Hello Fellow Hedonists,
I present you Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on 'Thinking Allowed'!
Sorry I haven't posted anything in awhile. I just got back from a long, arduous journey; I had to help my fiancee move from New Haven, CT to Talahassee, FL. I promise I'll be updating 'the Hic' regularly again.
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
Hello Fellow Hedonists,
If you follow this blog, you should read Alan Wolfe's excellent review of Bruno Frey's "Happiness: A Revolution in Economics" and Dan Ariely's "Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions" from this month's issue of The New Republic!
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
In the paper, I Want to Be Creative: Exploring the Role of Hedonic Contingency Theory in the Positive Mood-Cognitive Flexibility Link, Indiana University researchers have shown that happy people are more likely to choose tasks that allow for creativity, happy people are more likely to use creative means to transform unpleasant tasks into more enjoyable experiences and that happy people who believed their mood was not susceptible to change were less likely to engage in creative activities than happy people who believed their mood could change. These modest findings seem to support the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
Hello Fellow Hedonists,
According to the World Values Survey, overall, the world is getting happier. More people are happier today than was the case 25 years ago; the survey found increased happiness from 1981 to 2007 in 45 of 52 countries analyzed. As usual, Denmark, Columbia and Puerto Rico top the charts. The United States maintains about the same relative position (19 out of 96) as it did in the 2000 survey. Countries whose respondents reported high levels of happiness were much likelier to be democracies than were countries that rank lower in terms of their citizens' happiness. Apparently, there is a strong correlation between happiness, economic development (this is distinct from wealth, y'all) and democracy!
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
Hello Fellow Hedonists,
Alex Edmans has shown that Fortune magazine's 100 best companies to work for earned a 14 per cent annual return for investors between 1998 and 2005, compared with 6 per cent for the overall market.
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
P.S. Check out this blog post at the Situationist on "Law and the Emotions: the Problems of Affective Forecasting."
Hello Fellow Hedonists,
In May's issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family, David Atkins reveals that people who report being "not very happy" are three times as likely as having an affair as those who report being "very happy." Atkins' research analyzed 1,439 responses from the 1998 General Social Survey of adults who had ever been married. Keep 'em smilin'!
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
P.S. You should also check out the article on the well-being of children born to teen mothers.
Hello Fellow Hedonists,
Read this post by Matthew Pianalto commenting on this research by Felipe de Brigard which first appeared on the experimental philosophy blog. I found this study fascinating.
I take it that a psychological hedonist might claim (I'm not a psychological hedonist, but I have argued this in other places) that Nozick, and those who agree, are hedonists who are making mistakes: they are misinformed or irrational. Thus this data (alone) doesn't show that psychological hedonism is false.
Philosophers, such as Nozick, also argue that the fact that we don't prefer the experience machine or 'immoral' lifestyles is evidence that there is more to well-being than the experiences of welfare subjects. That is, philosophers presuppose desire accounts of well-being.
This is all fine and good, but if you accept a desire account of well-being, you need to explain miswanting. According to mental state accounts of well-being, you miswant when you want something that, unbeknownst to you, is going to make you miserable. According to simple preference satisfaction views, the things that make you miserable are good simply in virtue of the fact that you wanted them. You might attempt to accommodate this concern by invoking an informed preference satisfaction account of well-being.
Even if you accept an informed preference satisfaction account of well-being, you need to explain what makes good fortune good (this is, after all, the' hap' in happiness and the 'daimon' in eudaimonia). Often, we don't want this or that, and we don't know it is good for us, but it still turns out to be good for us insofar as we are ultimately glad this or that happened. One might claim the best way to explain this phenomenon is by appealing to a mental state account of well-being (you might also think of this in terms of post facto or retrospective desire satisfaction).
You might also claim that we might want stuff that is bad for us even when we are perfectly informed, in which case we ought to want other stuff (even if we don't want to). If it turns out that some informed people sometimes still prefer reality to the experience machine, we still might say they want wrong (or they're irrational) even though they got all the facts straight, so to speak. Here, I imagine you would need posit some sort of non-instrumental, substantive view of rationality (a la Kant).*
From a purely dialectical point of view, I take it that if you subscribe to a mental state account of well-being, such as hedonism (personally, I prefer enjoyment accounts), you will argue Nozick is begging the question: if you don't already accept desire accounts of well-being you won't be persuaded by the experience machine intuition pump.
In the end, it might turn out the folk implicitly or explicitly accept non-hedonic accounts of well-being, in which case I am tempted to say they have something besides well-being in mind. At this point, it might be a good idea to simply distinguish hedonistic, subjective accounts of well-being, from non-hedonistic, 'objective' accounts of well-being instead of Chisholming endlessly about whether well-being is essentially one or the other according to the folk or philosophers. In other words, operationalize, baby!
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
*You might even believe that rational norms are determined by what is in fact (statistically) normal, thus, you can use the results of experimental philosophy to determine what the norms are (by determining what is normal) and what you should do, from a rational point of view, in these hypothetical scenarios (according to the norms).
Hello Fellow Hedonists,
The hustle and bustle of activity that has occured since my haitus is a bit overwhelming, but I am going to do my best to cover it here:
1) Peter Clough (University of Hull), in collaboration with AQR, has shown it is possible to teach kids to be tough (which they claim you can measure using the MTQ48) and that doing so has the beneficial effects you would expect, given other research on the benefits of resilience.
2) Research on hedonic adaptation has shown that “Within a few years, paraplegics wind up only slightly less happy on average than individuals who are not paralyzed.” Recently, researchers have shown that, ironically, functionally impaired patients with diseases such as amytrophic lateral sclerosis might be depressed (and, consequently, decline life sustaining treatment) because they don't realize that having the disease won't nessecarily compromise subjective quality of life (if they accept life sustaining treatment). It was also shown that, unsurprisingly, educated patients adapt to the illness better, from a hedonic point of view (this might be surprising if you buy into the myth of the melancholic genius).
3) Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin have shown that having strong family ties is a much bigger predictor of contentment than income. This research seems to support the jist of the Easterlin Paradox: money matters up to a point (when basic needs are met), then, other things matter more. In the words of Rebecca J. North, one of the researchers,"Our findings underscore the importance of additional policy indicators that can tap the well-being of individuals and families at the psychosocial level to provide a more comprehensive understanding of a nation's well-being." As I have argued in other places, researchers often forget that money is extrinsically valuable. If it has any influence on subjective well-being, it is probably because of how it is used.
4) It has previously been shown old people are as happy as young people. This is puzzling, in part, because old people spend more time alone, which has been shown to cause (and be caused by) depression. In the current issue of Psychology and Ageing, Bill Von Hipple has shown that "older people are just as satisfied with their social lives because they seem to get much more from the few interactions they have." In other words, the old aren't lonely because the elderly simply adapt, hedonically, to being less social than they used to be.
5) Check out this Gallup graph. Apparently, everybody is, in fact, working for the weekend. Yet another reason to pursue a gratifying profession.
6) Previously, I have discussed the link between subjective well-being and health. A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown "that positive affective states are related to favourable profiles of functioning in several biological systems and may thereby be relevant to risk of development of physical illness."
7) Read this interesting how-to article on how to maintain a happy marrige (and your health, by extension).
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
Hello Fellow Hedonists,
Betsey Stevenson on why (she believes) the work she has done with Steven Wolfers shows that the Easterlin Paradox is false:
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
Hello Fellow Hedonists,
Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson claim that they have have shown that there is no Easterlin Paradox!
The authors don't address the truly puzzling cases that troubled Easterlin: why, for example, are Venezuelans happier than Americans? Why, exactly, are extremely wealthy nations (such as Japan) as happy or slightly happier than poor nations (such as Jamaica)?
As far as I'm concerned, this chart reveals the gross hedonic inefficiency of wealthy nations (and, conversely, the hedonic ingenuity of less wealthy nations). Remember, money is extrinsically valuable, and this data provides us with reasons to reconsider the way we use it.
Excelsior!
C.L.Sosis
P.S. You can watch a video on the research, here.
Stephen Darwall: Welfare and Rational Care (Princeton Monographs in Philosophy)
Christopher Peterson: Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification
Richard Kraut: What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being
James Griffin: Well-Being: Its Meaning, Measurement, and Moral Importance (Clarendon Paperbacks)
Culture and Subjective Well-Being (Well Being and Quality of Life)
Bruno S. Frey: Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human Well-Being.
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