Dispositional Optimism
Smarter people aren’t any happier, but those who drink in moderation are. Attractive people are slightly happier than unattractive people. Men aren’t happier than women, though women have more highs and more lows. Older people report slightly higher levels of life satisfaction and fewer dark days than do the young.
Ed Diener determined that those on the Forbes 100 list in 1995 were only slightly happier than the American public as a whole.
According to Daniel Gilbert, every bit of data says children are an extreme source of negative affect, a mild source of negative affect, or none at all. It’s hard to find a study where there’s one net positive.
Nebraskans think that Californians are happier, but a study done by Daniel Kahneman suggests they aren’t. In a 2003 poll by the Roper organization, the Danes, the Americans, and the Australians rated themselves the happiest. Other polls have found the Swiss happiest, and the Canadians always do well. Compared with their purchasing power, Latin and South Americans are much happier than one would imagine, and the Japanese are less so. And every survey agrees on one point: That the people of Eastern European nations - Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Latvia, Belarus, and Bulgaria - consistently rank themselves the least happy, with Russia coming in especially low. Yet people in the happiest countries are more likely to kill themselves.
We tend to mistake our present feelings for future ones, which is why, when we decide to marry the right person, we find it unthinkable we’ll ever be tempted to sleep with anyone else. We’re more likely to take a positive view of things we did than things we didn’t, more comfortable with decisions we can’t reverse than ones we can, and more apt to make the best of a terrible situation than a merely annoying one.
Those who are permanently injured say they’d be willing to pay far less to undo their injuries than able-bodied people say they’d pay to prevent them.
Being surrounded by friends and family is one of the most crucial determinants of our well-being.
Economists call those who seek out the best options in life “maximizers.” And maximizers, in practically every study, are far more miserable than people who are willing to make do (”satisficers”).
Sheena Iyengar examined speed dating, and found that women who sat at smaller tables of potential mates were inclined to go on second dates 50% of the time, but if the group got bigger, they followed up on only a third of the candidates (though the men remained content to follow up on 50% no matter how big the sample).
Disparities in income make people miserable.
Twin studies suggest that roughly 50% of our affect is determined by genetics.
“There’s no credible evidence that dispositional optimism is changeable,” says Julie Norem. “And the research shows that it’s dispositional optimism that makes your life better.”
One of Norem’s studies involved giving anagrams to solve to both optimists and pessimists, first listening to Mozart, then listening to a dirge. The pessimists did better when they were listening to the dirge.
In one study, a group of undergraduates was given varying degrees of control over turning on a green light. Some members of the group had perfect control; others had none - the light went on and off of its own accord. The depressives accurately predicted, in each instance, whether they were in control of the situation or not. The nondepressives, on the other hand, thought they had control about 35% of the time over the situation in which they were, in fact, 100% helpless.