By Philip Moscovitch
This item originally appeared as VIEWS in Morning File, April 26, 2024
Here at the Examiner, we get a lot of media releases, and we like to share the strange, random media releases we get with each other. You take your entertainment where you can get it, I guess.
Once in awhile, one of these releases sparks something to write about — although it’s rarely the subject of the release.
Earlier this week, at least two of us got a strange one from Scouts Canada, saying what percentage of Canadians think various celebrities would make a good Scouts Canada volunteer. Ryan Reynolds was the clear winner, but also… WTF?
Then, yesterday, we got a release from an online gambling website about a survey on how happy residents of each province are.
Why, I kept wondering, would a gambling website commission this research, which makes no overt or even oblique references to gambling? The only thing I can think is that media outlets are stretched so thin the hope is that they will jump on any click-baity thing that comes their way, and getting the gambling site’s name in the media provides enough attention to make the cost of the study worthwhile.
Nova Scotia, in case you are wondering, comes in ninth out of the 10 provinces.
But how do you measure happiness?
The study used a bunch of different metrics, most of which, I would argue, correlate pretty poorly with happiness. They include life expectancy, crime rate, median family income, and air quality.
You know, the air quality out here is fantastic today! It makes me feel so happy!
Bhutan famously set out to use Gross National Happiness as a metric earlier this century. Its measure is based on nine inter-related elements:
- Living standards
- Education
- Health
- Environment
- Community vitality
- Time-use
- Psychological well-being
- Good Governance
- Cultural resilience and promotion
Last month, after yet another one of these widely reported “which country is happiest” studies came out, Vox published a great piece looking under the hood of how these happiness rankings come together:
Believe it or not, it typically comes down to one question. The pollsters use something called the Cantril Ladder. They ask: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”…
When I first did this exercise, I said my life is a seven out of 10. But behind this answer was a more complicated truth. I’d initially thought about rating my life a six. Yet there was a voice tugging at me, from my years of reporting on people living in extreme poverty. Compared to their lives, I figured mine was probably pretty easy. So I bumped up my rating…
Did you implicitly find yourself doing something similar? Comparing yourself to others — either positively or negatively?
A new paper from researchers in Scandinavia and the US suggests that’s actually very common — and it may be a flaw in the question itself. By showing a picture of a ladder and saying to imagine some people “at the top” and others “at the bottom,” the question may be influencing respondents to consider not so much their actual happiness as their status.
This makes me think of the 1-10 pain scale used to triage patients. I have been in some pretty extreme pain, but I also tend to take things quite literally, so when I am told 10 is the worst pain I can imagine, well, I can imagine some pretty terrible pain! So I bump myself down.
The piece, by Sigal Samuel, notes that the answer to how happy people feel changes if you take the status element out of it:
The researchers also found that when they removed the ladder symbol and description, people associated well-being more with mental and physical health, relationships, and family. They still thought of money, but rather than thinking in terms of wealth, they thought in terms of financial security (the important thing was not to be richer than others but simply to have enough for a nice life).
And crucially, they gave a more intuitive answer when asked which level of happiness they’d prefer, answering much closer to the “10” end of the spectrum.
That makes sense. If you think a 10 is about being richer than others, you might actually feel like an asshole saying that’s your preferred level — it feels like you’re saying that you want to outrank others. Plus, as the researchers noted, “It is likely that the ladder framing imposes a hierarchical perspective that influences individuals to interpret it as less compatible with other essential aspects of well-being, such as belongingness and mutuality in relationships.”
Interesting stuff. Maybe I can see if I can get a gambling website to look into it further.
