Marrying satisfaction with happiness

Shawn Grover and John Helliwell have just written a paper that claims to say something about marriage and happiness. Just about all the news coverage  of this research has featured headlines like "Married People Are Happier People" or "Definitive Proof That Marriage, Especially To Your Best Friend, Makes You Happier."

The paper is just one of the latest contributions to the academic sub-discipline of happiness studies. Serious people study happiness, and they aim to have a serious impact on public policy, with publications like the  World Happiness Reports. 

Just one  thing: most of this research is about something other than happiness. A good chunk of it is about "satisfaction". Much of the rest is about quality of life. The Grover-Helliwell paper, for example, is partly based on data from questions such as “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?” or "How dissatisfied or satisfied are you with your life overall".

Satisfied. Not happy.

The Grover-Helliwell paper also uses data based on responses to a "life ladder" question. Respondents were asked “to evaluate the quality of their lives on an 11-point ladder scale running from 0 to 10, with the bottom rung of the ladder (0) being the worst possible life for them and 10 being the best possible”. 

Quality of life. Not happiness.

If researchers are interested in what makes people happy, why don't they actually study happiness, rather than life satisfaction or quality of life? Conversely, if what really matters is life satisfaction, why confuse journalists by even mentioning the word happiness at all? 

Jeffrey Sachs, John Helliwell and Richard Layard address some of these questions in the 2013 World Happiness Report. In the introduction to the report, Sachs argues there are two types of happiness. As he puts it:

Affective happiness captures the day-to-day joys of friendship, time with family, and sex, or the downsides of long work commutes and sessions with one’s boss. Evaluative happiness measures very different dimensions of life, those that lead to overall satisfaction or frustration with one’s place in society.

As Helliwell goes on to note (in chapter 1, co-authored with Shun Wang), affective happiness is measured with questions such as, "“How happy are you now?" Questions such as “How happy are you with your life as a whole these days?” measure evaluative happiness.

The determinants of these types of happiness are quite different. People's answers to "how happy are you now?" tend to be very much shaped by day-to-day events, whereas life-as-a-whole evaluations respond more to things like income and material circumstances. As the 2013 World Happiness Report puts it "life evaluations are more closely determined by life circumstances than are emotions."

Translation: if you try to explain people's emotions - whether or not they're feeling happy or not right now - using things like marital status and income - it's hard to find a strong statistical relationship. It's much easier to find a statistical relationship between evaluative happiness and income or marital status. That's why people do it. Data on people's emotional states is out there. The reason it's not used more often in economic research is that it's relatively hard to explain using standard economic variables. [Updated.]

Helliwell presents evidence suggesting that people's answers to evaluative, life-as-a-whole happiness questions are very similar to the responses to life satisfaction questions. Therefore he and his co-authors seem to feel that it is acceptable to use the terms satisfaction and happiness interchangeably.

It's not.

I spend a lot of my time trying to persuade students to read survey questions, report data carefully, and interpret results accurately. Survey data about life satisfaction tells us about life satisfaction. Survey data about quality of life tells us about quality of life. Both probably tell us something about evaluative happiness. But they do not speak to affective happiness - the flashes of pure joy that make life worth living. Thus using the word "happiness" to describe the results of research on "satisfaction" is confusing. But how can I hope to persuade students to avoid using the word happiness to describe satisfaction when they see some of Canada's leading economists doing so?  

Economists have a special responsibility to report data accurately, because this is our comparative advantage. Journalists can't be expected to know that, when Grover and Helliwell say happiness, they mean evaluative happiness and not affective happiness. It would be so much clearer to say satisfaction. So why didn't Helliwell and Grover just ditch the happiness talk entirely?

One possible explanation is that Grover and Helliwell knew, by putting happiness in the title of their paper, they would get more media play. The average journalist, I suspect, would figure it hardly surprising that marriage leads to satisfaction. There's even a phrase to describe self-satisfied happily wed types: "smug marrieds". After all, satisfaction is basically about having one's wants and desires met, and as I've pointed out before, marriage is a pretty good way of satisfying one's basic needs.

But I don't think John Helliwell is deliberately trying to stir up media interest (I don't know Shawn Grover, so feel less comfortable speculating about his intentions). I've known John Helliwell for years, and he's always struck me as a well-intentioned scholar who is trying to make the world a better place. I think he believes his research findings - that marriage leads to greater life satisfaction (for a contrary view, see here, or Andrew Clark's research e.g. here).  I think he believes it's better for people to seek long-term life satisfaction than short-term emotional highs - that's why he labels the former "happiness". If he can persuade people and governments that marriage makes people happy - so more people get married and stay married - he figures he will be doing good [updated].

This is where John and I part company. I think I'm less paternalistic than John is. I believe that people aren't all that stupid. They know the difference between happiness and satisfaction, between emotions and reasoned thought. They reveal their preferences between the two every time they click on a link to something that promises to make them happier. 

The honest thing to do - indeed the right thing to do - is to report research results as clearly and accurately as possible, and let people make of them what they will.

Comments

[Joseph Savon]

Affective happiness as described herein is a shining example of the Uncertainty Principle: measuring it changes the value. Imagine a white coat with a clipboard bursting into the bedroom; "Excuse me, is either of you happy now?

[Joseph Savon]

Studying happiness is all very good fun, but perhaps the effort would be better directed toward human misery, which, besides being much more important, is certainly easier to quantify: infant mortality, life expectancy, malnutrition, fecal coliform in water, murder rate, days/month with incoming ordnance... the list goes on

[Jim Sentance]

So the takeaway here sounds like marriage doesn't necessarily mean happiness?

Along these lines, you should read an obscure little book by G.B. Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

[Frances Woolley]

Joseph - "but perhaps the effort would be better directed toward human misery"

Here's a couple of reasons why it's a good idea not to limit the focus of public policy to alleviation of misery. First, it makes it easy to ignore first world problems - to reason that, if people aren't malnourished, and the infant mortality rate is low, then there's no need for public policy interventions to improve the quality of people's lives. Not true. Good policy still has a role to play in making people's lives better.

Second, people have been trying to reduce infant mortality and increase life expectancy for decades. There's political value in framing the issues in a new and more positive way - people can start to feel jaded struggling with the same old problems; happiness research is something new(er).

Jim, thanks.

[Lord]

Happiness seems like something that has its limits. Being perpetually ecstatic sounds like a mental problem or drug addiction. Even neutral could be quite happy, and memories of recent happiness and expectations of future happiness could seem to affect it for both better or worse. I wonder if unhappiness may be better starting point, each being unhappy in their own way.

[Donald A. Coffin]

An onteresting sidelight (although it may be paywalled) at History Today:
http://historytoday.com/sandie-mchugh/changing-nature-happiness

[Avon Barksdale]

Frances,

The authors are careful in their definitions. They use the word “happiness” in a technical sense which the authors explain. While the word “happiness” might have a variety of colloquial uses, this state of affairs is no different than how economists use technical words like “efficient” or “affordable” different from everyday parlance. Physicists know that electrons do not literally spin, and mathematicians know that monstrous moonshine has nothing to do with massive illicit distilling, but they nevertheless use these terms to convey a specific meaning.

You say, “I think I'm less paternalistic than John is.” Really? You say in your comments, “First, it makes it easy to ignore first world problems,...then there's no need for public policy interventions to improve the quality of people's lives. Not true. Good policy still has a role to play in making people's lives better.” Hmmmm..., making people's lives better. At whose expense? Under whose definition of better? Who decides how much Pareto optimality to sacrifice in the quest for “better lives”? Sounds pretty paternalistic to me, just of a different sort. We are way beyond, “hey, let's just all chip in for public goods”.

[Patrick]

"Sounds pretty paternalistic to me"

Sounds like a libertarian troll to me. But maybe I'm just grumpy 'cause I had to change a burnt out headlight (requires removing the air filter box and scraping knuckles in tight corners) in -20C.

[Min]

First, let me say that I agree with you about reading survey questions carefully. Small changes in wording can make a huge difference in responses, even when they do not seem to change the meaning of the question much, if at all. Also, when you deal with pollster surveys, there is a lot to criticize. I remember once looking at some political survey questions, and it was possible to predict which alternative would get the higher rate of agreement by simply counting the number of words in the question. The longer alternative elicited higher agreement. (As I had expected. ;))

Second, the word "happiness" is ambiguous in the vernacular. I, for one, interpret it in the context of marriage and happiness pretty much as the authors intended. Happiness means something different when you ask if marriage makes you happy than when you ask if chocolate makes you happy. At the same time I am not, err, happy when social scientists appropriate ordinary words and assign them a technical meaning that is close to the vernacular. "Action" in physics does not on its face have much to do with "action" in the vernacular. Nor does "energy". There is not much chance of confusion. But "happiness" is likely to be misunderstood, if it is used as a technical term. You can even get arguments about what happiness means when someone insists that the technical meaning is the only correct meaning.

[Shangwen]

Bella DePaulo's article in Psychology Today (saying there are numerous countries where single people are happier) raises an interesting question: what if you live in a society where, on average, the institution of marriage is unlikely to be satisfying? What if you live in a place like China where single people over 27 are subjected to routine private and public shaming?

Perhaps the research, if accurate, says that Western countries have managed to craft a relatively successful institution by making it more appealing to educated people with above-average incomes. When marriage rates among lower-SES groups are falling (as in the US), it can only lead to having the institution populated more by those with plenty of other things in their favor. Perhaps a study on the impact of knowing a good interior designer on happiness would yield a similar result.

On the other point of happiness versus satisfaction, there are certainly lots of people with few material complaints and decent health who would say their lives are unfulfilling. Surely there's a compelling case for economists to measure to what extent people believe they have made the best of their lives and their abilities.

[Vicki Larson]

Well, it's clear that marriage doesn't make everyone happy, as two-thirds of all divorces are requested by women (http://bit.ly/1BJn1aw). many it just makes us happy for a while. According to sociologist and author Pepper Schwartz, 53 percent of U.S. women aged 18 an older are single and many may stay that way for good. Why? She suggests that marriage just isn’t a good deal anymore for women, especially now that we have so many options (http://bit.ly/1Bvuyya), not just in the States but throughout the world. I imagine if single people could be financially secure, have good friends and connections with their community, and have sex whenever they want it -- and still have their freedom -- marriage would not be seen as the way to have a happy or even satisfying life.