Finding Happiness

In the econ literature there is a pretty well known U shaped relationship between age and happiness, with happiness being at its lowest around middle age. So I thought that meant my happiness had nowhere to go but up.

It turns out that it is probably not true.

The inclusion of the usual socio-economic variables in a cross-section leads to a U-shape in age that results from indirectly-age-related reverse causality. Putting it simply: good things, like getting a job and getting married, appear to happen to middle aged individuals who were already happy. . . . The found effect of age in fixed-effect regressions is simply too large and too out of line with everything else we know to be believable. The difference between first-time respondents and stayers and between the number of years someone stays in the panel doesn't allow for explanations based on fixed traits or observables. There has to be either a problem on the left-hand side (i.e. the measurement of happiness over the life of a panel) or on the right-hand side (selection on time-varying unobservables).

But maybe I should just listen to Penelope Trunk and stop trying to be happy. Of course maybe I shouldn't take her advice, even if I wouldn't mind having sex with her - it would be different. Speaking of sex, I hear that helps improve happiness.

Previous musings on happiness.

Happiness

Today means so little for your future happiness. Mostly because we are bad at predicting our future happiness. Here is a snippet from PT:

The evidence is pretty clear, though, that big positive and negative events don't have an enormous impact on people's happiness. In a 1998 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dan Gilbert, Tim Wilson, and their colleagues found that college faculty being evaluated for tenure believed they would be quite unhappy if they were denied tenure. Several months after their tenure decision, though, college faculty who had been denied tenure were no less happy than those who had gotten tenure.

This finding, that we believe future positive and negative events have a bigger impact on our future happiness than they do, is called an affective forecasting error. One thing about these errors that is not well understood: Why don't they go away over time? We all have experience with these errors. As a kid, I remember toys that I really wanted because I had seen them in a catalog. When I actually got one of those toys, though, it was never quite the life-changing experience I expected. So, why don't examples like this get rid of affective forecasting errors?

This question was explored in a November 2010 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology by Tom Meyvis, Rebecca Ratner, and Jonathan Levav.

These researchers find that people have difficulty remembering their initial prediction for how they would feel after a positive or negative event. In one study, they asked voters in the 2008 election how they would feel a week after the election if Barack Obama won. Supporters of John McCain rated that they would be quite unhappy. A week after the election, these same voters were contacted again and asked how happy they were. They were also asked to recall how happy they said they would be before the election. These voters were significantly happier than they predicted they would be (that is the affective forecasting error). They also remembered their prediction as being less extreme than it was. That is, they did not remember predicting that they would be very unhappy.

The researchers demonstrated that this poor memory for previous predictions makes it hard for people to learn to predict better in the future. In this study, some people were reminded of their initial prediction, and those people who were reminded of what they actually predicted showed smaller affective forecasting errors in the future.

Mastering Skills

From my new favorite blog, "barking up the wrong tree" we have this gem about the importance of experiencing stress while trying to improve ones competency:

Contrary to previous research, the study found that people who engage in behaviors that increase competency, for example at work, school or the gym, experience decreased happiness in the moment, lower levels of enjoyment and higher levels of momentary stress. Despite the negative effects felt on an hourly basis, participants reported that these same activities made them feel happy and satisfied when they looked back on their day as a whole. This surprising find suggests that in the process of becoming proficient at something, individuals may need to endure temporary stress to reap the happiness benefits associated with increased competency.

I think this explains why I'm so frustrated with how bad I suck at swimming right now. But it looks like there is a happiness payoff around the corner.

Yet More Happiness Research

The blogs are a flurry with happiness research of late. Here is another link on how to make yourself happy.

The authors hypothesized that thinking about the absence of a positive event from one's life would improve affective states more than thinking about the presence of a positive event

So if you want to be happy, don't think about how you met the love of your life, think about what life would be like had you not met them.

Update: Penelope thinks she overemphasizes happiness and has decided to dump it as a topic for posting. However if you read her here, you might get happy.

Other things you didn't know about happiness research here.

Education and Happiness

What makes you happy? The study of happiness is really picking up in economics. See for example, here and here. The NYT Economix blog recently had a post on the correlation between education and happiness.

But the variable they looked at that showed the strongest relationship with happiness was “human capital,” measured as the share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher:

I think it probably works something like this. Education pushes ones intellectual maturity to a point where they realize and enjoy the complexity and diversity in the world. They understand happiness to be something different than those without the benefits of more education. The are happy because they are interesting and interested in the world around them, even if they can't control it or understand it. It isn't the trade-off that Penelope Trunk suggests. Of course since this is only a bivariate correlation, education likely also has effects through the other channels, like increases in income, marriage, better sex lives, etc.