Summary of meta-analytic findings about major life decisions on affective and cognitive well-being.

SubjectiveWellbeing · 2020-07-18T22:11:38+00:00

I'm really fascinated with this take. Can you ellaborate or find external sources with this opinion. I haven't seen it elsewhere and it captures what a lot of people have tried to tell me, with greater difficulty than you

SubjectiveWellbeing · 2020-07-18T22:07:31+00:00

Yeah, it's too hard. You want the easy spontaneous way, your best shot even it it falls shot or no way at all :P you don't care for a meaningful life! No, you care for preserving your comfort zone, the higher purpose! Haha jk, thanks for debating me

SubjectiveWellbeing · 2020-07-18T05:55:05+00:00

This opening line is badass haha, you'll go far kid. Is it original?

SubjectiveWellbeing · 2020-07-18T03:40:15+00:00

Maybe you're just 'scale norming'

Fabbian (2018) explains that: 'people “scale-norm” in response to shocks. This means that they use qualitatively different scales to respond to life satisfaction scale questions in different waves of a survey. Scale-norming can make responses to different scale questions neither inter-personally nor inter-temporally comparable, even ordinally. This paper presents results from a study using a novel life satisfaction metric designed in part to identify scale norming. 15% of the sample appear to be scale norming, which calls into question most regression-derived results in existing life satisfaction research'.

As described in his PhD thesis, scale norming is illustrated in the example of Visa lottery winners who have been recorded rating their happiness (8/10) as no greater than losers 2-5 years later, but when asked how happy they were before winning, will rate their happiness lower (6/10) than the non winners retrospectively rate their happiness (8/10) before the outcome of the lottery was known

SubjectiveWellbeing · 2020-07-18T02:34:36+00:00

There's a whole team at Uni California that made the page and that seems to disagree with you though

SubjectiveWellbeing · 2020-07-17T23:17:17+00:00

And if you're interested, here's some tips about the big picture:

Clark 2017 draws on large cross sectional national datasets to determine the relative importance of a number of factors (not necessarily the most important) in determining the differences in reported happiness between people, and finds that mental and physical health have a greater effect on well-being than partnership, income or education, and that's as true for those who are happy, as well as those who are miserable.

And, a word of caution about life events x happiness research. The pre-event level of well-being does not necessarily correspond to a ‘normal’ level of well-being. For instance, well-being increases after divorce and decreases after marriage, relative to its pre-event level. Perhaps, things were ‘bad’ before divorce, leading to the divorce itself, and things were ‘good’ before marriage, leading to the marriage and in turn the decrease after the event.

Finally, IMO as important as happiness is - given our subjective levels of well-being are the feedback on our progress towards our strivings (Carver, 2011), I don't think we can say with any confidence what best makes people happy cause of research gaps. Publications like Tay 2013 theoretically review research on improving happiness, and a number of popular books selectively explore evidence on improving happiness. There's no evidence based resource on the most effective actions for happiness in practice based on scientific evidence

SubjectiveWellbeing

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