

Measuring happiness: When happiness research became a ‘science’, we also developed quantifiable ways to measure it. The most common way to collect data is self-reporting—i.e surveys that map qualitative information like feelings onto quantifiable scales of 1 to 10 etc. Of course, the data is only as accurate as its participants’ answers. Human beings are notoriously nostalgic about how happy we were in the past—and optimistic about how happy we will be in the future. Some studies show that even stumbling on a teeny bit of cash before a survey can inflate our happiness assessments. 

But experts argue surveys are “very good approximations of their [people’s] experiences, and they make it possible for us to see the world through their eyes.” As Gilbert puts it:

People may not be able to tell us how happy they were yesterday or how happy they will be tomorrow, but they can tell us how they’re feeling at the moment we ask them. “How are you?” may be the world’s most frequently asked question, and nobody’s stumped by it.

Biological measures of happiness: It may be tempting to think that medical data is far more reliable than self-assessments of deluded human beings. Scientists, for example, have looked for biological markers that signify happiness—but it has mostly proved a dead end. Turns out it’s easier to look for indicators of depression—say, serotonin levels—than of happiness. No, high levels of serotonin does not mean you are happy.

Enter, the smartphone: Now that we are conveniently attached to devices that know everything about us, researchers can take self-surveys to the next level. Like Matt Killingsworth whose research project called ‘Track Your Happiness’ asks 15,000 people in 83 countries to report their emotional states in real time:

I created an iPhone web app that queries users at random intervals, asking them about their mood (respondents slide a button along a scale that ranges from “very bad” to “very good”), what they are doing (they can select from 22 options including commuting, working, exercising, and eating), and factors such as their level of productivity, the nature of their environment, the amount and quality of their sleep, and their social interactions. Since 2009 I have collected more than half a million data points—making this, to my knowledge, the first-ever large-scale study of happiness in daily life.

In other words, it’s only a matter of time before someone develops an app that fires instructions on how to be happy every day, all the time.

The Harvard study of happiness

The basic deets: Most happiness research is typically a snapshot of a moment in history. This, however, is the world’s longest running study on happiness—dating back to 1938. Since then, its researchers have been surveying the same set of participants as they went through different stages in their lives. And its transformation over the decades has mirrored the evolution of the field itself—for better and worse.

Origin story: The study began under the aegis of a physician Arlie Bock—who was in charge of health services at Harvard. He was convinced that medical research “paid too much attention to sick people”—and “could never shed light on the urgent question of how, on the whole, to live well.” So he decided to sign up 268 “normal” male students—who could “paddle their own canoe” and reveal the factors that add up to “successful living.” 

In other words, Bock assumed these elite young men would achieve happiness—and tracking them would reveal their secret. Later—when some ended up as schizophrenics or alcoholics—he would say: “They were normal when I picked them. It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up.”

The participants: This first batch of participants were all affluent white males— including John F Kennedy—whose records have since been sealed. So it isn’t surprising that the data failed to produce any useful insights for decades. In the 1970s, the study’s director tracked down 456 poor inner city kids in Boston who had participated in a parallel study since 1939—and integrated them into his pool. Since then, the current director Robert Waldinger has expanded the participant profile to include the wives and kids of the original participants—many of whom are now dead.

Point to note: Most media coverage of the study often skips over just how unrepresentative it remains—in terms of race, gender, ethnicity and class. But behavioural psychologists insist that these factors are less important when it comes to happiness. Waldinger says: “So much of this is about the basic human experience, which does not change.” We’ll take a closer look at that claim in part two.

The methodology: As you may suspect, no study that spans 85 years will have a single, consistent methodology. In the 1930s, the techniques reflected the flawed assumptions of the era—measuring skulls and brow ridges, even analysing handwriting. Today, researchers draw blood for DNA testing and put participants into MRI scanners to examine organs and tissues. The methods—and the data they measure—have radically changed in pace with the field of human psychology. 

Why it still matters: Over the course of decades, the study itself was valuable in debunking the many myths of psychiatry—e.g, the role of genetics or the idea that personalities are “set like plaster” by age 30. But above all, the sheer length of the study has made it extremely valuable:

The authority of these findings stems in large part from the rarity of the source. Few longitudinal studies survive in good health for whole lifetimes, because funding runs dry and the participants drift away. [The study’s director] managed, drawing on federal grants and private gifts, to finance surveys every two years, physicals every five years, and interviews every 15 years.

The bottomline: What makes the Harvard study remarkable is that its conclusions have remained consistent—despite vast changes in how we view and measure happiness. Since the 1970s, the secret of a good life has remained exactly the same: relationships. In the second part, we’ll look at its findings in greater detail—and place them in context of other studies. We’ll also look at the various critiques of happiness research as a field.

Reading list

The Guardian and the Harvard Gazette have the best overviews of the study. For a deep dive into its raw data and findings, read this fascinating Atlantic essay. This interview with Daniel Gilbert in the Harvard Business Review is very useful in laying out the foundation of happiness research.