Can This Body of Evidence Show Us How to Become Happier?

This photo makes me smile. It’s a little shot of happiness. The view is from a dear friend’s balcony – a place drenched with who knows how many hours of happy companionship, a long time ago. I found it unexpectedly this week, saved on a forgotten USB stick, along with the treasure of some long-lost family photos.

I’m old enough, by now, to know what can make me happier. These days, though, grief shadows me. I could use more happiness, for sure. I didn’t expect much from this hype-y headline – Here’s the Happiness Research that Stands Up to Scrutiny. But I looked anyway….Maybe this time, the claim would be true?

For a moment, I thought it might be. The article is based on a paper by Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn with an interesting premise: That the way to overcome the weaknesses of the psychology literature is to do a systematic review limited to pre-registered experiments. Researchers committing themselves to specified methods and analyses ahead of time could overcome some cherry-picking and data manipulation problems.

My first concern was mostly, would there be enough evidence to be convincing? A quick look at the search methods revealed there were 65 studies included in the review. OK – worth reading, I thought. Unfortunately, it went south very quickly.

I gave up on this paper after I hit some deal-breakers. I’m keen on pre-registration – so much so, that in a few weeks I’m flying half-way around the world to participate in a meeting about it at The Royal Society. But pre-registration is not a panacea for every possible weakness in research – and it doesn’t necessarily work against cherry-picking & co, either. Yet, these authors proceeded pretty much as though they only needed to worry about study size.

There are many crippling problems in psychology research. For example, there’s the bias about making claims about the human condition based on studying convenient but unusual groups of people, like university students. Those typical volunteers have been called “the weirdest people in the world”: from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Even if a study in WEIRD participants is pre-registered, the WEIRD-ness remains.

The authors of this systematic review haven’t been critical about study biases generally – so the conclusions they draw are at high risk of being unreliable. Conversely, some of the major old-school research that wasn’t pre-registered must be reliable. These authors haven’t grappled with the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater inherent in their method.

Then, when they got to a bunch of genuinely strong and diverse evidence – on giving people significant sums of money – they not only didn’t do a critical-enough analysis, they didn’t meta-analyze any data. The authors argued against meta-analysis, on the grounds that meta-analyzing unreliable studies gets you unreliable results, and multi-center pre-registered studies are better. But that doesn’t mean that meta-analysis of reliable studies is unreliable – and once you have a bunch of similar studies, it’s too hard to get your head around a long description of each study separately.

Sigh… Reading an analysis of a body of evidence that falls short sure doesn’t make me happier!

In the last few weeks, though, I have written about some things that make me happy – links on that below, along with some other things. Plus, I made a Linktree.

I hope you have a good week!

Hilda

The photo of the Australian bush is my own (CC BY-NC-ND license).

• My update on next generation Covid vaccines in January has an exciting milestone – A Major First Next Generation Covid Vaccine: Could There Be More in 2024?
• Also at Absolutely Maybe, a new explainer. Have you ever wondered about what’s behind network meta-analysis and its jargon? Then check out: 5 Tips for Understanding Network Meta-Analysis.
• If you’re looking for some inspiration, I’ve got you covered here: A thread on Mastodon about the groundbreaking botanist, cytogeneticist, and ecologist, E.K. Janaki Ammal (1897-1984) – with gorgeous photos, too.
• My new Linktree gathers my blogs etc in one place – including all the social media places where I post. I’m only really active on Mastodon, but I pop in to post about things I write at some others.
• If you’re interested in pre-registered studies, the meeting I mentioned above is at The Royal Society in London on March 4-5. Details here, and program in progress here.
• An exciting book is now available on pre-order. Called Stories are Weapons, it’s by Annalee Newitz, and about “psychological warfare and the American mind.” She has tackled the history of the techniques starting and fanning culture wars, and how to deal with them.