Voices From The Community
Measuring happiness
Story by Janet Harvey/Photo by Veer
Economist Dr. John Helliwell discusses what makes us happy.
The more we get together,
Together, together,
The more we get together,
The happier we'll be.
For your friends are my friends,
And my friends are your friends.
The more we get together,
The happier we'll be.
It's more than just a children's song. According to Dr. John Helliwell, it's part of a blueprint for happiness.
Dr. Helliwell studies well-being. He was first drawn to the subject through his interest in social capital: the norms and networks that permit people to work and play together. "I then became interested in measuring the extent to which these connections create, improve, and facilitate well-being," he explains. It turns out that social capital makes a big difference to well-being.
Dr. Helliwell analyzes the responses from national and international surveys (some covering as many as 140 countries) that ask people to describe and evaluate the circumstances of their lives—income, health, etc. The responses show that our material standard of living is important for well-being, but so is the quality and nature of our relationships with family, friends, and workmates, as well as our levels of trust in individuals and institutions. Hence, the more we get together the happier we'll be.
To illustrate, Dr. Helliwell tells about a study at the University of Exeter. One floor of a seniors home housed residents who were less happy than the residents on the other floor. Prior to moving to a new facility, the "disgruntled" residents were allowed to decide on the layout and furnishings in their new home while the other residents had no input into their new surroundings. To make these decisions, residents had to consult and interact with one another much more than they were used to doing. After the move, all measures of life satisfaction in the group improved more than in the other group. "This modest expansion of their abilities to do things together, for each other, had tremendous impact on their quality of life," notes Dr. Helliwell. "When human beings do something together, they tend to find it enriching."
If community is so important to happiness and well-being, do online communities such as Facebook serve the same purpose? Not necessarily, says Dr. Helliwell. "Internet communities can be enormously enriching and broadening, because they allow you to meet and collaborate with people who are otherwise so far-flung you would never get to interact with them," he concedes. But online connections are more valuable as add-ons rather than as substitutes for real, live communities that provide the rich and fulfilling relationships necessary for well-being. "Direct physical contact, personal contact, is very important to humans. The interactive community does not cut it."
A sense of community proved to be equally important for happiness and well-being in the workplace. In one of his surveys, Dr. Helliwell asked respondents how much they thought management at their workplace could be trusted, on a scale of 1 to 10. He then devised a formula to translate how much the respondents valued trust and other factors into dollar amounts. These "other factors" that contribute to workplace happiness included having an interesting and challenging job, enough time to complete tasks, and freedom from excess time pressure.
"Survey data for life satisfaction tells us a lot about the characteristics of the lives of the people giving answers—income, state of health, et cetera," he explains. "When we set about explaining life satisfaction in terms of these characteristics, we can then compare the effects of income with the effects of factors such as trust in the workplace. Once you know how two different factors influence life satisfaction, it's easy to compare them. For many, this translation into a dollar amount makes it easier to understand." Dr. Helliwell found that an increase of just one point on a ten-point scale that measured an employee's trust in management was equivalent to a one-third increase in income.
Dr. Helliwell also points out the strong links between life satisfaction and the quality of a person's physical and mental health. "A lot of the same factors that influence happiness also influence physical health. And studies have shown that people who are happier tend to be more resistant to disease. "The conclusion, therefore, is that we should pay more attention to what creates positive states, instead of concentrating only on repairing the damage after something has gone wrong. We ought to rethink all of the social and curative sciences, instead of waiting until something bad happens and then finding a way to cure it. It could be cheaper and better to focus on creating the positives, which have been found effective against many of life's ills."