Talk­ing of hap­pi­ness, Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia philoso­pher Eric Schwitzgebel dis­cusses the prob­lem with the self-reporting of hap­pi­ness for research pur­poses.

If the inter­ven­tion is obvi­ously intended to increase hap­pi­ness, par­tic­i­pants may well report more hap­pi­ness post-intervention sim­ply to con­form to their own expec­ta­tions, or because they endorse a the­ory on which the inter­ven­tion should increase hap­pi­ness, or because they’ve invested time in the inter­ven­tion pro­ce­dure and they’d pre­fer not to think of their time as wasted, or for any of a num­ber of other rea­sons. Par­tic­i­pants might think some­thing like, “I reported a hap­pi­ness level of 3 before, and now that I’ve done this inter­ven­tion I should report 4″ — not nec­es­sar­ily in so many words.

[…] The vast major­ity of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion describe them­selves as happy (despite our high rate of depres­sion and anger prob­lems), and self-reports of hap­pi­ness are prob­a­bly dri­ven less by accu­rate per­cep­tion of one’s level of hap­pi­ness than by fac­tors like the need to see and to por­tray one­self as a happy per­son (oth­er­wise, isn’t one some­thing of a fail­ure?). My own back­ground assump­tion […] is that those reports are dri­ven pri­mar­ily by the need to per­ceive one­self a cer­tain way, by image man­age­ment, by con­tex­tual fac­tors, by one’s own the­o­ries of hap­pi­ness, and by pres­sure to con­form to per­ceived exper­i­menter expectations.

Of course, reac­tiv­ity isn’t a prob­lem exclu­sively linked with this type of research, but it’s worth reiterating.

via Mind Hacks