Happiness literature pet peeve — The Average Effect

I think most people would readily admit that happiness (broadly defined; not just emotional affect) is a complex thing, so they why do they jump so easily to fawning over the latest TED talk one-liner?

Carl Jung

This week happiness is about relationships. Last week it was about solitude. Next week it will be ‘turns out money does matter!’ The fact is that all of these findings are correct, but only for certain people.

These findings are all derived from taking averages across very large samples, often thousands of people. The problem is that very few people are ‘average’ when it comes to happiness. We are each too complex and unique for some trite tripe like ‘happiness comes from good relationships’ to be of any meaningful help to us.

I am reminded of a comment from psychiatrist Carl Jung on averages:

Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid though it need not necessarily occur in reality. Despite this it figures in the theory as an unassailable fundamental fact. … If, for instance, I determine the weight of each stone in a bed of pebbles and get an average weight of 145 grams, this tells me very little about the real nature of the pebbles. Anyone who thought, on the basis of these findings, that he could pick up a pebble of 145 grams at the first try would be in for a serious disappointment. Indeed, it might well happen that however long he searched he would not find a single pebble weighing exactly 145 grams. The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way.

I haven’t come across anything where this quote applies more readily than happiness research. It’s ironic that it comes from Jung because he was both a master of human psychology and one of history’s most prolific (and competent) utilisers of that most opaque of crystal balls: qualitative case data. Modern empiricists might reply that this is precisely why you shouldn’t listen to Jung: he’s biased. My own view is that if anyone can have a worthwhile opinion on these matters, it’s him, if only because when you use thousands of cases you start to get large sample properties.

There are two bad things that I associate with the average effect. The first is superficial findings like the aforementioned: happiness is about good relationships. What are you supposed to do with that? Are you supposed to invest more time in your existing relationships? Maybe the reason why those relationships are great is precisely because you don’t lean on them all the time. Does it mean you should make more friends or have better friends? Does it mean you should try to hold on to old friends when you change town or make new ones? What does a ‘good relationship’ even mean?! Is a good friend someone who loves you the one you are or someone who tries to catalyse you into reaching your potential? Maybe you need a bit of both. Is a good friend the kind who call to cry to or the kind you have over to shoot the breeze and watch football? What if you’re an introvert and you genuinely just want your own space? The kinds of trite observations that average effect taking produces are so vacuous as to be useless.

Something I find funny about average effects is that it’s so often a trivial matter to undermine their validity. One example I came across this year is a paper by Guven and Chapman on the marriage effect. As far as the average effect is concerned, it is an undeniable fact that marriage makes people happier. What G&C find though is that people in unsatisfying marriages are actually significantly less happy than those who are unmarried, on average. So the question then becomes what makes a good marriage? The answer is obviously, well it depends on the person…aaaannd we’re back doing case studies.

The second bad thing I associate with the average effect is that it obfuscates the most important theme in happiness research: your authentic preferences matter. Speaking very simplistically, happiness comes from affirming your authentic preferences. These are preferences you have developed through a process of self-reflection and an honest dialogue with the world, which is saturated with the preferences and rationalisations of others. Some people’s authentic values might orient them towards family, for others they might find themselves tracking towards careers, adventure or even materialism. Critically, your authentic preferences are autonomously and intrinsically determined and your comportment towards them is similarly autonomous and intrinsic. They can’t be received from outside, because then they aren’t your preferences. This is not to say that you can’t develop them in conversation with trusted others like parents or your priest, but it is to say that you can just try to live the way some person on TED tells you to and expect good results. That something ‘works’ on average doesn’t mean it will work for you. More importantly, even if it does, you’re going to need to do some seriously hard yards to figure out how to fit that thing into your life, how to organise your values and behaviours around it, how to align it with your other values and preferences, and how to make it your own. For that you need more than a statistic; you need reasons, intuitions, personal experience and most importantly, self-knowledge. Have you seen anyone on TED recommend we get back to the Greeks and ‘know thyself’! I guess that would make the speaker redundant...

I suspect that the reason why the average effect doesn’t show up anything useful is because it is trying to find ‘the one true value’, which doesn’t exist. The one true value is one of my least favourite memes. It pops up every now and then. Somebody gets cancer and goes on a speaking tour about how before they were all about fast cars and fast women but now they realise family is actually the most important thing. It is when you’re unexpectedly about to die! There are no objective values (well there are if you’re religious but let’s not go there right now). We can’t find the secret sauce for happiness because it’s not an object it’s a process, and one that, barring some very rough contours, is different for everyone. Rather than groping for some simple formula why can’t we embrace this wondrous notion that we are all really special and thus need to find our own way?