If you're happy and you know it -- think again
UNNATI GANDHI
Globe and Mail Update
Think you would be happier if you were richer? Think again.
Princeton University researchers have found that the link between a higher income and an elevated sense of well-being is greatly exaggerated and mostly an illusion.
In fact, economist Alan Krueger and psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics Daniel Kahneman have found, using a newly developed analytical technique, that people with above-average incomes do not necessarily spend more time doing things they enjoy.
“Happiness is inherently a subjective concept. There are different dimensions to it and there are different ways people view their lives as a whole,” said Prof. Krueger, also a research chair at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. “We're trying to get at the way people actually spend their time day to day.”
Until now, most surveys on happiness asked how people felt about their overall well-being. The answers were almost always “vast exaggerations.”
What the Princeton researchers and their colleagues found using the “Day Reconstruction Method” was that when it came to how people experienced the moment-to-moment experiences in their daily lives, income was hardly a factor. Their method creates an “enjoyment scale” requiring people to record the previous day's activities in a short diary form and describe the feelings they attributed to them.
“People, regardless of their income, are happier when they're socializing than when they're doing work around the house. They're happier when they're doing active leisure-type activities than when they're watching TV.” What Prof. Krueger found surprising was that those with higher incomes tended to devote more of their free time to tasks involving tension and stress — such as work, shopping, childcare and exercise.
In the article to be published in today's issue of the journal Science, the authors write that if people continue to think a higher income will make them happier, it may lead to “a misallocation of time,” with people going to such lengths as accepting longer commutes (among the worst moments of the day, Prof. Krueger notes) for higher-paying jobs and sacrificing time spent socializing with friends (among the best moments of the day).
Their findings build on their efforts to develop an alternative standard of gauging the well-being of individuals and of society, moving away from the current benchmark of using gross domestic product to measure a population's overall life-satisfaction.
People's misperceptions that income has a strong effect on happiness comes down to how survey questions are asked, Prof. Krueger said. When people are asked how happy they are in general, their answers are skewed depending on what they are thinking about at that moment, or something they are prompted to think about, like income.
In an earlier experiment testing this “focusing illusion,” researchers asked people to describe their overall happiness level in life and then switched topics, asking how many dates they had gone on in the past month. Their answers showed little correlation. But when the questions were asked in reverse order to a second group, the link between their love life and how happy they were was much stronger. In other groups, the results were similar when researchers asked about marriage, health, and income.
“One conclusion from this research is that people do not know how happy or satisfied they are with their life in the way they know their height or telephone number,” the article reads. “Nothing in life is quite as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”
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