The Happiness Gap

A column by David Leonhardt in yesterday's New York Times reports on two new studies that have reached the same finding: Men today say they're happier than women do. This is the opposite of what research found in the 1970s.

Drawing on studies by Alan Krueger at Princeton University and Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers at the University of Pennsylvania, Leonhardt offers this explanation for the gender role reversal:

Since the 1960s, men have gradually cut back on activities they find unpleasant. They now work less and relax more. Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

He notes that women aren't actually working more than they did 30 or 40 years ago; they're doing different kinds of work. They're spending more time on paid work, yet they still have most of the same responsibilities they did a generation ago: cooking, cleaning, caring for their kids and (more and more)
their parents. As Leonhardt writes,

What has changed — and what seems to be the most likely explanation for the happiness trends — is that women now have a much longer to-do list than they once did (including helping their aging parents). They can’t possibly get it all done, and many end up feeling as if they are somehow falling short. ...

[These findings] show just how incomplete the gender revolution has been. Although women have flooded into the work force, American society hasn't fully come to grips with the change. The United States still doesn't have universal preschool, and, in contrast to other industrialized countries, there is no guaranteed paid leave for new parents.

Historian Stephanie Coontz makes a very similar argument in her essay in the new issue of Greater Good, which features a series of essays on "The 21st Century Family." Subscribers have received this issue and it's currently on newsstands; some articles from it will be on our website soon. You can also receive a no-risk sample copy when you start a subscription to Greater Good here.

Winning and Losing

Cnn.com's story on Jack Whittaker, 2002 Powerball jackpot winner, is another example of the truism that "money doesn't buy happiness." Described as "bad luck", Whittaker recounts his post-jackpot days to the AP, highlighting how his wife left him, his 17-year-old granddaughter died battling a drug addiction, and over 400 legal actions have been taken against him since he won big.

Whittaker was relatively affluent before even winning the lottery. He describes his and his family's life as "lavish", living off his prospering $17-million pipeline company. What seems to stand out in Whittaker's story, however, is the way his interactions with others have changed.

"I don't have any friends," says the multi-millionaire. "Every friend that I've had, practically, has wanted to borrow money or something and of course, once they borrow money from you, you can't be friends anymore." There was also mention on how cautious he had to be when meeting women and straying from those interested in his wallet, not him.

So Whittaker's case is unique in the sense that he seemingly had everything before striking it rich(er). According to past research, money seems to buy happiness when the individual is getting the financial boost out of poverty. For others, there seems to be no effect. Whittaker didn't need any more money for material things; his winnings instead resulted in a loss of social capital. From this particular story, we are limited to say how much of Whittaker's unfortunate outcomes can be attributed to him, but the story is telling of how impactful others can become in reacting to large sums of money. Where does one strike the balance between accumulating social versus financial capital?

Happiness, Inc.

The San Francisco Chronicle's Steven Winn had a piece yesterday about the recent boom in the study and the marketing of happiness, citing everything from last year's film Happyness (with Will Smith) to the international Happiness Foundation:

As the field fills with social scientists, pharmaceutical breakthroughs and brain scans, the happiness quest grows more complicated and fraught. Philosopher Sissela Bok, in a 2003 address on the subject, argued that "it's in times of high danger and turmoil that concerns for happiness are voiced most strikingly and seen as most indispensable." That's what made the "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" language in the Declaration of Independence so ompelling. It almost might explain why sales of those smiley-face buttons boomed during the Vietnam War (50 million in 1971). And why, in our own anxious and unsettled times, happiness is once again a growth industry.

And, Winn writes, "the converse may also be true. In times of relative peace and prosperity, happiness seems self-evident and therefore a little shrill and vulgar to acknowledge." He refers to Todd Solondz's bleak and cynical 1998 film Happiness as an example of how the subject was treated when the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal seemed to be our greatest threat to national security.

I can agree with Winn's premise, but only to a point. Part of the happiness boom today is surely motivated by scientific breakthroughs, particularly in neuroscience, that just didn't happen until recently. If they were made in 1998, I think the same amount of ink would have been spilled about them then. Indeed, many of the "pharmaceutical breakthroughs" he refers to were made in the mid-90s, and they generated an entire literary sub-genre of books with the word "Prozac" in the title (Prozac Nation and Listening to Prozac both came out in 1997). And it would be misleading to imply, as Winn does, that many of today's happiness scientists embrace the concept uncritically--see Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, which Winn does mention--just as some of those Prozac books were skeptical about the whole idea of happiness ten years ago.

All that said, there's definitely a booming happiness industry, at least in the research and publishing worlds. I only wonder whether this happiness boom is truly sui generis, the product of this particular cultural moment, as Winn suggests--or if it's just a movement that's been escalating for the last 200+ years.

Happiness is a Flaming Lip

I was initially skeptical when I heard that NPR was launching the series This I Believe, based on the old Edward R. Murrow program of the same name. But I'm always impressed when I catch a segment, which consists of someone explaining his or her worldview in three to five minutes, often zeroing in on a defining experience, hobby, or belief. They manage to sound polished and professional while still conveying the distinct personality of each essayist--some famous, some not. I usually find that I like each contributor, even if I don't agree with them.

I was jolted out of Monday-morning grogginess a few days back when the host (the esteemed public radio host/producer Jay Allison) introduced this week's This I Believer: Wayne Coyne, the singer/guitarist for the band The Flaming Lips. I'm a big fan. Then I got really excited when Coyne proceded to expound on a topic relevant to Greater Good, essentially offering his own theory on the nature of happiness.

His piece had a curious approach to the psychology of happiness--kind of a cross between Horatio Alger and Norman Vincent Peale. Check it out:

Try to be happy within the context of the life we are acutally living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves.

To back himself up, he pointed to his own 11-year(!) stint as a fry cook at Long John Silver's, which could have seemed like a dead-end job, but which he came to appreciate as a chance to get paid to daydream and nurture other ambitions. (Plus, "at least I had a job," he says.)

At first, part of me was taken aback by what could be construed as a rather conservative message, encouraging people to embrace the status quo. But I was also impressed by how Coyne's essay resonated with a major theme of positive psychology research: Gratitude. Robert Emmons, probably the leading researcher of gratitude in the world, has described gratitude as

a conscious, rational choice to focus on life's blessings rather than on its shortcomings... a universal human experience that can be either a random occurrence of grace or an attitude chosen to create a better life.

And, in line with Coyne's theory of happiness, Emmons (and many others) have found that boosting one's feelings of gratitude result in better health, increased positive emotions, a significantly rosier outlook on life, greater progress toward achieving personal goals, and maybe even more helpful behavior toward others.

So can anyone cultivate gratitude, or just those people who are capable of winning a few Grammies and producing some of the best albums of the 90s and the 21st Century? Or is gratitude what helped Coyne ascend from fast-food fry cook to indie-rock demi-god? So far, research suggests that, with the right kinds of practice, almost anyone is capable of reaping at least some of the short-term benefits of gratitude. But the jury's still out. I'd love to see Emmons and Coyne get together to discuss this further.

What's Your Jen Ratio?

My work as a psychologist—and my life as a father—has led me to believe that a simple fraction can tell us whether or not we’re truly happy. Put aside your justified suspicions for a moment and consider the following ratio--we’ll call it the jen ratio, in honor of the Confucian concept jen, which refers to a multilayered mixture of humanity, benevolence, and kindness not well captured by any word or phrase in the English language. A person of jen, Confucius observes, “wishing to establish his own character, also establishes the character of others,” and “brings the good things of others to completion and does not bring the bad things of others to completion.”

In the denominator of the jen ratio place recent actions in which someone has behaved in selfish, malevolent fashion, bringing the bad in others to completion -- the aggressive driver who flips you off as he roars in front of you, pealing away; the disdainful diner in a pricey restaurant who sneers at less well heeled passersby. Above this, in the numerator of the ratio, list recent benevolent acts of others, which brought the good in others to completion – a kind hand on your back in a crowded subway car; the woman who laughs melodiously as a stranger accidentally steps on her foot. The greater the value of the jen ratio, the more humane your world. The smaller the number becomes, the clearer it is that you are living in a Hobbesian, dog-eat-dog world, bloody in tooth and claw.

Let’s take the jen ratio for a test drive. An after school moment at my daughters’ playground yields the following: In the numerator, two boys laugh, giving each other noogies on the head; girls do handstands and cartwheels, giggling at their butt-thumping mistakes; on a grassy field, laughing kids dog pile on a young boy deliriously clasping the football to his chest. In the denominator, a boy calls a smaller boy baboon breath, in measured, low tones; two girls whisper, heads askance, about another girl who tries to enter into their game of unicorn. This minute of playground life yields a jen ratio of 3/2, or 1.5. A pretty good scene.

Let’s compare that with… in an interminable, eight minute line to buy stamps. I see 24 varieties of exasperation, from sighs to glares to threatening groans of the bureaucratically imprisoned, and one guy laugh 3 times. 3/24 = .125. Not such an uplifting time. And then how about two minutes of a video game? That’s easy: 38 heads explode/0; it’s infinitely malevolent.

One can apply the jen ratio to any realm -- our interior life, the esprit of a family in a photograph, the face of a loved one at a poignant moment in time, the tenor of a dinner party or family reunion, the ebbs and flows of intimacy in the life long relations of two sisters, the rhetoric of presidents, the spirit of historical eras, the good will of a neighborhood, more satisfying and more trying periods of a marriage.

Of course, a high jen ratio does not define what is right or good. Sitcoms, cheerleaders, servers at fastfood restaurants, and beauty pageant contestants, on the surface, yield higher jen ratios than any page of Dostoevsky, most paintings of Van Gogh, and the films of Scorscese. Think of the jen ratio as a snapshot, though, of the state of your life as you perceive it, and as it truly is.

Outside Room 15: Chocolate Ice Cream vs. "Flow"

Once upon a time there was a newspaper columnist who spent most of her time trying to figure out how to live happily. One day, while watching her daughter rub her palms raw on the monkey bars, she met a PhD candidate who was doing the very same thing. That is, watching her daughter rub her palms raw while trying to figure out how to live happily. While the columnist had been relying mostly on anecdotal evidence to support her theories, the PhD candidate had been pulling all nighters for six years, forced, as academics are, to pin her theories to studies and statistics. The writer ran an idea past the researcher and a conversation started that, six months later, is still going strong every weekday outside Room 15.

KC: If I inventoried my kids’ moods, I’d bet that watching TV and eating ice cream and getting to play at a friend’s house longer would be the high points of every week. Is that happiness? And if it is, what’s so hard about that?

CCM: Who said happiness is hard? For kids I think it comes quite easily, even to moody American teenagers—70% report being quite happy.

There's definitely happiness—in the form of pleasure—that comes from laughing at a TV show, snarfing down ice cream, and playing with a buddy. A happy life is full of positive feelings, and those can easily come from a television show, an ice cream cone (which has the added benefit of triggering a physiological response in the brain’s pleasure center) and a playdate. The thing is, happy for how long? The feelings from the TV show fade. That ice cream is gonna boomerang when all that sugar dumps them. The one thing you mentioned that has a chance at generating lasting or meaningful happiness, in my opinion, is the playdate.

KC: So that’s why I’m having so much fun right now. Because I’m playing with my friend.

CCM: Well, you might be having just as much fun watching a funny movie while eating ice cream, but I'd say we’ve got two things going on right now that have been shown to create more lasting happiness. The first is “flow,” that blissful state when you are exercising your unique strengths. I love how Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chick-SENT-me-high-ee”), the world’s foremost expert on “flow,” describes it:

[A] person in flow is completely focused...Self-consciousness disappears, yet one feels stronger than usual. When a person’s entire being is stretched in the full functioning of body and mind, whatever one does becomes worth doing for its own sake; living becomes its own justification.

KC: I love flow--like when you forget to eat or when you leave your coffee in the microwave all morning because you got going on something and you never even heard the beep or missed the caffeine.

CCM: Exactly, and kids have flow too. Look at our three year-olds, Molly and Claire, and how they get lost in their pretend play. Joint imaginative play is hard for three year-olds, but they have so much in common [mainly, obsession with the Wizard of Oz] that what is normally difficult is actually, for them, the ideal developmental challenge. That’s a key aspect of flow: the challenge cannot be too difficult, which just leads to frustration and anxiety, or too easy, which would lead to boredom and loss of engagement.

KC: Just like Goldilocks and her porridge: not too hot, not too cold, just right.

CCM: That's it. And I’d argue that the happiness Claire and Molly experience from their play far surpasses what they’d get out of watching TV—which takes no skill whatsoever. Their imaginative play is actually an application of their unique skills and talents.

KC: It's the difference between fleeting pleasure and happiness, the difference a quick tickle and a long hug.

CCM: I think this is one of the important lessons in the childhood roots of adult happiness: kids learn to achieve flow when we enable them to participate in the activities likely to produce it--namely, those things that both challenge them and provide them with some immediate feedback.

KC: So that's the name of the game, helping them find flow. I got it. Makes me happy just thinking about it.

CCM: I gotta say that there is another really obvious thing happening here that is making us happy: we’ve got a meaningful social connection (aka friendship). Hanging out with you outside Room 15 and talking about life and happiness makes me feel connected, both to you and to our larger community of families and teachers.

KC: So let's talk about connection, because some connections feel good and some don't. You know? I have some questions about that.

CCM: It'll have to wait for next week.

References & Further Resources:

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Finding Flow : The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life. New York, BasicBooks. Quote above on pp. 31-32.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., K. R. Rathunde, et al. (1993). Talented Teenagers : The Roots of Success and Failure. Cambridge England ; New York, N.Y., Cambridge University Press.

a little tickler about the correlation between friendship and happiness...

Diener, E. and M. E. P. Seligman (2002). "Very Happy People." Psychological Science 13(1): 81-84.