Hi, you're listening to Science Versus the Show where we pit fact against fad. I'm Wendy Zukerman, and on today's show, happiness. If you try hard enough, can you really find it? Researchers have been celebrating a breakthrough and you reap it as carefully.
It seems to break through and covering the sins to sit behind us across the world. The idea of happiness is that if you try, you can find it, perhaps with a shift in your mindset, or a change in your lifestyle. Happiness is waiting for you. In fact, it might be just around the corner, just like these ridiculously popular YouTube videos say it is.
Today I'm going to be talking to you about how to be happy. So we figure it out, the basics of happiness. Happiness is actually so simple. So somehow a gratitude journal.
We've your eight hours. OK, this positive happy bubble. I don't watch the news ever. Yes, like ever.
Right, got it? Well, that's YouTube. Because then, there's science. On today's show, we're going to look at what makes a happy person, from the internal stuff like your personality, to the external stuff, like income and the community.
And mixed into that, we're going to explore how much power you have to change how happy you are. But first, how does science study something as seemingly ephemeral as happiness? The main way in which we study happiness is by looking at the answers that people give on questionnaires. This is Professor Paul Frighters, an economist at the University of Queensland.
Around the world, there will be several thousands of people asked, this very day, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole? Or how happy are you in general? They can answer on a numerical scale from 0 to 10, or on a verbal scale, like very happy or very unhappy. And in these surveys, there will also be questions about other things, say, your outlook on life, your income, your age.
And from this, scientists make correlations about the sorts of traits that happy people have, and unhappy people don't. Now, already you can probably see that this science of happiness is not an exact science. Or they can even take a box with a very smiley face or an unhappy face. But according to Paul, if you do these surveys with enough people and you do some clever statistics, you can arrive at some largely scientific findings.
So, what have these sorts of surveys told us about what makes a happy person? First, let's talk about the internal stuff, like your personality. Here's Paul again. The main personality types were happier on the extroverts, within Western culture at least, about the people who express themselves openly quite confident.
Those are the happier ones than the introverted types. And according to Paul, people who are optimistic about the future also tend to be happier. So if we think life is going to get better, this means that for many moments in a day or in a year, we are imagining ourselves in this future, that reach our more important and with higher status than we currently have. This brings us a lot of happiness, this imagination, if you like, of the future.
Dr. Milianna Simon-Thomas, director of the Greater Good Science Centre in the University of California in Berkeley, adds that happy people also tend to be more grateful than unhappy people. People who are more grateful are healthier, they're happier, they have more satisfying relationships, they're more resilient, they don't suffer as much in response to traumatic experiences. Okay, so happy people tend to be optimistic, extroverts and grateful.
So next question, what makes people like that? How much of this is related to genetics or personality factors that you just can't change? Well, to get an idea of what role Algians might play in our happiness levels, scientists have conducted studies using identical and non-identical twins. And the way these sorts of studies work is that because identical twins have pretty much the same DNA, if you find that both twins tend to have the same level of happiness compared to non-identical twins, then we can fairly confidently assume that our genetics plays an important role in our level of happiness.
What we've come to understand from that analysis... Here's Milianna again. Is it about 50% of the variance? And that is the difference in happiness scores between one person and another can be explained by their genetic endowment.
Now that figure comes from a 1996 paper that analyzed the results of over 2000 twins who answered the question, how happy and contented are you on average? The researchers actually wrote that genetics may account for up to 80% of our happiness, even writing, quote, it may be that trying to be happier is as futile as trying to be taller, in quote. So much for those YouTubers telling you to create a... I'm a happy bubble and I do hate to pop your happiness bubble, but this notion that a big chunk of our happiness is almost hardwired genetically.
Fits into an idea called the Happiness Set Point Theory. And this suggests that our average level of happiness is set at a baseline, and there's very little we can do to become happier. So even if we have a really great day, or we fall in love, or we get our dream job, or we try to think more positively, over time our happiness will just go back to that set point. But for those who don't see themselves as particularly happy, you might be happy to hear that the Happiness Set Point Theory is under dispute.
Now of course, any happiness that you'll get from this new news is likely to be short-lived, because you'll just go back to the baseline pretty quickly. No joking, because it's under dispute, remember? So for example, using different statistics, a paper published by Professor Paul Frighters in 2014, suggested that genes might play a much smaller role in our happiness, maybe only 30%, and that means we have more happiness we go wrong to play with. Conclusion.
By the time you have grown up, a chunk of how happy you are has already been laid down, but not everything. So can you make yourself more optimistic, grateful, and happy if you're not born that way? Diane Beller-Brodrick, an associate professor at the University of Melbourne, says yes. There are things, intentional things, that we can actually do in our lives to try and increase our levels of happiness.
She says that people in general tend to focus on the negative things in life. Particularly unhappy people, when they do this even when life is pretty good, and it's due to a psychological process called negative bias. But when we bring to our attention, the good things that are going on around us, that makes us feel better. But often, if you're not deliberately doing those activities, they don't really come to your attention.
She also adds that savour in the moment can help us to be more optimistic, which involves really trying to amplify a positive experience that you've already had, by perhaps celebrating it or by having a conversation with somebody else about how fantastic that experience was. So it enables you to relive the experience when you're telling it to somebody else, and therefore it makes you feel happy. And Diane says you can even make yourself more grateful by writing a gratitude journal. You're writing down three good things that have happened to you throughout the day.
These sorts of exercises are called positive psychology interventions, and Diane says that studies have found they can improve well-being. These positive psychology interventions are generally very successful. So a review paper published in BMC Public Health in 2013 analyzed studies looking into these sorts of practices, say savouring the moment, gratitude journals thinking positively this sort of thing. And they found that most of these interventions had small to moderate benefits for those who practice them.
But the authors also noted that quote, the quality of the studies was not high, so often they didn't have that many people in them, for example. So what we have here is small effect sizes, plus-equality studies, and that means we really don't know how many people will benefit from, say, writing a gratitude journal. I tried for a week to write down everything I think before. He is comedian Jen Frigal.
And I just would cry so much. I don't know why I'm laughing there. But Jen said that the journal made her upset because she didn't connect with what she was doing at all. I'm grateful that I live in a house and I'm grateful.
And I know I should be grateful, but I didn't connect with any of it. Like this performative thing, like I'm writing for some invisible audience. These things I don't in that moment feel at all. But on the other hand, Amelia, on YouTube absolutely loves a good gratitude journal.
I write down things like literally anything and everything. I would do like deep stops of like, why do I feel so disconnected from what I'm doing? I'm so happy I can walk to the post office because if you're walking, you have something conclusion. Happy people tend to be optimistic and grateful, but whether practicing positive thinking and writing gratitude journals can actually make you like the happy people?
Well, we don't have scientific data for that. So we've gone through the internal things that make us happy, our personality, possibly our genetics. But what about the external factors? Money.
Like money. Money. We are told that money can't buy you happiness. But is it true?
Well, in the 1970s, economist Richard Easterland worked out that when you look at countries, happiness and average national incomes are only linked up to a point. And after this, there's no correlation. So despite real income growth in the West over the last 50 years, we haven't gotten a whole bunch happier. Money can buy happiness if it takes you from poverty to not poverty.
This is a story in Jennifer Michael Hecht and author of The Happiness Myth. So as long as your belly can be full and your babies don't dive starvation and you have some small amount of choice in your life, you are a leap ahead of people without that. And then it's a story of diminishing returns. The more you get, the less it helps.
And in a recent paper, economist Richard Easterland and his colleagues wrote that this is largely because once you get more money, your aspirations rise, you just want more things and more money. But economist Paul Fright is tells a different tale. There's no end to the happiness increase that you can get for more income. The very richest people are happy than just rich people who are happier than sort of reasonably well-off people who are happier than poor people.
Using a different way to slice up the data, Paul has found that while national happiness levels don't increase as a country gets richer and richer. For an individual living in a country, they will get happier if they're getting richer and richer when compared to their neighbours. You feel better about yourself if you become even richer than the other people around you. The status in life is really important.
So our sense of self-worth, our self-esteem is incredibly important for our happiness. On the other hand, excessively desiring financial goals has been associated with lower life satisfaction. Conclusion. Having lots of money can make you happier, but you might be surprised to hear that the level of happiness you'll receive from high income isn't all that much, particularly when you compare it to those whopping 50% figures that get bandied about for genetics.
And I'll come back to this in just a moment. But first, how happy do you get once you've got the wife, or husband, and the kids? While marriage is associated with happiness, a recent review on this topic by a team at the Free University in Berlin found that the honeymoon effect of getting wedded is short to live. The happiness supposed only lasts about two years according to one study, and then we just head towards baseline.
And what about the baby? Well, the review paper also found that life satisfaction tends to drop after the birth of a child, possibly because parents have less time to spend with each other. Parents, it's not all bad highlighting how difficult happiness can be to measure. The review found that parents tend to be more positive in daily life than the child's free.
Because I guess babies are really cute and stuff. And the reason that all of these things that we usually think will make us happy, getting married, having kids, having a lot of money, doesn't really, is because humans are generally very good at adapting to our situation. Or as author of the Happiness, it's Jennifer Michael Heck who we heard from before puts it. When you have everything you need, you get bored pretty fast.
And so people have lamented the fact that you can want and want and want and then you get it and always that's it. Now in the Happiness literature, this is called the headdonic treadmill. So you're running to achieve something, even something big like getting married, and then you get it, and then you just want something more because you've gotten used to it. So you're running but you're on that treadmill and you're not getting anywhere in terms of happiness.
And to show you how powerful this effect is, when scientists have used those big surveys of well-being and happiness, they've calculated that the joy we get from marital status, income, job, and even a whole bunch of other stuff, all rolling together achieves about 10% of our happiness. Conclusion. If you're getting married and having kids because you think it'll make you happy, that's a bad idea. Next up, community.
According to a millionaire sign in Thomas from the University of California in Berkeley, a strong community is really important when it comes to making us happy. What is it that goes on the lives of happy people? The most regularly occurring thing is a strong sense of community. A knowledge that there's at least one other person in the world who you can rely on and who relies on you for support and connection.
So for example, in the recent Household Income and Labor Dynamics survey, also called Hilda, that was published in Australia, found that people are happier in communities where neighbours help out and do things together. Paul Fratas has also come to this conclusion that strong connections with family and the community play an important role in making us happy. And his research has looked at international comparisons of happiness rates. So in general, you think that countries with a high national income, high levels of freedom and democracy would be the happiest nations.
And you'd be right. So think about Norway, Denmark, Australia, yeah, New Zealand, that's pretty good too. But there are interesting anomalies, countries where the people are happier than you'd expect given their levels of poverty. Columbia is a good example, it has quite high levels of happiness.
He's economist Professor Paul Fratas again. But nevertheless, the murder rate, the domestic violence rate is very high there and the level of income is not so high. So what are the questions of, well, why are they so happy? According to Paul, his international assessment has found that this comes back to community and family.
Okay, so that's all well and good if you're already part of a community, if you like your family, or even if you just live in a happy country. But what if you don't? So it's not true that you have to take your national level of miserable illness or your culture, it's given you've just moved to another culture. Okay, so you got it?
If you want to be happy, move to Australia. But if you're afraid of koalas, yes, this is actually the sound of a koala. Anyway, Paul says there are things you can do that aren't quite so drastic as moving countries. You can choose to as it were, build up a more warm family structure, be part of community building.
Oh, community building, that sounds like a lot of work. If you basically don't want to change anything major about life and then want to be happy by going to a course in positive psychology, well, then you're just eluding yourself. Conclusion, having a strong community can play an important role in your happiness. And then there's this question of whether obsessively pursuing happiness can actually make a sad or through the happiness myth, Jennifer Michael Hecht.
I can say again. We have a culture that's telling us that it really is up to us to somehow squeeze all the fun out of this life and all the meaning and all the accomplishments. And we do ourselves into service a lot of the time. Indeed, Dr.
June Gruber at Yale University and her colleagues predicted in a rather politically titled paper called the Darkside Happiness. That quote, the more people strive for happiness, the more likely it is that they will become disappointed about how they feel, paradoxically decreasing their happiness the more they want it. End quote. Dr.
Amelia Simon Thomas agrees that there is a wrong way to go about the search for happiness. When people seek happiness in this kind of hedonic treadmill way, it is something that actually can be harmful to their well-being, the expectation that I'm going to just be happier. If I keep working on things that will bring me pleasure is one that is bound for disappointment. Well, on the whole, very little research has looked into this question of whether seeking happiness can actually make us sad.
Early work suggests that for some people, when they value happiness too highly, it can backfire, leading to disappointment and not enjoying nice things as much. Conclusion. We don't have the scientific evidence to show that doggedly pursuing happiness can make you sad, but watch this space. So when it comes to science versus happiness, does it stack up?
Well, a lot about whether you are a happy person is probably laid down by the time you're grown up, but there is some wiggle room. There are some things that you can do to increase the chance that you'll be happy, like making an effort with the people around you to create But in terms of trying to change who you are to make yourself more grateful and more positive by doing those gratitude journals and the like, the science is inconclusive on this. But of course, if you are doing these practices and it's working for you, then keep on doing them. For our comedian Jen Fricker, gratitude journals aren't so good, but when I asked her what's making her satisfy these days, she said, just simple things.
Like at the moment, I'm really into raking leaves in my backyard, and I'll just turn off my phone and I'll go into my backyard and then I'll rake my leaves and I'll put them in a pile and then it's done. And I feel a sense of accomplishment, I feel a sense of calm, I don't have to talk to anyone, so I feel very happy. So that science, maybe half a point? And the quest for happiness, I'll give it half a point too.
That's it for Science Versus. If you like what you hear, you can subscribe to us because we are a podcast. So please do that, you can do that on iTunes and that or your favourite podcast app. A big thanks to Sophie Townsend and Kate & Sorri, also my sister Debbie Zukman for her amazing comment every week.
And next week is our final episode for this season of Science Versus. So we are ending with a big one. It's Science Versus Science. With papers getting retracted each week and scientists under a huge pressure to publish results, we're asking, is science broken?
Science is for humans just like everybody else. And I snared Dr. Neel's brass Tyson to ask him about it. And so they might want to fake a result or whatever.
Go ahead. I'm Wendy Zukman, factiac time.