In Pursuit of Happiness
John T. Cacioppo Ph.D., University of Chicago
Human biology includes a variety of mechanisms that motivate individuals to achieve or maintain pleasant affective states. Hunger, thirst, cold, and pain each alerts us to tissue needs and motivate us to act to rectify the corresponding need. But happiness is not simply the opposite of pain, sadness, or discomfort. What predicts happiness in contemporary society?
Prior research has measured happiness in twins to determine if happiness was heritable. This work indicated that 62% of the variance in happiness was found to be attributable to persistent and transitory environmental factors, whereas only 38% was estimated to be heritable. Research on the features in people’s lives that are associated with happiness revealed that people who have higher incomes and satisfying interpersonal relationships (e.g., satisfying marriages) are also happier. However, two things (e.g., money and happiness) can be associated without one causing the other. For instance, ice cream sales and shark attacks are correlated, but neither causes the other. (Hot weather increases the likelihood that people eat ice cream and that people swim in the ocean. With more people swimming in the ocean, shark attacks also rise in hot weather.) To determine whether money, satisfying relationships, or either make people happy, longitudinal research is needed.
To address this question, we turned to data from our Chicago Health, Aging, and Social Relations Study (CHASRS), a population-based longitudinal study of English-speaking African Americans, Latino-Americans, and Non-Hispanic Caucasians born between 1935 and 1952. Individuals in the United States who fall in this age range represent approximately 18% of the population, owns more than 50% of the financial assets in America, accounts for more than half of the funds spent annually on new car sales, and generally drives the overall economy in the United States. Most have also spent their adult life working and are now nearing or have reached retirement. It therefore is an interesting group to probe for factors that make adults happy.
We first replicated prior research showing that household income and satisfying interpersonal relationships were correlated with happiness. To investigate what factors in people’s lives were likely to lead to happiness, we next performed longitudinal analyses. Two factors emerged that are noteworthy here. First, people who had satisfying interpersonal relationships became happier over time whereas those who felt lonely or isolated, whether married or not, became less happy over time. Second, although household income had been correlated with happiness, longitudinal analyses indicated that household income did not predict the subsequent changes in happiness. Instead, we found that happiness predicted subsequent increases in household income. Indeed, when we examined what might be producing this surprising result, we found that satisfying relationships made people happy and vice versa, and that it was the quality of the interpersonal relationships that led to bigger increases in income!
How might higher levels of satisfaction with your relationships transform happiness into greater income? There are at least two routes by which this may be achieved. First, happy people form good relationships in the workplace as elsewhere, and good relationships promote better job performance, positively influence the likelihood of receiving good performance reviews and promotions, and provide better “networking” opportunities that lead in financially productive directions. Second, happiness promotes creative decision making, which in turn improves one’s station in social and work domains. In both cases, these results suggest that sacrificing quality relationships with spouse, family, and colleagues in pursuit of higher raises may be counterproductive.
In sum, Aristotle suggested that the only critical ingredient in the recipe for supreme happiness was other people. Although we may often think that money is the route to happiness, scientific research suggests the effect goes in the other direction. When you are happy with your personal relationships, you perform better at work and you enjoy bigger increases in income across time. Taking time to develop and maintain meaningful and personally satisfying relationships may pay great dividends.
