Happiness is infectious - we catch it from others. That’s the finding of this new paper. The authors find that people in Chinese villages are more likely to be happy if their fellow villagers are. Significantly, this is not simply because the things that cause their neighbours to be happy cause them to be happy. Instead, there seems a causal relationship from neighbours’ happiness to one’s own.
This seems yet more evidence to suggest that peer effects matter.
But it raises a puzzle. There’s abundant evidence that other people’s income makes us unhappy. So why does others’ happiness make us happy? What’s the difference between income and happiness?
Yes other people’s high incomes might make us more aware of our relative poverty, though a contrast effect. Or others‘ incomes, in showing us what might have been, increase our sense of having lost opportunities. But exactly the same is true for happiness, as Hank sang:
This seems yet more evidence to suggest that peer effects matter.
But it raises a puzzle. There’s abundant evidence that other people’s income makes us unhappy. So why does others’ happiness make us happy? What’s the difference between income and happiness?
Yes other people’s high incomes might make us more aware of our relative poverty, though a contrast effect. Or others‘ incomes, in showing us what might have been, increase our sense of having lost opportunities. But exactly the same is true for happiness, as Hank sang:
Through tears, I watch young lovers
As they go strollin' by
Oh all the things that might have been
God forgive me if I cry
As they go strollin' by
Oh all the things that might have been
God forgive me if I cry
Offsetting this is the tendency for happier people to be friendlier and more trusting, which in turn increases others’ happiness. What’s odd is that this spill-over effect should be so powerful.
It's probably because there is no upper bound on the level of happiness in the world, therefore no reason to worry about anyone else 'stealing' your happiness. It's not competitive, whereas wealth (to an extent) is. Whilst it's possible for the total amount of wealth in society to increase, I suspect that happiness can increase much more quickly and easily, satisfying everyone. With wealth, there's often a divide between those who have it and those who don't, and those who have it will feel the need to defend what they have.
In that sense, happiness is like other forms of intellectual property - if I share mine with you, I don't end up with any less than I started with.
Posted by: Rob Knight | September 21, 2009 at 03:34 PM
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Posted by: David | September 21, 2009 at 04:29 PM
This finding crops up from time to time in all sorts of societies. For me as an economist it means that I assume that economic man (a gender free concept) factors into his personal utility function the happiness of others, with a positive sign. I have no information on the weight he gives it relative to other utility.
There is also a good scattering of evidence that economic man factors in the status (wealth included) of others with a negative sign; and a weight sufficient to shorten lives if status inequalities are too great.
But is the pursuit of happiness what our lives are about? Mine isn't, nice as happiness is.
Posted by: Diversity | September 21, 2009 at 08:26 PM
To extend what Diversity said about status: someone else having more money than me is liable to be perceived (for various reasons) as indicating her greater value than me - that society recognises her more, or that she has more competently 'won' it. Happiness does this to a much lesser degree: I can see someone else be happy and feel quite easily that it's fairly random and unrelated to their personal worth, and so not feel forced to make a personal comparison.
Plus, as was mentioned by Rob Knight, resources are more limited and more transferable - I can consider what someone else's specific particular wealth could do if I had it instead, whereas I can't really imagine 'receiving' their happiness via. transfer.
In short, both can sadden us by comparison, but wealth forces the comparison upon us more.
Posted by: Alderson Warm-Fork | September 21, 2009 at 10:36 PM
Gentlemen - your theories seem plausible, but they rest upon the view that others are irrational, or at least not paying attention to the data.
1. Wages are not a sign of people's worth or status. They merely tell us what "skills" are in demand or scarce supply. Hayek was perfectly clear about this. We don't say a pineapple has higher status or moral worth than an apple. Why do we regard the labour market as any different?
2. If you look at the time-series for developed economies - showing big rises in incomes but very little rises in happiness - you'd infer that aggregate happiness is bounded but incomes less so. Which suggests that it's happiness that's a zero-sum game but incomes a positive-sum one.
Posted by: chris | September 22, 2009 at 08:42 AM
I came across an interesting idea on the Dilbert blog - Happiness Smoothing - an apparently innate human tendency to cheer up the unhappy, cheer down the uber-happy & help ensure an even spread of happiness. Which made me smile.
Posted by: Mark | September 22, 2009 at 10:01 AM
Surely happiness is catching because it is a behaviour as well as a state? That is, it is something people 'do'; and, since humans tend to copy one-another's behaviours, we copy the happiness behaviours. And that in turn actually makes us happier (thus recreating the state).
In the same way, there's research indicating that partners of depressed people tend to copy their depressed behaviours over time & this increases the risk of them becoming clinically depressed (i.e. reaching the 'state' of depressed).
So, the difference between income and happiness is that happiness is a behaviour that we tend to copy, while income is not a behaviour, just a state. (Of course income may have behaviours associated with it that we might copy - thereby increasing our own income - but there is no simple link from this to increasing or decreasing our own happiness.)
(Not sure about the time series point. I would have thought that happiness is bounded because each person has a maximum level of happiness they can reach - since it is a state of mind, it is presumably ultimately defined by biological parameters. That doesn't imply that it is zero-sum, just that there are material boundaries.)
Posted by: Rachel | September 22, 2009 at 03:47 PM
Happy people are nicer to be around, create a nicer and more trusting environment and consequently spread their happiness. Unless, of course, you are feeling particularly unhappy, then that infernal cheeriness has the opposite effect.
Posted by: Bruce | September 22, 2009 at 05:23 PM
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