What Can We Learn From Happiness Surveys?

Defenders of happiness surveys often claim that individuals are infallible judges of their own happiness. I argue that this claim is untrue. Happiness, like other emotions, has three features that make it vulnerable to introspective error: it is dispositional, it is intentional, and it is publically manifest. Other defenders of the survey method claim, more modestly, that individuals are in general reliable judges of their own happiness. I argue that this is probably true, but that it limits what happiness surveys might tell us, for the very claim that people are reliable judges of their own happiness implies that we already have a measure of how happy they are, independent of self-reports. Happiness surveys may help us extend and refine this prior measure, but they cannot, on pain of unintelligibility, supplant it altogether

What Can We Learn From Happiness Surveys?

abStraCt defenders of happiness surveys often claim that individuals are infallible judges of their own happiness. i argue that this claim is untrue. Happiness, like other emotions, has three features that make it vulnerable to introspective error: it is dispositional, it is intentional, and it is publically manifest. Other defenders of the survey method claim, more modestly, that individuals are in general reliable judges of their own happiness. i argue that this is probably true, but that it limits what happiness surveys might tell us, for the very claim that people are reliable judges of their own happiness implies that we already have a measure of how happy they are, independent of self-reports. Happiness surveys may help us extend and refine this prior measure, but they cannot, on pain of unintelligibility, supplant it altogether. Measurements of self-reported happiness are taken increasingly seriously by psychologists, sociologists and (more recently) by economists. they form part of the official statistics of many nations. yet they remain beset by methodological problems. Some of these are superficial. For instance, people's satisfaction with their life as a whole can be significantly influenced by trivial recent events, such as finding a dime (See Schwarz and Strack, 1999, p. 62). this kind of "noise" can be eliminated by good survey design. Other problems are more intractable. it has been said, for instance, that studies claiming to show that English people are happier than Poles reveal nothing more than the fact that the English word "happy" is used more freely and lightly than its Polish counterpart (See Wierzbicka, 2004). disentangling such semantic effect