How do you research happiness? (his)

The first obstacle to believing you can be happier is believing the right information to be happier is out there.  We are bombarded with various theories from numerous sources on how to be happy.  Some of them legitimate, some of them not so legitimate.  But how do we sort the legitimate from the non-legitimate?

As you know, I like to start with the science and then find those who are giving me similar information.  That way I can triangulate the information and when enough sources are giving me the same message I’m more inclined to listen, believe and start changing my habits.

But that raises another question – what makes us believe science is getting us the right information?

In the recent issue of the Harvard Business Review, Daniel Gilbert, a leading Harvard psychology professor and researcher on happiness, explains how happiness can be studied (“The Science Behind The Smile”).  Gilbert explains how he collects data, measures it and is able to draw conclusions from what seems to most of us a very subjective standard.  We’ve held for years that we can study and measure depression.  Why not happiness?

For example, he admits that we can’t know what one person means by the term “happy” as compared to another, but that’s also true for color and sound.  We have to take their word for it.  And, when we have enough people giving us information as to what makes them happy and when they’re happy we can draw reasonable conclusions.

Gilbert points to the work of his collaborator Matt Killingsworth, a doctoral student in psychology at Harvard, to show how technology has made it easier to measure happiness (see HBR sidebar “The Future of Happiness Research”).  Killingsworth has developed an iPhone app called Track Your Happiness that allows him to track the happiness of over 15,000 people.  He does so by pinging them at various times during the day and asking them to rate their happiness and identify what activity they are doing at that very moment.  By using this research method, Killingsworth gets instantaneous information (not remembered experiences – a faulty source) and a large sample size.

(To participate in this study go to trackyourhappiness.org.)

Science, especially the science of our minds and emotions, is not perfect.  But the last 20 years of research on happiness has both exploded and become increasingly more accurate.  By implementing strict research processes and using the latest technology we are getting better and better information on what can truly make us happier.  If we don’t take advantage of that we only have ourselves to blame.