The Folk Concept(s) of Happiness

I've finally written up a rough summary of some survey results I've been collecting for several years now, posted at the link below. This has been pretty informal so far, and I'd like to follow up with better studies using larger samples, as well as to address some questions not yet studied here. You'll see that my methods are primitive, but I think the results are interesting all the same. 

The Folk Concept(s) of Happiness: Preliminary Notes

Very briefly and crudely, I take the studies to offer some evidence that:

1. 'Happy' is primarily a psychological term in folk usage, whereas 'happy life' is closer to the normative notion of well-being or eudaimonia.
2. Hedonism about well-being is probably not a majority view.
3. Intuitions about well-being depend heavily on subtleties of wording.
4. To count as happy (by lay stds), a mere majority of positive vs. negative affect does not suffice.
5. Happiness ascriptions may draw on inferences about nonconscious affective states.
6. People are happy to ascribe happiness based purely on affective information.

Comments and suggestions for future surveys most welcome!

Dan

Comments

[Jonathan Phillips]

Hey Dan,

These are three really intriguing studies! I definitely agree that these results seem to indicate that people have an ordinary conception of well-being as separate from pleasure.
This could really have important implications for public policy programs and a lot of other research which depends on self-reports of happiness.

I wonder though, in the first study, if part of the reason participants were so willing to say George was happy was because there were six *other* questions having more to do with well-being. That is, perhaps the students in your philosophy courses realized you wouldn't just have asked the same question 7 times and specifically adopted a hedonistic interpretation of happiness. This might also be able to explain the effects observed for attributions of happiness in the other research you mention by Sven Nyholm. If this is right, then perhaps even 'happiness' can be used normatively.

What do you think?

[Joshua Knobe]

I agree that this finding about 'happy' vs. 'happy life' was a particularly interesting one, and I'd be interested to hear what other readers thought about Dan's exact case.

In Dan's study, all participants received the following vignette:

George is generally very cheerful, highly satisfied with his life, and feels deeply fulfilled. He enjoys his life greatly and has a very pleasant experience on the whole. But he does not realize that his wife, children and friends can’t stand him, ridiculing him behind his back. They pretend to love him only because he is wealthy. If he knew these things, he would be devastated. But he remains ignorant of the facts even into old age, and feels completely satisfied through the end of his life. He never learns the truth.

This vignette, of course, is designed in such a way that George has a lot of positive mental states but, considered from a normative perspective, his life is a bad one.

The results showed that subjects disagreed with the sentence 'George's life was a happy one' but agreed with the sentence 'George was happy.'

I'd love to hear whether people think this study actually provides good evidence for the view that although people's concept of a *happy life* might be a normative one, their concept of *being happy* is not.

[Dan Haybron]

Thanks very much, Jonathan and Joshua!

Jonathan--good point about the other questions possibly encouraging a psychological reading of 'happy'. This relates to the possibility I mentioned that having both 'happy' and 'happy life' on the same questionnaire caused participants to try to differentiate them. I expect any such impact is minor at most, but it would be good to test that with different questionnaires (and in this last case it could also be that students felt pressure to give the *same* answer on the 'happy' and 'happy life' to stay consistent).

However, even if the format distorted the responses, it is noteworthy that students tended in the psychological direction on 'happy', and the normative on 'happy life'. So there seems to be at least some tendency to distinguish the terms along those lines.

Joshua--agreed! Again, I think my studies leave open the possibility that 'happy' has some normative component, though they at least put pressure on the idea that it is equivalent to the strongly normative notion of well-being.

I'm not sure, though, how to distinguish empirically between (1) 'happy' being a normative concept and (2) 'happy' being a non-normative concept, with ascriptions sometimes being influenced by normative factors via performance errors, contamination from the normative concept of a 'happy life', emotions, heuristics, etc.

I suspect a lot of it will come down to our prior commitments about how to individuate concepts, though that's an area where I don't have a lot of conviction. But perhaps a clever study could help discriminate between 1 and 2.

As long as 'happy' has a weak enough normative component that I can justify reconstructing the concept in non-normative terms, I'm happy.

The *really* interesting thing would be if 'happy' is partly normative, though not equivalent to well-being, and people have good *reason* to use it that way. (I.e., it isn't just muddled thinking.)

[Sven Nyholm]

Looking at the vignette described by Joshua, I am noticing what might be two relevant differences between that vignette and those that I used in my happiness experiments:

(1) unlike my imagined people who knew the relevant facts about they were doing, George doesn't know that his life has the features that make his life bad

(2): what's bad about George's life is not that he is being immoral, whereas the agents in my vignettes were living bad lives whose badness consisted (from the point of view of the evaluating survey-participants) in their being immoral.

One possibility is this: the normative component of *happiness* is a moral one: we cannot be truly happy if what causes our pleasure and overall life satisfaction is some immoral activity. But, we can be happy if we are living lives that are bad in other, non-moral respects. An addition to this might be that we need to be aware of how we are engaging in these immoral activities in order for them to make us not count as truly happy.
(It can't be the case that we also ourselves have to regard ourselves as immoral, because in my studies the agents were explicitly described as themselves thinking that what they were doing was okay.)

I'm not necessarily endorsing the explanation of a potential normative component of *happiness* just given, but it is one that points out two relevant features missing in the George case. So, I'd therefore be interested in what people think about it.

[Jorgen Hansen]

I would like to see further work on "nonconscious affective states" and happiness. It would be very interesting if most people (on a larger scale) failed to ascribe happiness to a subject who reported consciousness of happiness-related characteristics (such as in Robert's case). If, as you interpret (and which I take to probably be the case), the majority take Robert to have "deep emotional troubles" from which he merely becomes distracted, it would be interesting to test whether or not the majority would hold this view if asked explicitly. That is, if you asked whether or not Robert's being distracted from deep emotional troubles would in turn produce characteristics of happiness, would the folk's intuitions change?

[Dan Haybron]

Sven--I agree it'd be useful to sort those differences out. The interesting thing about your results is that happiness ascriptions seem not only sensitive to normative considerations, but *moral* ones. What would be truly weird is if they are sensitive to moral qualities (as in your cases) but *not* what we normally think of as well-being (as in George, re. 'happy'). However, the 'happy life' responses to George suggest that at least that locution invokes something like a WB concept.

I would love to know whether questions that are more clearly about WB are also sensitive to moral variables, or if it's just happiness. It would be really interesting to find lay support for something like an Aristotelian view of WB!

Jorgen--I've thought about putting the question to participants directly, say asking them to rate the plausibility of various explanations of Robert's unhappiness. (Is something like that what you had in mind in your last question? I wasn't sure.)

I worry about how reliable people are at giving such explanations, though--how to tell if they actually have no idea what's driving their intuitions and are just giving post-hoc rationalizations?

I'm thinking it would be fun to try a variation of Robert w. *no* conscious negative affect--nothing but dispositional information. If people ascribed unhappiness then, that'd be pretty remarkable.

Nameless--for background on the terminology, there are a couple of short overviews, incl a 1-pager, on my website: http://sites.google.com/site/danhaybron/research/happiness-and-well-being

Thanks all!

[Sven Nyholm]

Dan,

yes, it would be interesting to see whether we could uncover a similar effect for WB. I wonder, though, what question to use in a study about this that would correspond to "do you agree with the following statement "X is happy"?". Something like that seems harder to formulate for well-being. Something like "do you agree with this statement "X has a high level of well-being"?"sounds highly technical and unnatural.

Now regarding how my studies indicate that *moral* considerations in particular seem to partly determine whether we attribute happiness to others: perhaps what's going on is that reading about these (in the opinion of the participants) immoral people is especially upsetting and that reading about people who live what we regard as bad lives where the badness is non-moral is less upsetting, but that this even so has some influence on how willing we are to attribute happiness to these people. That is, one possibility worth thinking about is whether badness per se is a key factor, but that especially upsetting sorts of badness might have a stronger influence on our happiness-attributions than less upsetting kinds. When some kind of badness is especially upsetting then the badness of the person's life perhaps becomes a more salient feature, which then has a stronger influence on our judgment than some less upsetting, less salient type of badness.

[Dan Haybron]

Sven,
Unfortunately one of my findings is precisely that attitudes about WB are hard to gauge! Of the various wordings I tried (basically I think all except the first, 'happy', are well-being terms), the ones that got the most disagreement (e.g., fortunate) might be the most useful indicators of attitudes toward well-being. Whereas terms like 'went well for him' or 'well-being' itself seem to invoke a narrower reading.

However, it occurs to me that 'fortunate' and the like may have its own problems: in the case of immorality, someone having a pleasant life might be deemed fortunate or lucky simply because she got away with it!

Given that, 'happy life' may actually be the most reliable indicator of attitudes about WB, if my results hold up! (Even as 'happy' may not be a WB term at all.)

However, other WB locutions I haven't tested include: 'better off', 'benefit', 'beneficial', 'gained', 'in her interest', 'self-interest'. These would be worth trying as well, though some are only comparative. Are there others?

Re. the influence of upsetting-ness, that seems pretty plausible to me (it's what I had in mind re. the influence of emotions vs. the concept).

Another possibility is that people may hesitate to ascribe such a positively valenced word as 'happy' to a bad person. (Similarly, they might be reluctant to call a hero ugly, stupid or miserable, simply because they don't want to "badmouth" a good person.) That could be fun to test! (A good paper title too: "Could Moses Have Been Ugly and Fat?" Well, maybe not *that* example, but you get the idea.)

[diploma in psychology]

'Happy' is primarily a psychological term in folk usage, whereas 'happy life' is closer to the normative notion of well-being or eudaimonia.
however, how to happy?

[Nick1254367]

Truly insightful! Recently I had my own shot at defining happiness, which aims to be more “scientific” and “objective” (as much as this is possible for a subjective feeling such as happiness):

“A person can be considered to have experienced a “happy” moment if the person chooses to re-live it as an end in itself if offered at no cost.”

For the detailed derivation of this conclusion please have a look at http://www.spreadinghappiness.org/2009/08/what-is-happiness/
What do you think about this definition?

Thank you,

Nick