What contribution I would like to make to the literature

Last week I discussed the history of happiness research, especially since the Easterlin Paradox in economics in the mid-1970s and the advent of Hedonic Psychology in the 1990s. In the past I’ve presented the model that I’m going to be building. This week, on Bruce’s suggestion, I’m going to talk about how my model fits into the literature. That is to say, I’m going to explain what contribution I would like to make.

The main thing I want to do is integrate what we already know into a comprehensive theoretical model that we can then use to guide future research.

Happiness research has been driven by empirics rather than theorising. This is partially because both economics and psychology have science-envy. Well actually, it’s because they want to be more rigorous than the humanities and more traditional social sciences.

Unfortunately, this has meant that the ‘theory of happiness’ has historically been a collection of stylised facts rather than a model that we build, test and refine. Consequently, there is a great of deal of confusion in the literature. The most obvious example is the interchangeable use of a large number of terms to describe the object of research: wellbeing, life satisfaction, happiness, human flourishing, utility, the good life, eudemonia etc.

I think it would be valuable to step back from the empirics for a moment to develop a better theoretical model of happiness than combines and can explain the stylised facts we have discovered.

This would help clarify some the confusion I just mentioned.

It would also get this particular research area back to good scientific method. In science we ideally want to have a good hypothesis that we then subject to a range of tests. If it passes these tests we can treat it as fact until it is refuted by a later test and/or a better hypothesis.

If we don’t have a good theory then when our hypothesis passes or fails tests we can’t be very sure about what exactly has gone right or wrong.

Let me give you one example. It is undeniable that when we ask people the standard happiness question “all things considered how happy would you say you are 1–10” captures psychological wellbeing (existential issues), subjective wellbeing (emotional issues) and life satisfaction (life course and economic issues).

As a result, when we ask a successful, neurotic woman who has just lost a small bet on a sunny day this question and she answers 7/10, we can’t infer much from a comparing this to a poor, extroverted man who has just handed in his PhD on a rainy day who also answers 7/10. We really don’t know whether it is someone’s subjective wellbeing, psychological wellbeing, life satisfaction or mood that we are measuring, or what their relative contributions are to whatever overall faculty we are measuring with this question.  

Consider the consequences. In a recent paper, Easterlin essentially suggested that people were happier in the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen incidents in China than throughout the next 20 years of liberalisation because unemployment became more common. He makes this claim based on surveys using the question I just mentioned. I suspect he is wrong because he the period after Tiananmen saw a great deal of liberalisation in China, and the ten years after that saw little major change but still huge increases in income. I suspect, moreover, that he is ignoring the possibility of rescaling, but we can’t know until we get a better theory that allows us to take more accurate and specific measurements.

This brings me full circle. We need a better theory with which to make sense of our existing empirical measurements, and this theory in turn will require empirics to be validated. It’s an iterative process, but thus far I don’t think we’ve given theory its due.

A valuable theoretical model at this time would be able to explain the stylised facts that we currently have about happiness. It would also be able to explain them in a mechanistic way as this makes testing and drawing inferences easier.

What do I mean? For example, if we hypothesise that happiness and log(income) have a linear relationship with a slope of 1/3, then we have a mechanistic theory that is both quite detailed and very easy to test. I can also draw inferences about how happy someone on $150 000 ought to be.

On the other hand, if I say that happiness that happiness comes from virtue, then I don’t have a mechanistic feature (what is the numerical relationship between happiness and virtue?) and I don’t have an obvious criteria upon which to base tests.

For these reasons I will try to develop a theory that is parsimonious, mechanistic and can explain the stylised facts we have.

Some of these facts include the Easterlin paradox, relative status effects, the log relationship between income and happiness, the importance of self-actualisation for some and comfort for others, emotional volatility in otherwise very satisfied people, emotional happiness among bonded labourers and very high levels of life satisfaction among the very poor in developed countries.

My attempts to explain all the stylised facts have already led me to what I think is another contribution of my paper to the literature, which is the integration of insights from philosophy and the clinical arms of psychology into thinking about happiness.

This integration is important to explain the difference between psychological wellbeing as in mental health, subjective wellbeing as in emotional stability and positive affect, and life or existential satisfaction. I hope that one of the main contributions of my paper will be to make the distinctions between these things clearer and their contribution to human flourishing more salient.