There are areas where science has no choice but to take risks. Researchers who dare to explore these muddy fields must fight against subjective, ambiguous and even ethically sensitive aspects of their objects of study. THE Analysis of human happiness is one of these ambiguous areas. For almost a century, researchers have tried, without reaching an agreement, to define, observe and measure the well-being or the development 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 to think about this question, some experts are starting to find something that could look like an answer.
“There are no 100% reliable methods to measure happiness,” warns Alejandro CencerradoAnalyst at the Copenhagen Research Institute of Happiness, one of these research centers which devotes his knowledge to explore why certain societies are happier than others and what are his causes and effects. “It’s subjective, and it will always be the case,” he adds. Faced with this, researchers like Cenerrado have opted for the simplest and most complex option of all: ask people directly what they feel.
The analyst explains it in this way: “If I ask you how happy you are today on a scale of nothing, you can give me a fairly good idea. This method has its faults because if you tell me that your day was a seven, I will never know if it is the same thing as a seven for me. But if you ask for thousands and thousands of peopleYou achieve very useful conclusions. »»
By applying this method, various institutes around the world have reached a similar conclusion: that the vast majority of people understand happiness in a multidimensional manner. To understand why it’s new, we have to summarize a little story.
One of the first to discuss happiness was Aristotle with its concept of Eudaimoniawhich could be translated by “good life”. It is an idea that refers to personal development by virtue, contemplation and material means to maintain it. “In other words, it was a fairly holistic vision of happiness,” says Tyler VanderweeleDirector of human flourishing program at Harvard University. This vision lasted in different forms over time. Thomas Aquinas, for example, defined happiness as a total satisfaction. “Something that was only possible if all aspects of life were in order,” notes Vanderweele.
Things went wrong after the industrial revolution with the first more or less serious attempts to measure happiness. “At the beginning, the attempt was made by objective quantitative indicators,” explains Víctor Raúl López Ruiz, coordinator of the intangible asset observatory and the quality of life at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in Spain. GDP growth, criminalization, employment and life expectancy have started to be the data used to determine whether a company was happy or not.
Thus emerged the so-called “paradox of the Easterlin”, in which the economist Richard Easterlin Approached that, while increasing the per capita income of a country can improve the quality of life of its inhabitants, this does not necessarily mean that they are more satisfied with their lives. In short, there seems to be a truth to the famous saying Money cannot buy happiness.
From the 1980s, and very gradually, researchers like Ed Diene began to shape the concept of happiness from a scientific point of view, distancing itself from its conceptual, philosophical or spiritual definition. “The former indicators have been replaced by more advanced subjective measures,” explains López Ruiz.
This change, Cencerrado Ventures, has a very concrete explanation: “When our grandparents wanted to be happy, they knew exactly where to seek their happiness. For example, by achieving some economic or social stability. Then we started to have everything that has already dreamed, but we have always felt anxious, empty and annoyed. ” 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 its first measure, happiness is studied from several dimensions with several groups of variables,” explains López Ruiz. Each institution has developed its own method. The observatory of intangible assets and quality of life, for example, creates a personal, residential and professional profile of each individual questioned on the basis of 40 variables. These variables take into account everything, general levels of satisfaction of life, namely if you trust your neighbors, the amount of green spaces in your neighborhood and your satisfaction of your work. The expert adds that “now we must not only measure economic development, but also include other facets of humanity which contribute to a better quality of life in a society. It is not only a question of knowing if there are few thefts in the city in which you live, but also if you work in the field that you have studied, that you feel fulfilled or that you share relations with your family. ”
The social and economic sciences have evolved to the point of synthesizing all these intangible and subjective elements in one or more indicators, giving the study of the happiness and well-being of new nuances. However, Vanderweele de Harvard – who uses measures with between 12 and 54 variables and has just published a relationship with his first results in the review Nature – admits that researchers working on these subjects “must accept that they can never be perfectly measured and that, consequently, such a measure will be partial”.
The key, in addition to expanding the range of variables, is to take advantage of new data analysis tools to process large volumes of information from hundreds of thousands or, preferably, millions of people. “It’s always our main challenge,” says López Ruiz. The more respondents participate in studies, the more reliable the results, the more likely it is that more detailed conclusions can be drawn on What is collective social happinessAnd how it works.
However, with their inaccuracies and everything, the data is important. “Measuring happiness should be a responsibility for the state,” says Cenerrado. “If we call ourselves a welfare state, we must ask people if they are really good.” These questions, according to experts consulted, are increasingly seriously, but they still play a secondary role in decision -making. “The scientific movement of well-being and fulfillment still has a lot of work before it to ensure that its approaches are clearly integrated into public policies,” explains Vanderweele.
“What we measure as scientists really influence what we discuss as society, what we are studying, what we know, what we aspire to achieve and the policies we implement to achieve these objectives,” adds the researcher.
Register Our weekly newsletter To obtain greater information coverage in English from the El País USA edition