College 1: Social aspects of happiness
Happiness…
- provides energy
- leads to lower blood pressure after stressful event
- leads to better immune system
- leads to more tolerance for pain
Research
is happiness something that prolongs our lives? → relationship between health and happiness
- nuns were asked to write a small autobiography (1930) → assess how happy they are
- age of passing + autobiographies → 4 equal groups (very happy - unhappy)
- same lifestyle: very happy group older (7 year difference)
Happiness does prolong your life: it is about health
Can we influence our own happiness?
- old age: part of our happiness in our own hands and we can influence it by doing the right thing
- Augustines: trying to achieve happiness doesn't make sense, serve gods, maybe in our afterlife we will
be happy
- Thomas jefferson: pursuit of happiness is a right → we can pursue it
Predictors of happiness
- intelligent people are slightly more happy
- attractive people are more happy
- correlates with national income
- partly genetically dependent → more depressions in one family
What about circumstances? Why do we think they are so important?
1. Immediate reward or punishment
- buying something you like → feeling happy for sometime
- afterwards: ‘you should've bought this too’ → feeling less happier
- distorted view of how emotions are affected when something happens to us
2. Correlation versus causation
→ are not nearly as important as we think
Overestimate importance of circumstances based on predictions...
1. Which emotion → easy to do
2. Intensity of emotion → harder, but we do this reasonably well
3. Duration of emotion → problematic; overestimating
Duration
Prospective students are asked:
1. how happy they are
2. how happy they would be two months after their relationship ended
- when relationship ends, happiness is lower
- after 2 months it does not have any effect anymore
Correlation versus causation:
- correlation doesn't mean causal!
- people who are in stable relationship are happier than single people → need stable relationship?
happiness has bigger effect other way around
- people don't fall in love with someone with depression
- happy people fight more for relationship
- so: relationship and happiness is partly causal
- but: people tend to think that circumstances are more important than they are
,Happiness formula
Happiness = 40% genes + 10-20% circumstances + 40-50% own choices → but …
- not on individual level, it is about explained variance
- only works stable western democracies
- they interact! (it is over simplified)
- what about now? with the corona crisis: formula might not work very well
Psychological well-being during COVID-19
Protective factors Risk factors
- gratitude, resilience - intolerance for uncertainty
- extraversion - pre-existing mental health condition
- quality & quantity of relationships - engaging in distancing
- prosocial behavior - loneliness, poor social support, abuse
- social media use - social media use
- psychical activity & time outdoors - disease risk factors, occupation type
- older age - financial insecurity, lower SES
Social component of happiness:
What happens when you are excluded from a group?
- brain activity of social pain overlaps with physical pain
- trace it back to our evolution → for many animals, not being part of group = death sentence
- e.g. once you are excluded, you are easy prey
- spend 20% of time socially
- 60% of this time with ‘immediate five’
Groups that we are part of:
- 5: immediate family, best friends, complete trust
- 15: family, friend groups, work, sportsteam
- 150: people you know
- 500: including vague acquaintances
- 1500: matching name/face
When groups grow, it becomes more than 50 → divide groups into smaller groups
Exclusion
1. Pain
- social pain; feeling sad
2. Pressure on fundamental needs
- e.g. need to belong, autonomy / control & self-worth
- start to feel useless and awful
3. Repairing
- do something to establish affiliation → e.g. calling good friend
- do something you are good at
Speculative but: if our brain responds to mental pain like physical pain, we can take paracetamol
Social cortex
- social brain hypothesis: as brain size increases, so does group size
- size of neocortex relative to rest of brain → strong correlation between groups
- predict average group size when looking at neocortex → once group increases in size, it is more
difficult to handle it
- humans are supposed to navigate in group of 150
Paper: Epley & Schroeder (2014)
Commuters are approached on subway platform and asked to do different things:
, 1. talk to fellow passenger
2. refrain from talking to fellow passenger
3. nothing (control group)
- afterwards: questionnaire on how happy they were
Conclusion
- people who engaged in conversations were happier
Follow-up study
Commuters are approached on subway platform and asked:
1. how would you feel after starting conversation with fellow traveler?
2. how would you feel after not starting conversation with fellow traveler?
3. nothing (control group)
Conclusion
- people thought that starting a conversation would make them less happy
- bias: we are happier when we talk to people, but we think we will be less happy
- we think others don’t want to talk
- also happier when others start conversation
Paper Akin et al. (2020)
Question: which part of your income goes to …
1. rent, mortgage, bills
2. things for yourself
3. things for others
4. donations, charity
Conclusions
- spending more on others = happier, even when controlled for income
- doing more for others = happier
Other study
You are given 15 euros and asked one for the following:
1. buy something for yourself
2. buy something for good friend
- question: what do you think would make you happier?
- after experiment: what actually makes you happier?
Conclusion
- people who buy present for someone else → happier than the other group
Other study
Previous results replicated on small children: looking at smile
- give children candy: “they are yours if you want, you can have them for yourself or give it to monkey”
- you can also give other things away
- blood donation or volunteer work
Example
- Hindus get together at holy river & festival lasts for full month
- what does this do to people? no privacy, quite filthy, all kinds of risks
Hypothesis
- people are less happy at end and less healthy than before
Results
- health is improved
- if we share a big experience, it makes us very happy and it lasts for quite a while
If it makes us happy, what does it mean for other things?
- measure all other things e.g. music festivals makes people very happy
- once you’ve been to these things you will look forward to it
- you share experience together, it is bigger than you and you can identify with it → you are part of same
group that day
- socially tired? → it is not for everyone, for some it is simply too much
