Short Wave - The Science Of Happiness Sounds Great. But Is The Research Solid?

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

How do we really get happier? In a new review in the journal Nature Human Behavior, researchers Elizabeth Dunn and Dunigan Folk found that many common strategies for increasing our happiness may not be supported by strong evidence. In today's Short Wave episode, Dunn tells co-host Aaron Scott about changes in the way scientists are conducting research, and how these changes led her team to re-examine previous work in the field of psychology. Want to hear Dunn read the paper? Check it out here. Questions? Email us at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. These days, it seems like a lot of folks, including us in the media, are obsessed with finding ways to boost our happiness. ...hours of free time a day. You can be fulfilled and happy. Researchers found kids more connected to nature tend to be happier. Small tuck, it actually lifts up your day, makes you more positive, makes you happier. How to be happy is Googled more often than how to get rich. And Elizabeth Dunn is right in the center of it all. I started studying happiness when I was only about 20 years old.

I was really fortunate that I got to experience really the cutting edge research that was happening in happiness science at that time. And I was just captivated by it. Liz became a leading happiness researcher in her own right and now runs a lab at the University of British Columbia. But while she was studying things like how spending money on others can boost a person's happiness, there was a big change going on in psychology and a lot of other scientific fields. The replication crisis. Basically, it was the growing discovery that a lot of studies could not be replicated because they had too few subjects in use flawed methodologies, like massaging the data.

Engaging in the kinds of practices that were very normal in the field at the time could dramatically increase the false positive rate. That is, the likelihood that we would obtain a statistically significant result for an effect that actually didn't exist. Suddenly, the research that made up the foundation of disciplines like psychology was suspect. It really did feel like a crisis. There were emergency meetings around the world where departments were getting together and going, okay, gosh, like, what do we do about this?

So Liz and a lot of scientists altered how they conducted experiments to better ensure that their evidence really does back up their conclusions. But it also meant looking backwards at all the previous research. I was standing in the airport one day when I got a call from a journalist that I knew at the time he was at the Atlantic. And so he asked me, you know, what about these happiness strategies that you hear about so often in the media? How strong is the evidence in the wake of the change of the change of. that have happened in the field. And I had to admit I didn't know, and I really don't like not knowing things. So I decided to try to find out.

Liz and her team first determined the five happiness strategies that the media talks about most, settling on gratitude, social interaction, exposure to nature, physical exercise, and meditation slash mindfulness. Then her grad student, Dunagan Folk, led a team to scrutinize thousands of studies, to see whether these five strategies are backed up by what qualifies as good evidence today. We really went in with just an attitude of open curiosity. I did not have any really strong preconceived notions of what we would find. And I was just shocked to find that to some extent there was just a lack of really good evidence.

Liz and Dunnigan's review recently came out in the journal Nature Human Behavior. And needless to say, it is not all happy face emojis. So today on the show, we dive into the happiness strategies you have probably heard about a hundred times and uncover which ones are backed up by science and which ones are not. I'm Aaron Scott. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. So when Liz and Dunnigan set to work to see which happiness strategies have solid evidence, they first had to decide what is happiness. They went with the most commonly accepted definition among academic, something called subjective well-being.

It includes emotional elements, like having more positive feelings than negative ones, and also a mental element, like being satisfied with your overall quality of life. Then they used a few key factors to assess all the previous research and determine what was up to snuff. First up, statistical power, which involves using probability to decide, whether the data supports the hypothesis or not. It takes into consideration things like the size of the experiment, because researchers today have realized that studies need to be a lot bigger than they historically were to actually establish

that a psychological effect like a happiness strategy works. If we have studies that have samples that are too small, we can end up failing to detect effects that really exist, but we can also end up with a really high proportion of false positives, where we think we found something, but it's not real. Next, they looked at whether a paper was pre-registered, meaning that scientists state exactly what they plan to do, how they're going to test their hypothesis,

and make those intentions publicly available, before they start the experiment and analyze the data. This helps prevent scientists from massaging the data this way and that in order to find a statistically significant result. In the absence of pre-registration, researchers can kind of shoot darts at the wall and then draw the bullseye on afterward. What pre-registration does is to prevent us from doing that. We have to draw our bullseye, shoot our dart, and then be pretty honest and transparent about whether it hit.

And finally, they looked for the scientific gold standard, randomized, controlled experiments, because those are the best ways to show that a happiness strategy actually boosts happiness. Liz, I want to go just kind of quickly through the strategies you looked at. I mean, what did you find? What worked and didn't work? Well, we found pretty solid evidence supporting the value of practicing gratitude and of social interaction, specifically of acting a little more extroverted as well as talking to strangers. On the flip side, we found surprisingly weak evidence supporting the value of three really popular strategies,

specifically, the evidence did not look so good for mindfulness and meditation, for spending time in nature, and for physical exercise. Now, importantly, it doesn't mean that those strategies could never work. It's just that we're not seeing the kind of strong scientific foundations supporting these ideas that we think is essential in recommending them to the public. And I was going to say, like, it's not that we need to throw these things out completely. It's more that we just can't take them for granted, right? Right. And so I want to be really clear that, you know, if you're somebody who starts every day with, you know, a three-mile run and it leaves you feeling happy and positive about life, by all means, continue it. But, you know, I think there are a lot of unhappy people out there. And I think we as scientists need to do a better job in figuring out for whom these strategies work so that we can provide better guidance. Now, we should put a disclaimer in here. Liz and her collaborators only looked at research focused on so-called non-clinical adults. That is to say, folks who are looking to boost their happiness in general.

The team did not look at research focused on folks diagnosed with specific physical and mental health disorders, like, say, depression or anxiety, and whether these strategies might boost their happiness. That research still needs to be evaluated. So if there's any PhD students listening looking for, for a dissertation, consider it. You did follow up this review that appeared in Nature, Human Behavior, with another paper that appeared in the annual review of psychology, in which you looked at not just kind of the top strategies that are repeated over and over

in the news media, but a whole bunch of strategies. Can you just share us kind of a summary of the highlights of which of these happiness strategies you found do have decent scientific grounding? So working on this paper, was a bit depressing because we kept seeing such weak evidence for these strategies. So that inspired us to take a different approach in a new paper and instead start with what we saw as a really valuable criterion for good research, namely pre-registration. And we looked for every single experiment we could find that was pre-registered and tested any strategy whatsoever and looked at the effects on

happiness. And in particular, there is pretty great evidence. that we can improve happiness by giving poor people money. Turns out the opposite is likely true too. There's pretty solid evidence that folks with money can boost their happiness by giving that money away. There is pretty good evidence that simply smiling may improve your mood. So obviously we know happiness can lead you to smile, but just engaging in a genuine natural smile may be perhaps the very simplest thing that you could do to feel a bit happier.

So there's some good evidence for a few strategies, but also a whole lot of questions. So what is the takeaway for those of us hunting for a little more happiness? My greatest dream is that perhaps members of the public or at least shortwave listeners might become more critical consumers of this research. You know, if you just see study shows X boost happiness, don't take that at face value. You really need to dig a little deeper, especially if you are going to make investment in a particular type of happiness strategy. So, you know, I think there's certainly no harm in trying out these strategies. But the flip side is that, you know, if you're someone like me

who tried meditation and found it just didn't do anything for you, don't feel bad, right? we don't actually know that these strategies are broadly effective in promoting happiness. Elizabeth Dunn, it's been a pleasure talking happiness with you. Thank you so much for taking some time for us. Thank you so much for having me. This episode was produced and fact-checked by Britt Hansen and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by managing producer Rebecca Ramirez, and Josh Newell was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director of programming, and Anya Grumman is our senior vice president of programming.

I'm Aaron Scott. Thanks as always for listening to Shortwave from NPR.