Happiness by Design

by Paul Dolan

  All responses are on a 0 to 10 scale where 0 represents “not at all” and 10 means “completely.” You have already had a go at the first question, so please take a few moments to answer the others:

  Worthwhileness=________

  Happiness yesterday=________

  Anxiety yesterday=________

  Thanks to analysis performed by Kate Laffan, you can see how you compare to the UK general population, whose average scores were as follows:

  1.Life satisfaction = 7.4

  2.Worthwhileness = 7.7

  3.Happiness yesterday = 7.3

  4.Anxiety yesterday = 3.1

  I must stress that the averages, despite appearances, are quite different. The 0.3-point difference between life satisfaction and worthwhileness, for example, is slightly more than the impact on life satisfaction of being widowed.21 These differences justify asking more than one question in happiness surveys.

  There are similarities in how age affects responses to the four questions: there is a general “misery of middle age” confirmed in all cases. Those aged forty-five to forty-nine report the lowest life satisfaction, worthwhileness, and happiness and those aged fifty to fifty-four report the highest anxiety.

  There are also some interesting differences in the responses across different groups. Women are happier on all three positive measures but they also report more anxiety. This finding is broadly in line with other research looking at gender differences, although the gap between the life satisfaction ratings of men and women appears to have been narrowing over the last few decades.22 Happiness also appears to vary across ethnicities in the UK, with people in the Black, Arab, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indian ethnic groups reporting significantly lower scores on all measures than those in the White group. Overall, a white man is, on average, slightly happier than a woman from an ethnic minority.

  Some intriguing associations come up when we look at marital status (remember that we need to be cautious about inferring anything causal). Those who are married or in a civil partnership (the latter was restricted to same-sex couples in the UK at the time of the survey) report higher happiness on all the three positive measures than those who are divorced, separated, or widowed. Being in a civil partnership has a bigger effect on the positive measures than being married but no effect on anxiety. Those who are married and in civil partnerships are happier than those who are cohabiting. So there seems to be some extra happiness benefit from putting a ring on it, as Beyoncé might say. Interestingly, though, being in a civil partnership is associated with higher scores on all measures in London but has no effect in Northern Ireland. Perhaps Londoners are generally more tolerant of gay and lesbian couples than people in Northern Ireland.

  As previously discussed, unemployment has a big negative impact on life satisfaction. At the other end of the spectrum, working long hours might not be good for how people feel and think about their lives, either: those working more than forty-eight hours per week are less happy. Despite the fact that European Union law states that employers cannot force employees to work more than forty-eight hours per week, many “choose” to do so. This would be all well and good if these figures reflected a real life choice and these longer working hours brought more happiness. Without good causal data we do not know, but further findings in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) “How’s Life?” report in 2011 suggest otherwise: the study found that three-quarters of people in European countries are not satisfied with their work/life balance, with too much “work” and not enough “life.”23

  Before moving on, I would like to raise a word of caution in comparing the results across different studies—and sometimes even within studies. When the first ONS data were released in 2012, George Kavetsos and I noticed that the questions were asked either during face-to-face interviews or over the telephone, and so we looked to see whether the mode of administration made a difference to reports of happiness. There was a difference—but in which direction? If you are anything like me, you would think that there is an inclination to appear happy when someone is sitting opposite you and so the participants interviewed face-to-face would report being happier than their telephone survey counterparts. You know what’s coming—we found the exact opposite: the telephone folk were happier.24 We don’t have a robust scientific interpretation of why this occurs, but when I discussed our results with Daniel Kahneman he suggested that people can’t lie to your face whereas they can inflate how happy they really are on the phone. More research is needed but in addition to knowing what questions people have been asked in happiness surveys, we need to know how they have been asked.

  The measure matters

  We are gathering more happiness data at a good rate and we are learning lessons all the time, particularly about the pleasure and purpose associated with different activities. We still know much more about how people evaluate their lives than about how people feel in the experience of their lives, though. For some factors associated with happiness, the effect is similar for evaluations and experiences: people who are tall, for example, report more positive life evaluations and better emotional experiences. Some of this effect is because taller people tend to be better educated and earn more money, which is often attributed to the fact that taller people may have received good nutrition and care during childhood, thus enabling them to reach their full cognitive and physical potential in adulthood.25 It could also be because taller people are perceived to be smarter and stronger than shorter people, which has knock-on effects throughout life—in much the same way that more attractive people are more likely to be hired after a job interview.26

  Overall, though, the circumstances of your life (income, marital status, age, etc.) matter much more to your evaluating self, and what you do matters more to your experiencing self. Consider unemployment. We know that people who are unemployed are less satisfied with their lives than people who are employed. We also know that people who are unemployed are sadder when doing many of the same activities that employed people do, such as shopping, traveling, and socializing. Despite this, being out of work does not have much effect on DRM responses because time in work is not particularly pleasurable.27 Our own German DRM data show that work is purposeful, though.

  Or consider marriage. Our review of the literature showed a positive effect on life satisfaction. But if we look at how they use their time, married women are no happier than single ones. It also looks as if married women benefit more from intimate time: Les enjoys watching TV with me, mostly because she enjoys our shared rants about what we are watching. But the lucky single folk among you have more free time, which it seems you use pretty well. This is all on average, of course, and it is consistent with my observation that the happiest couples are those who spend a fair amount of time apart as well as together, thus benefiting from “shared” time and “free” time; they also have less time to get on each other’s nerves.

  Overall, when researchers and commentators make claims about what affects happiness, they are often not as clear as they should be that the associations depend greatly on the ways in which happiness is measured. It has been claimed that happiness suffers a midlife crisis, and with good reason, if you think back to the U shape of happiness across the life span, where being in your forties and fifties is a bad time for life satisfaction, and which we replicated in the German DRM data. Not only that, but some intriguing recent evidence suggests that happiness is U shaped in age among great apes, too.28

  But let’s not be so hasty. Reports of daily pleasure don’t change much with age in the ATUS data, and purpose in the German DRM data has more of an inverted U shape, peaking just when life satisfaction troughs (in the late forties). Other research has found that empathy also has an inverse U-shaped relationship with age (perhaps we need to be more empathetic with kids around).29 Stress, worry, and anger appear to decrease with age.30 Other more general negative sentiments like boredom, as menti
oned earlier, as well as shame and guilt, become less frequent until about sixty years of age, when their frequency stops declining any further.31 Intriguingly, Laura Kudrna and I have also found that reports of the tiredness associated with daily activities also decreases with age in the ATUS data.32

  Yet when we combine all of the happiness measures in ATUS—tired, pain, stress, happy, sad, and meaning—the familiar U shape found in evaluative measures is also evident here. It looks a bit different though: from the teens to about thirty, our experiences get better before they start to decline with the downward move on the U. In the ONS data, however, there is no increase from the teens to the thirties, and the U shape is of the generally observed kind. Despite our best efforts to quickly pick up experiences through happiness and anxiety the day prior, these responses will be generated by reflecting on yesterday and so, in hindsight, it is not surprising that the responses are more like evaluations. We should therefore do even more now to measure experience-based happiness directly, either through experiencing sampling, which asks people how they feel at random times of the day, or through efforts like the DRM or the ATUS study, which in both cases reminds people what they were doing at specific times during the day, thus reducing the tendency for them to generate responses based on overall evaluations.

  To reiterate, the conclusions we reach about the factors associated with happiness depend greatly on the measure of happiness used, and much more than most scholars have typically accounted for. Despite declining levels of life satisfaction, people’s feelings appear to improve from their teens to age thirty. They might be feeling increasingly good as they approach thirty, until they’re reminded that they’re reaching thirty. So much depends on what we pay attention to—in fact, everything depends on what we pay attention to, as we shall now see.

  3

  What causes happiness?

  There have been many attempts to describe the causes of happiness, and many reasons put forward for why we might not be as happy as we could be. As I noted in the introduction, all explanations have sought to directly relate inputs (the various determinants of happiness, such as income and health) to outputs (happiness measured in particular ways, such as by life satisfaction). The research and policy questions have been framed along the lines of “What is the effect of health on happiness?” I have always felt that these discussions are incomplete and rather piecemeal. The academic economist in me has been searching for a more complete explanation, and ideally one that does not needlessly complicate matters.1 I think I have found one.

  From widgets to happiness

  To an economist, if any output is not being maximized, it means that the resources devoted to its production are not being used as well (efficiently) as they could be. If you are not maximizing the output of widgets, you could produce more if the production process were more efficient; that is, if the staff and machinery used to produce widgets were better allocated. Notice that the production process converts inputs into outputs: inputs are not directly related to outputs. You could possibly produce more widgets if you had more staff and machinery but you might not if the additional resources were used so inefficiently as to have no effect on output. The production of widgets depends critically on the efficiency of the production process.

  Analogously, there is a production process that converts income, health, etc., into happiness. What, then, is the production process for happiness? One immediate response, at least when thinking about happiness as the flow of pleasure and purpose over time, might have something to do with how you use your time. You take income, health, etc., and convert them into happiness by allocating your time to different activities. But time is not spent just doing—it is also spent thinking. In fact, much of your time is spent paying attention to stimuli that have very little do with what you are seemingly engaged in. I have been distracted many times during the course of writing this difficult paragraph, for example; I am aware of having thought about whether to have another coffee quite a few times. And I’m guessing you have had the odd distraction reading it, too.

  The production process for happiness is therefore how you allocate your attention. The inputs into your happiness are the plethora of stimuli vying for your attention. These are then converted into happiness by the attention that you pay to them. A focus on attention is the “missing link” in the chain between inputs and outputs. The same life events and circumstances can affect your happiness a lot or a little depending on how much attention you pay to them. Two people who in every other way are identical can be very differently happy, depending on how they convert inputs into the output of happiness.

  You therefore need to consider how you can make and facilitate better decisions about what to pay attention to, and in what ways. You might have many demands on your attention as you read this book. Perhaps you can hear the kids playing outside or the television in the next room, or you might feel the urge to check your phone for new messages or to make a cup of tea. All these stimuli need to be dealt with somehow.

  Inputs the production process outputs

  Various stimuli, e.g., the allocation of attention happiness

  this book, kids, bank

  balance, health status

  Thankfully (for most of you, I’m sure), this is about as formal as my exposition of the production processes will get. The point here isn’t to give you a literal model of how inputs are converted into outputs. Rather, I am seeking to describe the production process in a way that has intuitive appeal and that allows us to develop a narrative that facilitates a better understanding of the causes of happiness and what you can do to become happier.

  Just as a company seeks to combine its various inputs in the most effective ways, you are seeking to process all the stimuli vying for your attention in ways that bring about as much as happiness as possible. And just as with the production of widgets, you might be able to produce more happiness with more inputs, but you can definitely produce more of it if you allocate your attention more effectively. These insights bring together the production process of economics with the role of attention in psychology. Interestingly (to an academic economist, at least), attention does not appear in any economics textbooks.

  Rationing attention

  Your attention, like everything else in life, is a scarce resource. You must ration it, since attention devoted to one thing is, by definition, attention that is not devoted to another. Attend to one thing, and you pay by not being able to attend to something else. The concept of scarcity lies at the heart of economics—it is actually what defines the dismal science, as the discipline is fondly known. The scarcity of attentional resources lies at the heart of my investigations into happiness.

  The key to being happier is to pay more attention to what makes you happy and less attention to what does not. Notice this is not the same as paying attention to happiness itself. A company will monitor its output when it redesigns its production process but once it finds an efficient process, it will not change the process unless there are changes in external conditions (such as the relative prices of the inputs). When there is no incentive to change things, the production process is said to be in equilibrium. You are searching for equilibrium, too, so that you don’t have to monitor your happiness directly until you or the world around you changes.

  Economists are beginning to use attention to explain economic decisions.2 As a nice example, if shoppers were to pay full attention to the price they paid for goods and services, we would predict that $4.00 CDs could be advertised on eBay as $0.01 plus $3.99 shipping or $4.00 plus no shipping and generate the same sales. But in reality, shoppers pay much more attention to the sale price and much less to the shipping cost, and so sellers make more sales in the former condition.3 The inherent scarcity of attention has also caught on in the business world; it’s described as the “attention economy,” where obtaining the attention of customers and employees who are constantly bombarded by information and technology is an essentia
l element of commercial success.4

  As well as being aware of how best to allocate your attention, you need also to consider how to effectively manage your attentional energy. Just as a productive company does not work its workforce and machinery into the ground, you should not work yourself into attentional exhaustion.5 Once you feel that you are in equilibrium, you can rest your attentional energy for a while.

  In order to help myself focus my attention on this book and prevent exhaustion as I strove to finish it, I set up an autoreply on my e-mail account, which said: “Hi. I am prioritizing working on my blockbuster during July and August, and so I am dealing with only the most urgent of other matters. Thanks for your understanding. See you, Paul.” It is also worth noting that this message helped to manage other people’s expectations about where my attention would be directed during this time.

  Paying attention can literally change your brain. Drivers of London’s black cabs have to pass a very difficult test that requires them to know and be able to navigate twenty-five thousand different city streets. Only half of the prospective cabbies who take this test pass it. Those that do pass have larger hippocampi—the part of the brain that corresponds with spatial processing—than those who fail. Yet it isn’t that the drivers started out with better spatial processing; instead, as they studied for the test, their hippocampi became larger as they learned more.6

  The brain is a highly complex and sophisticated processing system, with billions of neurons and trillions of synaptic connections, and you can learn to pay more attention to some stimuli. But you can only ever process a limited amount of information at any one time. As a nice example of the scarcity of attentional energy, consider the contestants on a quiz show called Britain’s Brightest. The quiz culminates by asking contestants a series of tricky trivia questions. Participants have to answer as many as they can in forty seconds—the even trickier bit is that they get to decide when they think the forty seconds are up. They can stop the clock at any time, but they lose more and more points the longer they take to answer beyond forty seconds. It turns out that many contestants take so much time that they lose more points by doing so than they gain by providing the answers they’re thinking so long about. And they do this for the simple reason that they cannot attend fully to answering the questions and to the time passing. When they focus on the former, the latter quite literally runs away with them.