The elusive path of science to measuring human happiness: “There are no 100 percent reliable methods”

There are areas where science has no choice but to take risks. Researchers who dare to explore these muddy fields must grapple with the subjective, ambiguous, and even ethically sensitive aspects of their objects of study. The analysis of human happiness is one of those ambiguous areas. For almost a century, scholars have been trying, without reaching agreement, to define, observe, and measure the well-being or flourishing of a society under the rigor of the scientific method. But how? How can a dimension as elusive and mutating as happiness be organized, structured, and systematized? After decades and decades of mulling over this question, some experts are beginning to come up with something that might resemble an answer.

"There are no 100% reliable methods for measuring happiness," warns Alejandro Cencerrado, an analyst at the Copenhagen Happiness Institute , one of the research centers that dedicates its knowledge to exploring why some societies are happier than others and what its causes and effects are. "It's subjective, and it always will be," he adds. Faced with this, researchers like Cencerrado have opted for the simplest and most complex option of all: asking people directly how they feel.

The analyst explains it this way: “If I ask you how happy you were today on a scale of 0 to 10, you can give me a pretty good idea. That method has its flaws because if you tell me your day was a seven, I'll never know if it's the same as a seven for me. But if you ask thousands and thousands of people, you reach conclusions that are very useful.”

Applying this method, various institutes around the world have reached a similar conclusion: that the vast majority of people understand happiness in a multidimensional way. To understand why this is novel, we need to recap a little history.

One of the first to discuss happiness was Aristotle with his concept of eudaimonia , which could be translated as "the good life." It's an idea that refers to personal fulfillment through virtue, contemplation, and the material means to sustain it. "In other words, it was a pretty holistic vision of happiness," notes Tyler VanderWeele, director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. This vision has endured in different forms over time. Thomas Aquinas, for example, defined happiness as complete satisfaction. "Something that was only possible if all aspects of life were in order," VanderWeele notes.

Things went awry after the Industrial Revolution with the first more or less serious attempts to measure happiness. "At first, the attempt was made through objective quantitative indicators," says Víctor Raúl López Ruiz, coordinator of the Observatory of Intangibles and Quality of Life at the University of Castilla-La Mancha. GDP growth, criminalization, employment, and life expectancy began to be the data used to determine whether a society was happy or not.

Thus emerged the so-called "Easterlin paradox," in which economist Richard Easterlin posited that while increasing a country's per capita income can improve its inhabitants' quality of life, this does not necessarily mean they are more satisfied with their lives . In short, there seems to be some truth to the famous saying that money can't buy happiness.

Beginning in the 1980s, and very gradually, researchers like Ed Diene began to shape the concept of happiness from a scientific perspective, distancing themselves from its conceptual, philosophical, or spiritual definition. “The old indicators have been replaced by more advanced, subjective measurements with more dimensions,” says López Ruiz.

This change, Cencerrado ventures, has a very concrete explanation: “When our grandparents wanted to be happy, they knew exactly where to look for their happiness. For example, by achieving a certain economic or social stability. Then, we began to have everything previous generations had always dreamed of, but we still felt anxious, empty, and bored.” The idea of ​​happiness began to change, and with it, the ways of measuring it.

It's not just a matter of money

“Today, unlike when it was first measured, happiness is studied from multiple dimensions with several groups of variables,” explains López Ruiz. Each institution has developed its own method. The Observatory of Intangibles and Quality of Life, for example, creates a personal, residential, and occupational profile of each individual surveyed based on 40 variables. These variables take into account everything from general life satisfaction levels to whether you trust your neighbors, the amount of green spaces in your neighborhood, and how satisfied you are with your job. The expert adds that “now we must not only measure economic development, but also include other facets of humanity that contribute to a better quality of life in a society. It's not just about whether there are few robberies in the city you live in, but also about whether you're working in the field you studied, whether you feel fulfilled, or whether you share relationships with your family.”

The methods of social and economic sciences have evolved to the point of synthesizing all these intangible and subjective elements into one or more indicators, giving the study of happiness and well-being new nuances. However, Harvard's VanderWeele—who uses metrics with between 12 and 54 variables and has just published a report with his initial results in the journal Nature —confesses that researchers working on these topics "must accept that they can never be measured perfectly and that, therefore, any such measurement will be partial."

The key, in addition to expanding the range of variables, is to leverage new data analysis tools to process large volumes of information from hundreds of thousands or, preferably, millions of people. "That's always our main challenge," says López Ruiz. The more respondents participate in the studies, the more reliable the results will be, and the more likely it is that more detailed conclusions can be drawn about what collective social happiness is and how it operates.

Even so, with their inaccuracies and all, data matters. “Measuring happiness should be a state responsibility,” argues Cencerrado. He adds: “If we call ourselves a welfare state , we have to ask people if they are truly well.” These issues, according to the experts consulted, are being taken increasingly seriously, but they still play a secondary role in decision-making. “The scientific movement of well-being and flourishing still has a lot of work ahead of it to ensure that its approaches are clearly integrated into public policies,” says VanderWeele.

"What we measure as scientists truly influences what we discuss as a society, what we study, what we know, what we aspire to achieve, and the policies we implement to achieve those goals," the researcher adds.