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What makes you happy?
Sentences to ponder:
Dr. Kahneman said unless the findings were replicated, he could not accept that a spouse’s happiness had less impact than a next-door neighbor. Dr. Christakis believes that indicates that people take emotional cues from their own gender.
Read the whole fascinating article. You'll find a link to the paper here.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 4, 2008 at 09:09 PM in Science | Permalink
Comments
[quote]Still, Professor Fowler said, “We are not giving you the advice to start smiling at everyone you meet in New York. That would be dangerous.”[/quote]
Well, that's my advice. It's not dangerous.
Posted by: babar at Dec 4, 2008 9:36:41 PM
The authors are way out of line attributing causality to the correlations that they find. They appear to have no exogenous drivers of one person's happiness in their model that could then be used to see if it changed other, linked people's happiness. Likewise, the social connections are not exogenously determined but a function of the same environment that affects happiness.
A much more plausible explanation is that unobserved factors that lead to happiness in one person are also likely to lead to happiness to people of "nearby" people. There are myriad such factors, large and small, from business conditions, investment strategies, new technologies, local news, disease, environment and traffic congestion to sports teams, cultural events, restaurant quality, movies and of course blog posts, that both a) affect happiness and also b) have a non-zero correlation with social distance.
I'm a bit surprised that a refereed journal would let them publish causal claims about the correlation they find and that so many people seem to take them at face value.
A better study would look at some exogenous, localized, random factor like one person winning the lottery, and then see how the happiness of linked people changed, if at all, in a narrow window before and after the event.
Posted by: a student of economics at Dec 4, 2008 10:09:29 PM
So this would support the idea that geography is a major factor in one's happiness.
Posted by: thehova at Dec 5, 2008 12:19:20 AM
Sounds like an argument for gay marriage to me.
Posted by: tom s. at Dec 5, 2008 12:56:30 AM
Sounds plausible to me. When my friends are unhappy or otherwise having difficulties (which is much too often these days...) I worry about them which stresses me out, and I am less happy myself, all else equal. Also, although I usually enjoy hanging out with my friends if they are depressed and unhappy then it feels more like an unpleasant chore. I hang out with them anyway because I don't want to dump them when they're down, but it's very draining.
I need happier friends.
Posted by: Jacqueline at Dec 5, 2008 1:58:45 AM
Posted by: 2moons gold at Dec 5, 2008 3:58:31 AM
Wow. Now that my happiness affects Kevin Bacon, doesn't that mean it qualifies as a bona fide externality. This of course means we need government-mandated happiness.
Posted by: Andrew at Dec 5, 2008 4:51:55 AM
Taxation will continue until morale improves?
Posted by: Cyrus at Dec 5, 2008 7:29:44 AM
I heard Kahneman is writing a pop book, so I may be the first person to get to read one of their MR dream books:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/08/what-is-your-dr.html
Posted by: burger flipper at Dec 5, 2008 9:27:11 AM
I need happier friends.
Sounds like your friends need happier friends....
Posted by: at Dec 5, 2008 2:21:54 PM
Ha ha; was the Times actually serious? "A student of economics" nailed it -- everything in the NYTimes article could be explained by groups of people being affected by a common causative factor, such as national economic conditions, local layoffs (or hiring), election results in a politically homogeneous area, or practically anything. In this area, for example, a winning season by the Pittsburgh Steelers has a remarkable effect. And, certainly, everyone in my neighborhood was smiling after 11/4 :-)
Posted by: PghMike at Dec 6, 2008 9:39:07 AM
First, the Cohen-Cole-Fletcher rejoinder in BMJ clearly shows that the original results are largely spurious, unless you believe that height or acne is also "contagious" so the NY Times article is a waste of time. Debunked, move on. Second, the idea of a small effect (much smaller than claimed) is obvious and uncontroversial: my happiness might be correlated with my immediate friends and family by 20%. Then, 0.2*0.2 implies 4% correlation with friends-once-removed, and 0.8% correlation with friends twice-removed. This is believable, but we're talking small effects. Anything more than that is spurious, cf. common environmental factors.
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