Summary: Objective circumstances and behaviors like wealth and health affect happiness as much as subjective psychological traits, according to a recent study. Researchers found that surveys of happiness and life satisfaction overstate the importance of psychological traits because they are measured similarly, and a methodological change — simply asking someone how they’re doing — enables a fairer comparison.
Source: Cornell University
Happiness can’t be bought, but nor does it depend mostly on one’s mindset, as many happiness surveys would suggest, according to a recent study by Cornell psychology researchers.
They find that objective circumstances and behaviors, such as wealth and health, influence happiness as much as subjective psychological traits, like an outgoing nature.
Their analysis shows that surveys of happiness and life satisfaction overstate the importance of psychological traits because they are measured similarly, asking respondents to rate themselves using scales or multiple-choice questions, sometimes the same questions.
But a methodological change—simply asking someone how they’re doing—enables a fairer comparison. In written responses to such an open-ended question in one large study, personality’s huge advantage relative to circumstances and behaviors disappeared, according to the analysis.
“If we look at the research, it suggests that people are just happier because they have a happy personality,” said William Hobbs, assistant professor of psychology and government in the College of Human Ecology and College of Arts and Sciences. “Our study suggests that’s not the case, that there are many drivers of happiness. For some it might have to do with personality, for others saving money, exercising or spending time with family and friends.”
Hobbs is the lead author of “For Living Well, Behaviors and Circumstances Matter Just as Much as Psychological Traits,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Anthony Ong, professor of psychology in the College of Human Ecology and professor of gerontology in medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, is a co-author.
Their findings could inform happiness research as well as policies that increasingly seek to demonstrate happiness benefits. They suggest that policies targeting circumstances and behaviors, such as reducing inequality or smoking, may be more valuable than interventions focused on psychology, which might not be possible to implement on a population scale.
To test whether open-ended questions better capture circumstances’ influence on happiness, the researchers tapped the only nationally representative longitudinal study that has systematically included an open-ended question about well-being. From 2004 to 2016, the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study asked, “What do you do to make life go well?”
Hobbs and Ong scored more than 1,000 responses using a large language model, validated by research assistants and sentiment analysis software, to assess whether they reflected thriving, struggling or suffering, terms used to describe scales in Gallup happiness reports.
Using a pre-existing language model and other automated scoring systems limited the researchers’ control over the tests, and multiple measures helped assess sensitivity to different shortcomings across the happiness scores.
The MIDUS study also provided information about respondents’ income, education and whether they were married or had children, a measure of social connectedness; health behaviors, including smoking or physical activity; and medical history and certain current health indicators.
Analyzing answers to the open-ended question, the researchers found that the measures of circumstances and psychological traits were correlated roughly equally with how happy people said they were.
“If we don’t use self-ratings and closed-ended questions to study happiness, then things like health and money and to some extent social connectedness are just as strongly associated with happiness as personality,” Hobbs said. “If we correct for this methodological problem, then they look about the same.”
While closed-ended questions are crucial for researchers to track life’s ups and downs and compare results, Hobbs and Ong suggest that the open-ended approach they evaluated “appears to be a uniquely promising addition to the well-being and wellness studies repertoire … [and] provides a view of well-being from the perspective of survey respondents.”
Hobbs said advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence now make it possible to ask people if they are happy in different ways, and still have replicable ways of scoring responses. Language models introduce their own biases, he said, but they probably aren’t multiple-choice survey response biases and so they enable fairer comparisons between personality and circumstances than existing closed-ended measures.
“Perhaps the best way to see whether someone is doing well,” the researchers concluded, “is to ask them.”
About this psychology research news
Author: James Dean
Source: Cornell University
Contact: James Dean – Cornell University
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.
“For living well, behaviors and circumstances matter just as much as psychological traits” by William R. Hobbs et al. PNAS
Abstract
For living well, behaviors and circumstances matter just as much as psychological traits
In 2004 through 2016, three studies in the national Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) project asked participants the open-ended question “What do you do to make life go well?”.
We use verbatim responses to this question to evaluate the relative importance of psychological traits and circumstances for predicting self-reported, subjective well-being.
The use of an open-ended question allows us to test the hypothesis that psychological traits are more strongly associated with self-reported well-being than objective circumstances because psychological traits and well-being are similarly self-rated—meaning that they both ask respondents to decide how to place themselves on provided and unfamiliar survey scales.
For this, we use automated zero-shot classification to score statements about well-being without training on existing survey measures, and we evaluate this scoring through subsequent hand-labeling. We then assess associations of this measure and closed-ended measures for health behaviors, socioeconomic circumstances, biomarkers for inflammation and glycemic control, and mortality risk over follow-up.
Although the closed-ended measures were far more strongly associated with other multiple-choice self-ratings, including Big 5 personality traits, the closed- and open-ended measures were similarly associated with relatively objective indicators of health, wealth, and social connectedness.
The findings suggest that psychological traits, when collected through self-ratings, predict subjective reports of well-being so strongly because of a measurement advantage—and that circumstance matters just as much when assessed using a fairer comparison.
