BBC 2' s Happiness Formula

Following on from the success of Making Slough Happy the BBC is offering another series about happiness: The Happiness Formula starts tonight on BBC2 at 7 pm.

The programme looks at the power, politics and science of happiness. It explores the finding that although people are three times richer than they were in the fifties, by some measures, most people are more miserable.

In a series of questions that are familiar, The Happiness Formula asks if government should continue trying to make us as rich as possible, or whether they should be trying to make people happier.

There are six programmes so I am hoping for a better than usual discussion of the subject. I shall be very annoyed if there are extrapolations from data relating to depression or the number of prescriptions for anti-depressants. Subjective well-being as a measure of happiness is all well and good but I feel that Raj Persaud among others has made some very cogent arguments against its scientific robustness.

maybe why you’re detecting all this happiness out there, is because when you ask people how happy they are, when they respond, they’re not really thinking very clearly or sensibly about their answer. They’re not giving you really a very profound answer, and there’s a clue that that might be right from another interesting study done recently by a psychologist. They engineer a situation where people have to go and make some photocopies from a photocopying machine. Unbeknownst to these people, they don’t know the experimenter has engineered it, but they will discover a 10-cent dime on the photocopying machine, an ‘unexpected’ discovery. So one group find the 10-cent dime, the other group who are photocopying don’t find anything. Then they’re interviewed shortly afterwards about how happy they are. But the happiness question doesn’t ask them how happy you are right now, it asks them ‘Tell us how you evaluate how happy your whole life has been.’ In other words, they ask people to evaluate happiness over their whole lifetime.

The amazing result is the discovery of a 10-cent dime piece on a photocopying machine statistically significantly raises your assessment of how happy your whole life has been. The implications are dramatic for government policy. It suggests the cheapest and most effect public policy measures imaginable.

But here you see a secret as to the difficulty in raising people’s happiness, which is it was the unexpected nature of a discovery that raised their happiness, and that’s one of the problems: how do you make it unexpected that people have positive ends if it’s the unexpected nature that adds to the happiness?

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project