This post is free for everyone. If you want full access to 170+ Provoked posts, consider upgrading to paid (details here).
I’m looking at the number of books with happiness in the title on my bookcase.
The Art of Happiness
The Happiness Hypothesis
The Happiness Project
The How of Happiness
Hardwiring Happiness
The Happiness Track
Delivering Happiness
The Pursuit of Happiness
Authentic Happiness
The Happiness Trap
Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth
It’s exhausting to contemplate reading them again. The scientific study of happiness is not new. Search for peer-reviewed scientific articles with "happiness" in the title and you find tens of thousands. We learned a great deal about happiness, including how it is the cause of benefits1 as wide-ranging as accomplishing important goals, creativity, healthy social relationships, physical health, and coping with adversity.
It’s hard to pinpoint the origin of happiness research. Originally, my plan was to discuss 1984—the year when Dr. Ed Diener published a seminal review of 700 studies and 18 measures on how to study happiness and what we know about the influence of income, age, sex, race, employment, education, religion, marriage, family, and social integration. An article that has been cited over 24,000 times! (Click here for 3 lessons from Ed Diener's research.)
Also in 1984, Dr. Ruut Veenhoven published a 477-page manifesto reviewing 245 studies on whether happiness can be measured, the antecedents, and the individual differences and societal living conditions that are most relevant. Amazingly, this tome has only been cited 2,112 times.
Why did the work of these two researchers produce dissimilar impact? Where do Ed Diener and Ruut Veenhoven disagree? How many of their ideas from 1984 remain lost or unexplored? I will get to the answers in another article. Before I discuss their contributions, we have to discuss a pioneer who preceded them by 15 years.
The OG of Happiness Research
In 1969, Dr. Norman Bradburn published his monograph, The Structure of Psychological Well-Being. It was a revolutionary contribution. His conclusion alone, on page 233, foreshadows modern use of happiness research for public policy:
"The wisdom of a particular social policy depends considerably on the extent to which it is able to accomplish the goals to which it is addressed. Insofar as we have greater understanding of how people arrive at their judgments of their own happiness and how social forces are related to these judgments, we shall be in a better position to formulate and execute effective social policies."
Unlike the future leaders of positive psychology, who claimed to be descriptive, not prescriptive, Dr. Bradburn sought to help people in society from the onset - especially those deprived of economic and social opportunities. He ensured that his study would include more than college students and the financially secure. He knew that social factors are important which led him to sample from an all-white suburb in Detroit, an all-Black area in Detroit’s inner city, a working-class neighborhood in Chicago, a wealthy suburb near Washington, D.C., and finally a nationwide sampling of residents from the ten largest cities to offer a broad vantage point.
It is worthwhile to detail his discoveries for two reasons.
Understand the lasting legacy of a single scientific contribution.
Consolidate his discoveries in hopes of adding to them.
Here are six discoveries by Bradburn that predated positive psychology by three decades:
1. A lot of people are very happy.
Among a sample of men who lost their job because of a plant shutdown, 22% reported being “very happy” and 44% reported being “pretty happy.” This is not far off from residents in a wealthy Washington, D.C. suburb where 33% reported being “very happy” and 61% reported being “pretty happy.” As for the all-Black inner-city sample, 20% reported being “very happy” in the first two months of 1963, and 31% being “very happy” in the last two months. Each of these groups is in the vicinity of the 33% of adults sampled from ten metropolitan cities who said they are “very happy.”
Thanks to these data, we know that happiness is commonplace. Happiness levels are highly uniform across the United States. To grasp the psychological and social origins of happiness, Bradburn offered a starting point.
2. Race and education matter for happiness.
Diving into demographics, Bradburn found that 31% of men reported being “very happy” compared to 33% of women. Nearly identical. Of adults with an eighth-grade education, 26% reported being very happy compared with 37% of high school graduates and 39% of college graduates. A much smaller difference than expected in light of the opportunities afforded by education.
In general, demographic findings showed remarkable similarity across samples with one exception: race. For Black adults, 18% were very happy, 57% were pretty happy, and 25% were unhappy—whereas for White adults, 35% were very happy, 56% were pretty happy, and 9% were unhappy. By examining racial differences within educational levels, Bradburn found that “for both races, unhappiness declines with higher education.” A full 28% of Black adults with an eighth-grade education or less reported being unhappy whereas only 13% of White adults with the same education felt unhappy. Thanks to these data, we learned to test assumptions about the combination of variables that are relevant (and irrelevant) to happiness and human suffering.
One variable rarely tells the story of who is happy or unhappy. And yet, most scientists do not test hypotheses of multiple, interacting variables.
I have a ton of thoughts about scientists and authors limiting the discussion to singular variables (Grit! Curiosity! Willpower! Extraversion! Awe! Kindness!). Bring your thoughts to the Provoked subscriber chat room so we can discuss:
3. Positive and negative experiences are independent.
Bradburn's revelation that a person’s negative experiences do not necessarily dictate the presence of positive experiences remains remarkable. For instance, the feeling of accomplishment had a negligible correlation of -.01 with feeling restless and a minor -.10 correlation with depression. Similarly, being upset due to criticism had a mere .06 correlation with the belief that things are going your way.
Your negative experiences DO NOT determine your happiness
Bradburn's most significant contribution is this revelation: positive and negative emotions aren't two ends of a continuum; they must be studied separately. Research shows that people often face numerous stressful events (traumatic events) but still manage to experience plenty of positive emotions, thoughts, and events (link). We learned that people often experience a large number of life stressors (traumatic events) and yet are still privy to extensive positive emotions, thoughts, and events. Distress is not a proxy for functional impairment or positivity deficits. This has an immense clinical implication: you don't need to feel good to live a fulfilling life; you don't need to feel good to do good.
4. Well-being remains fairly stable over time.
When people were interviewed three days apart, the percentage of people who reported high levels of positive experiences (feeling pleased, proud, excited, on top of the world, and having things go their way) only increased slightly from 43% to 47%. When asked about negative experiences (feeling restless, bored, depressed, lonely, or upset), those reporting high levels only saw a minor increase from 54% to 62%. These findings led to the development of models on stable individual differences and hedonic adaptation.
5. Socializing and novelty-seeking are strongly linked with well-being.
The activities that predicted positive experiences the most were making new friends, meeting new people, traveling, and socializing with friends. Interestingly, none of these social or novelty-seeking activities correlated with negative experiences (correlations ranged from -0.04 to 0.06). These findings led to the revelation that the key difference between very happy people and the rest lies in the quality of their social life (link). It also showed that curiosity and learning something new are good indicators of whether someone had a good day.
NOTE: Read Provoked issues on the science of curiosity including how this strength changes over the lifespan (click here), enhances creativity (click here), alters social interactions (click here), persuades people (click here), and has hidden costs (click here).
6. Income doesn’t significantly impact well-being.
Bradburn was surprised to find income had only a small effect on well-being. Whether you expected to make less money, more money, or the same amount in the next year, the change in well-being was nearly the same. The same was true if you expected to pay off debts, increase your debts, or stay the same. He did find that those with low income and heavy family responsibilities tended to have a lower sense of well-being. But apart from severe financial difficulties, income had at best a small to moderate impact. These findings sparked the exploration of the complex relationship between money and happiness. Bradburn confessed,
the data so far have been unable to answer the question of whether the important variable at the higher income levels is the income itself, in the sense that it enables greater discretion over the kinds of goods and services that one purchases, whether it is a certain position in society and the way in which one is treated by other people, or whether it is the symbolic effect of income that allows a person to judge his worth in society.
Coda
Bradburn's work reminds us to respect earlier discoveries while continuously building on them. We must remember to study the full spectrum of humanity, not just convenient pockets of easily accessible characters or those who share the same socioeconomic status. His work serves as a reminder to continue the challenge of understanding people within their environment, with the ultimate goal of improving individuals, communities, and societies.
If this issue resonated, leave a ❤️ and share it with others. It means a lot to get this work to as many people as possible.
Todd B. Kashdan is an author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Leader of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.
Read Past Issues Here Including:
We can quibble with how happiness is defined and measured. Although as someone interested in this topic, I am often curious as to why people pick their definitions. I’ve been part of interesting debates and incredibly boring discussions. The difference? Whether people can articulate and understand how they derived their definition and take an interest in the unintended consequences. Something I wrote about in graduate school: link.