Could Paris Hilton Ever Be Happy?

Luke Misenheimer, Joshua Knobe and I have recently been doing some research on attributions of happiness (much like Dan Haybron and Sven Nyholm). In particular, we suspected that there would be an evaluative component in people's attributions of happiness that was totally absent from their attributions of unhappiness. 

To investigate whether or not unhappiness had an evaluative component, participants were told about a woman named Maria who is described as a caring individual with a great family life and a variety of meaningful friendships and projects. Nonetheless, she feels terrible all the time and regards her life as fundamentally a failure.

Participants were then asked whether they agreed that Maria is unhappy. Not too surprisingly they agreed that Maria was unhappy despite having a good life. What this seems to show is that a person could be unhappy whether or not they have a good life.

We took a really similar approach to testing happiness. Maria is described as a vapid individual who has no real  no goals beyond going to parties and gaining greater social status. Nonetheless, she enjoys her day-to-day activities and feels like there isn’t anything she would rather be doing with her life.

Participants were then asked whether they agreed that Maria is happy.

Surprisingly, participants disagreed! They reported that, despite Maria's positive mental states, she wasn't happy. This seems to suggest that the ordinary concept of happiness has an evaluative component that the concept of unhappiness does not.

The results from the full 2 x 2 study can be seen in the graph below:

[For this study and others along the same basic line, see our very brief paper.]

Comments

[Josh May]

Interesting paper, guys! I don't have a great deal to say, but here are a couple of minor things:

(1) It's a bit confusing to have one of your independent variables called "Happy" when the dependent variable is judgments of happiness. In general, it's kind of weird to be inquiring in to our concept of happiness but then seemingly using it as an independent variable. Why not have the one independent variable labeled something like "Feelings" (varied as either "Feels Good" or "Feels Bad"). After all, the vignettes seem to be operationalizing it by employing terms like "feels."

(2) On p. 3 of the Supplement, you seem to be missing an F value for the main effect of Mental State. And is the p value there supposed to be .03 instead of .93? The "9" on the keyboard is next to the "0" and .93 sure ain't significant! :)

By the way, I've never heard of this Amazon Mechanical Turk before. I'll look into it, but it sure would be great if you guys posted something on the blog here about how to use it to solicit subjects, especially if it's quick, easy, and not very expensive.

[A Facebook User]

Thanks for the interesting post. I wonder about the conclusion that is obtained from this example.

I think the evaluation of (un)happiness occurs with respect to Maria's standard.

In 1) Maria is not living up to her own standard for happiness. Your result appears to highlight that an inability to live up to one's own standard for happiness prevents her from being happy.

In 2) Maria is living up to her own standard, but because it is so meaningless(!), we are reluctant to attribute happiness to her.

Living up to one's standard for happiness is then necessary but not sufficient for happiness. I think that for (un)happiness there are thus (at least) 2 evaluations:

i) First, assess whether Maria is living up to her own standard for happiness. (If one is unhappy, she clearly does not live up to her own standard for happiness).

ii) Check that standard and (somehow) judge whether or not it is rightly constitutive of happiness.

I suppose my comment/question is: Is there really an evaluation with respect to happiness that isn't already there in the unhappiness case? That does not seem clear to me. The evaluation is done with respect to the standard, in both cases.

[Justin Sytsma]

Hey Jonathan,

Interesting. I had a similar thought to Facebook User's point about the Paris case (Bad Life / Happy)--i.e., the one where you got the most interesting result. Specifically, I wonder if people might just be reading the question with an implied "really" in it; that is, as asking: Is Maria *really* happy? Another way to put this is that I think that in some contexts "happiness" talk has a connotation of fulfillment. I suspect that the Bad Life / Happy case provides such a context. People judge that while Maria is having a good time, she is leading a rather empty life that is lacking in true fulfillment. As such, while she might say that she is happy, she is not *really* happy.

[Jonathan Phillips]

Josh,

Thanks for your comments. You are completely correct about (1) and (2). Those are both just typos which should be corrected shortly. I really appreciate the extra pair of eyes!

I also like your idea about letting x-phiers know about Mturk. I'll try to post something about it in the next week or so. It definitely is an easy way to collect data, though I think there is something to be said for the public park approach.

[Dan Haybron]

Great stuff. I second Justin's point that Maria's mental life may be underspecified, so that people may be inferring negative mental states to explain the "not happy" responses. (Eg, the psych description is consistent with my "Robert" scenario, where I added further psych info that caused participants to ascribe unhappiness, most likely on purely psychological grounds.)

It would be interesting to see what happens if you replace 'happy' with 'happy life'--probably a stronger "evaluative" tendency. Also, if you tried both wordings on the same questionnaire, to see if 'happy' would become less "evaluative" (ie, more people say "bad life" Maria is happy, though at least as many deny she has a happy life). If so, that could support an "evaluative" interpretation of your findings over the "inferred mental distress" reading. (Since 'happy life' seems to differ from 'happy' in introducing evaluative, or at least nonpsychological, criteria.)

Dan

[Joshua Knobe]

Thanks for all these comments! This is really super helpful.

A number of people have suggested that the difference we find between conditions in the 'happiness' cases might be due not to any normative judgment but rather just to a fact about how people attribute some kind of mental state in the different conditions. This is a very nice point, and we tried looking further at our data to see whether we might be able to address it.

In particular, we actually asked people to make normative judgments in each of these cases (i.e., to judge whether Maria had a good life). Different people gave quite different answers to this question, with some saying, for example, that the life of wholesome motherhood was actually a bad one.

Well, if you add these ratings in as a covariate, it turns out that you only get an effect for the covariate itself (the normative judgments) with no remaining effect of the difference between conditions (mother vs. Paris Hilton).

So, for example, if someone is assigned to the wholesome motherhood condition but thinks that this is not truly a good form of life, this person will be unlikely to say that Maria is happy.

This result seems to suggest that the difference between conditions is only affecting happiness judgments *by affecting normative judgments*.

Does that help to address the question?

[Dan Haybron]

I do think that's suggestive, and it also helps your case insofar as you've found similar types of normativity for lots of other ostensibly non-normative concepts.

However, I would already expect the psychological inferences (eg, assuming Maria's life is somehow emotionally unfulfilling) to correlate strongly with the normative judgments. So, eg, they could be reasoning, Maria's life is bad, people living badly tend to have all sorts of mental nasties lurking down in the boiler room, therefore she probably isn't happy (ie, truly emotionally fulfilled, or something like that).

As with my Robert case, you might test this by asking people what they think of Maria's mental life (eg, if it's fulfilling, if she's really troubled "deep down," etc).

I recall that in an early variant of George (my EM-type case), some students wrote in that he couldn't really feel happy "deep down" or something like that.

I wonder what you'd find if you also tested for "just world" beliefs, as just-worlders might be more likely to add the psychological inference (viz, that bad people, getting their just deserts, must be plagued by distress etc).

And hey, how are we supposed to compete with Paris Hilton??

[Mellski]

It seems awkward that you attribute an evaluative component to unhappiness but not happiness, when the same line of reasoning seems to appear in both cases. For example, you say that an evaluative component arises when one judges someones life that is supposedly happy, as being not happy, thus the evaluative component arises. However, the same thinking occurs in the first case when the individual is not happy, an evaluative component arises that says she is, in fact, living a happy life. So there seems to be a type of reasoning whereby individuals have a set system of what a "happy" life is, and when this system is not met, a unhappy life becomes apparent. This already suggests an evaluative component regardless of whether or not the individual is being judged in terms of happiness or unhappiness.

[Jonathan Phillips]

Dan,

You bring up a really good point, but I wonder if the example Josh mentioned could address it. Participants who thought that the wholesome mom did not have a normatively good life were also less likely to say she was happy. But it doesn't seem clear to me, in that case, that the reason participants thought she wasn't happy was because they imagined her have a bunch of mental nasties lurking in the boiler room. What do you think?

By the way, I'm not sure any of us can really compete with Paris, but I guess we can all take solace in the fact that no one will ever think she's happy.

[Dan Haybron]

Jonathan,

Ah, I'd misread Josh's comment! Still... I would expect that people will generally tend to make judgments according to the following rule: those living in ways they disapprove of are less likely to be leading fulfilling lives. Nice folks think bad folks aren't really fulfilled, and bad folks think nice folks would be better off, and leading more pleasant lives, if they weren't such saps (or...).

In short, I think inferred mental states and normative judgments about good/bad lives will tend to covary, so that either could explain the Maria results. (If I'm now reading this correctly!)

Still, I wonder *why* anyone would attribute "bad life" in the happy/good life scenario. I would think such a response is either a joke or the opinion of a sociopath (who thinks good folks saps who can't really be as fulfilled as they look).

But was there more to the vignette? The comments attribute motherhood to Maria, but I didn't see that in the paper. If she was described as a mother, then people might think the wholesome mom has a "bad life" b/c they have a dim view of the rewards of motherhood, which is a fairly common view. Ie, they might read Maria as a Stepford wife who wears a vapid smile but isn't really fulfilled.

Not that participants *aren't* treating 'happy' normatively, just that there seems to be another plausible explanation that hasn't to my mind been ruled out. In any event, your results are pretty interesting! At the very least you've found an intriguing (and plausible) asymmetry of some sort between 'happy' and 'unhappy'.

Come to think of it, that asymmetry itself may be evidence for normativity directly driving the 'happy' judgments. For the best explanation of the asymmetry, to my mind, is that 'happy' is more strongly associated with the well-being notion of happiness, which figures heavily in talk of ideal lives, than 'unhappy'.

Ie, you get conceptual bleed-through in ascriptions of 'happy' from the clearly normative well-being notion (eg, 'happy' and 'happy life' are easily confused). Whereas you don't for 'unhappy', b/c we don't talk about bad or unfortunate lives as readily in terms of unhappiness. So there's a thought in favor of your hypothesis.
Dan

[Joshua Knobe]

Dan,

Thanks for these new thoughts. If you want to take a look at a detailed description of the studies (with all the vignettes, etc.), you can just go to the 'supplementary materials' at:

http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jk762/LovHapSupp.pdf

In any case, I really like your point about the asymmetry between intuitions about happiness and intuitions about unhappiness. It does seem like it would be hard to explain how people's attributions of mental states could generate this effect on happiness attributions without having any corresponding effect on unhappiness attributions.

[Dan Haybron]

Thanks Josh--as you might expect, my take on "good life" Maria from the supplements was that it doesn't *sound* to me like a very pleasant life (at least my response to her routine was "bleagh!")--and it is tempting to fill in the blanks with (possibly repressed) mental nasties. So I would wonder if participants' doing so partly explains your results.

Still, the asymmetry point I made still seems to me right, and I wouldn't be surprised if normativity was directly playing a role.

I can't help mentioning, re. Maria, the recent studies suggesting that dealing w. the kids is among the least pleasant parts of American moms' lives (Kahneman et al). Participants may be keying off their sense of that.

Perhaps as evidence of the pathological turn American parenting has taken in recent years, the same methods (as I recall) found dealing w. kids to be among the *most* pleasant parts of the day for mothers in France...