A Scientific Study I Am Looking Forward to Hearing the Results of.
Or rather, a scientific study I hope they will do some day. I don't read the journals, I don't know whether these things have been studied. I hope someone has already had this idea. It's not like I'm going to get credit for it either way.
Someone needs to do an in-depth study of how happy the average American (European, person) is. I know they already do those phone polls. They ask people "on a scale of one to ten how happy would you say you are?" I forget whether they do these as part of a larger psychology poll. In any case, it is not enough.
I seem to recall that the median response on those polls is fairly happy. This is probably misleading for a couple of reasons. First, people never ever rate anything lower than 4 on a scale of one to ten, least of all themselves. Second, people like to think of themselves as happy. If you start dwelling on how unhappy you are, you just make yourself worse. Better to tell the pollster that you're happy.
It would be so much better for a major institution, I am looking at you US government, to fund a study to find out what people really think. It would not be very expensive. I would be surprised if it cost over a million dollars and if it did so what? The government already spends millions of dollars determining the cause of Dutch Elm disease (Answer: Bugs) and this research would be so much more useful. Think how much public policy would be affected if we knew just how many people were unhappy, how that was changing over time, and what they were unhappy about.
It would not be a complicated experiment to set up. All you would need is a psychologist to interview so many hundred subjects, and report how happy he thought they were. It might have to be one psychologist, to eliminate bias error. Or it could be many psychologists with some kind of statistical analysis to weed out error. I don't know I am not a scientist. I just have better ideas than them.
Someone needs to do an in-depth study of how happy the average American (European, person) is. I know they already do those phone polls. They ask people "on a scale of one to ten how happy would you say you are?" I forget whether they do these as part of a larger psychology poll. In any case, it is not enough.
I seem to recall that the median response on those polls is fairly happy. This is probably misleading for a couple of reasons. First, people never ever rate anything lower than 4 on a scale of one to ten, least of all themselves. Second, people like to think of themselves as happy. If you start dwelling on how unhappy you are, you just make yourself worse. Better to tell the pollster that you're happy.
It would be so much better for a major institution, I am looking at you US government, to fund a study to find out what people really think. It would not be very expensive. I would be surprised if it cost over a million dollars and if it did so what? The government already spends millions of dollars determining the cause of Dutch Elm disease (Answer: Bugs) and this research would be so much more useful. Think how much public policy would be affected if we knew just how many people were unhappy, how that was changing over time, and what they were unhappy about.
It would not be a complicated experiment to set up. All you would need is a psychologist to interview so many hundred subjects, and report how happy he thought they were. It might have to be one psychologist, to eliminate bias error. Or it could be many psychologists with some kind of statistical analysis to weed out error. I don't know I am not a scientist. I just have better ideas than them.
posted by apk01004 at 5:43 PM
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