Authentic happiness?

Michael - Thursday

Stan or Annamaria should be writing this blog. They would be able properly to assess this work; I can only offer my own reactions as a complete layman. Maybe many of you have heard of Professor Laurie Santos already, but I came across her for the first time on CNN a few days ago. She’s articulate and charismatic, and I could immediately see how students would be attracted to take a course - any course - from her. The interview was around the launch of her new podcast that replaces her “happiness course,” Psych 157 at Yale. Wait: a happiness credit course at Yale? That was my automatic reaction as an academic. What do they teach? How do you assess it? By how happy the students are? Why not just give them all automatic As? That should do it. (Turns out it doesn’t, although bad grades can make them, and their parents, more unhappy!)

But I was intrigued. After all, Yale is a serious place. This isn’t some community college offering easy credits. Actually, when you look into it, there’s clearly a lot of serious research work in psychology on happiness. And why not? After all isn’t that what everyone wants? Isn’t that what psychologists try to get their clients to achieve—or at least to become less unhappy?

First off, Professor Santos is no lightweight. She has a PhD from Harvard, is a tenured associate professor at Yale, and has an impressive string of publications in serious journals. Interestingly, her research is in much more mainstream areas of psychology. Her course is called Psychology and the Good Life, has serious textbooks, and, although I can’t judge for myself, I’ve no doubt it's an appropriate academic offering. It ended up the most popular course Yale has ever offered with 1200 students registered. (It’s now been cancelled because it attracted too many students. I suspect there’s a story there too. Courses are often cancelled because they have too few students, but this way around is a first for me.)

So what was Professor Santos's motivation to offer the course? Normally, academics like to offer courses close to their areas of specialization because (a) they know the most about that, and (b) they hope to attract students to work with them. But Santos is the head of a college at Yale and she’s discovered that her students really are not happy on the whole. One’s immediate reaction is: what’s not to be happy about? They’ve been accepted by an Ivy League college, a good future lies ahead of them, and probably their parents are forking out the money. And college years are supposed to be the best of your life. But it turns out college students generally aren’t happy. An American College Health Association survey noted that 52% reported feeling “hopeless” while a mind boggling 39% reported being so depressed that they’d battled to function at all at some point in the previous year. So much for the best years of your life. When Santos became the head of Silliman College, she found that her students were experiencing all these issues, and that motivated her to offer the course. And she admits to a sneaking suspicion that despite her successes, she wasn’t as happy a person as perhaps she thought she ought to be.

I think we’re no longer surprised by the advice to spend money on experiences rather than things, and there’s theory behind that one too. We all know the old joke about “Money isn’t everything, but who’s so greedy they want everything?” Well, it turns out that provided you have enough for basic needs, money isn't really a big factor in happiness at all. And once your income reaches a certain level (about $75k annual income in the US), money doesn’t affect your happiness at all, even though people are adamant that more will make them happier.  Then again, Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at UC, Riverside, has suggested that 50% of happiness is determined genetically, 10% by circumstances, and only 40% by things you can actually change. So you need to work pretty hard on what's under your control to make a difference!

I feel sorry for this person...

The course is described as both theory and practice. There’s plenty to study, but you’re supposed to be able to do the practice as well. And as for quantitative assessment, there’s the “Authentic Happiness Inventory” from Penn State. If you want to try it, it’s available free on line here (although you have to register), and it establishes a personal baseline before you start the course. The site has a strong disclaimer: they cannot say that this gives you an absolute measure of your happiness. Rather it compares you to people in a similar population group (by geography, age, etc.). As with many surveys, I had difficulty with some of the questions. Presumably choosing the option “the whole world is a much better place because of my life,” would indicate that you are pretty happy with yourself and your contributions. It almost certainly also means that you are delusional. Nevertheless, I took the survey and ended up with 3.54 out of 5, which put me in about the top third. I was surprised. I think of myself as pretty happy. Only the top third? Maybe people are much happier than Santos believes? Or maybe I need to take the course? But I still have a sneaking suspicion that maybe what the course will do is just get me a better score on the quiz. But then, you might say pretty much the same thing about a lot of other courses! (Santos says the course pushed her score up by a full point and most of her students do so as well.) 

If you’re interested in finding out more, google Laurie Santos or take a look at her podcast series that launched this week.