As a clinical psychologist and researcher, I love learning about the science of happiness. Nothing brings me happiness like studies about wellbeing: how to increase it, how to maintain it, how to spread it to others. There’s just one, pesky little problem: many of these studies are nonsense.
So, how do we know what to believe? What will actually make us happy? Let’s take a look at the science. Scholars and philosophers have always been interested in what makes us happy. Credit: Getty Images The science of happiness Scholars and philosophers have always been interested in what makes for a good life, but the scientific study of happiness took off in the late 1990s with a new field called Positive Psychology.
The next decade saw an explosion of research on happiness, with hundreds of studies on the topic published in academic journals. Then, around 2012 , the happiness bubble burst. Psychology researchers came to the unsettling realisation that many of their findings were wrong.
Published studies had often relied on faulty, but common, publishing practices. There was p-hacking, or manipulating data analyses until statistically significant results were squeezed out, and HARKing (Hypothesizing After Results are Known), or changing one’s hypotheses after-the-fact to match obtained results. When carefully scrutinised, the findings did not hold up.
For instance, priming people with stereotypes about older people does not cause them to walk more slowly. Encouraging people to t h.
