Does activism make you happy?

Flickr photo by Matthew Bradley

I’m quoted in the Boston Globe’s Ideas Section in “The Upside of ‘down with’” (Drake Bennett, 10/11/09).

The article reports on a forthcoming study “Some Benefits of Being an Activist” by Tim Kasser and Malte Klar that activism is associated with happiness (2009, Political Psychology 30(5) ).

The Globe article neglected to quote me that there are lots of reason to support activism — it may increase people’s confidence in making a difference, it may improve governmental quality and leaders’ accountability, it may spark extra-governmental change or reveal the immorality of laws (as seen in the Civil Rights Era).

That said, I am skeptical, as the Globe article noted that it is activism per se that is causing happiness, based on our forthcoming religious research.  Religious Americans are more happy, but it has nothing to do with their theology, or what they hear from the pulpit, or a sense of calling.  It is explained by being in a morally-infused social network.  Praying alone or attending a church where you hear the sermons (but don’t make friends) makes you no happier.  Similarly if one looks at research by Alan Krueger and others, it is social activities that bring happiness.

So while I’m not sure that bowlers are doing as much for government accountability as protesters, my guess would be that they are equally happy.

Sarkozy’s blue-chip Commission recommends measuring social capital

French President Nicholas Sarkozy, convinced that GDP was not properly measuring French citizens’ well-being, appointed a 25-member blue-chip commission (chaired by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and largely composed of the world’s best economists, including 4 other Nobel Laureates) to advise him on whether GDP adequate mesured well-being and, if not, what else to measure. [The findings are supported by Gallup World poll surveys.]

The Commission has reported back, and strongly recommended, among other things, measuring social capital (social connections, political voice, etc.).

Their descriptions of: 1) what is social capital; 2) why is social capital important, especially to subjective well-being (or happiness); and 3) how to measure social capital are among the best things written on this subject.

On what is social capital, they say the following (pp. 182-183):

Like political voice and the rule of law, social connections and the attendant norms of trust and trustworthiness are important for people’s QoL. These social connections are sometimes subsumed under the heading of “social capital”. Definitions of social capital (as were other forms of “capital” at an equivalent stage in their conceptual development) have been much debated, but there is now convergence towards a “lean and mean” definition: social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness. Since it is impractical to measure social networks at large geographic levels, researchers generally rely on proxies for these networks (e.g. number of close friends, political participation, membership in voluntary associations, religious involvement, doing favours, etc.). The core insight of the concept of social capital is that, like tools (physical capital) and training (human capital), social connections have value for QoL.

Social connections have value, first, to the people who are in the networks. For example, labour markets are permeated by networks, so that most people are as likely to get their jobs through whom they know as through what they know. Similarly, social connections bring benefits for health: as a risk factor for premature death, social isolation rivals smoking (Berkman and Glass, 2000). Evidence also suggests that social connections are powerful predictors of (and probably causes of) subjective well-being. Finally, the same personal activity can have different impacts on subjective well-being, depending on whether it is conducted alone or with others.

All these are “internal” effects of social networks, since they represent ways in which
social networks benefit people in those networks. Social connections, however, also have “externalities”, i.e. implications for bystanders. The literature on “social capital” has brought out clearly a number of examples of positive externalities. For example, neighbourhood networks can deter crime (Sampson 2003), and this effect also benefits residents who sit at home in front of their TV. The performance of democratic government and even the pace of economic growth may also depend on the quality of social connections within a jurisdiction.  Finally, several (mainly US) studies suggest that both child welfare (infant mortality, teen pregnancy, low birth-weight babies, teen drug use, etc.) and school performance (drop-out rates, test scores) are robustly predicted by measures of community social capital. However, the “externalities” stemming from networks can also be negative. A strong sense of belonging to one group can strengthen a sense of a unique personal identity in terms of the group to which he or she belongs (Sen, 2006). This may generate fissures in national communities, and breed a climate of violence and confrontation. More generally, a longstanding tradition in economics has stressed the potential for groups to generate benefits for insiders that weigh heavily on the opportunities and QoL of outsiders. In other words, groups can foster bonds among participants but also erect walls with respect to outsiders and members of other groups. To account for these multiple effects, research distinguishes between two types of social capital, “bonding” and “bridging”, but practical implementation of this distinction in empirical research remains a challenge.

In short, a rich literature from several disciplines shows that social connections benefit people in the networks, with effects on non-participants that depend on both the nature of the group and the effects being considered. In some cases, like health, studies have demonstrated that social connections can have positive effects at both the “individual” and “aggregate” level: people with more friends live longer in part because of the biochemical effects of social isolation, and in part because public health systems are more effective in areas of higher social capital. Many of these “causal” claims are yet to be tested with an experimental or quasi-experimental design, but even on this score progress is slowly being made. A high priority for research in this field is more work on causal linkages using natural or randomized experiments.

On why social capital is important to subjective well-being, they note:

Much evidence at both the aggregate and individual level suggests that social connections are among the most robust predictors of subjective measures of life satisfaction. Social connections have a strong independent effect on subjective well-being, net of income.  Moreover, the available evidence also suggests that the externalities of social capital on wellbeing are typically positive, not negative (Helliwell, 2001; Powdthavee, 2008). In other words, increasing my social capital increases both my own and my neighbours’ subjective well-being, and thus represents a coherent strategy for improving QoL for the country as a whole.

The analysis of the effects of social connections on subjective well-being is in its infancy. Much of it does not account for unmeasured individual characteristics, and most of it relies on cross-sectional data. That said, recent analyses have strengthened the case that the link between at least some forms of social connections and subjective well-being is causal. Krueger, Kahneman et al. (2008)  report that, when controlling for individual fixed effects (such as personality traits), most pleasurable activities involve socializing — religious activities, eating/drinking, sports, and receiving friends. Similarly, in a recent large-scale US panel survey on religious attendance and subjective well-being, Lim and Putnam (2008) found that religious attendance at time1 (or time2) predicted subjective well-being at time2, controlling for levels of subjective well-being at time1, as well as many other covariates; the essential mechanism involved in this relation is neither theological nor psychological, but rather the strong effect of “friends at church” on well-being. Fowler and Christakis (2008) also report evidence suggesting that subjective well-being can spread in a beneficially “contagious” way from one person to another. For no other class of variables (including strictly economic variables) is the evidence for causal effects on subjective well-being probably as strong as it is for social connections.

And on measurement, the report notes:

As research on social connections is relatively new, national statistics are still rudimentary. Most researchers have relied on unofficial sources. One proxy of social connections often used is the number of associations in civil society or church to which each person belongs. However, the fragility of such measures is, by now, well recognized. A formal organization with a name and address may not correspond to any actual individual members, much less to social networks among those members. Moreover, the role of associations differs from country to country. Because of these reasons, measures of organizational density are generally not good measures of social connections, despite their frequent use for that purpose.

A related approach measures the activities assumed to be the result of social connections, such as altruistic behaviour. Thus, some research has used blood donations, membership in voluntary organizations or charitable giving as proxies. Other studies have relied on some aggregate measures of individual behaviour like voting turnout, based on the argument that, even though balloting is a private activity, participation in voting is higher in countries with a dense network of political parties or civic organizations, and that in all countries members of
these organizations have a higher probability of voting. Other studies have used proxy measures of social connections based on information on family ties, such as marriage rates, though social changes throughout the world have made these an imperfect measure of enduring interpersonal ties.

Ultimately, however, all these indicators are inadequate proxies of social connections, and reliable indicators can only be constructed through survey data. Only personal reports allow measuring the many and evolving forms of social connectedness. In recent years a number of statistical offices (in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, and most recently, the United States) have begun to gather and report survey-based measures of various forms of social connections. As an example of these endeavours, Appendix 2.2 presents the list of the questions included (since early 2008) in an annual Supplement to the
November US Current Population Survey, which has traditionally probed respondents about voting in national elections.56 These questions have been selected after extensive vetting by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics for reliability, intelligibility, and inoffensiveness; they cover several manifestations of civic and political engagement, as well as other forms of social connections (such as number of friends, or frequency of contacts and
favours done for neighbours).

Measuring social connections, however, goes beyond measuring these particular aspects. Also needed are suitably tested questions assessing people’s experience in a range of other domains. Some of the most important domains that could be explored through dedicated surveys include the following:
• Social trust. Despite only moderate test-retest reliability, the canonical social trust question has been asked thousands of times in many countries: its behaviour is well understood, and it allows many comparisons across time and space.59 Moreover, at the aggregate level (e.g. states/nations), responses are highly stable over time (even when individual-level stability is low), suggesting that this question measures a very predictive characteristic of communities. Data on social trust are also significant determinants of subjective well-being. Compared to this canonical question, questions about “lost wallets” are potentially more reliable, since they are more specific and quasi-behavioural. Opportunities for comparison across time and space are, however, scant, and we still lack studies of its variability across time for the same person.
• Social isolation. Lack of contacts with other people in normal daily living is both a symptom and a cause of social distress, and it can lead to a downward spiral affecting morale and reducing social and economic opportunities. Social isolation can be measured through questions asking people about the frequency of their contacts with others or about how often they spend their time socializing with family members, friends and work colleagues or with other people in sports, religious and cultural associations. Social connections are also a function of living arrangements (i.e. living alone) and employment status (e.g. having a job). Research has highlighted strong associations between the degree of social isolation of each person and measures of their well-being, self-assurance, ability and power of action, and activity (Ringen, 2008)
• Informal support. Questions about the availability of social support in case of need have been used in many countries. The Gallup World Poll includes a yes/no question about friends or relatives “you can count on”; answers to this question are highly predictive of subjective well-being but have little discriminatory power (about 90% of respondents answer this question affirmatively). This suggests that alternative formulations or more nuanced responses may be needed (e.g., “if yes, how many?”, or specifying the type of help expected in various specific contingencies).
• Workplace engagement. For many people in many countries, a large fraction of all their social connections are with workmates, either in the workplace or outside of it. Helliwell and Huang (2005) found that trust in workmates is a robust predictor of life satisfaction. Questions about trust in workmates have been tested in some countries (e.g. North America).
• Religious engagement. While there is general agreement that religion is an important form of social connections, the introduction of specific survey questions (even when extensively vetted) raises issues of political sensitivity. Identifying suitable formulations of these questions is important as, in most countries, religious engagement is a robust predictor of subjective well-being and (in many countries outside Europe) it is a large fraction of all social networks.
• Bridging social capital (i.e. friendships across lines of race, religion, class, etc.) is the most important under-measured form of social connections for many outcomes. The informal advisory committee to the US Current Population Survey recommended that a suitable measure of bridging social capital could take the form of follow-on probes of the form, “Of these close friends, how many are… (White, Black, Asian, Hispanic, Catholic, Jewish, college-educated, etc.)”. This bridging question is least susceptible to response bias and political correctness.

The Economist reports on the commission in Measuring What Matters:

” Man does not live by GDP alone. A new report urges statisticians to capture what people do live by…HOW well off are Americans? Frenchmen? Indians? Ghanaians? An economist’s simplest answer is the gross domestic product, or GDP, per person of each country. To help you compare the figures, he will convert them into dollars, either at market exchange rates or (better) at purchasing-power-parity rates, which allow for the cheapness of, say, haircuts and taxi rides in poorer parts of the world.

“To be sure, this will give you a fair guide to material standards of living: the Americans and the French, on average, are much richer than Indians and Ghanaians. But you may suspect, and the economist should know, that this is not the whole truth. America’s GDP per head is higher than France’s, but the French spend less time at work, so are they really worse off? An Indian may be desperately poor and yet say he is happy; an American may be well fed yet fed up. GDP was designed to measure only the value of goods and services produced in a country, and it does not even do that precisely. How well off people feel also depends on things GDP does not capture, such as their health or whether they have a job. Environmentalists have long complained that GDP treats the despoliation of the planet as a plus (via the resulting economic output) rather than a minus (forests destroyed).”

See earlier Social Capital blog post on “Advances in Social Capital Measurement“.

See full 292 page “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress” here.

See Economist’s article, “Measuring What Matters” (9/17/09)

What leads to happiness?

(Flickr photo by adwriter)

The Atlantic Magazine has a very interesting story called “What Makes us Happy?” (June 2009)

The author was granted rare access to a longitudinal surveyof 268 men who entered Harvard College in the late 1930s; Harvard scholars tracked them over the last 8 decades through adolescence, “war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age.”  [The author suggests that the Harvard scholar who has guided this study (The W.T.  Grant Study) over the last roughly half century, George Vaillant, may have used the study to try to make up for deficiencies in his own childhood, suffered when his father committed suicide.]

“Yet, even as he takes pleasure in poking holes in an innocent idealism, Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, ‘Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.’  The other boy runs to him and says, ‘Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!’

“The story gets to the heart of Vaillant’s angle on the Grant Study. His central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of  ‘adaptations,’ or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called ‘defense mechanisms’) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.

“Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.

“At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or psychotic, adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the immature adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. Neurotic defenses are common in ‘normal’ people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or mature, adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).

Vaillant found in general that people improve at adapting. Toddlers often exhibit psychotic adaptations and older children commonly show immature adaptations, but these disappear as children age.  In the Grant Study, adolescents used immature defenses twice as frequently as mature defenses, but by mid-life the ratio had reversed: they were four times more likely to respond in mature ways.  Vaillant also noticed that altruism and humor grew more prevalent between the ages of 50 and 75.  [It is for these reasons that Vaillant examined the subjects over their life trajectory rather than at a fixed point in time, because the progression or lack of progression in defenses was especially important.]

What were Vaillant’s conclusions?

• Relationships were the only thing that really matters: “It is social aptitude, not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging”, Vaillant said. Aside from an individual’s defenses, relationships at age 47 were the strongest predictor of late-life adjustment.  93 percent of those men who were happy at 65 had a close sibling when younger. Those who didn’t have close siblings found these connections in parents or uncles, or mentors or friends.
• Vaillant dismisses social determinism. Social ease predicted good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, but became less significant with time. And shy or anxious kids by age 70 were just as likely to be “happy-well” as outgoing kids by age 70.
• Besides relationships and mature defenses, the best predictors of thriving (physical and psychological) in senior years were “education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight”. If one had 5+ of these factors at age 50, half were  happy-well by 80 and only 7.5% “sad-sick.” Conversely, no one with with three or fewer of these health factors at age 50, ended up happy-well at age 80, regardless of physical shape at age 50.
• Cholesterol levels at age 50 did not predict happy-wellness in old age.
• Being fit in college explained late-life mental health better than late-life physical health.
• Of the men diagnosed as depressed by age 50, over 70% were dead or chronically ill by 63. Pessimists aged far less well than optimists.

Read the Atlantic article here by Joshua Wolf Shenk “What Makes Us Happy?“.

The Boston Globe also had an interesting recent article also on happiness called “Perfectly Happy:  The New Science of Measuring Happiness Has Transformed Self-Help” (by Drake Bennett, 5/10/09)

See other recent posts on happiness “Happiness is Contagious“, “Do Fat Friends make you fat (and less happy)?“   and “Gallup takes daily pulse of American happiness/Krueger’s interesting happiness research.”

Happiness is contagious

Nick Christakis (Harvard School of Public Health) and James Fowler (Univ. of Calif., San Diego), who previously used the Framingham Heart Study to show that having fat friends increasingly makes people obese, are back with a very interesting paper showing that happy friends make you happy — what the co-authors called ‘an emotional quiet riot’.

It is already established that happiness and having social capital (friendships) are linked, but this research demonstrates that it matters how happy your friends are and that it is the happy friends that are causing your happiness rather than vice versa. Conversely, having unhappy friends over time makes you less happy.

The research shows up in the latest issue of BMJ. “Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network: longitudinal analysis over 20 years in the Framingham Heart Study.”  [The study involved 5,124 adults aged 21 to 70 who were followed between 1971 and 2003.]

They measured happiness with a 4-item construct:  “I felt hopeful about the future”; “I was happy”; “I enjoyed life” and “I felt that I was just as good as other people.”

They found that happiness is a network phenomenon, clustering in groups of people that extend out to 3 degrees of separation (the friends’ friends of one’s friends), but with greater impact on friendships that are 2 or 1 degree of separation from you.  Demonstrating the magnitude of this effect, co-author James Fowler noted, “if your friend’s friend’s friend becomes happy, that has a bigger impact on you being happy than putting an extra $5,000 in your pocket.”

They found that happiness spreads across a diverse array of social ties, from spouses to siblings to neighbors. They found no happiness effect of co-workers and found that nearby ties had a far greater influence than distant ties: for example, knowing someone who is happy, makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy, but having happy next-door neighbors makes you a full 34% more likely to be happy (much higher than having happy neighbors merely on your block). The optimal effect was for a happy friend living less than half a mile away, which boosts your chance of happiness by42%. In one of the study’s surprises, happy spouses (which one assumes live less than a half mile away!) only increased one’s chance of happiness by 8%. Part of the lower spouse effect is that happiness spreads more effectively through same sex relationships than relationships (romantic or not) between a man and a woman.  (Gays take note!)  Christakis and Fowler believe we may take emotional cues from people of our gender.

They observed that network characteristics (where you were in the network and how happy the people were around you) could independently predict which individuals would be happy years into the future.

They suggest that there may be an evolutionary basis for human emotions.  Previous work noted that emotions like laughter or smiling seemed evolutionary adapted to helping people form social bonds.  [They note: "Human laughter, for example, is believed to have evolved from the 'play face' expression seen in other primates in relaxed social situations. Such facial expressions and positive emotions enhance social relations by producing analogous pleasurable feelings in others."]

While they couldn’t prove it, they suggested 3 possible causal mechanisms:

1. happy people might share their good fortune
2. happy people might change their behavior toward others (by being nicer or less hostile)
3. happy people might exude a contagious emotion (although this would have to be over a sustained time period)

Christakis and Fowler noted that the 3-degrees of separation impact observed in happiness was the same as for smoking and obesity (which also reached out 3 degrees). They wonder whether a “3-degrees of influence” extends to behaviors like depression, anxiety, loneliness, drinking, eating, exercise and other health-related activities.

So the next time you’re unhappy realize that you may be “infecting” your friends with unhappiness as well.  Christakis’ work is suggesting that we need friends, but we also need to carefully pick friends that are happy and have healthy behaviors or we risk that their unhappiness and unhealthy behaviors will spread to us.  The New York Times notes that one of the co-authors indicated that he now thinks twice about his mood knowing that it affects others. That said, he noted: “We are not giving you the advice to start smiling at everyone you meet in New York….That would be dangerous.”

While they think that face-to-face connection is important in spreading happiness (hence the decline of these effects with distance), they did a separate study of 1,700 Facebook profiles, where they found that people smiling in their photographs had more Facebook friends and that more of those friends were smiling. While the Facebook study is just an initial foray into the online word, Christakis thinks that it shows that some of these happiness findings might extend on social networking as well.  And it would take longitudinal studies to determine whether our online activities are gradually eroding our need for face-to-face communication to spread happiness.

Note: Justin Wolfers (on the Freakonomics blog) is skeptical of this research.  As he notes:

[It's possible that it is not your friends' happiness that is causing yours, but that "if you and I are friends, we are often subject to similar influences. If a buddy of ours dies, we’ll both be less happy. Or, less dramatically, if our favorite football team wins, we’ll both be happier. But this isn’t contagious happiness — it is simply a natural outcome of the shared experiences of people in the same social circles. Unfortunately, observational data cannot distinguish the headline-grabbing conclusion — that happiness is contagious — from my more mundane alternative: friends have shared emotional influences."

Wolfers notes that a very careful article by Ethan Cohen-Cole and Jason Fletcher uses the same research design to show how it can lead to silly conclusions.  Cohen-Cole and Fletcher find in another dataset that this approach shows “height, headaches, and acne are also contagious.” As Wolfers notes, it’s more likely that “the same jackhammer causing your headache is likely causing mine.” And the height finding is obviously not causal but more likely a function of homophily (people choosing similar friends).

See Clive Thompson, “Is Happiness Catching?” (NYT Sunday Magazine, 9/13/09)

Boston Globe story available here.

New York Times story available here (which also has a nice graphic showing the clustering in this network of happy and unhappy people).

L.A. Times story available here.

See Wolfers’ Freakonomics blog post here.

Do fat friends make you fat and less happy? (new evidence)

I blogged earlier about Christakis and Fowler’s 2007 research about obesity as a social epidemic.  [See blog posts here.]

David Branchflower et al have released a paper using European Barometer data (across 29 European countries) that suggests that for Europeans as well, having fat friends may increasingly make them fat.  One’s friends influences what one thinks of as fat or skinny, so having more obese friends, makes one ratchet up (subconsciously) what one thinks of as the dividing line between fat and thin.

Blanchflower and colleagues also find in German panel data that controlling for other factors, being fatter (having a higher Body Mass Index, or BMI) reduces one’s sense of subjective wellbeing (i.e., happiness).  As I noted in an earlier blog, since having friends itself is associated with higher happiness and many benefits of social capital, the conclusion is not to drop one’s overweight friends, but it does suggest that if one is not mindful to ensure that you have a healthy dose of thinner friends as well, you may well find yourself fatter and less happy overall.

See: David G. Blanchflower, Andrew J. Oswald, Bert Van Landeghem, “Imitative Obesity and Relative Utility” (NBER Working Paper No. 14337, September 2008)

See also, Clive Thompson, “Is Happiness Catching?” (NYT Sunday Magazine, 9/13/09)

Do Olympics spur patriotism, xenophobia or civic engagement?

I haven’t seen any surveys that show whether patriotism rises during periods of Olympics although people anticipate this to be the case (at least in the UK). Even my daughter wants to know for every competition (*who are the Americans?*). I myself am a bit skeptical of the survey numbers during the games since it requires that those of us bleary-eyed from late night Olympics watching are alert enough to answer the surveys. Richard Posner, a man with whom I rarely agree, writes: “When a sport or other game is played all over the world (chess for example, or soccer), it is natural that there should be international competition. The oddity of the Olympics is that they are presented as athletic competitions between nations, rather than between teams each of which presumably would have a permanent residence in one nation yet might recruit team members from other nations as well. Nations in the grip of nationalist emotion or wanting to advertise their power to the world (nations such as Hitler’s Germany, which made the 1936 summer Olympics, held in Berlin, a major propaganda event; East Germany and other communist countries; and now China) invest heavily in training their Olympic athletes. China is estimated to have spent as much as half a billion dollars to train their athletes for the Olympic games now underway in Beijing. The heavy investments that nations that regard Olympic competition as a propaganda opportunity in turn spur other nations to invest heavily in training their own Olympic athletes. The nationalistic fervor and great-power aspirations that Olympic competition stimulates seem to me a negative externality….”

But does this rise in patriotism, assuming it exists, spur more xenophobia (distrust of outsiders)? Very similar to the assumption that in-group bonding and trust must come at the expense of out-group increased distrust. So many citizens and scholars assume some zero-sum relationship where bonding must be offset by less bridging. While we haven’t done work on the Olympics, our general research of diversity and social capital shows that bonding and bridging are mildly positively related, not negatively related. In other words, those who trust or identify with Americans more doesn’t necessarily entail a distrust or dislike of “outsiders”.

Along these lines, I’ve been moved by images of pan-ethnic unity during the game (e.g., the Gerogian and the Russian pistol shooters who exchanged kisses after a match).

Some of the images are like the optical illusion of the outline of two faces and a vase. For example, the general embracing of the moving story of 21-year old first-time Olympic-gold US wrestler Henry Cejudo, the son of illegal immigrants who slept on the floor growing up and was proud enough to wrap himself in the US flag upon his victory; but even on this “feel good” story, there are rants of American nativists who want him deported). Nothing makes one more proud of that inclusive American spirit. (cue sarcastic music)

In the Michael Phelps relay team that had Cullen Jones, the African-American relay swimmer , or Raj Bhavsar (the Gujarati member of the surprisingly good American gymnastics team), is one impressed by the diversity, or by how largely white these teams are?

And are we more inclined during the Olympic games to feel our competitive edge on hyperdrive or reach out through common acts of kindness to help others? Let’s hope the latter.

And in an interesting side note, the Washington Post reports that on a study that found bronze medalists were happier with their performance than silver medalists. A study found that “The silver medalists couldn’t get the gold medalists out of their heads, whereas the bronze medalists compared themselves with athletes who didn’t win anything.” Silver medalists and those finishing fifth were, on average, equally happy. Brings to mind Dan Gilbert’s talk on happiness.

Should parents ‘take two aspirin and call me in the morning?’

I wrote recently about Alan Krueger’s interesting research on how religion and sports/exercise bring happiness.

An NPR story recently referred to a meta-study of happiness and parenting featured in Newsweek magazine (which claimed that parents have 7% less happiness on average) and highlighted research of Florida State University’s Robin Simon (sociology) asserting that caring for kids brought greater depression and unhappiness, partly because of the childcaring itself and partly because of shriveled social networks that stemmed from parents staying in more (for the latter finding, Simon cites research by Linsbeth Levin at Duke).

Excerpts from NPR story:

“Dr. Simon: (reporting on parents’ self-rated emotions in sample of 13,000 time diary reports): They [parents] definitely experienced more depression. They – people with kids, all parents, that is to say including people with kids who are living at home, young children who are living at home, as well as empty-nest parents, surprisingly, when you combine all kinds of parents in the United States, and ask them, you know, if they experience these serious emotions, what you find is that they report significantly more feelings of depression than people who have never had kids.

MIKE PESCA: [NPR Bryan Project host] Does it correlate to the number of kids, or just having a kid?

Dr. SIMON: Well, we actually didn’t look at the number of kids, though I suspect that it does, because other sociological studies have found that the more kids one has the more feelings of depression.”

Simon goes on to say that some of this depression stems from the fact that parents are on their own and we don’t provide them enough social support and provide enough family-friendly policies for them to reap the full benefits of parenthood, including having access to decent healthcare. And host Mike Pesca describes Dan Gilbert’s work (Harvard, psychology) that asserts that parents are happier sleeping and grocery shopping than childrearing.

Simon goes own to admit that the while parents often report lower short-term happiness from parenting, most feel immense life satisfaction and pride from being parents.

Interestingly, this research doesn’t accord with careful research of hotshot economist Alan Krueger (at Princeton), whose work I discussed in an earlier blog post. He finds childcare giving as the fifth most pleasurable activity (out of 21 asked), where pleasurability (or their U-index) is the percent of 15-minute segments in which stressed/sadness/pain emotions exceeded happiness. Childcare had the 5th LOWEST U-index score. The Krueger research is preferably methodologically since it controls for respondents’ baseline levels of happiness, depression, etc. and thus is able to weed out whether parents, for example, are just more happier people in general. You can read the Krueger study here.

Gallup takes daily pulse of American happiness/Krueger’s interesting happiness research

Since January 2008, Gallup has surveyed 1000 people a day to gauge their levels of wellbeing. [Confession: We were asked to recommend social capital questions that should be included on this survey.] Gallup plans to continue the surveying indefinitely into the future.

Gallup’s first report is out and picked up by the press. TIME calls it the *Dow Jones Index of Happiness*. The data is probably going to be less useful on a daily basis: i.e., *happiness off today in late-day profit-taking …* and more useful after months or years of this data has been gathered together.

This aggregated dataset could be used to construct county-level happiness estimates for most counties in the U.S. And then these aggregate happiness measures could be attached to other datasets to see how much individuals’ happiness is affected by those around them. For example, are the same individuals (controlling for education, ethnicity, years lived in the community, income, marital status, etc.), happier or not if they are surrounded by others who are happy. One could imagine that subjective wellbeing is contagious or conversely that if one is a lone misanthrope in a sea of happy neighbors that it heightens one’s depression (in the same way as New Year’s Day is a grim holiday for those who are not happy).

One could also use this aggregated dataset to determine how individuals’ levels of happiness relate to various activities (social activity, political activity, religion, sports participation, etc.).

Along the latter topic, Alan Krueger (a terrific economist at Princeton) and others have some of the most interesting new recent work on happiness. He used the American Time Use Survey methodology and privately gathered through the Princeton Affect and Time Survey (PATS). The individuals whose activities were being recorded through PATS had Palm-like devices and were randomly pinged on different days and at different times of the day and had to report their levels of happiness, what activity they were doing, and who they were doing it with. [I'm glad it wasn't a picture-phone!] What was unique about Krueger’s data and approach is that he could compare levels of happiness for the same individual across the week. So some people (the Zen Masters or Buddhists) might be pretty happy doing everything from dish-washing to summiting Everest, whereas others are relatively unhappy even if their dream spouse has just said yes to their marriage proposal. The Time Use data enabled Krueger to measure the happiness of individuals relative to each individual’s baseline level of happiness and thus see which activities brought more happiness or less. And the most pleasurable activities (that I can write about) were….

Religion

and Sports and Exercise.

[Note: they chart happiness by looking at the percent of the time that happiness feelings in the activity exceeded stress, pain and sadness). On this score religion was highest with 92% of the experiences being pleasurable; pleasure is the inverse of the U-index they report where religion is low with 8% of experiences.]

The full study is called “National Time Accounting: The Currency of Life” and is written with Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman (also of Princeton), David Schkade (UCSD), Norbert Schwarz (U. Michigan), and Arthur Stone (Stony Brook U.). For the results on religion, see especially Tables 5.2.b and 8.3 at the end of the National Time Accounting piece.

Money can’t buy you love, but can buy you happiness (II)

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers in a data rich paper conclude three things:

a) the rich are happier;

(b) rich countries are happier;

(c) economic growth is associated with greater happiness for their citizens; and

(d) they find little evidence for the “relative income hypothesis” (that happiness depends more on one’s income relative to others in one’s country or community than it does on absolute levels of income).

Justin Wolfers is blogging about the paper at Freakonomics blog. There are to be several posts, but this is the first post. The paper is also summarized in today’s New York Times, featuring a nice graphic, The authors also discussed the research on CNBC (4/16/08).

The paper by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers (both at Penn’s Wharton School) has the rather academic title of “Economic Growth and Subjective Well-being: Regressing the Easterlin Paradox“

Earlier post on this subject available here discussing paper by Angus Deaton on this topic; Deaton’s conclusions were partially the same but he found a cut-off point beyond which economic growth did not lead to increases in happiness, perhaps because of the destabilizing impact of the growth.

Spending money on others “buys” you happiness

They say money can’t buy you happiness, but new research suggests that it can, if you spend it on someone else.

“Simply making very small changes in how you spend money can make a difference for happiness,” said Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, who led the research along with a professor at Harvard Business School.”

They tested their theory at a small Boston-area medical supply company, where employees received fat bonuses averaging about $5,000, measuring levels of happiness before and after. What they found, said Michael I. Norton, assistant professor at Harvard Business School, was that “the size of the bonus you get has no relation to how happy you are, but the amount you spend on other people does predict how happy you are.”

Read Boston Globe article here and view other Social Capital blog entries on happiness.

Dunn et al. article appears here: “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness” by Elizabeth W. Dunn, Lara B. Aknin, and Michael I. Norton, Science, 3/21/08 319: 1687-1688

See also Harvard Gazette article on this research.