high level - knowing yourself

Jane Student

Psych 1900

Final Project

What makes you happy?

Common wisdom is full of suggestions about what makes people happy. From the

Puritan tradition it is suggested that hard work is the secret to a happy life. A more Bacchanalian

sentiment suggests that all work and no play make Jack a dull boy, and that rather than work, it is

the direct pursuit of leisure and pleasure that is the not-so-secret secret to happiness. Recent

psychological and anthropological work has characterized the human ecology as especially and

complexly social in comparison to the rest of the animal kingdom, suggesting that part of our

niche may be the cultivation of close friendships to help buffer the hardships of life (Dunbar,

1998). From this perspective it can be predicted that happiness may lie in the richness of our

social connections. While these theories are not mutually incompatible, they do make different

predictions and can thus be independently supported or contradicted by data.

To test these predictions a paper-and-pencil survey was administered to 51 Harvard

undergraduates enrolled in an introductory statistics course. Pursuit of ‘hard work’ was

operationalized as a self-report of the number of hours spent studying on a weekly basis. The

pursuit of leisure and pleasure was operationalized as the self-reported number of alcoholic

drinks consumed per week and the number of hours spent watching television per week. The

two hedonic measures were individually z-transformed and these transformed values were

averaged within a participant to compute a composite ‘pleasure’ score for each participant.

‘Social ties’ was operationalized as the self-reported number of friends the participant had.

Finally, ‘happiness’ was operationalized as the endorsement of the 1-7 Likert scale item “I am

happy in life” anchored at 1 (strongly disagree) and 7 (strongly agree).

No support was found in these data for the Puritan hypothesis. The relationship

between hours spent studying (M=15.37, SD=10.53) and self-rated happiness (M=5.94,

SD=0.77) was assessed with a Pearson’s correlation, and no significant effect was observed. The

number of hours Harvard Undergrads spend studying is not significantly related to their self-

reported happiness, r(50)=.085, p>.05, two-tailed, 95% CI [0.36, -0.20].

The Bacchanalian hypothesis was also not supported. To compare high and low pleasure

groups, the data were split at the median for composite ‘pleasure’ (Me = -0.108). The difference

in happiness between the high pleasure group (M=6.04, SD=0.68) was not significantly different

than the low pleasure group (M=5.79, SD=0.83), t(47)=1.148, p>.05, 95% CI [-0.187, 0.683],

d=.33.

No support was found in these data for the social ties hypothesis, either. The data for

‘social ties’ were dichotomized into low friends (5 or less) and high friends (6 or more) groups,

and the data for happiness were dichotomized into less happy (rated 5 or less) and more happy

(rated 6 or more) groups. These data were then analyzed with a chi-square test of independence,

and no significant relationship between social ties and happiness was observed, χ2(1,

n=51)=0.22, p>.05. Were a significant effect observed, the size of the effect would be very

small, =0.065.

The results of this study fail to support three broad theories of the sources of happiness:

hard work, pleasurable experience, and social connection. It is possible that other

operationalizations of these variables would have yielded more positive results, or that a higher

powered study would have revealed true effects that were too small to observe with this sample.

However, given the present data none of the theories in question received any support from this

study. What causes happiness remains a mystery.

Works Cited

Dunbar, R. I. M. (1998), The social brain hypothesis. Evol. Anthropol., 6: 178–190.