Social science is undermined by slippery language and sloppy measurement. The term happiness (singular) has led to a lot of confusion about the meaning of happiness or its twin wellbeing. It seems to imply that there is one happiness, one way to have high wellbeing, and one way to have a good life. Philosophers have tried to define this elusive construct without success. Not a problem for social scientists. They just operationalize constructs and bypass any philosophical problems about the meaning of the words that they use as labels for their happiness or wellbeing measures. Wellbeing is simply whatever my wellbeing measure measures and of course my measure is better than the other measures. This mindless approach to measurement gave us hundreds of happiness measures and unless Reviewer 2 stops them, we will have more every day (see my review below).

The multitude of happiness measures shows of course that researchers do not agree because there is no single, universal definition of happiness that scientists can agree on because people do not agree on it. In other word, there are happinesses (plural) and the first task for everybody is to figure out what happiness means for them.

So, how can we measure happinesses, for example, to rank nations in terms of the average happinesses of their citizens. The solution to this problem comes from a science that is not even recognized as a distinct science, namely public opinion research. In the 1960s, public opinion researchers simply started asking people how happy they are with their lives or how satisfied they are with their lives. They did not give people a definition of happiness or ask specific questions based on a deep theory of happiness because they treated happiness like other topics; that is, as personal opinions.

This approach to the measurement of happiness has later been formalized in measurements of subjective well-being (Diener, 1984) and provided with a theoretical framework in philosophy (Sumner, 1996). The core assumption of subjective indicators of wellbeing or subjective well-being measures is that people have different conceptions of ideal lives (plural), but we can measure how their actual lives compare to people’s ideal lives.

Not all social scientists are happy with this approach, especially when studies show results that they do not like. To avoid the pesty problem that people do not define happiness in a way they like, researchers develop measures that fit their own views and produce results that they like. For example, when the average life-satisfaction of citizens in rich countries is higher than in poor countries because money is essential for the fulfillment of basic needs, they create measures that are not correlated with money because they have the romantic idea that 8 billion people on this planet would be better off living off the land. So, they create a wellbeing measure that is not correlated with national wellbeing. This is of course not science this is politics pretending to be science.

Given the lack of clear standards for the validation of measures in the social sciences, it is important that scale names have no meaning and no construct validity because constructs are not defined. Wellbeing is just a cool name to say “my measure is really important.” If you agree that there is no single wellbeing or happiness, you need to focus on work with life-satisfaction judgments that require people to define happiness for themselves.

My Review

The manuscript starts with the common assumption that there is one true happiness (well-being) and that the goal of wellbeing science is to define it and measure it. This mindset has let to the creation of hundreds of different definitions and measures. It is probably time to recognize that the search for a single construct of happiness is elusive. There is not one happiness. There are many happinesses.

The plurality of happiness creates a problem for the use of happiness as a social indicator or policy goal. If there is not one true happiness, who gets to decide what happiness is used to measure people’s happiness? The king of Bhutan with his clever slogan of the Gross National Happiness?  Not everybody may agree with this definition.

The appeal of subjective wellbeing indicators is that they do not impose a definition of wellbeing on the people who’s wellbeing is measured. Ideally, the measure reflects their own definition of wellbeing rather than a definition that they do not share. This approach solves the problem of plurality because people can have different definitions of wellbeing and we can still measure the average wellbeing of a population.

This does not automatically imply that life-satisfaction judgments are perfectly valid measures of subjective wellbeing. Far from it. The observed scores can be biased by many factors, including a bias towards consideration of material factors, which was argued by Kahneman for some time.

However, correlations at the individual level show that money plays a relatively small role in people’s life-satisfaction judgments. Personality dispositions and satisfaction with life-domains that are not affected by income (e.g., family relationships) also play a role.

At the level of national averages, the correlation is strong, but that may simply show that fulfillment of basic needs varies a lot across nations and is important for wellbeing. It does not automatically undermine the validity of life-satisfaction judgments.

The problem for other approaches is to demonstrate that they are valid measures of people’s wellbeing. The authors’ approach is questionable. They look for variables that are not related to economic conditions under the assumption that the strong correlation with life-satisfaction reflects a bias. However, they provide no evidence that it is a bias. Money buys shelter, food, medicine, education, etc. etc., all good things that people need to even start thinking about a good life. To claim that a measure that shows no relationship with economic conditions is a valid measure of well-being requires evidence and the authors do not provide such evidence. Therefore, it lacks support for the claim that “ this study provides fresh evidence that psychosocial well-being represents a distinct dimension of national well-being,”

To examine fundamental questions in wellbeing science requires deeper reflection about the meaning of happiness and the limitations in measuring such an elusive construct.