What our scientific findings can teach you about happiness
Short of time? Read the key takeaways.
😊 There are two distinct kinds of happiness. "Hedonic wellbeing" is the moment to moment feeling of happiness, while "life satisfaction" is how happy you are with your life overall. The two are correlated but can diverge.
💰 Money buys more life satisfaction than moment to moment happiness. More income predicts greater life satisfaction, but only a small increase in hedonic wellbeing, and each doubling of income brings roughly the same happiness boost.
🧠 We've found no link between IQ and happiness. Across large studies, IQ scores showed almost no correlation with either hedonic wellbeing or life satisfaction, contradicting assumptions that intelligence helps people achieve happiness or that ignorance brings bliss.
👥 A varied social life predicts greater happiness. Spending time with a wider mix of people, such as friends, family, and coworkers, rather than only one group, is linked to higher hedonic wellbeing, even after controlling for total social time.
🎭 Personality strongly shapes life satisfaction. Extraversion and conscientiousness both predict greater life satisfaction, while neuroticism predicts less, and together the Big Five traits explain roughly a third of the variation in people's life satisfaction scores.
One of the most famous opening lines in all of literature comes from Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina:
“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
This line suggests to readers that unhappiness (at least in families) is more complicated, more multifaceted, more nuanced, more interesting than happiness. You can see this point of view all over the place; it’s in the myth of the tortured artist, and it’s in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s declaration that:
“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”
It’s in the standard view in literary criticism that “tragedy confronts us with profound truths about morality and the human world, comedy provides an enjoyable flight from it.” And it’s in the famous ending, “happily ever after,” which assumes that the happiness after the story is not interesting enough to warrant inclusion in the story itself.
Isn’t that strange, though?
The novelist Ursula Le Guin certainly thought so. She argued passionately against the view that happiness is less interesting than misery. You can see this in work such as her essay “All Happy Families” and her short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, where she wrote:
“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting.”
She objected to the way artists refuse “to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.” To Le Guin, the cultivation of happiness was a deeply profound pursuit, and one just as complex as any interrogation of suffering.
We’re with Le Guin on this one; we agree that happiness is complex and interesting. We’ve conducted lots of research into the nature of happiness over the years (including some of our own studies, as well as a lot of synthesizing the studies of others), and many of the findings are quite surprising! In this article, we’ve collected together and summarized some of those surprising findings, along with links to the full articles (in case you want to go deeper). We hope it will help you to reflect on your own happiness and to view happiness in general as something at least as deep, complex, and worthy of attention as pain and misery.
1. There are (at least) two kinds of happiness
Psychologists draw an important distinction between being “happy in” and being “happy with” your life. This corresponds to two kinds of happiness:
Hedonic wellbeing. This is the moment-to-moment feeling of being happy.
Life satisfaction. This is the zoomed-out way you think of (and are happy with) your life as a whole.
Achieving happiness may therefore require attending to the two different forms: seeking positive experiences that bring you hedonic wellbeing (happiness in your life) and those that confer more life satisfaction (happiness with your life).
Interestingly, in our research, we’ve found that the two kinds of happiness are correlated (r = 0.67, 95% CI: 0.63 to 0.71, n = 618). Nevertheless, it’s clear they can also come apart. Daniel Khaneman’s work gives a simple illustration: When you’re deciding what kind of holiday you want, you might focus more on one full of experiences that are enjoyable in the moment (like sitting around relaxing), or you might choose experiences that are “mostly painful in real time and gain value from the expectation that both the pain and the joy of reaching the goal will be memorable” (like difficult hikes). Click here to read more.
2. Money buys more of one kind of happiness than the other
Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, yes; common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. On the other hand, it’s a cliche that “money can’t buy happiness.” Many people admire and aspire to the lifestyles of multi-millionaire celebrities, yet rich and famous people in the public eye often seem desperately unhappy. In an earlier article, we dove into the empirical research regarding the connection between money and happiness. The key takeaways are:
Making more money is associated with moderately greater life satisfaction
Making more money is associated with a very small increase in hedonic wellbeing
…unless we're talking about the unhappiest 20% of people who already make $75,000 a year or more in the U.S. For those people, additional income was not associated with greater hedonic wellbeing.
For both kinds of happiness (life satisfaction and hedonic wellbeing), extra income has a greater effect when you start off with less money – or, more precisely, each doubling of income is associated with roughly a constant increase in happiness.
3. We found no link between IQ and happiness
This might be surprising. For one thing, IQ is known to positively correlate with some things that positively correlate with happiness (such as income). For another thing, you might think that a higher IQ score would enable you to achieve your goals more reliably, and since happiness is a goal of many (perhaps all) people, it stands to reason that those with higher IQ scores would be more able to achieve it. But, on the flip side, you might think that a higher IQ score would be associated with less happiness because “ignorance is bliss.”
However, in our large study, IQ was virtually unrelated to both hedonic wellbeing (r = -0.04, n = 3688) and life satisfaction (r = -0.001, n = 674). Here are the scatter plots from that study:
This is generally in line with existing literature, which has tended to find (with some exceptions) very low and usually not statistically significant correlations between IQ and happiness. Click here to read more. It remains a genuine mystery why there’s no association between IQ and happiness.
4. A more varied social life predicts greater happiness
If we told you that spending more time with people is correlated with more hedonic well-being, you’d probably not be surprised. But we found that (for people in the US), when you control for the amount of time spent with people in general, hedonic well-being is also correlated with the variety of kinds of relationships you spend time with. In other words, you could be better off getting a mix of time with friends, family, colleagues, etc., rather than spending all your time with one category.
This finding comes from a study we ran, as part of our Transparent Replications project, in which we attempt to replicate the findings of recently published psychology and human behavior studies in prominent academic journals. However, the authors of the original study point out something important: we can't be sure that interacting with more different types of people in your life causes people to be happier. Perhaps the result is explained by lower well-being leading people to limit the diversity of their socialization, rather than the other way around. Or it could be that there is some other factor, say, such as access to fulfilling employment, which increases both their well-being and their opportunity to have diverse social interactions.
Despite some open questions, it remains true that diversity in one’s social interactions appears to be predictive of happiness for people in the U.S. It therefore may be worth trying as an experiment in your own life to see if you feel it improves your own well-being. To try diversifying your social interactions, you could seek new relationships with a variety of people (such as neighbors, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances) or try to reconnect with old contacts. Click here to read more.
5. Extroverts and conscientious people tend to be happier than others
In our research into personality tests, we looked into whether the Big Five personality traits are predictive of a bunch of different life outcomes, including people’s life satisfaction. When controlling for the effects of the other Big Five traits, we found the following associations between Big Five traits and life satisfaction:
Conscientiousness: mild positive association(standardized β = 0.2255, p < 0.0001)
Extraversion: moderate positive association (standardized β = 0.3245, p < 0.0001)
Neuroticism: moderate negative association(standardized β = -0.3213, p < 0.0001)
The other two Big Five traits (“openness” and “agreeableness”) didn’t have statistically significant relationships with life satisfaction.
Taken together, the Big Five traits accounted for 36% of the variation in participants’ life satisfaction scores. That suggests that roughly a third of how happy you are with your life is predicted by your personality! However, it doesn’t tell us the direction of causation: perhaps personality affects life satisfaction, or perhaps life satisfaction affects how people describe their personalities in personality tests, or perhaps other factors affect both. It is likely though, that there is a significant degree to which personality generates higher or lower happiness. For instance, extroverts spend more time with others (and really enjoy this time) and people high in neuroticism often struggle with upsetting thoughts.
If you’d like to find out how you score on the Big Five personality traits, you can try our free Ultimate Personality Test, here. And you can click here to read more about our large study of personality tests.
Happiness is a rich and interesting phenomenon
When we look at all these research findings together, we see that happiness is not a single, simple phenomenon; it’s a multifaceted thing that includes a moment-to-moment experience and a broad evaluation of your life, and it’s connected to your circumstances, your relationships, and your personality in complex ways. And, undoubtedly, there’s still much more to be discovered about it!
If you found this article interesting, you might enjoy trying our free tool for discovering what brings you the most joy and personal life satisfaction (with tips on how to experience them more often):
