2020
®
AP Seminar
Performance Task 2
Directions and Stimulus Materials
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AP Seminar Performance Task 2:
Individual Research-Based
Essay and Presentation
Directions and Stimulus Materials
January 2020
© 2020 College Board. College Board, Advanced Placement, AP, AP Central, and the acorn logo are
registered trademarks of College Board. AP Capstone and AP Capstone Diploma are trademarks owned
by College Board. All other products and services may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Visit College Board on the web: www.collegeboard.org.
Contents
iv Introduction
1 Directions
5 Stimulus Materials
5 “Have You Renounced Pleasure?” from The Book of Joy by His Holiness the
Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, with Douglas Abrams
12 “On Virtue and Happiness,” from Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill
16 “High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being,”
from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS)
21 “Big Daddy’s Last Dance” video
22 “Genes, Economics, and Happiness” from Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology,
and Economics
41 “The Story of An Hour” by Kate Chopin
43 “The Happiness Project,” from T: The New York Times Style Magazine
by Andrew O’Hagan
54 Credits
Introduction
This performance task, highlighted in bold below, is one of three parts of the overall
assessment for AP Seminar, and one of two performance tasks. The assessment for
this course comprises the following:
Performance Task 1: Team Project and Presentation
❯
Component 1: Individual Research Report
❯
Component 2: Team Multimedia Presentation and Oral Defense
Performance Task 2: Individual Research-Based Essay and Presentation
❯
Component 1: Individual Written Argument
❯
Component 2: Individual Multimedia Presentation
❯
Component 3: Oral Defense
End-of-Course Exam
❯
Part A: Three Short-Answer Questions (based on one source)
❯
Part B: One Essay Question (based on four sources)
The attached pages include the directions for Performance Task 2, information
about the weighting of the task within the overall assessment, and detailed
information as to the expected quantity and quality of work that you should submit.
Also included are the stimulus materials for the task. These materials are theme-
based and broadly span the academic curriculum. After analyzing the materials,
develop a research question that suits your individual interest based on a thematic
connection between at least two of the stimulus materials. Your research question
must be rich enough to allow you to engage in meaningful exploration and to write
and present a substantive, defensible argument.
© 2020 College Board iv
AP
®
Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
AP Seminar Performance Task 2:
Individual Research-Based Essay and Presentation
Student Version
Weight: 35% of the AP Seminar score
Task Overview
This packet includes a set of stimulus materials for the AP Seminar Performance
Task 2: Individual Research-Based Essay and Presentation.
You must identify a research question prompted by analysis of the provided
stimulus materials, gather information from a range of additional sources, develop
and refine an argument, write and revise your argument, and create a presentation
that you will be expected to defend. Your teacher will give you a deadline for when
you need to submit your written argument and presentation media. Your teacher
will also give you a date on which you will give your presentation.
Task Components Length Date Due (ll in)
Individual Written Argument 2000 words
Individual Multimedia Presentation 6–8 minutes
Oral Defense Respond to 2 questions
In all written work, you must:
▶
Acknowledge, attribute, and/or cite sources using in-text citations, endnotes or
footnotes, and/or through bibliographic entry. You must avoid plagiarizing (see
the attached AP Capstone Policy on Plagiarism and Falsification or Fabrication of
Information).
▶
Adhere to established conventions of grammar, usage, style, and mechanics.
Task Directions
1. Individual Written Argument (2000 words)
❯
Read and analyze the provided stimulus materials to identify thematic
connections among the sources and possible areas for inquiry.
❯
Compose a research question of your own prompted by analysis of the stimulus
materials.
❯
Gather information from a range of additional sources representing a variety of
perspectives, including scholarly work.
❯
Analyze, evaluate, and select evidence. Interpret the evidence to develop a
well-reasoned argument that answers the research question and conveys your
perspective.
© 2020 College Board
1
AP
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Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
❯
Throughout your research, continually revisit and refine your original research
question to ensure that the evidence you gather addresses your purpose and
focus.
❯
Identify opposing or alternate views and consider their implications and/or
limitations as you develop resolutions, conclusions, or solutions to your research
question.
❯
Compose a coherent, convincing and well-written argument in which you:
w
Identify and explain the relationship of your inquiry to a theme or connection
among at least two of the stimulus materials prompted by your reading.
w
Incorporate at least one of the stimulus materials.
w
Place your research question in context.
w
Include a variety of perspectives.
w
Include evidence from a range of sources.
w
Establish an argument that links claims and evidence.
w
Provide specific resolutions, conclusions and/or solutions.
w
Evaluate objections, limitations or competing perspectives and arguments.
w
Cite all sources that you have used, including the stimulus materials, and
include a list of works cited or a bibliography.
w
Use correct grammar and style.
❯
Do a word count and keep under the 2000-word limit (excluding footnotes,
bibliography, and text in figures or tables).
❯
Remove references to your name, school, or teacher.
❯
Upload your document to the AP Digital Portfolio.
2. Individual Multimedia Presentation (6–8 minutes)
❯
Develop and prepare a multimedia presentation that will convey your argument
to an audience of your peers.
❯
Be selective about the information you choose for your presentation by focusing
on key points you want your audience to understand.
❯
Design your oral presentation with supporting visual media, and consider
audience, context, and purpose.
❯
Prepare to engage your audience using appropriate strategies (e.g., eye contact,
vocal variety, expressive gestures, movement).
❯
Prepare notecards or an outline that you can quickly reference as you are
speaking so that you can interact with supporting visuals and the audience.
❯
Rehearse your presentation in order to refine your design and practice your
delivery.
❯
Check that you can do the presentation within the 6- to 8-minute time limit.
© 2020 College Board 2
AP
®
Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
❯
Deliver a 6–8 minute multimedia presentation in which you:
w
Contextualize and identify the importance of your research question.
w
Explain the connection between your research and your analysis of the
stimulus materials.
w
Deliver an argument that connects claims and evidence.
w
Incorporate, synthesize and interpret evidence from various perspectives.
w
Offer resolutions, conclusions, and/or solutions based on evidence and
consider the implications of any suggested solutions.
w
Engage the audience with an effective and clearly organized presentation
design.
w
Engage the audience with effective techniques of delivery and performance.
3. Individual Oral Defense (two questions)
Defend your research process, use of evidence, and conclusion(s), solution(s), or
recommendation(s) through oral responses to two questions asked by your teacher.
Be prepared to describe and reflect on your process as well as defend and extend
your written work and oral presentation.
Sample Oral Defense Questions
Here are some examples of the types of questions your teacher might ask you
during your oral defense. These are examples only; your teacher may ask you
different questions, but there will still be one question that relates to each of the
following two categories.
1. Reection on Research Process
❯
What information did you need before you began your research, and how did
that information shape your research?
❯
What evidence did you gather that you didn’t use? Why did you choose not to
use it?
❯
How valid and reliable are the sources you used? How do you know? Which
sources didn’t work?
❯
How did you select the strategies you used to gather information or conduct
research? Were they effective?
❯
How did your research question evolve as you moved through the research
process? Did your research go in a different direction than you originally
planned/hypothesized?
❯
What information did you need that you weren’t able to find or locate? How did
you go about trying to find that information?
❯
How did you handle the differing perspectives in order to reach a conclusion?
© 2020 College Board
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AP
®
Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
2. Extending argumentation through effective questioning and inquiry
❯
What additional questions emerged from your research? Why are these
questions important?
❯
What advice would you have for other researchers who consider this topic?
❯
What might be the real-world implications or consequences (influence on
others’ behaviors or decision-making processes) of your findings? What are the
implications to your community?
❯
If you had more time, what additional research would you conduct related to
this issue?
❯
Explain the level of certainty you have about your conclusion, solution, or
recommendation.
❯
How does your conclusion respond to any of the other research or sources you
examined?
❯
How did you use the conclusions and questions of others to advance your own
research?
AP Capstone™ Policy on Plagiarism and Falsication or Fabrication
of Information
A student who fails to acknowledge the source or author of any and all information
or evidence taken from the work of someone else through citation, attribution or
reference in the body of the work, or through a bibliographic entry, will receive
a score of 0 on that particular component of the AP Seminar and/or AP Research
Performance Task. In AP Seminar, a team of students that fails to properly
acknowledge sources or authors on the Team Multimedia Presentation will receive a
group score of 0 for that component of the Team Project and Presentation.
A student who incorporates falsified or fabricated information (e.g. evidence, data,
sources, and/or authors) will receive a score of 0 on that particular component
of the AP Seminar and/or AP Research Performance Task. In AP Seminar, a team
of students that incorporates falsified or fabricated information in the Team
Multimedia Presentation will receive a group score of 0 for that component of the
Team Project and Presentation.
© 2020 College Board 4
AP
®
Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
.
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Have You Renounced
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From The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World
by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
with Douglas Abrams
© 2020 College Board
5
AP
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Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
THE BOOK OF JOY
HAVE YOU RENOUNCED PLEASURE?
53
© 2020 College Board 6
AP
®
Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
THE BOOK OF JOY
HAVE YOU RENOUNCED PLEASURE?
53
© 2020 College Board
7
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®
Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
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© 2020 College Board 8
AP
®
Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
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© 2020 College Board
9
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Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
57
© 2020 College Board 10
AP
®
Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
57
© 2020 College Board
11
AP
®
Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
7/12/2019 https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print
https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print 1/4
Home
On Virtue and Happiness, by John Stuart
Mill
"There is in reality nothing desired except happiness"
Updated January 09, 2018
by
Richard Nordquist
English philosopher and social reformer John Stuart Mill was one of the major intellectual figures
of the 19th century and a founding member of the Utilitarian Society. In the following excerpt
from his long philosophical essay Utilitarianism, Mill relies on strategies of classification and
division to defend the utilitarian doctrine that "happiness is the sole end of human action."
On Virtue and Happiness
by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all
other things being only desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required of this
doctrine,what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfill, to make good its claim to be
believed?
The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The
only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it; and so of the other sources of our
experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything
is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes
to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever
convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is
desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own
happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of,
but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good, that each person's happiness is a
good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all
persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one
of the criteria of morality.
On Virtue and Happiness
by John Stuart Mill
From Utilitarianism, 1863
7/12/2019 https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print
https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print 2/4
But it has not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole criterion. To do that, it would seem, by
the same rule, necessary to show, not only that people desire happiness, but that they never
desire anything else. Now it is palpable that they do desire things which, in common language,
are decidedly distinguished from happiness. They desire, for example, virtue, and the absence
of vice, no less really than pleasure and the absence of pain. The desire of virtue is not as
universal, but it is as authentic a fact, as the desire of happiness. And hence the opponents of
the utilitarian standard deem that they have a right to infer that there are other ends of human
action besides happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of approbation and
disapprobation.
But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or maintain that virtue is not a
thing to be desired? The very reverse. It maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it
is to be desired disinterestedly, for itself. Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian moralists as
to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue, however they may believe (as they do)
that actions and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than virtue,
yet this being granted, and it having been decided, from considerations of this description, what
is virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to
the ultimate end, but they also recognize as a psychological fact the possibility of its being, to the
individual, a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it; and hold, that the mind is not in
a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility, not in the state most conducive to the general
happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner—as a thing desirable in itself, even
although, in the individual instance, it should not produce those other desirable consequences
which it tends to produce, and on account of which it is held to be virtue.
This opinion is not, in the smallest degree, a departure from the Happiness principle. The
ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not merely
when considered as swelling an aggregate. The principle of utility does not mean that any given
pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, is to
be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that
account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a
part of the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of
the end, but it is capable of becoming so; and in those who love it disinterestedly it has become
so, and is desired and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness.
Concluded on page two
Continued from page one
To illustrate this farther, we may remember that virtue is not the only thing, originally a means,
and which if it were not a means to anything else, would be and remain indifferent, but which by
association with what it is a means to, comes to be desired for itself, and that too with the utmost
intensity. What, for example, shall we say of the love of money? There is nothing originally more
desirable about money than about any heap of glittering pebbles. Its worth is solely that of the
© 2020 College Board 12
AP
®
Capstone Program Stimulus Materials
7/12/2019 https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print
https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print 1/4
Home
On Virtue and Happiness, by John Stuart
Mill
"There is in reality nothing desired except happiness"
Updated January 09, 2018
by
Richard Nordquist
English philosopher and social reformer John Stuart Mill was one of the major intellectual figures
of the 19th century and a founding member of the Utilitarian Society. In the following excerpt
from his long philosophical essay Utilitarianism, Mill relies on strategies of classification and
division to defend the utilitarian doctrine that "happiness is the sole end of human action."
On Virtue and Happiness
by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
The utilitarian doctrine is, that happiness is desirable, and the only thing desirable, as an end; all
other things being only desirable as means to that end. What ought to be required of this
doctrine,what conditions is it requisite that the doctrine should fulfill, to make good its claim to be
believed?
The only proof capable of being given that an object is visible, is that people actually see it. The
only proof that a sound is audible, is that people hear it; and so of the other sources of our
experience. In like manner, I apprehend, the sole evidence it is possible to produce that anything
is desirable, is that people do actually desire it. If the end which the utilitarian doctrine proposes
to itself were not, in theory and in practice, acknowledged to be an end, nothing could ever
convince any person that it was so. No reason can be given why the general happiness is
desirable, except that each person, so far as he believes it to be attainable, desires his own
happiness. This, however, being a fact, we have not only all the proof which the case admits of,
but all which it is possible to require, that happiness is a good, that each person's happiness is a
good to that person, and the general happiness, therefore, a good to the aggregate of all
persons. Happiness has made out its title as one of the ends of conduct, and consequently one
of the criteria of morality.
7/12/2019 https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print
https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print 2/4
But it has not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole criterion. To do that, it would seem, by
the same rule, necessary to show, not only that people desire happiness, but that they never
desire anything else. Now it is palpable that they do desire things which, in common language,
are decidedly distinguished from happiness. They desire, for example, virtue, and the absence
of vice, no less really than pleasure and the absence of pain. The desire of virtue is not as
universal, but it is as authentic a fact, as the desire of happiness. And hence the opponents of
the utilitarian standard deem that they have a right to infer that there are other ends of human
action besides happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of approbation and
disapprobation.
But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or maintain that virtue is not a
thing to be desired? The very reverse. It maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it
is to be desired disinterestedly, for itself. Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian moralists as
to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue, however they may believe (as they do)
that actions and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than virtue,
yet this being granted, and it having been decided, from considerations of this description, what
is virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to
the ultimate end, but they also recognize as a psychological fact the possibility of its being, to the
individual, a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it; and hold, that the mind is not in
a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility, not in the state most conducive to the general
happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner—as a thing desirable in itself, even
although, in the individual instance, it should not produce those other desirable consequences
which it tends to produce, and on account of which it is held to be virtue.
This opinion is not, in the smallest degree, a departure from the Happiness principle. The
ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not merely
when considered as swelling an aggregate. The principle of utility does not mean that any given
pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, is to
be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that
account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a
part of the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of
the end, but it is capable of becoming so; and in those who love it disinterestedly it has become
so, and is desired and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness.
Concluded on page two
Continued from page one
To illustrate this farther, we may remember that virtue is not the only thing, originally a means,
and which if it were not a means to anything else, would be and remain indifferent, but which by
association with what it is a means to, comes to be desired for itself, and that too with the utmost
intensity. What, for example, shall we say of the love of money? There is nothing originally more
desirable about money than about any heap of glittering pebbles. Its worth is solely that of the
7/12/2019 https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print
https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print 2/4
But it has not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole criterion. To do that, it would seem, by
the same rule, necessary to show, not only that people desire happiness, but that they never
desire anything else. Now it is palpable that they do desire things which, in common language,
are decidedly distinguished from happiness. They desire, for example, virtue, and the absence
of vice, no less really than pleasure and the absence of pain. The desire of virtue is not as
universal, but it is as authentic a fact, as the desire of happiness. And hence the opponents of
the utilitarian standard deem that they have a right to infer that there are other ends of human
action besides happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of approbation and
disapprobation.
But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or maintain that virtue is not a
thing to be desired? The very reverse. It maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it
is to be desired disinterestedly, for itself. Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian moralists as
to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue, however they may believe (as they do)
that actions and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than virtue,
yet this being granted, and it having been decided, from considerations of this description, what
is virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to
the ultimate end, but they also recognize as a psychological fact the possibility of its being, to the
individual, a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it; and hold, that the mind is not in
a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility, not in the state most conducive to the general
happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner—as a thing desirable in itself, even
although, in the individual instance, it should not produce those other desirable consequences
which it tends to produce, and on account of which it is held to be virtue.
This opinion is not, in the smallest degree, a departure from the Happiness principle. The
ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not merely
when considered as swelling an aggregate. The principle of utility does not mean that any given
pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, is to
be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that
account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a
part of the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of
the end, but it is capable of becoming so; and in those who love it disinterestedly it has become
so, and is desired and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness.
Concluded on page two
Continued from page one
To illustrate this farther, we may remember that virtue is not the only thing, originally a means,
and which if it were not a means to anything else, would be and remain indifferent, but which by
association with what it is a means to, comes to be desired for itself, and that too with the utmost
intensity. What, for example, shall we say of the love of money? There is nothing originally more
desirable about money than about any heap of glittering pebbles. Its worth is solely that of the
7/12/2019 https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print
https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print 2/4
But it has not, by this alone, proved itself to be the sole criterion. To do that, it would seem, by
the same rule, necessary to show, not only that people desire happiness, but that they never
desire anything else. Now it is palpable that they do desire things which, in common language,
are decidedly distinguished from happiness. They desire, for example, virtue, and the absence
of vice, no less really than pleasure and the absence of pain. The desire of virtue is not as
universal, but it is as authentic a fact, as the desire of happiness. And hence the opponents of
the utilitarian standard deem that they have a right to infer that there are other ends of human
action besides happiness, and that happiness is not the standard of approbation and
disapprobation.
But does the utilitarian doctrine deny that people desire virtue, or maintain that virtue is not a
thing to be desired? The very reverse. It maintains not only that virtue is to be desired, but that it
is to be desired disinterestedly, for itself. Whatever may be the opinion of utilitarian moralists as
to the original conditions by which virtue is made virtue, however they may believe (as they do)
that actions and dispositions are only virtuous because they promote another end than virtue,
yet this being granted, and it having been decided, from considerations of this description, what
is virtuous, they not only place virtue at the very head of the things which are good as means to
the ultimate end, but they also recognize as a psychological fact the possibility of its being, to the
individual, a good in itself, without looking to any end beyond it; and hold, that the mind is not in
a right state, not in a state conformable to Utility, not in the state most conducive to the general
happiness, unless it does love virtue in this manner—as a thing desirable in itself, even
although, in the individual instance, it should not produce those other desirable consequences
which it tends to produce, and on account of which it is held to be virtue.
This opinion is not, in the smallest degree, a departure from the Happiness principle. The
ingredients of happiness are very various, and each of them is desirable in itself, and not merely
when considered as swelling an aggregate. The principle of utility does not mean that any given
pleasure, as music, for instance, or any given exemption from pain, as for example health, is to
be looked upon as means to a collective something termed happiness, and to be desired on that
account. They are desired and desirable in and for themselves; besides being means, they are a
part of the end. Virtue, according to the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of
the end, but it is capable of becoming so; and in those who love it disinterestedly it has become
so, and is desired and cherished, not as a means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness.
Concluded on page two
Continued from page one
To illustrate this farther, we may remember that virtue is not the only thing, originally a means,
and which if it were not a means to anything else, would be and remain indifferent, but which by
association with what it is a means to, comes to be desired for itself, and that too with the utmost
intensity. What, for example, shall we say of the love of money? There is nothing originally more
desirable about money than about any heap of glittering pebbles. Its worth is solely that of the
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things which it will buy; the desires for other things than itself, which it is a means of gratifying.
Yet the love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but money is,
in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to possess it is often stronger than the desire
to use it, and goes on increasing when all the desires which point to ends beyond it, to be
compassed by it, are falling off. It may, then, be said truly, that money is desired not for the sake
of an end, but as part of the end.
From being a means to happiness, it has come to be itself a principal ingredient of the
individual's conception of happiness. The same may be said of the majority of the great objects
of human life:power, for example, or fame; except that to each of these there is a certain amount
of immediate pleasure annexed, which has at least the semblance of being naturally inherent in
them—a thing which cannot be said of money. Still, however, the strongest natural attraction,
both of power and of fame, is the immense aid they give to the attainment of our other wishes;
and it is the strong association thus generated between them and all our objects of desire, which
gives to the direct desire of them the intensity it often assumes, so as in some characters to
surpass in strength all other desires. In these cases the means have become a part of the end,
and a more important part of it than any of the things which they are means to. What was once
desired as an instrument for the attainment of happiness, has come to be desired for its own
sake.
In being desired for its own sake it is, however, desired as part of happiness. The person is
made, or thinks he would be made, happy by its mere possession; and is made unhappy by
failure to obtain it. The desire of it is not a different thing from the desire of happiness, any more
than the love of music, or the desire of health. They are included in happiness. They are some of
the elements of which the desire of happiness is made up. Happiness is not an abstract idea, but
a concrete whole; and these are some of its parts. And the utilitarian standard sanctions and
approves their being so. Life would be a poor thing, very ill provided with sources of happiness, if
there were not this provision of nature, by which things originally indifferent, but conducive to, or
otherwise associated with, the satisfaction of our primitive desires, become in themselves
sources of pleasure more valuable than the primitive pleasures, both in permanency, in the
space of human existence that they are capable of covering, and even in intensity.
Virtue, according to the utilitarian conception, is a good of this description. There was no original
desire of it, or motive to it, save its conduciveness to pleasure, and especially to protection from
pain. But through the association thus formed, it may be felt a good in itself, and desired as such
with as great intensity as any other good; and with this difference between it and the love of
money, of power, or of fame—that all of these may, and often do, render the individual noxious to
the other members of the society to which he belongs, whereas there is nothing which makes
him so much a blessing to them as the cultivation of the disinterested love of virtue. And
consequently, the utilitarian standard, while it tolerates and approves those other acquired
desires, up to the point beyond which they would be more injurious to the general happiness
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things which it will buy; the desires for other things than itself, which it is a means of gratifying.
Yet the love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but money is,
in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to possess it is often stronger than the desire
to use it, and goes on increasing when all the desires which point to ends beyond it, to be
compassed by it, are falling off. It may, then, be said truly, that money is desired not for the sake
of an end, but as part of the end.
From being a means to happiness, it has come to be itself a principal ingredient of the
individual's conception of happiness. The same may be said of the majority of the great objects
of human life:power, for example, or fame; except that to each of these there is a certain amount
of immediate pleasure annexed, which has at least the semblance of being naturally inherent in
them—a thing which cannot be said of money. Still, however, the strongest natural attraction,
both of power and of fame, is the immense aid they give to the attainment of our other wishes;
and it is the strong association thus generated between them and all our objects of desire, which
gives to the direct desire of them the intensity it often assumes, so as in some characters to
surpass in strength all other desires. In these cases the means have become a part of the end,
and a more important part of it than any of the things which they are means to. What was once
desired as an instrument for the attainment of happiness, has come to be desired for its own
sake.
In being desired for its own sake it is, however, desired as part of happiness. The person is
made, or thinks he would be made, happy by its mere possession; and is made unhappy by
failure to obtain it. The desire of it is not a different thing from the desire of happiness, any more
than the love of music, or the desire of health. They are included in happiness. They are some of
the elements of which the desire of happiness is made up. Happiness is not an abstract idea, but
a concrete whole; and these are some of its parts. And the utilitarian standard sanctions and
approves their being so. Life would be a poor thing, very ill provided with sources of happiness, if
there were not this provision of nature, by which things originally indifferent, but conducive to, or
otherwise associated with, the satisfaction of our primitive desires, become in themselves
sources of pleasure more valuable than the primitive pleasures, both in permanency, in the
space of human existence that they are capable of covering, and even in intensity.
Virtue, according to the utilitarian conception, is a good of this description. There was no original
desire of it, or motive to it, save its conduciveness to pleasure, and especially to protection from
pain. But through the association thus formed, it may be felt a good in itself, and desired as such
with as great intensity as any other good; and with this difference between it and the love of
money, of power, or of fame—that all of these may, and often do, render the individual noxious to
the other members of the society to which he belongs, whereas there is nothing which makes
him so much a blessing to them as the cultivation of the disinterested love of virtue. And
consequently, the utilitarian standard, while it tolerates and approves those other acquired
desires, up to the point beyond which they would be more injurious to the general happiness
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than promotive of it, enjoins and requires the cultivation of the love of virtue up to the greatest
strength possible, as being above all things important to the general happiness.
It results from the preceding considerations, that there is in reality nothing desired except
happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and
ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it
has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the
consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or
for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost
always together—the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in
not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would
not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to
himself or to persons whom he cared for.
We have now, then, an answer to the question, of what sort of proof the principle of utility is
susceptible. If the opinion which I have now stated is psychologically true—if human nature is so
constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness,
we can have no other proof, and we require no other, that these are the only things desirable. If
so, happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge
of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality,
since a part is included in the whole.
(1863)
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things which it will buy; the desires for other things than itself, which it is a means of gratifying.
Yet the love of money is not only one of the strongest moving forces of human life, but money is,
in many cases, desired in and for itself; the desire to possess it is often stronger than the desire
to use it, and goes on increasing when all the desires which point to ends beyond it, to be
compassed by it, are falling off. It may, then, be said truly, that money is desired not for the sake
of an end, but as part of the end.
From being a means to happiness, it has come to be itself a principal ingredient of the
individual's conception of happiness. The same may be said of the majority of the great objects
of human life:power, for example, or fame; except that to each of these there is a certain amount
of immediate pleasure annexed, which has at least the semblance of being naturally inherent in
them—a thing which cannot be said of money. Still, however, the strongest natural attraction,
both of power and of fame, is the immense aid they give to the attainment of our other wishes;
and it is the strong association thus generated between them and all our objects of desire, which
gives to the direct desire of them the intensity it often assumes, so as in some characters to
surpass in strength all other desires. In these cases the means have become a part of the end,
and a more important part of it than any of the things which they are means to. What was once
desired as an instrument for the attainment of happiness, has come to be desired for its own
sake.
In being desired for its own sake it is, however, desired as part of happiness. The person is
made, or thinks he would be made, happy by its mere possession; and is made unhappy by
failure to obtain it. The desire of it is not a different thing from the desire of happiness, any more
than the love of music, or the desire of health. They are included in happiness. They are some of
the elements of which the desire of happiness is made up. Happiness is not an abstract idea, but
a concrete whole; and these are some of its parts. And the utilitarian standard sanctions and
approves their being so. Life would be a poor thing, very ill provided with sources of happiness, if
there were not this provision of nature, by which things originally indifferent, but conducive to, or
otherwise associated with, the satisfaction of our primitive desires, become in themselves
sources of pleasure more valuable than the primitive pleasures, both in permanency, in the
space of human existence that they are capable of covering, and even in intensity.
Virtue, according to the utilitarian conception, is a good of this description. There was no original
desire of it, or motive to it, save its conduciveness to pleasure, and especially to protection from
pain. But through the association thus formed, it may be felt a good in itself, and desired as such
with as great intensity as any other good; and with this difference between it and the love of
money, of power, or of fame—that all of these may, and often do, render the individual noxious to
the other members of the society to which he belongs, whereas there is nothing which makes
him so much a blessing to them as the cultivation of the disinterested love of virtue. And
consequently, the utilitarian standard, while it tolerates and approves those other acquired
desires, up to the point beyond which they would be more injurious to the general happiness
7/12/2019 https://www.thoughtco.com/virtue-and-happiness-john-stuart-mill-1690300?print
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than promotive of it, enjoins and requires the cultivation of the love of virtue up to the greatest
strength possible, as being above all things important to the general happiness.
It results from the preceding considerations, that there is in reality nothing desired except
happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and
ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it
has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the
consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or
for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost
always together—the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in
not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would
not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to
himself or to persons whom he cared for.
We have now, then, an answer to the question, of what sort of proof the principle of utility is
susceptible. If the opinion which I have now stated is psychologically true—if human nature is so
constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness,
we can have no other proof, and we require no other, that these are the only things desirable. If
so, happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge
of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality,
since a part is included in the whole.
(1863)
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than promotive of it, enjoins and requires the cultivation of the love of virtue up to the greatest
strength possible, as being above all things important to the general happiness.
It results from the preceding considerations, that there is in reality nothing desired except
happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and
ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it
has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the
consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or
for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost
always together—the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in
not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would
not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to
himself or to persons whom he cared for.
We have now, then, an answer to the question, of what sort of proof the principle of utility is
susceptible. If the opinion which I have now stated is psychologically true—if human nature is so
constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness,
we can have no other proof, and we require no other, that these are the only things desirable. If
so, happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge
of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality,
since a part is included in the whole.
(1863)
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High income improves evaluation of life but not
emotional well-being
Daniel Kahneman
1
and Angus Deaton
Center for Health and Well-being, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544
Contributed by Daniel Kahneman, August 4, 2010 (sent for review July 4, 2010)
Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective
well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an
individual’s everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of ex-
periences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one’s
life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that
people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the
question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two
aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 re-
sponses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of
1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find
that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional
experiences yesterday)and life evaluation(measuredby Cantril’s Self-
Anchoring Scale) have different co rrelates. Income and education are
more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, lo ne li-
ness,and smokingarerelativelystrongerpredictors of daily emotions.
When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emo-
tional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further
progress beyond an annual income of ∼$75,000. Low income exacer-
bates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce,
ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life sat-
isfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both
with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.
life evaluation
|
emotional experience
|
household income
|
satiation
|
happiness
T
he question of whether “money buys happiness” comes up fre-
quently in discussions of subjective well-being in both scholarly
debates and casual conversation. The topic has been addressed in
a vast and inconclusive research literature (for a selection of recent
reviews, see refs. 1–4). No single article can settle this complex ques-
tion definitively, but data recently collected by the Gallup Organi-
zation in the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (GHWBI) pro-
vide a rich source of observations, as well as an unusually detailed
measurement of well-being. We analyze the responses of more than
450,000 US residents surveyed in 2008 and 2009 to several questions
about their subjective well-being. The results suggest a rather com-
plex answer to our opening question.
A discussion of subjective well-being must recognize a dis-
tinction between two concepts that are often confounded (5–8).
Emotional well-being (sometimes called hedonic well-being or
experienced happiness) refers to the emotional quality of an
individual’s everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of
experiences of joy, fascination, anxiety, sadness, anger, and af-
fection that make one’s life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evalu-
ation refers to a person’s thoughts about his or her life. Surveys
of subjective well-being have traditionally emphasized life eval-
uation. The most commonly asked question in these surveys is
the life satisfaction question: “How satisfied are you with your
life as a whole these days?” The GHWBI survey is unusual in its
attempt to distinguish and capture both aspects of subjective
well-being. Emotional well-being is assessed by questions about
the presence of various emotions in the experience of yesterday
(e.g., enjoyment, happiness, anger, sadness, stress, worry). Life
evaluation is measured using Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Scale,
which has the respondent rate his or her current life on a ladder
scale in which 0 is “the worst possible life for you” and 10 is “the
best possible life for you.” We find that emotional well-being and
life evaluation have different correlates in the circumstances of
people’s lives. In particular, we observe striking differences in the
relationship of these aspects of well-being to income. (For related
observations in the Gallup World Poll, see ref. 9.)
Confusion abounds in discussions of our question. For an ex-
ample, consider the statement that “a lasting marriage...is esti-
mated to be worth $100,000 a year” (10). This correct statement of
a research finding is likely to be misunderstood, because many
readers will interpret it by imagining the pleasure of a change of
this magnitude in their income. The pleasure of a raise is likely to
be transient, however, due to a phenomenon known as adapta-
tion. Because of adaptation, the difference in well-being between
two random individuals whose income differs by $100,000 is far
less impressive than the joy and misery that these individuals
would immediately experience were they to trade places. Because
the observed effects of long-established income differences are
much smaller than intuitively expected, they are sometimes de-
scribed as inconsequential, but this too is misleading. When en-
tered in multiple regression model to predict well-being along
with other aspects of life circumstances (marital status, age, ed-
ucation), the effects of household income are almost invariably
both statistically signi ficant and quantitatively important. We re-
port that household income matters for both emotional well-being
and life evaluation, and that there are circumstances under which
it matters for the latter when it does not matter for the former.
Some of the confusion regarding the effects of income on well-
being can be traced to incorrect analysis. Psychologists and soci-
ologists often plot measures of subjective well-being against income
in dollars, but a strong argument can be made for the logarithm of
income as the preferred scale. The logarithmic transformation re-
presents a basic fact of perception known as Weber’s Law, which
applies generally to quantitative dimensions of perception and
judgment (e.g., the intensity of sounds and lights). The rule is that
the effective stimulus for the detection and evaluation of changes or
differences in such dimensions is the percentage change, not its ab-
solute amount. In the context of income, a $100 raise does not have
the same significance for a financial services executive as for an in-
dividual earning the minimum wage, but a doubling of their re-
spective incomes might have a similar impact on both. The loga-
rithmic transformation reveals an important regularity of judgment
that risks being masked when a dollar scale is used.
Plots of subjective well-being against income in dollars in-
variably yield a strongly concave function. Although concavity is
entailed by the psychophysics of quantitative dimensions, it often
has been cited as evidence that people derive little or no psy-
chological benefit from income beyond some threshold. Al-
though this conclusion has been widely accepted in discussions of
the relationship between life evaluation and gross domestic pro-
duct (GDP) across nations (11–14), it is false, at least for this
Author contributions: D.K. and A.D. designed research; performed research; analyzed
data; and wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.
1
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1011492107 PNAS
|
September 21, 2010
|
vol. 107
|
no. 38
|
16489–16493
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND
COGNITIVE SCIENCES
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aspect of subjective well-being. In accordance with Weber’s Law,
average national life evaluation is linear when appropriately plotted
against log G DP (15); a doubling of income provides similar incre-
ments of life e valuation for countries rich and poor. As this example
illustrates, the statement that “money does not buy happi ness” may
be inferred from a careless reading of a plot of life evaluation against
raw income—an error avoided by using the logarithm of income. In
the present study, we confirm the contribution of higher income to
improving individuals’ life evaluation, even among those who are
already well off. However, we also find that the effects of income on
the emotional dimension of well-being satiate fully at an annual
income of ∼$75,000, a result that is, of course, independent of
whether dollars or log dollars are used as a measure of income.
The aims of our analysis of the GHWBI were to examine pos-
sible differences between the correlates of emotional well-being
and of life evaluation, focusing in particular on the relationship
between these measures and household income.
Results
Some observations were deleted to eliminate likely errors in the
reports of income. The GHWBI asks individuals to report their
monthly family income in 11 categories. The three lowest cate-
gories—0, <$60, and $60–$499—cannot be treated as serious
estimates of household income. We deleted these three catego-
ries (a total of 14,425 observations out of 709,183), as well as
those respondents for whom income is missing (172,677 obser-
vations). We then regressed log income on indicators for the
congressional district in which the respondent lived, educational
categories, sex, age, age squared, race categories, marital status
categories, and height. Thus, we predict the log of each indi-
vidual’s income by the mean of log incomes in his or her con-
gressional district, modified by personal characteristics. This re-
gression explains 37% of the variance, with a root mean square
error (RMSE) of 0.67852. To eliminate outliers and implausible
income reports, we dropped observations in which the absolute
value of the difference between log income and its prediction
exceeded 2.5 times the RMSE. This trimming lost 14,510 obser-
vations out of 450,417, or 3.22%. In all, we lost 28.4% of the
original sample. In comparison, the US Census Bureau imputed
income for 27.5% of households in the 2008 wave of the Ameri-
can Community Survey (ACS). As a check that our exclusions do
not systematically bias income estimates compared with Census
Bureau procedures, we compared the mean of the logarithm of
income in each congressional district from the GHWBI with the
logarithm of median income from the ACS. If income is approxi-
mately lognormal, then these should be close. The correlation was
0.961, with the GHWBI estimates about 6% lower, possibly attrib-
utable to the fact that the GHWBI data cover both 2008 and 2009.
We defined positive affect by the average of three dichotomous
items (reports of happiness, enjoyment, and frequent smiling and
laughter) and what we refer to as “blue affect”—the average of
worry and sadness. Reports of stress (also dichotomous) were an-
alyzed separately (as was anger, for which the results were similar
but not shown) and life evaluation was measured using the Cantril
ladder. The correlations between the emotional well-being meas-
ures and the ladder values had the expected sign but were modest
in size (all <0.31). Positive affect, blue affect, and stress also were
weakly correlated (positive and blue affect correlated –0.38, and
–0.28, and 0.52 with stress.)The results shown here are similar when
the constituents of positive and blue affect are analyzed separately.
As in other studies of well-being, we found that most people
were quite happy and satisfied with their lives. About 85% of
respondents experienced much positive affect (the average of
smiling, enjoyment, and happiness) each day. Blue affect (sadness
and worry) was reported by 24%, and stress was reported by 39%.
The average of the Cantril ladder score was 6.76. Compared with
about 150 other countries for which we have corresponding data
from the Gallup World Poll, these results indicate that the US
population ranks high on the ladder (ninth after the Scandinavian
countries, Canada, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and New Zea-
land), and also does well in terms of happiness (fifth), smiling
(33rd), and enjoyment (10th), but much less well on worry (89th
from best), sadness (69th from best), and anger (75th). Americans
report very high levels of stress (fifth among 151 countries).
Table 1 presents regressions of the four well-being measures on
a set of demographic variables, which provide context for inter-
preting these measures. All of the predictors are dichotomous.
The
first row of the table shows the regression coefficient for an
indicator of high income, defined as reporting a monthly income
of at least $4,000, which corresponds to the top 58% of the pop-
ulation. These coefficients cannot be compared across the row,
because the outcomes have different scales. The entries in other
rows are ratios normalized by the coefficient on the high-income
indicator, thus representing the estimated effect relative to the
effect of increasing income by approximately 4-fold. The sign of
each ratio is positive if its regression coefficient has the same sign
as the coefficient for income (positive for positive affect, negative
for blue affect, etc.). A coefficient >1 indicates an effect larger
Table 1. Life evaluation, emotional well-being, income, and the
income-normalized effects of other correlates
Positive affect Blue affect Stress Ladder
Regression coefficient
High income 0.03 −0.06 −0.03 0.64
Ratio of coef ficient to log income coeffi cient
High income 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00
Insured 0.40 0.92 1.19 0.59
Old 0.79 0.93 6.28 0.50
Graduate 0.03 0.01 −1.93 0.48
Religious 1.16 −0.02 1.21 0.35
Female 0.16 −0.60 −1.89 0.29
Married 0.66 0.45 0.66 0.32
Weekend 1.13 0.72 4.83 0.01
Children 0.08 −0.37 −2.47 −0.11
Caregiver −0.49 −1.02 −2.99 −0.25
Obese −0.38 −0.14 −0.42 −0.31
Divorced −0.38 −0.27 −0.88 −0.32
Health condition −1.36 −1.22 −3.15 −0.48
Headache −4.45 −3.41 −9.82 −0.78
Alone −7.13 −2.10 −3.73 −0.75
Smoker −1.01 −0.84 −2.85 −0.70
All correlates are dichotomous. The first row reports the coefficient of an
indicator for high income in regressions of the ladder, positive affect, blue
affect, and stress on all correlates. Note that the four outcomes are on different
scales. High income is the 58% of the sample whose monthly income is at least
$4,000/mo. The subsequent rows give the regression coefficients on the other
correlates divided by the regression coefficient on the high-income indicator,
and thus show the estimated effect relative to the effect of increasing income
by approximately 4-fold. Income has a beneficial effect on all outcomes, so the
ratios in rows other than the first are positive when the correlate is associated
with a good effect on the outcome and negative otherwise. “Insured” indi-
cates that the respondent has health insurance. “Old” is age 60 y or above.
“Graduate” indicates a college degree. “Religious” indicates that the respon-
dent reports that religion is an important part of his or her daily life. “Week-
end” indicates that the day reported on was a Saturday or a Sunday; this is
the previous day for stress and for positive and blue affect, and the day of the
interview for the ladder. “Children” is 1 if there are children living in the
household, and “caregiver” is 1 if the respondent currently helps care for an
elderly or disabled family member, relative, or friend. “Obese” is 1 if body mass
index (based on self-reported height and weight) is ≥30. “Health condition” is
1 if the respondent reports ever having been diagnosed by a doctor or nurse
with one or more of the following: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, di-
abetes, myocardial infarction, asthma, cancer, or other chronic condition.
“Alone” is 1 if the respondent reports zero social time with friends or family
yesterday, including telephone and e-mail contact.
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than that of the income dichotomy. Because higher incomes are
always associated with better outcomes, positive ratios indicate
that the predictor is associated with better outcomes, and negative
ratios indicate the opposite.
With few exceptions, the various predictors have the same sign
for all four well-being measures, but their relative sizes vary con-
siderably. As might be expected, weekends are associated with
improved affect, especially with reduced stress. Physical illness,
headaches, spending a day alone, and caring for an adult all have
relatively larger adverse effects on emotional well-being than on
life evaluation. Headaches and being alone, like emotional well-
being, are measured for yesterday, which may enhance their im-
portance in the regressions. At the other extreme, being a college
graduate is associated with high life evaluation but has only a small
association with positive and blue affect and a (perhaps) coun-
terintuitive relation with stress; all other factors being equal, col-
lege graduates report more stress than nongraduates. The Gallup
World Poll found high levels of stress in high-GDP countries (16).
Religion has a substantial influence on improving positive af-
fect and reducing reports of stress, but no effect on reducing
sadness or worry. Females report slightly higher positive affect
and life evaluation, but also more blue affect and much more
stress. The presence of children at home is associated with sig-
nificant increases in stress, sadness, and worry (6). As reported
recently, older people enjoy greater emotional well-being, most
notably a pronounced reduction in the experience of stress and
anger (17). Smoking is an impressively strong predictor of low
well-being—especially its emotional dimensions—even when
income and education are controlled for. A propensity to smoke
is in part genetically determined (18) and is a known indicator of
a tense personality (19, 20).
Fig. 1 and Table 2 characterize the relationship between the
dimensions of subjective well-being and household income. Fig.
1 presents averages over eight income groups for the three
aspects of emotional well-being and for the Cantril ladder
measure of life evaluation. Here blue affect and stress are con-
verted to their complements, not blue and stress-free, so that
higher values in the figure always refer to better psychological
outcomes. Income is converted to an annual basis and plotted on
a log scale. (The midpoints of each income range, used only in
the figure, are imputed assuming that the underlying distribution
of income is lognormal; the figure shows vertical lines for the top
three interval limits.) Stress is the average of a yes/no response to
the question: “Did you experience a lot of stress yesterday?”
Thus, Fig. 1 shows the percentage of the population in each
income group who did not report experiencing this emotion on
the previous day. Not blue is 1 minus the average of the per-
centage reporting sadness and worry. The right-hand axis shows
the average score on the ladder, with values ranging from 0 to 11.
Fig. 1 shows that for all measures of experienced well-being,
individuals in the lower- income groups do worse on average than
those above them, but that those in the top two groups do not
differ. For the two top categories to be equal, the entire range of
the second category must lie above the satiation point. This ob-
servation implies that emotional well-being satiates somewhere in
the third category of income from the top. We infer that beyond
about $75,000/y, there is no improvement whatever in any of the
three measures of emotional well-being. In contrast, the figure
shows a fairly steady rise in life evaluation with log income over
the entire range; the effects of income on individuals’ life evalu-
ations show no satiation, at least to an amount well over $120,000.
Table 2 reports a formal test of satiation for the four measures,
showing how the second-to-top income group (annual income
$90,000–$120,000) differs from the group immediately below it
($60,000–$90,000) and from the group immediately above it
(> $120,000). Positive affect, blue affect, and Cantril ladder score
are all significantly improved in the first comparison with the ex-
ception of stress, which appears to satiate at a lower income level,
roughly $60,000. In comparisons of the top two categories, only
the ladder score shows a significant improvement with higher
income. The small t values are remarkable in these very large
samples. We conclude that lack of money brings both emotional
misery and low life evaluation; similar results were found for
anger. Beyond ∼$75,000 in the contemporary United States, how-
ever, higher income is neither the road to experienced happiness
nor the road to the relief of unhappiness or stress, although higher
income continues to improve individuals’ life evaluations.
Below $75,000, many factors become gra dually worse, at least on
average. For example, the emotional pain associated with ill health
depends on income; for those reporting a monthly income of at
least $3,000 (about two-thirds of households), the fractions re-
porting blue affect with and without headaches are 38% and 19%,
respectively, a difference of 19 percentage points. The correspond-
ingvalues for thosewitha monthly income of <$1,000 (about 10% of
households) are 70% and 38%, a difference of 32%. Table 3 shows
that the pain of some of life’s misfortunes, including asthma, divorce,
and being alone, is signi
ficantly exacerbated by poverty; even the
benefits of the weekend are less for the poor. Similar results apply to
stress and positive affect.
5.5
6
6.5
7
7.5
Mean ladder
.5 .6 .7 .8
.9
10,000 20,000
40,000 80,000 160,000
Annual income
Fraction of population experiencing
Ladder
Posi�ve affect
Stress free
Not blue
Fig. 1. Positive affect, blue affect, stress, and life evaluation in relation to
household income. Positive affect is the average of the fractions of the
population reporting happiness, smiling, and enjoyment. “Not blue” is 1
minus the average of the fractions of the population reporting worry and
sadness. “Stress free” is the fraction of the population who did not report
stress for the previous day. These three hedonic measures are marked on the
left-hand scale. The ladder is the average reported numb er on a scale of
0–10, marked on the right-hand scale.
Table 2. Tests for income satiation of life evaluation and
emotional well-being
Positive affect Blue affect Stress Ladder
Top vs. second 0.0035 0.0013 0.0055 0.2264
t value (1.9) (0.6) (1.5) (19.4)
Second vs. third 0.0082 −0.0131 0.0016 0.2268
t value (4.4) (5.7) (0.4) (19.7)
Observations
Top group 72,744 73,104 73,109 73,068
Second group 40,136 40,291 40,301 40,283
Third group 88,887 89,278 89,290 89,245
The coefficients reported are the differences in mean outcomes between the
two indicated income categories. The top category is >$10,000/mo, the second
category is $7,500–$9,999/mo, and the third category $5,000–$7,499/mo. SEs are
corrected for spatial clustering within zip codes.
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Discussion
The data for positive and blue affect provide an unexpectedly sharp
answer to our original question. More money does not necessarily
buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional
pain. Perhaps $75,000 is a threshold beyond which further increases
in income no longer improve individuals’ ability to do what matters
most to their emotional well-being, such as spending time with
people they like, avoiding pain and disease, and enjoying leisure.
According to the ACS, mean (median) US household income was
$71,500 ($52,000) in 2008, and about a third of households were
above the $75,000 threshold. It also is likely that when inc ome rises
beyond this value, the increased ability to purchase positive experi -
ences is balanced, on average, by some negative effects. A recent
psychological study using priming methods provided suggestive evi-
dence of a possible association between high income and a reduced
ability to savor small pleasures (21).
When interpreting our findings, it is essential to distinguish changes
from differences. Our data speak only to differences; they do not
imply that people will not be happy with a raise from $100,000 to
$150,000, or that they will be indifferent to an equivalent drop in in-
come. Changes of income in the high range certainly have emotional
consequences. What the data suggest is that above a certain level of
stable income, individuals’ emotional well-being is constrained by
other factors in their temperament and life circumstances.
We observe a qualitative difference between our measures of
emotional well-being and of life evaluation—the former satiates
with high income, whereas the latter does not. This observation
underscores the importance of the distinction between the judg-
ments individuals make when they think about their life and the
feelings thattheyexperienceas they live it. As mightbe expected, the
former is sensitive to socioeconomic status, whereas the latter is
sensitive to circumstances that evoke positive and negative emo-
tions, such as spending time withothers and caringfor a sick relative.
Several a uthors have commented on a related d ifference between
two questions that are often used in surveys of subjective well-being:
“How satisfied are you with your life?” and “How happy are you these
days?” (8, 22, 23). The common conclusion is that income is more
strongly related to satisfaction than to happiness, but the difference
that we found in the present study is unusually sharp. We speculate
that the Cantril ladder of life is a purer measure of life evaluation
than the life sati sfaction question, which has an emotional aspect,
and that the reports of the emotions of yesterday provide a purer
measure of emotional well-being than the standard happiness
question. If both aspects of subjective well-being are considered
important, then the separation of the measures is an advantage.
The relevance of subjective well-being as a guide to policy is
a contentious issue, on which we do not take a position. If
measures of well-being are to be used to assess human welfare and
to guide policy, the present findings raise the question of whether
life evaluation or emotional well-being is better suited to these
aims. The Cantril ladder is a serious contender for the best tool for
measuring the degree to which individuals view themselves as
achieving their goals, both material and other. But emotional
well-being also is clearly important for individuals and for policy,
and here there are choices as well. Not everyone will agree that
enhancing the happiness experienced by those who are already
quite happy is a legitimate policy objective. The policy goal of
reducing suffering is likely to raise fewer objections, and measures
of emotional pain may be useful for that purpose. This topic
merits serious debate.
Materials and Methods
The survey involved a telephone interview using a dual-frame random-digit
dial methodology that included cell phone numbers from all 50 US states.
Interviews were conducted between 9:00 AM and 10:00 PM (local time), with
most done in the evening. Up to five callbacks were made in the case of no
answer. Spanish language interviews were conducted when appropriate.
Approximately 1,000 interviews were completed daily from January 2 through
December 30, 2009.
The questionnaire covered many topics of interest to the Gallup Organi-
zation and Healthways Corporation, including basic demographic information,
participants’ opinions about the current economic climate and their personal
financial situation, information about past diseases, and other topics.
Life evaluation was assessed using Cantril’s Self-Anchoring Scale (the
ladder), worded as follows: “Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered
from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the
best possible life for you, and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst
possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you per-
sonally feel you stand at this time?” (15). Questions about emotional well-
being had yes/no response options and were worded as follows: “Did you
experience the following feelings during a lot of the day yesterday? How
about _____?” Each of several emotions (e.g., enjoyment, stress) was
reported separ ately. The positive affect score was the average of the reports
of enjoyment and happiness and of a dichotomous question about the
frequency of smiling: “Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?” The blue
affect score was the average of worry and sadness.
To broaden coverage and representativeness, cell phones were part of the
sampling design. Relative to land lines, the response rate for cell phones was
typically lower. Of all calls that resulted in contacts with an eligible candidate,
31% of the candidates agreed to be interviewed; of these, 90% completed
the entire interview. Despite the sampling limitations, available evidence
suggests that the estimates of population parameters were not compro-
mised; for example, the survey predicted recent election results within an
acceptable margin of error.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. We thank Carol Graham, Richard Nisbett, Norbert
Schwarz, and Arthur Stone for their comments. Special thanks to James
Harter, one of the authors of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, for
his contribution to the research and for his comments on this report. We
thank the Gallup Organization and Healthways Corporation for access to the
survey results. This work was supported by the Gallup Organization and by
National Institute on Aging Grant AG024928-06.
1. Diener E, Biswas-Diener R (2002) Will money increase subjective well-being? Soc Indic
Res 57:119–169.
2. Headey B, Muffels R, Wooden M (2008) Money does not buy happiness: Or does it? A
reassessment based on the combined effects of wealth, income and consumption. Soc
Indic Res 87:65–82.
3. Clark AE, Frijters P, Shields M (2008) Relative income, happiness and utility: An
explanation for the Easterlin paradox and other puzzles. J Econ Lit 46:95–144.
4. Clark AE, Kristensen N, Westergaard-Nielsen N (2009) Economic satisfaction and
income rank in small neighbourhoods. J Eur Econ Assoc 7:519–527.
5. Diener E (1984) Subjective well-being. Psychol Bull 95:542–575.
6. Kahneman D, Krueger AB, Schkade DA, Schwarz N, Stone AA (2004) A survey method for
characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method. Science 306:1776–1780.
7. Kahneman D, Riis J (2005) The Science Of Well-Being, eds Huppert FA, Baylis N,
Keverne B (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford), pp 285–304.
Table 3. Poverty exacerbates the effect of adverse
circumstances: Average percentage of people reporting a lot of
sadness and worry yesterday, by income group and condition
Income <$1,000/mo Income ≥$3,000/mo
No Yes Difference No Yes Difference
Weekend 46.6 44.5 −2.1 22.3 17.1 −5.2
Divorced 44.3 50.5 6.2 20.5 24.4 3.9
Alone 44.0 58.9 14.9 20.5 31.5 11.0
Headache 38.0 69.5 31.6 18.9 38.4 19.5
Asthma 33.1 40.8 7.8 18.0 21.6 3.6
Approximately 10% of US households have a monthly income <$1,000,
and around two-thirds have a monthly income of ≥$3,000. The reported
figures are unadjusted for covariates. For the asthma variable, to control
for persons with multiple conditions, who are more common at low incomes,
the comparison is between those with asthma and no other health condi-
tions and those reporting no health conditions at all. The difference in the
third column is statistically different from the difference in the sixth column
in each case; the t values range from 23.9 (headache) to 3.1 (asthma.)
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8. Graham C (2010) Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and
Miserable Millionaires (Oxford University Press, New York).
9. Diener E, Ng W, Harter J, Arora R (2010) Wealth and happiness across the world:
Material prosperity predicts life evaluation, whereas psychosocial prosperity predicts
positive feeling. J Pers Soc Psychol 99:52–61.
10. Blanchflower DG, Oswald AJ (2004) Well-being over time in Britain and the USA.
J Public Econ 88:1359–1386.
11. Diener E, Suh EM (1999) Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, eds
Kahneman D, Diener E, Schwarz N (Russell Sage Foundation, New York), pp
434–452.
12. Layard R (2005) Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (Penguin, New York).
13. Inglehart R, Klingemann HD (2000) Culture and Subjective Well-Being, eds Diener E,
Suh EM (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA), pp 165–184.
14. Veenhoven R (1991) Is happiness relative? Soc Indic Res 24:1–34.
15. Deaton A (2008) Income, health, and well-being around the world: Evidence from the
Gallup World Poll. J Econ Perspect 22:53–72.
16. Ng W, Diener E, Arora R, Harter J (2009) Affluence, feelings of stress, and well-being.
Soc Indic Res 94:257–271.
17. Stone AA, Schwartz JE, Broderick JE, Deaton A (2010) A snapshot of the age distribution of
psychological well-being in the United States. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 107:9985–9990.
18. Munafò MR, Johnstone EC (2008) Genes and cigarette smoking. Addiction 103:893–904.
19. Munafò MR, Zetteler JI, Clark TG (2007) Personality and smoking status: A meta-
analysis. Nicotine Tob Res 9:405–413.
20. Terracciano A, Costa PT, Jr. (2004) Smoking and the five-factor model of personality.
Addiction 99:472–481.
21. Quoidbach J, Dunn EW, Petrides KV, Mikolajczak M (2010) Money giveth, money
taketh away: The dual effect of wealth on happiness. Psychol Sci 21:759–763.
22. Howell RT, Howell CJ (2008) The relation of economic status to subjective well-being
in developing countries: A meta-analysis. Psychol Bull 134:536–560.
23. Veenhoven R, Hagerty M (2006) Rising happiness in nations, 1946–2004: A reply to
Easterlin. Soc Indic Res 79:421–436.
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Big Daddy’s Last Dance
The reverence and revelry of a New Orleans jazz funeral procession
Drawing from West African, Haitian and European colonial influences, jazz funerals
are a tradition almost entirely exclusive to New Orleans, and as culturally rich
and multifaceted as the city itself. The processions generally open with a brass
band performing solemn marches and dirges as family and friends accompany
the deceased to a burial. Eventually, the band breaks out into more upbeat and
swinging numbers, allowing mourners cathartic release in music and dance, and
onlookers to form a ‘second line’ and join the festivities. In what director Caitlyn
Greene describes as ‘a love letter to New Orleans’, Big Daddy’s Last Dance captures
the arc of a jazz funeral, in all its reverent, jubilant glory.
Directors: Caitlyn Greene, Jon Kasbe
10 July, 2017
e video can be viewed at the link below.
https://aeon.co/videos/the-reverence-and-revelry-of-a-new-orleans-jazz-funeral-procession
© 2020 College Board
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Genes, Economics, and Happiness
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve
University College London and Centre for
Economic Performance
Nicholas A. Christakis
Harvard University
James H. Fowler
University of California, San Diego
Bruno S. Frey
Warwick Business School and Zeppelin University
We explore the influence of genetic variation on subjective well-being by employing a twin
design and genetic association study. In a nationally representative twin sample, we first
show that 33% of the variation in life satisfaction is explained by genetic variation.
Although previous studies have shown that baseline happiness is significantly heritable,
little research has considered molecular genetic associations with subjective well-being. We
study the relationship between a functional polymorphism on the serotonin transporter gene
(5-HTTLPR) and life satisfaction. We initially find that individuals with the longer,
transcriptionally more efficient variant of this genotype report greater life satisfaction (n
2,545; p .012). However, our replication attempts on independent samples produce
mixed results, indicating that more work needs to be done to better understand the
relationship between this genotype and subjective well-being. This work has implications
for how economists think about the determinants of utility, and the extent to which
exogenous shocks might affect individual well-being.
Keywords:
life satisfaction, twin study, genetic association, serotonin transporter gene,
5-HTTLPR, rs2020933
Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0030292.supp
Happiness research has become one of the
liveliest subjects in economics in recent years.
1
Its main goal is to explain the determinants of
individual life satisfaction or subjective well-
being (often loosely called happiness). Econo-
mists have mainly dealt with economic influ-
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, School of Public Policy, Uni-
versity College London, and Centre for Economic Perfor-
mance (CEP), London School of Economics; Nicholas A.
Christakis, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University;
James H. Fowler, Department of Medicine and Department
of Political Science, University of California, San Diego;
Bruno S. Frey, Warwick Business School, and Department
of Economics, Zeppelin University.
This article expands on De Neve (2011)—a research
note that reports on the genetic association result in the
Add Health discovery sample. The authors thank the
anonymous reviewers and Dan Benjamin, Chris Chabris,
Chris Dawes, Pete Hatemi, David Laibson, Andrew Os-
wald, Richard Layard, Jaime Settle, Albert Vernon
Smith, and Piero Stanig. De Neve benefited from the
generous hospitality of the Institute for Empirical Re-
search in Economics (IEW) at the University of Zurich
and CREMA. Research was supported by National In-
stitute on Aging Grant P-01 AG-031093 and National
Science Foundation Grant SES0719404. This research
uses data from Add Health, a program project directed
by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard
Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and
funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Ken-
nedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23
other federal agencies and foundations. Special ac-
knowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara
Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Informa-
tion on how to obtain the Add Health data files is
available on the Add Health website (http://www.cpc.
unc.edu/addhealth). No direct support was received from
grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis.
Correspondence concerning this article should be ad-
dressed to Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, School of Public
Policy, University College London, 29/30 Tavistock
Square, London WC1H 9QU, United Kingdom. E-mail:
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics
2012, Vol. 5, No. 4, 193–211
© 2012 American Psychological Association
1937-321X/12/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0030292
193
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ences; in particular, income and its distribution,
labor market regulation, unemployment, and in-
flation. For example, Di Tella, MacCulloch, and
Oswald (2001) used happiness surveys to deter-
mine the welfare costs of inflation and unemploy-
ment, showing that unemployment depresses re-
ported well-being more than does inflation. In
fact, their longitudinal study of life satisfaction
self-reports enabled these authors to estimate
that people would trade off a 1 percentage-point
increase in the unemployment rate for a 1.7
percentage-point increase in the inflation rate.
Systematic influences on life satisfaction have
also been found for sociodemographic factors
(age, gender, race, marital status, children, and
social networks), as well as for political and
cultural factors (such as democracy, decentral-
ization, and religiosity). While variables like
socioeconomic status, income, marriage, educa-
tion, and religiosity are significantly associated
with individual happiness, none typically ac-
counts for more than 3% of the variation (Frey,
2008; Layard, 2005). Moreover, changes in
these variables appear to yield only short-term
changes to happiness. For example, the “East-
erlin Paradox” (Clark et al., 2008; Easterlin,
1974) suggests that increases in real income
either have no lasting effect on happiness, or
only a quite small one (Stevenson & Wolfers,
2008). A reason appears to be that happiness
levels tend to revert toward what psychologists
describe as a “set point” or “baseline” of hap-
piness that is partly shaped by personality and
genetic predispositions (Diener & Lucas, 1999;
Kahneman, Diener, & Schwarz, 1999). This in
turn has implications for how economists think
about the determinants of utility, and the extent
to which exogenous shocks might affect an in-
dividual’s well-being.
Although previous studies have shown that
baseline happiness is significantly heritable
(Lykken & Tellegen, 1996), little research has
considered molecular genetic associations with
subjective well-being. Here, we first corrobo-
rate the earlier work showing that happiness is
significantly influenced by genetic variation in a
nationally representative twin sample, and sub-
sequently, we present mixed evidence for a can-
didate gene association with life satisfaction. In
our discovery sample. we initially found that
individuals with a transcriptionally more effi-
cient version of the serotonin transporter gene
(SLC6A4, more commonly referred to as 5-HTT
or SERT for the protein it encodes) are signif-
icantly more likely to report higher levels of life
satisfaction. However, our replication efforts on
independent samples produce mixed results.
This combination of economics and genetics is
of rising salience (Beauchamp et al., 2011; Ben-
jamin et al., 2012; Benjamin et al., 2007).
Before we detail our genetic association ap-
proach and results, we explore the general in-
fluence that genes may have on happiness
through a twin study design. A growing number
of studies use twin research techniques to gauge
the relative importance of genetic and environ-
mental influences on economic behaviors (e.g.,
Cesarini, Dawes, Johannesson, Lichtenstein, &
Wallace, 2009; Fowler, Dawes, & Christakis,
2009). We estimate the heritability of subjective
well-being at 33%, indicating that about one-
third of the variance in individual life satisfac-
tion can be attributed to genetic influences.
Although twin studies are an important step
in establishing the influence of genes in subjec-
tive well-being, they do not identify the specific
genes involved. The increasing availability of
genotypic information now allows us to test
hypotheses about targeted genes and their ef-
fects. One place to start the search for such
genes is among those that have already been
shown to account for variation in emotional
states. Among these, 5-HTT is a prime candi-
date. The 5-HTT gene encodes a transporter in
the cell wall that absorbs serotonin into the
presynaptic neuron in parts of the brain that
influence mental states (Bertolino et al., 2005;
Canli & Lesch, 2007; Hariri et al., 2002; Heinz
et al., 2005). 5-HTT has been studied for more
than 20 years, and much is known about the
way different versions of this gene influence
transcription, metabolism, and signal transfers
between neurons, all of which may influence
personality. In particular, less transcriptionally
efficient variants of this gene have been shown
to moderate the influence of life stress on de-
1
Books are, for example, Kahneman et al. (1999); Gra-
ham and Pettinato (2002); Frey and Stutzer (2002a), Van
Praag and Ferrer-I-Carbonell (2004); Layard (2005), or Frey
(2008); articles are for example, Easterlin (1974); Clark and
Oswald (1996); Frey and Stutzer (2002b); Di Tella, Mac-
Culloch, & Oswald (2003); Luttmer (2005); Di Tella and
MacCulloch (2006); Rayo and Becker (2007); Dolan et al.
(2008); Fowler and Christakis (2008); Urry et al. (2004) or
Clark, Frijters, & Shields (2008).
194 DE NEVE, CHRISTAKIS, FOWLER, AND FREY
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pression (Caspi et al., 2003), and the more tran-
scriptionally efficient alleles have been linked
to optimism (Fox, Ridgewell, & Ashwin, 2009).
As a result, economists have specifically iden-
tified 5-HTT as a candidate gene for further
study (Benjamin et al., 2007).
Using data from two independent sources, the
National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent
Health (Add Health) and the Framingham Heart
Study (FHS), we analyze the relationship be-
tween variants of 5-HTT and life satisfaction.
We find some evidence of significant associa-
tion in both data sets, suggesting that the 5-HTT
gene may play a role in explaining life satisfac-
tion, yet more work needs to be done to verify
and better understand the relationship between
this genotype and subjective well-being. We do
not claim that 5-HTT determines happiness, nor
do we exclude the likely possibility that several
other genes may play a role in accounting for
the influence of genes on happiness.
The Add Health Data
This research is based on genetic and survey
data collected as part of Add Health. The study
was initially designed to explore the health-
related behavior of adolescents in Grades 7
through 12, but it has been employed widely
across disciplines and has made recent contri-
butions in economics (Alcott, Karlan, Mobius,
Rosenblat, & Szeidl, 2007; Echenique & Fryer,
2007; Echenique, Fryer, & Kaufman, 2006;
Norton & Han, 2008). In the first wave of the
Add Health study (1994–1995), 80 high schools
were selected from a sampling frame of 26,666
based on their size, school type, census region,
level of urbanization, and percentage of the
population that was white. Participating high
schools were asked to identify junior high or
middle schools that served as feeder schools to
their school. This resulted in the participation of
145 middle, junior high, and high schools. From
those schools, 90,118 students completed a 45-
min questionnaire, and each school was asked
to complete at least one School Administrator
questionnaire. This process generated descrip-
tive information about each student, the educa-
tional setting, and the environment of the
school. From these respondents, a core random
sample of 12,105 adolescents in Grades 7–12
were drawn, along with several oversamples,
totaling more than 27,000 adolescents. These
students and their parents were administered
in-home surveys in the first wave.
Wave II (1996) was comprised of another set of
in-home interviews of more than 14,738 students
from the Wave I sample and a follow-up tele-
phone survey of the school administrators. Wave
III (2001–02) consisted of an in-home interview
of 15,170 Wave I participants. Finally, Wave IV
(2008) consisted of an in-home interview of
15,701 Wave I participants. The result of this
sampling design is that Add Health is a nationally
representative study. Women make up 49% of the
study’s participants, Hispanics 12.2%, Blacks 16.
0%, Asians 3.3%, and Native Americans 2.2%.
Participants in Add Health also represent all re-
gions of the United States.
In Wave I of the Add Health study, research-
ers created a sample of sibling pairs including
all adolescents that were identified as twin pairs,
half-siblings, or unrelated siblings raised to-
gether. Twin pairs were sampled with certainty.
The sibling-pairs sample is similar in demo-
graphic composition to the full Add Health sam-
ple (Jacobson & Rowe, 1998). The number of
identical (monozygotic) and nonidentical (dizy-
gotic) twins who participated in Wave III was
1,098 (434 MZ and 664 DZ), with 872 twins
(434 MZ and 438 DZ) in same-sex pairs. The
Add Health data has been widely used for twin
studies (Fowler, Baker, & Dawes, 2008; Harris,
Halpern, Smolen, & Haberstic, 2006).
Allelic information for a number of genetic
markers was collected for 2,574 individuals as
part of Wave III. The candidate genotypes were
chosen for inclusion in the study because they are
known to affect brain development, neurotrans-
mitter synthesis and reception, and hormone reg-
ulation. Details of the DNA collection and geno-
typing process are available at the Add Health
website (Add Health Biomarker Team, 2007).
These candidate genes include markers that iden-
tify alleles (variants) of the serotonin transporter
gene or 5-HTT. The promotor region of 5-HTT
contains a variable number tandem repeat
(VNTR) sequence that influences transcriptional
activity—the “long” 528 base-pair allele is asso-
ciated with a higher basal activity than the “short”
484 base-pair allele. This functional polymor-
phism on the 5-HTT gene is commonly referred to
as 5-HTTLPR (5-HTT-linked polymorphic re-
gion). Allele frequency for the short allele is 43%
and for the long allele is 57%.
195GENES, ECONOMICS, AND HAPPINESS
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In 2012, Add Health released a second batch of
genotypical data that extended to almost all Wave
III participants and included the 5-HTTLPR ge-
notype. The distributional frequencies of this new
sample (used here for replication purposes)
closely align with the earlier discovery sample.
In Wave III, subjects were asked “How sat-
isfied are you with your life as a whole?” An-
swer categories ranged from very dissatisfied,
dissatisfied, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied,
satisfied, to very satisfied. Alternative answers
were “refused” or “don’t know,” and these were
discarded for the purpose of this study (1% of
interviewees gave such a response). This ques-
tion-and-answer formulation is standard in the
economics of happiness literature (Di Tella et
al., 2001, 2003; Frey, 2008; Kahneman &
Krueger, 2006). The distribution of answers to
the life satisfaction question is shown in the
Appendix. In line with the happiness literature,
a large majority of respondents report being
satisfied or very satisfied (Frey & Stutzer,
2002a). That most people, in fact, report a pos-
itive level of subjective well-being is the object
of an article by Diener and Diener (1996),
where the authors find this distribution to be
representative in a wide cross-national analysis.
Twin Design
Method
Twin studies compare the traits, behaviors,
and other outcomes (called “phenotypes”) of
twins who share 100% of their genetic material
(identical or monozygotic [MZ] twins) to those
who share 50% of their genetic material (frater-
nal or dizygotic [DZ] twins) to estimate the
relative importance of genetic and environmen-
tal influences (Ashenfelter & Krueger, 1994;
Taubman, 1976). Following Benjamin et al.
(2012), if we assume that the residual factors
covary equally MZ and DZ twins (informally
called the “equal environments” assumption),
and there are no gene– environment interac-
tions, then the variance in happiness can be
decomposed into additive genetic effects (A),
common or shared environmental influences
(C), and unshared or unique environmental in-
fluences (E). The ACE model does not allow us
to observe environmental and genetic influences
directly, but it does allow us to estimate these
effects by observing the covariance across MZ
and DZ twins.
Although the assumptions underlying the
ACE model are strong, the method produces
results that have been validated in numerous
other studies. For example, studies of twins
reared apart generate similar heritability esti-
mates to those generated by studies of twins
raised together (Bouchard, 1998). More re-
cently, Visscher et al. (2006) utilize the small
variance in percentage of shared genes among
DZ twins to estimate heritability without using
any MZ twins, and they are able to replicate
findings from studies of MZ and DZ twins
reared together. Moreover, personality and cog-
nitive differences between MZ and DZ twins
persist even among twins whose zygosity has
been miscategorized by their parents, indicating
that being mistakenly treated as an identical
twin by ones parents is not sufficient to generate
a difference in concordance (Kendler, Neale,
Kessler, Heath, & Eaves, 1993; Scarr & Carter-
Saltzman, 1979; Xian et al., 2000).
The ACE model can be formally expressed as:
y
ij
A
ij
C
j
E
ij
where y is the measure of the phenotype, j
denotes the family, i denotes the individual twin
in the family, is the mean of this phenotype
across all observations, A
ij
~ N0,
A
2
is the ad-
ditive genetic component, C
j
~ N0,
C
2
is the
shared environment component, and E
ij
~ N
0,
E
2
is the unshared environment component.
Notice that these assumptions imply:
Var(y)
A
2
C
2
E
2
.
If we further assume that the unshared environ-
ment is uncorrelated between twins (COV(E
1j
,
E
2j
) 0), that genes are perfectly correlated be-
tween MZ twins COV
MZ
A
1j
, A
2j
A
2
, and the
covariance between DZ twins who share half their
genes on average is half that of identical twins
COV
DZ
A
1j
, A
2j
1
2
A
2
, then we have two ad-
ditional equations
COV
MZ
y
1j
, y
2j
A
2
C
2
,
COV
DZ
y
1j
, y
2j
1
2
A
2
C
2
.
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The covariance equations reflect the fact that
DZ twins share on average 50% of their genes
whereas MZ twins share all of their genes.
Based on these equations, we can estimate the
ACE model via a random effects regression
model with the 2 2 variance-covariance ma-
trix specified as:
j
A
2
C
2
E
2
R
j
A
2
C
2
R
j
A
2
C
2
A
2
C
2
E
2
where R is the genetic relatedness of the twin pair
equaling 1 for MZ twins and
1
2
for DZ twins. We
use the variances of the random effects to generate
estimates of heritability, common environment,
and unshared environment.
2
To generate the ACE estimates, we use the
structural equation modeling program OpenMx
developed by Neale, Boker, Xie, & Maes,
(2010). In addition to estimating ACE models,
we estimate all of the possible submodels to
compare model fit. These include an AE model,
which assumes only genes and unshared envi-
ronment influence the phenotype (C 0), a CE
model which assumes only common and un-
shared environment influence the phenotype
(A 0), and an E model (A 0 and C 0).
If a submodel fits better than the general ACE
model, this suggests the parameters left out of
the submodel are not significantly contributing
to model fit. To compare the submodels, we use
the Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) in max-
imum likelihood estimation, where smaller val-
ues indicate better fit.
Twin Results
When assessing the role of genetic influ-
ences, the first step is to compare the correlation
in phenotype among MZ twin pairs with that of
DZ twin pairs. For life satisfaction, the correla-
tion coefficient for MZ twins is 0.334 and for
DZ twins is 0.132. The difference in correla-
tions is significant (p .013, one-sided). These
correlations show that identical twins are sig-
nificantly more similar in their level of happi-
ness than fraternal twins, which suggests that
genetic factors might play a role in this trait.
In Table 1, we report results from several
variance decomposition models described ear-
lier. Note that the ACE model yields a herita-
bility estimate of 33% (SE 0.044), and the
estimate for unshared environment is 67%
(SE 0.029), while a null estimate is returned
for common environment. In other words, about
a third of the variance in happiness in our sam-
ple can be attributed to variance in genetic fac-
tors. We also examine the submodels and find
that the models with lowest AIC all include A,
suggesting that the finding that happiness is heri-
table is robust to different model specifications.
3
Compared with previous studies of happi-
ness, our heritability estimate of 33% is on the
lower end of reported estimates. In fact, the
seminal paper by Lykken and Tellegen (1996)
estimated heritability at about 50%, and subse-
quent estimates ranged from 38% (Stubbe, Post-
huma, Boomsma, & De Geus, 2005) to 36%–
50% (Bartels & Boomsma, 2009) to 42%–56%
(Nes, Roysamb, Tambs, Harris, & Reichborn-
Kjennerud, 2006). However, the Add Health
study includes other questions that suggest the
heritability of happiness rises as people age.
The standard life satisfaction question used in
this article is only asked of Add Health subjects
in Wave III (2001–20002), but in other inter-
view waves the following question is asked of
participants: “How often was the following true
during the past seven days? You felt happy.”
Answers range from “never or rarely”to“most
of the time or all of the time.” Figure 1 in
Supplementary Online Material shows the MZ
and DZ twin pair correlations of the time series
that combines the “life satisfaction” and “You
felt happy” questions. The basic heritability es-
timates that result from comparing MZ and DZ
correlations range from 22% in Wave I (1994)
to 54% in Wave IV (2008). This longitudinal
analysis is consistent with a growing body of
longitudinal twin research that shows that the
heritability of a number of traits (e.g., intelli-
gence) increases with age (Plomin, DeFries,
McClearn, & McGuffin, 2008). It also shows
2
They are defined as
A
2
A
2
C
2
E
2
,
C
2
A
2
C
2
E
2
, and
E
2
A
2
C
2
E
2
respectively.
3
When we split our twin sample by sex we find that there
are significant differences between men and women. As in
Table 1, the results given in Table 1 in Supplementary
Online Material show that the AE models fit happiness best
according to the AIC values. However, the heritability es-
timate for males is 39%, whereas for females it is 26%.
197GENES, ECONOMICS, AND HAPPINESS
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that the finding that happiness is heritable is
robust to a variety of measures and time periods
over the life course. These findings are gener-
ally taken to mean that genes and environment
can play differing roles in explaining experience
at different points in the life course.
Genetic Association
Twin studies are important because they al-
low us to gauge the relative influence of our
genetic makeup on subjective well-being. How-
ever, twin studies do not give insight into which
specific genes may be involved in explaining
the heritability of traits. Because Add Health
collected a number of specific genetic markers,
it presents us with a unique opportunity to move
beyond a twin design study. Below we intro-
duce some basic concepts in genetics, our ge-
netic association research design, and present
discovery and replication results for our candi-
date gene study.
Basic Concepts in Genetics
Human DNA is composed of an estimated
21,000 genes that form the blueprint for mole-
cules that regulate the development and func-
tion of the human body. Genes are distinct
regions of human DNA that are placed in the 23
pairs of chains, or chromosomes that make up
all human DNA. Almost all human cells contain
the same DNA they inherited at the moment of
conception.
Individuals inherit one-half of their DNA
from each parent, with one copy of each gene
coming from the mother and one copy from
the father. Some genes come in different ver-
sions, known as “alleles”—for example,
sickle cell disease results from a particular
allele coding for abnormal rather than normal
hemoglobin. Each parent has two separate
copies of an allele at each “locus,” or loca-
tion, on the chromosome, but each sperm or
egg cell contains only one of these alleles.
Thus a child has a 50% chance of receiving a
particular allele from a particular parent. For
example, suppose that at a given locus there
are two possible alleles, A and B. If both
parents are “heterozygous” at that locus,
meaning they each have an A and a B allele
(AB or BA— order is irrelevant), then a given
offspring has a 25% chance of being “ho-
mozygous” for A (AA), a 25% chance of
being homozygous for B (BB) and a 50%
chance of being heterozygous (AB or BA). If
an individual is heterozygous at a locus, a
“dominant” allele may impose itself on the
“recessive” allele, and the expression of the
latter allele will not be observed.
Genes transcribe proteins that begin a cas-
cade of interactions that regulate bodily struc-
ture and function. Many of the observable traits
and behaviors of interest, referred to as “pheno-
types” are far downstream from the original
“genotypes” present in the DNA. While in some
cases, one allele can single-handedly lead to a
disease (such as sickle cell anemia, Hunting-
ton’s disease, or cystic fibrosis), the vast major-
ity of phenotypes are “polygenic,” meaning
they are influenced by multiple genes (Mackay,
2001; Plomin et al., 2008) and are shaped by a
multitude of environmental forces. As a result,
association models between genotypes and phe-
notypes are an important first step, but they are
not the end of the story. It is also important to
investigate the extent to which genetic associa-
tions are moderated by environmental factors
and other genes.
Table 1
Summary of ACE Twin Model Results
Life satisfaction Fit statistics
df
Akaike Information
Criterion diff 2ll diff df pa
2
c
2
e
2
ep 2ll
ACE 0.331 0.000 0.669 4 1878.9 795 288.9 — ——
AE 0.331 — 0.669 3 1878.9 796 286.9 0 11
CE — 0.257 0.743 3 1882.9 796 290.9 4 1 0.05
E — — 1 2 1907.2 797 313.2 28.3 2 0
Note. The models consist of additive genetic factors (A), shared or common environmental factors (C), and unshared
environmental factors (E). The model includes 217 monozygotic and 219 dizygotic same-sex twin pairs.
198 DE NEVE, CHRISTAKIS, FOWLER, AND FREY
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5-HTTLPR, Serotonin, and Happiness
One strategy in behavioral genetics is to start
with a “candidate” gene that is thought to influ-
ence behaviors or processes in the body that are
related to the phenotype of interest. For subjec-
tive well-being, this means focusing on genes
that affect brain development, neurotransmitter
synthesis and reception, hormone regulation,
and transcriptional factors (Benjamin et al.,
2007; Damberg, Garpenstrand, Hallman, &
Oreland, 2001).
We choose a candidate gene that has already
received a great deal of attention by biologists
and social scientists for its association with
mental states. The 5-HTT gene is critical to the
metabolism of serotonin in the brain. As shown
in Figure 1, serotonin is a chemical that is
released by a neuron and sensed by a receptor
on the receiving neuron, passing an electric
potential across a gap called a nerve synapse
(the nerve that emits the serotonin is on the
“presynaptic” side of the gap). Signals are car-
ried throughout the body by the sequential re-
lease of a neurotransmitter by one neuron after
another across these synapses. The 5-HTT gene
codes for the serotonin transporters that are
placed in the cell wall and reabsorb the neu-
rotransmitter serotonin from the synaptic cleft.
Most serotonin is recycled after use and the
serotonin transporter allows serotonergic neu-
rons to restock. The serotonin transporter gene
has been studied extensively and much is
known about the way different versions of this
gene influence serotonergic neurotransmission
which, in turn, is found to influence personality
and mental health (Canli & Lesch, 2007; Hariri
& Holmes, 2006; Hariri et al., 2002).
The 5-HTT gene contains a 44 base-pair vari-
able-number tandem repeat (VNTR) polymor-
phism
4
in the promoter region
5
(5-HTTLPR)
that is believed to be responsible for variation in
transcriptional efficiency. The “long” (528 bp)
and “short” (484 bp) polymorphism produce the
same protein, but the long allele is associated
with an approximately three times higher basal
activity than the shorter allele. As a conse-
quence, the long variant produces significantly
more 5-HTT mRNA
6
and protein (Canli &
Lesch, 2007; Glatz, Mössner, Heils, & Lesch,
2003; Heils et al., 1996; Lesch et al., 1996;
Little et al., 1998). The long polymorphism thus
results in increased gene expression and more
serotonin transporters in the cell membrane. In
turn, more serotonin is reintroduced into the
presynaptic cell. This process is also shown in
Figure 1.
Functional variation in the serotonin trans-
porter gene is increasingly understood to exert
influence on parts of the brain regulated by
serotonergic neurotransmission. In particular,
research shows increased amygdala activation
to negative emotional stimuli among carriers of
short alleles (Canli, Omura, Haas, Fallgatter, &
Constable, 2005; Hariri et al., 2002; Heinz et
al., 2005; Munafò, Brown, & Hariri, 2008; Pe-
zawas et al., 2005). A morphometrical study of
this genetic association reports reduced gray
matter volume in short-allele carriers in limbic
regions critical for processing of negative emo-
tion, particularly perigenual cingulate and
amygdala (Pezawas et al., 2005). These authors
conclude that 5-HTTLPR induced variation in
anatomy and function of an amygdala-cingulate
feedback circuit critical for emotion regulation
indicates one mechanism for a genetic suscep-
tibility for depression (Pezawas et al., 2005).
Another morphometrical study corroborates the
finding that short-allele carriers show decreased
volume in the affective division of the anterior
cingulate and decreased gray matter density in
its pregenual region (Canli et al., 2005). The
same study also finds that the 5-HTTLPR poly-
morphism is associated with activation changes
to positive stimuli, suggesting a general role in
emotional regulation, rather than negative va-
lence specifically (Canli et al., 2005).
Myriad behavioral studies also suggest that
serotonin and 5-HTT play an important role in
emotional regulation (Hariri & Holmes, 2006;
Hariri et al., 2002; Heils et al., 1996). Specifi-
cally, variance in 5-HTTLPR was found to be
associated with variation in mental health out-
comes (Lesch et al., 1996), and subsequent
studies report that about 10% of the variance in
anxiety-related traits depends on variation in
4
A VNTR polymorphism is a repeated segment of DNA
that varies among individuals in a population.
5
A promoter region is the regulatory region of DNA that
tells transcription enzymes where to begin. These promoter
regions typically lie upstream from the genes they control.
6
Messenger RNA (mRNA) is a type of RNA that carries
information from DNA to ribosomes. In turn, these ribo-
somes “read” messenger RNAs and translate their informa-
tion into proteins.
199GENES, ECONOMICS, AND HAPPINESS
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serotonin transporters (Munafò, Clark, & Flint,
2005; Sen, Burmeister, & Ghosh, 2004). A re-
cent study by Fox et al. (2009) also suggests
that 5-HTTLPR may influence optimism. The
authors obtained DNA from about 100 partici-
pants and compared reaction times with pictures
with positive, negative, and neutral emotional
valence (replicating a common experiment in
psychopathology research). The results show
that individuals with the transcriptionally more
efficient 5-HTTLPR alleles display a significant
bias toward processing positive information and
selectively avoiding negative information. This
emotionally self-protective pattern does not ob-
tain in individuals carrying one or both short
alleles. It is important to note, however, that
positive and negative emotions are not different
sides to the same coin. A score of zero on a
depression or anxiety scale may be indicative of
the absence of such mental health issues, but it
is not indicative of the presence of happiness
(McGreal & Stephen, 1993).
Not all studies show a direct relationship
between a gene variant and a phenotype. In-
stead, developmental or concurrent environ-
ments may moderate an association between
genes and phenotypes. A study by Caspi et al.
(2003) suggests a gene– environment interac-
tion for the influence of life stress on depres-
sion. The authors find that individuals with
short 5-HTTLPR alleles gene are more vulner-
able to stress-induced depression. Among those
individuals that had experienced a relatively
large number of stressful life events, about 33%
of the carriers of the less efficient short allele
were cases of diagnosed depression compared
with only 17% of the individuals that carried
both long alleles. Thus, in the Caspi et al.
(2003) study, the gene itself is not associated
with depression. Rather, it is the combination of
both gene and environment that yields a signif-
icant association. In this study we do not report
on a gene-environment interaction, but the di-
rect association between the number of long
5-HTTLPR alleles and life satisfaction.
It is important to highlight, however, that
later studies often fail to replicate candidate
gene discoveries. For example, a meta-analysis
Figure 1. Representation of the long/short functional variant on the 5-HTT gene and the
release, reception, and recycling of serotonin in neurons. Adapted from Canli and Lesch
(2007), with permission from the Nature Publishing Group.
200 DE NEVE, CHRISTAKIS, FOWLER, AND FREY
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by Risch et al. (2009) that incorporated 14 stud-
ies yielded no evidence for a direct effect be-
tween 5-HTTLPR and depression nor an indi-
rect effect moderated by stressful life events.
Association Methods
Genetic association studies test whether an
allele or genotype occurs more frequently
within a group exhibiting a particular phenotype
than those without the phenotype. However, a
significant association can mean one of three
things: (a) The allele itself influences subjective
well-being; (b) the allele is in “linkage disequi-
librium” with an allele at another locus that
influences subjective well-being; or (c) the ob-
served association is a false-positive signal be-
cause of population stratification.
7
Population stratification occurs because groups
may have different allele frequencies because of
their genetic ancestry. Subjective well-being in
these groups may be the product of their environ-
ments, alleles other than the one of interest, or
some unobserved reason. For example, two
groups may not have mixed in the past for cultural
reasons. Through the process of local adaptation
or genetic drift, these groups may develop differ-
ent frequencies of a particular allele. At the same
time, the two groups may also develop divergent
behaviors that are not influenced by the allele but
solely by the environment in which they live.
Once these two groups mix in a larger population,
simply comparing the frequency of the allele to
the observed behavior would lead to a spurious
association.
There are two main research designs em-
ployed in association studies, case-control de-
signs and family based designs. Case-control
designs compare the frequency of alleles or
genotypes among subjects that exhibit a pheno-
type of interest to subjects who do not. As a
result, case-control designs are vulnerable to
population stratification if either group is espe-
cially prone to selection effects. A typical way
to control for this problem is to include controls
for the race or ethnicity of the subject or to limit
the analysis to a specific racial or ethnic group.
Family based designs eliminate the problem of
population stratification by using family mem-
bers, such as parents or siblings, as controls.
Tests using family data compare whether off-
spring exhibiting the trait receive a risk allele
from their parents more often than would be
expected by chance. This design is very power-
ful in minimizing Type I error but also suffers
from much lower power in detecting a true
association. Xu and Shete (2006) show, based
on extensive simulation work, that a case-
control association study using mixed-effects
regression analysis outperforms family based
designs in detecting an association while at the
same time effectively limiting Type I error.
To test for genetic association we employ a
mixed-effects ordinary least squares (OLS) re-
gression model
8
:
Y
ij
0
G
G
ij
k
Z
kij
U
j
ij
where i and j index subject and family respec-
tively. For the 5-HTT gene, G 2 if the sub-
ject’s genotype is LL, G 1 for genotypes LS
or SL, and G 0 if the subject’s genotype is SS
(where L represents having a copy of a 528
base-pair “long” allele, and S represents having
a copy of a 484 base-pair “short” allele). Z is a
matrix of variables to control for the underlying
population structure of the Add Health sample
as well as potentially mediating factors such as
age, gender, education, religiosity, marriage,
job, welfare, or medication that may all influ-
ence subjective well-being. Finally, the variable
U is a family random effect that controls for
potential genetic and environmental correlation
among family members, and ε is an individual-
specific error.
To control for the effects of the underlying
population structure, we include indicator vari-
ables for whether a subject self-reported as
7
Given our data, we cannot differentiate between 1 and
2. To do so, we would need additional genetic information
about loci in close proximity to the locus of interest. Thus,
a significant association means that either a particular allele,
or one likely near it on the same gene, significantly influ-
ences subjective well-being.
8
The choice between OLS and ordered probit regression
analysis rests on whether the categories of the life satisfac-
tion are considered cardinal or ordinal. Economists typically
consider these happiness scores as ordinal and have mainly
opted for the ordered type of analysis. Psychologists and
sociologists interpret happiness categories as cardinal and
therefore use OLS. Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters (2004)
survey and test both empirical literatures to conclude that
assuming cardinality or ordinality of happiness surveys
makes little difference in studies where the dependent vari-
able is measured at a single point in time. We opted for
OLS, but other analyses using ordered probit reveal no
meaningful differences in coefficients or significance.
201GENES, ECONOMICS, AND HAPPINESS
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Black, Hispanic, or Asian (base category is
White). Following the policy of the United
States Census, Add Health allows respondents
to mark more than one race. Since this compli-
cates the ability to control for stratification, we
exclude these individuals (N 117), but a
supplementary analysis including them yields
substantively equal results. Population stratifi-
cation is a pertinent challenge in our sample.
The Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium (HWE) test
indicates a significant deviation from the ex-
pected frequencies (
2
7.66, p .005). On
the other hand, when considering the separate
HWE test statistics by ethnicity there are no
longer significant deviations from the expected
HWE frequencies (see Table 6 in Supplemen-
tary Online Material). As such, introducing eth-
nicity controls and running a Whites-only case
control test (Xu and Shete, 2006) may ade-
quately control for population stratification.
Association Results: Add Health Discovery
Sample
Table 2 shows the results of several specifi-
cations of the model to test the hypothesis that
the 5-HTTLPR long allele is associated with
subjective well-being in the original Add Health
discovery sample.
9
Each of these specifications
includes variables for age, gender, and race to
control for population stratification. Model 1
shows that the long allele is significantly asso-
ciated with increased life satisfaction (p
.012). In Figure 2, we summarize the results for
5-HTTLPR by simulating first differences from
the coefficient covariance matrix of Model 1.
Holding all else constant and changing the
5-HTTLPR variant for all subjects from zero to
one long allele would increase the reporting of
being very satisfied with one’s life in this pop-
ulation by about 8.5%. Similarly, changing the
5-HTTLPR variant from zero to two long alleles
would increase the reporting of being very sat-
isfied by about 17.3%.
Model 2 includes a number of socioeconomic
factors that are known to influence subjective
well-being. In particular, having a job, educa-
tion, marriage, divorce, religiosity, welfare as-
sistance, and being on medication. This model
also suggests that there is a statistically signif-
icant association (p .005) between the
5-HTTLPR long variant and the reporting of life
satisfaction. Notice also that the coefficient
actually increases a bit, suggesting that the
association cannot be explained by a media-
tion effect this genotype may have on any
other variables included in the model.
10
Following Xu and Shete (2006), as a robust-
ness test for population stratification, we also
include Model 3 that is a case-control associa-
tion model for those subjects that uniquely iden-
tified themselves as being white. The coefficient
on 5HTTLPR and its p value (p .017) suggest
that population stratification between self-
reported racial categories is not driving the as-
sociation between 5-HTTLPR and life satisfac-
tion in the Add Health discovery sample.
Replication Studies
Specific genotypes usually only account for a
very small amount of the variance in complex
social behaviors, which means the tests often
have low power. As a result, it is very important
to replicate results in independent samples
(Beauchamp et al., 2011; Benjamin et al.,
2012). Such efforts to replicate a significant
genetic association result, as well as increasing
the sample sizes, are key in addressing the pos-
sibility that the original association would be a
spurious result or false positive. Below we first
report on our replication effort in the FHS.
More recently, the release of new genotypical
data for the Add Health data allowed for another
replication effort which we also detail below.
Although the association between functional
variation on the 5-HTT gene and life satisfac-
tion found in the Add Health discovery sample
replicates in the Framingham sample it does not
replicate in the new Add Health sample.
Replication Study 1: FHS. Here we utilize
the FHS, a population-based, longitudinal, ob-
servational cohort study that was initiated in
1948 to prospectively investigate risk factors
for cardiovascular disease. Since then, the FHS
has come to be composed of four separate but
related cohort populations: (a) the Original Co-
9
This genetic association result in the Add Health dis-
covery sample is also reported in De Neve (2011).
10
We also report the results of association tests with
5-HTTLPR for each of these socioeconomic factors in the
appendix. An association with medication is nearly signif-
icant (p .08) but loses its significance (p .17) when
controlling for age, gender, and race. Hence, medication
cannot be considered a mediating variable (Baron & Kenny,
1986).
202 DE NEVE, CHRISTAKIS, FOWLER, AND FREY
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hort enrolled in 1948 (N 5,209); (b) the
Offspring Cohort (the children of the Original
Cohort and spouses of the children) enrolled in
1971 (N 5,124); (c) the Omni Cohort enrolled
in 1994 (N 508); and (d) the Generation 3
Cohort (the grandchildren of the Original Co-
hort) enrolled beginning in 2002 (N 4,095).
Published reports provide details about sample
composition and study design for all these co-
horts (Cupples & D’Agnostino, 1988; Kannel,
Feinleib, McNamara, Garrison, & Castelli,
1979).
The FHS makes available genetic markers for
its participants. Of the 14,428 members of the
three main cohorts, a total of 9,237 individuals
have been genotyped (4,986 women and 4,251
men) for single nucleotide polymorphisms
(SNPs). These are specific locations on human
DNA where a single pair of nucleotides varies
for some part of the human population. FHS
makes available a data set of expected geno-
types for all 2,543,887 SNPs in the European
ancestry HapMap sample that was computed
from the 550,000 observed SNPs from an Af-
fymetrix array using the program MACH (for
information on how this data set was con-
structed, see De Bakker, 2008). Although this
data does not contain the same VNTR polymor-
phism marker for 5-HTT that we analyze in Add
Health, it does contain a nearby marker called
“rs2020933,” and the “A” allele of this marker
is known to be associated with higher transcrip-
tional efficiency of serotonin transporters (Fa-
had et al., 2010; Lipsky, Hu, & Goldman, 2009;
Martin, Cleak, Willis-Owen, Flint, & Shifman,
2007; Wendland, Martin, Kruse, Lesch, & Mur-
Table 2
OLS Models of Association Between 5-HTTLPR and Life Satisfaction (Discovery Sample)
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3
Coefficient SE p Coefficient SE p Coefficient SE p
5-HTTLPR long 0.059 0.023 .012 0.065 0.023 .005 0.070 0.029 .017
Black 0.111 0.048 .021 0.114 0.049 .020
Hispanic 0.198 0.117 .092 0.216 0.118 .067
Asian 0.196 0.073 .007 0.221 0.071 .002
Age 0.004 0.009 .705 0.011 0.009 .262 0.031 0.012 .008
Male 0.014 0.033 .682 0.028 0.033 .406 0.039 0.041 .341
Job 0.093 0.041 .024 0.104 0.057 .071
College 0.115 0.033 .001 0.238 0.042 .000
Married 0.232 0.041 .000 0.318 0.050 .000
Divorced 0.313 0.153 .041 0.310 0.155 .047
Religiosity 0.103 0.017 .000 0.082 0.023 .000
Welfare 0.236 0.098 .017 0.121 0.153 .432
Medication 0.045 0.032 .162 0.095 0.041 .021
Intercept 4.078 0.208 .000 4.096 0.210 .000 4.514 0.262 .000
N 2,545 2,528 1,446
R
2
0.01 0.06 0.08
Note. Variable definitions are in the Appendix. SEs and p values are also presented.
Figure 2. Increasing the number of “long,” more efficient
5-HTTLPR alleles is associated with higher life satisfaction
in the Add Health discovery sample. First differences based
on simulations of Model 1 parameters are presented along
with 95% confidence intervals. All other variables are held
at their means.
203GENES, ECONOMICS, AND HAPPINESS
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phy, 2006). It is also known to be in positive
linkage disequilibrium with the long allele of
5-HTTLPR (Huezo-Diaz et al., 2009). The FHS
also asked 3,460 participants in the offspring
cohort a variant of the life satisfaction question:
“Indicate where you think you belong between
these two extremes . . . satisfied with job or
home life OR ambitious, want change.” Re-
spondents were given a 7-point scale to choose
from, and we reverse-coded the scale so that
higher values indicated greater satisfaction with
life (M 4.7, SD 1.7). Although this ques-
tion is not exactly like the one asked in Add
Health, if there is a real association between
5-HTT and happiness, we expect it to show up
in spite of variations in the way the question is
asked.
We merged the gene and life satisfaction data
and conducted an association test using a linear
regression with a general estimating equations
(GEEs) approach to account for within-family
correlation of errors. As shown in Model 1 in
Table 3, this association is significant (p .05)
and in the expected direction. In Model 2 we
include additional controls for age and gender.
We also include the first 10 principal compo-
nents of a singular value decomposition of the
subject-genotype matrix in the regression (see
Appendix), which has been shown to effectively
control for population stratification (Price et al.,
2006). Once again, the association is significant
(p .05).
Replication Study 2: New Add Health
Data. The staggered release of genotypical
data by Add Health provides another opportu-
nity to test the association between the
5-HTTLPR genotype and life satisfaction in an
independent replication sample as well as the
larger combined sample. Tables 4 (replication
sample) and 5 (full sample) present results for
association models that are identical to those
run in the discovery sample and shown in Table
2. While all model specifications return coeffi-
cients on 5-HTTLPR that indicate a positive
correlation between the long alleles of this ge-
notype and life satisfaction, no model specifi-
cation obtains statistical significance. We thus
fail to replicate the original significant associa-
tion result in the newly available Add Health
data.
Discussion
Our main objective here has been to pro-
vide empirical evidence that genes matter for
subjective well-being and to encourage econ-
omists to consider the importance of biolog-
ical differences. The results we present ad-
Table 3
General Estimating Equations Models of Association Between rs2020933 and Life Satisfaction
(Framingham Heart Study)
Model 1 Model 2
Coefficient SE p Coefficient SE p
rs2020933 “A” alleles 0.22 0.11 .05 0.21 0.11 .05
Age 0.04 0.00 .00
Male 0.00 0.06 .99
Principal component 1 0.88 1.57 .58
Principal component 2 0.04 6.43 .99
Principal component 3 3.32 2.21 .13
Principal component 4 1.08 2.33 .64
Principal component 5 3.30 2.64 .21
Principal component 6 1.13 2.45 .65
Principal component 7 2.21 1.97 .26
Principal component 8 2.10 2.21 .34
Principal component 9 0.52 2.06 .80
Principal component 10 1.82 2.26 .42
Intercept 4.68 0.04 .00 2.90 0.16 .00
N 2,843 2,831
R
2
0.01 0.05
Note. SEs and p values are also presented.
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dress one possible source of the “baseline” or
“set point” for happiness that prior work has
identified (Graham, 2008; Kahneman et al.,
1999). The existence of a baseline does not
mean that the socioeconomic influences on
happiness so far identified by researchers are
unimportant. Rather, our results complement
these studies and suggest a new direction for
research.
As indicated by the R
2
values in Table
2—where the 5-HTTLPR genotype explains
less than one percent of the variation in life
satisfaction— genotype effect sizes tend to be
very small. Still, contrary to a SNP, a func-
Table 4
Replication Sample OLS Models of Association Between 5-HTTLPR and Life Satisfaction
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3
Coefficient SE p Coefficient SE p Coefficeint SE p
5-HTTLPR long 0.003 0.012 .823 0.000 0.012 0.985 0.003 0.015 .827
Black 0.127 0.022 .000 0.117 0.023 0.000
Hispanic 0.067 0.033 .044 0.067 0.033 0.042
Asian 0.081 0.034 .017 0.093 0.034 0.007
Age 0.002 0.005 .614 0.010 0.005 0.030 0.007 0.006 .249
Male 0.010 0.016 .542 0.024 0.017 0.154 0.009 0.023 .680
Job 0.092 0.021 0.000 0.115 0.029 .000
College 0.200 0.017 0.000 0.238 0.042 .000
Married 0.237 0.022 0.000 0.278 0.028 .000
Divorced 0.080 0.061 0.187 0.056 0.071 .429
Religiosity 0.075 0.009 0.000 0.068 0.012 .000
Welfare 0.112 0.043 0.009 0.214 0.062 .001
Medication 0.041 0.018 0.019 0.046 0.025 .063
Intercept 4.119 0.102 .000 4.107 0.105 0.000 4.029 0.139 .000
N 10,163 10,030 5,335
R
2
0.004 0.042 0.055
Note. Variable definitions are in the Appendix. SEs and p values are also presented.
Table 5
Full Sample OLS Models of Association Between 5-HTTLPR and Life Satisfaction
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3
Coefficient SE p Coefficient SE p Coefficent SE p
5-HTTLPR long 0.012 0.011 .249 0.012 0.011 .267 0.015 0.014 .287
Black 0.127 0.020 .000 0.120 0.021 .000
Hispanic 0.077 0.030 .010 0.070 0.030 .018
Asian 0.102 0.032 .001 0.114 0.032 .000
Age 0.002 0.004 .599 0.011 0.004 .013 0.012 0.006 .029
Male 0.011 0.015 .440 0.024 0.015 .114 0.000 0.020 .984
Job 0.091 0.019 .000 0.117 0.026 .000
College 0.181 0.015 .000 0.229 0.020 .000
Married 0.233 0.019 .000 0.283 0.025 .000
Divorced 0.124 0.057 .031 0.122 0.069 .076
Religiosity 0.085 0.008 .000 0.075 0.011 .000
Welfare 0.136 0.040 .001 0.198 0.058 .001
Medication 0.045 0.032 .162 0.060 0.022 .006
Intercept 4.122 0.092 .000 4.113 0.095 .000 4.134 0.124 .000
N 12,391 12,232 6,639
R
2
0.004 0.044 0.058
Note. Variable definitions are in the Appendix. SEs and p values are also presented.
205GENES, ECONOMICS, AND HAPPINESS
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tional polymorphism such as the 5-HTTLPR
variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) cov-
ers a broader fragment of the genome and is
understood to have a potentially larger phe-
notypical influence (Can, Coe, & Eichler,
2011; Redon et al., 2006). Following on this,
we also note that because the twin analysis
suggests that all genes together account for
about a third of the total variance that it is
therefore highly likely that many other genes,
in conjunction with environmental factors,
help to explain how baseline happiness varies
from one person to another.
Another use of work such as this is to
address the problem of omitted variable bias
(OVB). A missing variable might be linked to
multiple parameters and thus bias the estimate
of the causal effect of X on Y. To the extent
that genetic attributes are a source of OVB,
and to the extent that they can be added to
models of economic outcomes and behaviors,
accounting for such variables will improve
causal estimates of other attributes.
While the Add Health study presents us
with a valuable opportunity to explore a ge-
netic basis of subjective well-being, we want
to emphasize a limitation of the data. The Add
Health sample is restricted to individuals who
are 18 –26 years old during Wave III, so our
results apply only to the subjective well-being
of young adults and not to people in different
age categories. However, the strong similarity
in the distribution of answers in the Add
Health data compared with other life satisfac-
tion surveys used in the happiness literature
suggests that the age limits are not likely to
gravely distort our results (Di Tella et al.,
2001, 2003; Frey, 2008; Kahneman &
Krueger, 2006). Our analyses in the FHS,
which has a much wider age range, further
suggests a degree of generalizability.
A second important limitation is that we
use a case-control method that is vulnerable
to population stratification. Because of lim-
ited mobility, local adaptation, and genetic
drift, it is possible that people from different
cultures have a different incidence of certain
genotypes, which could lead to a spurious
association between genotype and cultural at-
tributes. We limit this potential threat to the
validity of our results by including controls
for race and limiting the analysis to a specific
racial or ethnic group in Add Health. Our
related association analysis in the FHS—that
controls for the first 10 principal components
of a singular value decomposition of the sub-
ject-genotype matrix— has been shown to ef-
fectively deal with the problem of population
stratification (Price et al., 2006).
The estimates of the influence of sociodemo-
graphic, economic, and cultural covariates on
life satisfaction in Table 2 corroborate the gen-
erally identified systematic effects of these vari-
ables in the literature (for a survey, see Dolan,
Peasgood, & White, 2008). In particular, gender
does not systematically affect happiness. Higher
age has a negative, though not statistically sig-
nificant effect (this is not surprising considering
that our sample refers to young adults). African
Americans and Asian Americans are systemat-
ically less happy than are Whites, while Latinos
are somewhat happier, but not in a statistically
significant way. Better educated and married
individuals report having significantly higher
life satisfaction, while divorced people are more
unhappy. Having a job strongly raises life satis-
faction. This reflects the psychic benefits of being
occupied and integrated into society. At the same
time it suggests that having an income raises life
satisfaction. In contrast, persons on welfare are
much less happy than those employed which re-
flects the psychic costs of unemployment. Reli-
gious individuals are significantly more happy
than those without religious beliefs. Persons with
less good health, as measured by the need to be on
medication, are also less happy. As is the case
with most research on happiness, these estimates
identify correlations, not causality, given the dif-
ficulty in disentangling endogeneity. Once again,
consistency with previous studies suggests that
results using the Add Health data may generalize
to other populations and a wider demography in
terms of age.
The life satisfaction question and answer
formulation used in Add Health is standard in
the economics and psychology literatures
(Diener & Diener, 1996; Di Tella et al., 2001;
Frey, 2008; Kahneman & Krueger, 2006). This
question has been cross-validated with alternative
measures that gauge subjective well-being (Bar-
tels & Boomsma, 2009; Kahneman & Krueger,
2006) and Oswald and Wu (2010) provide objec-
tive confirmation of life satisfaction as a measure
of subjective well-being. Still, the life satisfaction
question has been criticized for inducing a focus-
ing illusion by drawing attention to people’s rela-
206 DE NEVE, CHRISTAKIS, FOWLER, AND FREY
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tive standing rather than moment-to-moment he-
donic experience (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade,
Schwarz, & Stone, 2006).
Conclusion
Our results corroborate prior research in sug-
gesting that genetic factors significantly influ-
ence individual subjective well-being. Using
twin study techniques we estimate that genetic
variation explains about 33% of the variance in
individual happiness. Moreover, using molecu-
lar genetic methods we studied the relationship
between a functional polymorphism on the se-
rotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) and life
satisfaction. Generally, our results provide
mixed evidence for a positive association be-
tween the “long,” more efficient 5-HTTLPR
alleles and self-reported life satisfaction in a
discovery sample and two replication samples.
By moving beyond a twin study and focusing on
specific genes, our analysis is among the first to
consider pathways through which genes may
influence happiness levels.
Given prior research linking the “short,” less
transcriptionally efficient, alleles of the 5-HTT
gene to mood disorders, and the “long,” more
efficient alleles to optimism bias, we hypothe-
sized that carriers of the “long” alleles would be
more likely to report being satisfied with their
lives. We find some support for this intuition in
both the Add Health and FHS data, but more
work needs to be done to better understand the
relationship between this genotype and subjec-
tive well-being.
We have stressed that genetic factors com-
plement, rather than substitute for, the existing
studies showing the influence of sociodemo-
graphic, economic and cultural variables on life
satisfaction. Future work could attempt to iden-
tify other genes or gene-environment interac-
tions that are implicated in subjective well-
being. Finding out which genes they are and
what physical function they have will improve
our understanding of the biological processes
that underlie economic outcomes like well-
being and may also shed light on their evolu-
tionary origin (Fitzpatrick et al., 2005). While
the 5-HTT gene may be a good candidate gene
for further study, it is important to reemphasize
that there is no single “happiness gene.” Instead,
there is likely to be a set of genes whose ex-
pression, in combination with environmental
factors, influences subjective well-being.
More broadly, these results suggest that inte-
grating the unique biology of each individual, in
addition to studying experience and environ-
ment, may usefully complement existing mod-
els and increase their explanatory power (Caplin
& Dean, 2008). We also believe that genetic
association studies such as ours may be a new
catalyst for two important lines of research.
First, economics places a high premium on
causal inference. Provided that robust genetic
associations are available and that exclusion
restrictions are met, genotypes could function as
instrumental variables to disentangle the reverse
causality in important relationships that have
been plagued by endogeneity. First attempts at
using genes as instruments have been tried on
the link between health and educational attain-
ment (Beauchamp et al., 2011; Fletcher & Leh-
rer, 2011; Norton & Han, 2008; O’Malley,
Rosenquist, Zaslavsky, & Christakis, 2010; von
Hinke Kessler Scholder et al., 2010). Second,
integrating genetic variation and neuroscientific
research may further advance our understanding
of the biological underpinnings of individual
behavior. For example, the work by Urry et al.
(2004) presents neural correlates of subjective
well-being. Some of the neurological variation
they observe may result from differences in
genotypes and could thus inform and stimulate
new studies. Since genes are upstream from
neurological processes, a better understanding
of genetic variation may bring us closer to un-
derstanding the objective sources of subjective
well-being.
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Appendix
Variable Definitions
5-HTTLPR long is a variable for having 0, 1,
or 2 of the 528 base-pair alleles of the 5-HTT
gene (as opposed to the 484 base-pair version).
The race/ethnicity indicator variables are based
on the questions “Are you of Hispanic or Latino
origin?” and “What is your race? [white/black
or African American/American Indian or Na-
tive American/Asian or Pacific Islander]”. Age
is self-reported age and Male is an indicator
taking the value of 1 if the respondent is a male
and 0 for a female. Job is the response to the
question “Do you currently have a job?” Col-
lege is an indicator variable taking the value 1 if
the respondent completed at least one year of
college and 0 for no college. It is based on the
question “What is the highest grade or year of
regular school you completed?” Married and
Divorced are dummies derived from the popu-
lation subset that have married and answered
“Are you still married?” Religiosity relies on
“To what extent are you a religious person?”
and takes a value between 0 and 3 for very
religious. Welfare is a dummy for “Are you
receiving welfare?” Medication is a dummy for
“In the past 12 months, have you taken any
prescription medication—that is, a medicine
that must be prescribed by a doctor or nurse?”
DRD4 is the number of r7 alleles (0, 1, or 2) as
opposed to r4 alleles. DRD2 is the number of a2
alleles (0, 1, or 2) as opposed to a1 alleles.
DAT1 is the number of r9 alleles (0, 1, or 2) as
opposed to r10 alleles. MAOA is the number of
“High” alleles (0, 1, or 2) as opposed to “Low”
alleles. rs2304297 is the number of G alleles (0,
1, or 2) for this SNP on CHRNA6 (as opposed to
C alleles). rs892413 is the number of C alleles
(0, 1, or 2) for this SNP on CHRNA6 (as op-
posed to A alleles). rs4950 is the number of G
alleles (0, 1, or 2) for this SNP on CHRNB3 (as
opposed to A alleles). rs13280604 is the num-
ber of G alleles (0, 1, or 2) for this SNP on
CHRNB3 (as opposed to A alleles). rs2020933
is the number of A alleles (0, 1, or 2) for this
SNP on 5-HTT (as opposed to T alleles).
Principal Component 1-10 is the individual
loading for each individual on the 10 principal
components associated with the 10 largest
eigenvalues of a singular value decomposition
of the subject-genotype matrix. These 10 values
contain information about population structure,
so including them in an association test helps to
control for population stratification (Price et al.,
2006). Because principal component analysis
assumes independent observations, we did not
use our entire (family-based) FHS sample to
construct the principal components. Instead we
used a subsample of 2,507 unrelated individuals
to calculate the principal components of the
genotypic data and then projected the other in-
dividuals in the sample onto those principal
components, thus obtaining the loadings of
each individual on each of the top 10 princi-
pal components.
Received February 12, 2012
Revision received August 7, 2012
Accepted August 21, 2012
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“The Story of An Hour”
Kate Chopin (1894)
Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken
to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.
It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that
revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her.
It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad
disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He
had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had
hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.
She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a
paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild
abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she
went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.
There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she
sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to
reach into her soul.
She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all
aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the
street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which
some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering
in the eaves.
There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had
met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.
She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless,
except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried
itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.
She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even
a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was
fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of
reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.
There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was
it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping
out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that
filled the air.
Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this
thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with
her will—as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she
abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said
it over and over under [her] breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look
of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her
pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.
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She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear
and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial. She knew
that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death;
the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead.
But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that
would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in
welcome.
There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for
herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence
with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon
a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a
crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.
And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter!
What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of
self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!
“Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.
Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhold,
imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg; open the door—you will
make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”
“Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life
through that open window.
Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer
days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that
life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life
might be long.
She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was
a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess
of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and together they descended the stairs.
Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.
Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who
entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella.
He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had
been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to
screen him from the view of his wife.
When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of the joy that kills.
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The Happiness Project
By Andrew O’Hagan
from T: The New York Times Style Magazine
July 17, 2015
Walt Disney didn’t just build a theme park for childhood fantasy. He created a world we believe in,
and a journey to the land of the better self.
With Disneyland, Walt Disney fashioned an American nirvana in Anaheim, Calif.
Credit: Daniel Stier
A few years ago I was driving around Hollywood in a rental car I’d inherited from
the folk singer Beth Orton. We were guests under the Hollywood sign, Beth had a
small baby, and it was time for her to go back to London and I kept the car. People
leave stuff behind in a car; you get to know them by their parking stubs and
beverage stirrers. But Beth’s an original: She left me a CD compilation of the best of
the Disney songs, and I cried for two weeks as I drove up Santa Monica Boulevard
or over Laurel Canyon or to the beach. I cried in Griffith Park and on the freeway
to a shopping mall in Sherman Oaks. I wasn’t sad; I was just, well, Disneyfied
— enjoying the small tearful yearnings that come with those songs. One night I
stopped at a beautiful edge on Mulholland Drive and looked at the twinkling lights
of the city, the years seeming to roll back with Louis Armstrong’s version of “When
You Wish Upon a Star.”
Fate is kind
She brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of
Their secret longing.
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If modern sentiment has an architecture, it was Disney that built it. Disney
furnished the house and chose the curtains, Disney stocked the fridge. In time,
the power of Disney came to light up your hall and your landing, its vapors making
their way over your vacuumed carpets and into the minds of your children. Disney
offers a hand to anybody who ever dreamed that the earth is all of heaven we shall
ever know. To love color, to love style, to know yourself in an element of fantasy, is
to think in the terms forged by Walt Disney. Driving the roads that summer on the
West Coast, I understood the significance of an ideal that had never felt wrong or
tired — it was the Disney aesthetic, a delicate passion ruled by hope, a sense of
necessary invention, and yet a sense of loss always embedded at the root of every
extravagance.
I first saw a Disney film in the Scottish industrial town of Kilmarnock, on a typically
cold and wet day in the 1970s. When foreigners think of Scotland they often think of
beautiful mountains and deep shadowy glens, apple-cheeked girls wearing tartan,
men in kilts drinking whisky and staring bravely into the future. In other words:
They think of “Brigadoon.” But it’s worth remembering that when Arthur Freed,
the well-known producer of musicals at MGM, was scouting locations for that film,
he came back from Scotland disappointed, complaining it didn’t look “Scottish
enough.” So the town of Kilmarnock — despite being the place from where the great
poet Robert Burns published his debut poems, the famous Kilmarnock edition —
was a place where dreams had traditionally come crashing down. The cinema was
half-empty, and I was young enough to need a booster seat, but I’ll never forget it,
the return of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which seemed to me like a vision
of higher possibility.
Never for a second did it appear to me implausible. Never for a moment did it look
unreal or exaggerated or in any way fake. If it was fabricated or designed, then it
appeared so, to me, only in the way life was fabricated or designed: Snow White and
her prince and her little friends were agents in a social-realist drama, a description
of society and moral life that was fundamentally true and based on observed
experience. I knew it was high end. I knew it was dreamy. But it was not impossible,
and it seemed we all had an obligation to live as colorfully as that, if only the gods
and the reality managers would allow it. My love affair with America started when
a lady from old Europe looked in a magic mirror and saw a pretty girl. My entire
sense of work and play, of domestic life and love, was informed by that film, and
stamped American, not because I recognized it from life, but because I wanted to.
I was too young to recognize the look — the German Expressionist aspect of that
film, by way of Gustave Doré — but it seeped into my unconscious and expanded
for all time my wish to transport myself. My father was beside me. He believed in
the innate absurdity of human effort, and the habits of the dwarfs delighted him.
It’s all tangled up now — it always is, and that’s how Disney captures you for life, by
generating tenderness mingled with regret — but the singing of “Heigh-Ho” on the
car journey home will always stay with me as part of the lost essence of my family.
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Most parents have lived with the characters of “The Little Mermaid,” but
to travel into their “world” is to join your child in an enchantment she
never knew could be realized.
Walt Disney spent part of his childhood in Marceline, Mo., a railroad town and
former prairie, 120 miles northeast of Kansas City. Its central street in the early
1900s, when Disney was a child, became a model for an idea of American happiness,
and a version of it, Main Street, U.S.A., is the first thing you come across in
Disneyland Park in California. Before he became king of the irresistible falsehood,
Walt Disney was merely a child, and in his works we might understand what Freud
viewed as the foolishness of American democracy. The Disney view of happiness
— embodied in a perfect street, a cast of animals, a fairy-tale castle, a bunch of
rides — might be foolish but it is also attuned to the habits of modern yearning.
Freud was for bringing illusions to an end, whereas Walt Disney was for bringing
them to fruition, and, in those two views of human progress, we might argue that
Disney’s was the more forgiving of the human condition. In the world of Disney, we
feel homesick for a home that never really existed, yet everything we care about,
whether being loved or feeling right or having fun or looking good, stems from a set
of narcissistic compulsions that Disney embraced and built to graphic completion.
That is his contribution, and, however foolish, however impossible in the end, it
gives life to the notion that happiness is a creation, something made rather than
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inherited, a beautiful, necessary lie. A poet once said, “There are plenty of ruined
buildings in the world but no ruined stones.” But who can live in a world of stones?
One might argue, along with Walt Disney, that the reality we love is the reality we
bought into.
I brought my daughter, Nell, and her aunt Sophia. In the British way, Sophia isn’t
really her aunt, but she’s helped bring Nell up, and is family. I was thinking as the
plane took off about modern Disney’s design for living and how expensive it is. If you
ask a young Russian or an Iranian who love America why they love it, they believe it
is a happiness mall. They believe you can pay your way to being anything you fancy
and that it represents a kind of genius, possessed and managed by corporations.
They speak of Apple and Disney, Coke or Ralph Lauren, all the entertainment,
technology and fashion companies, as if they harvest the atoms of well-being and
sell them to the world, and this, to young non-Americans directed by such dreams,
is the meaning of freedom today. Especially Disney, because Disney usually comes
with a song and a doll your child can take to bed. My daughter was excited for
Disneyland, she said, because it was like going on a magic journey. She asked if the
shops would be open all day and all night and whether the food was free. “Nothing
is free, darling,” I said, “but it is free to you and that’s why it’s a treat. We’re going
to have a wonderful time.”
I think the gods of reality like revenge. They were watching us. Flying over the
Atlantic, I woke up shivering and with swollen sinuses and a feeling of a coming
flu like a gathering storm, a tempest in my happiness firmament, and I perceived
from that moment a kind of Miltonic rebellion rising inside my head. A writer,
you might say, is someone with an acute interest in oppositions, and our journey
toward Disneyland was by necessity going to involve a certain conjuring with
misery. My body did it by itself. And by the time we were standing at reception in
Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa, I was sneezy, I was dozy, I was happy but
suffering a private existential crisis about what happiness meant. The hotel, to me,
is a mountain chalet as imagined by Lewis Carroll and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
It is a riot of wooden balconies and iron flowers, which they say are inspired by
the California Arts & Crafts movement. Disney music, that endless, tinkling sound
of make-believe and mend, was playing through the universe — or was it just the
street? — and I lay on the Disney bed and felt simply awful. And it felt like a crime.
It felt like a crime against fantasy and against good times. We’d traveled all our
lives to this spot of loveliness, and now I was roiling on the pillows and asking for
the company doctor? As it happened, there wasn’t one, and I was put through to a
medical call center somewhere in Anaheim. Let me just say that a part of me will
forever be lying bravely on that bed in Disneyland, with grinding bones and head of
fire, while the music from “The Lion King” mocks me from the window.
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Nell came back that evening levitating with gladness. It was as if she’d met the
world as it really should be, and it was bliss to see her so full of faith. Walt Disney
wanted to build a place that would stand against the horrors of the known world,
where rockets were Golden Zephyrs, not nuclear weapons, where trains could be
any color of the rainbow, made for the transport of children, not prisoners. And
where every fear came wrapped in a yelp of sheer delight. With Disneyland, Walt
Disney felt he was giving America a better version of itself: “The idea of Disneyland
is a simple one,” he wrote in a prospectus for the park. “It will be a place for people
to find happiness and knowledge. It will be a place for parents and children to share
pleasant times in one another’s company; a place for teacher and pupils to discover
greater ways of understanding and education. Here the older generation can
recapture the nostalgia of days gone by, and the younger generation can savor the
challenge of the future.” The press opening, on July 17, 1955, was a fiasco — there
was no drinking water, many of the attractions closed early and the TV broadcast
was wild and amateur — and one might argue that the design and the idea of
Disneyland has a fear of disaster embedded in it. Happiness, after all, is like that. We
can hardly live with happiness for the fear of it suddenly ending. In the days after I
left Disneyland, I walked through Los Feliz looking, as it were, for the footprints of
Walt Disney, the man. Some have said he was a person with demons, and perhaps
creating his own small world was a kind of compensation. In any case, what he
created was a new way of thinking about life and dreaming, a kind of American
Eden linked from his day to ours by an unfailing investment of common belief and a
love of invention and dollars.
He found a key in memory, and built, in Disneyland, a resort that both creates
memories and indulges them. By going there as adults, we are visiting a part of
our belief system that experience has failed to dull, and, for our children, we are
creating a memory with the hope that the same thing will happen for them. Mr.
Disney had a genius for bridging the gap between childhood and adult longing and
he made a universal out of that, as well as a brand. Of the thousands of reviews
left on TripAdvisor, one sums this up for me. It’s from a woman called Kathryn in
New Zealand, left on May 31, 2015, with the headline: “I felt like the best parent in
the world”: “My husband and I grew up watching Disney every Sunday night. For
us, going to Disneyland had always been a dream…. We always knew we wanted
to take our children there, and we got the opportunity last Christmas. When we
walked in, I felt like crying with happiness, and over the three days we visited, that
feeling never went away.”
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If the real world is in some ways a daunting prospect for most children,
then It’s a Small World exists at their level. Created for the 1964 World’s
Fair, the boat ride takes passengers past singing dolls representing
youngsters of many nationalities, all apparently within reach.
Nell came into our hotel room with a rasping love of the place that got me up from
my philosophical sickbed. We went into the Disney California Adventure Park and
found ourselves in a colored clamshell, entering the Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea
Adventure, a ride in the Paradise Pier section. Lights and cold air gave us the illusion
of floating underwater, and Nell looked up at me to see if I was believing. “This is
awesome,” I said.
“A bit awesome,” she said.
“You mean, ‘not really’?”
“I dunno. I like her face,” she said. By this point in the ride Ariel was singing “Part
of Your World” and every fiber in my sick being was saying “Yes. Yes, we are.”
“I think Daddy likes it more than me,” Nell said.
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Reader, I am not beyond shame. But I was so happy I wanted to cry. I suddenly
needed to live in this lagoon with all these fake bubbles. Nell is one of life’s natural
stylists. She might only be 11 but she knows what’s what. When we stood in front
of a giant painted billboard near Mickey’s Fun Wheel, and Sophia went to take a
picture, Nell started doing the Charleston and I felt that the best spirit of all the best
girls resided in my daughter. She ate a corn dog and we ate popcorn and bad food
never tasted so good.
My daughter responded immediately to the idea of America as a built environment
and of Americans as built too, by themselves. I think we all do. I took Nell to
Paradise Pier in the hope she’d feel like Dorothy in the land of Oz, and she did,
seeming entitled to her own large sense of belonging in a place that she’d dreamt
of. And that place, Disneyland, is then a part of parental self-creation: In America, in
Disneyland, you’re all the father or mother you can imagine yourself to be, creating
— along with the Imagineers — a place for childhood that is larger and purer than
you remember it being the first time round. So that is an evening we will always
remember, the evening we looked up and imagined the sky too must be Disney.
“Less is a bore,” said the American architect and writer Robert Venturi. And
the year I was born he was tracing maps of desire onto parking lots and the Las
Vegas Strip. During my time in Disneyland I thought about him a lot and believed
his thinking was slightly like that of most 11-year-olds today, who live in a world
of super graphics and aesthetics linked to shopping. On day two, Nell and I had
our only argument of the trip about her constant wish to be in the Disney shop.
Absurdly, I tried to argue that we didn’t come all this way to buy rubbish. But of
course we did. Floating over the emptiness of the parks in the minutes before they
opened each morning was the pall of prepurchase. “I really want some ears,” said
Nell, “like really, really. It would just be weird not to have them.” And not being
weird is what Disneyland is all about, in a weird sort of way. The idea of buildings
being symbols of what they are — of a concession stand shaped like a hot dog, a
swimming pool that looks like a wave — is not only accessible to children but makes
perfect sense to them. To be a child is to look at the horizon and see your desires.
When Nell wanted an ice cream she simply looked for the building that looked that
way. Life should be like this, she seemed to say — legible, self-representational,
literal and witty. The world on her iPod Touch is like that, and her mind looks for
scenographic explanations of what’s going on. Communication has enslaved her
generation to iconography — to symbols, logos and graphics as familiar as family.
And to her and to Robert Venturi, that is always going to feel like freedom. Venturi
tries to argue us out of our adult complacency. “Let us remember,” he writes, “that
throughout the history of architecture and urbanism, iconography has always
dominated the scene, instructing and persuading us with its religious and civic
content in ways no different from today’s vigorous (and despised) commercial
iconography. Let us acknowledge the validity of those signs as a flourishing element
within that vital, generic American scene, as well as within the great tradition of
architecture and urbanism! Let us today transfer the murals from the inside to the
outside of the buildings!”
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As an adult in Disneyland, you’re subconsciously waiting for answers. But mainly
you’re just waiting. The boredom of waiting vies with sudden thrill, in the same
way that happiness always competes with fear. The resort is full of frights and
angular delights, but modern children are hard-core, and the park must cater to
a certain amount of near-horror. Arguably, in the days of warty witches bearing
questionable apples, it used to be more psychological, but today’s screen princesses
are savvier, more materialistic — as are their fans — and one can feel that fashion
virtues outdo ordinary virtues in the kingdom of “Frozen.” Cascading stardust must
seem to be the opposite of spilled blood, but actually each is thrilling in its own way.
There is something non-negotiable in how the children, especially the young girls,
especially my own daughter, see access to princesshood, and beauty generally, as
a power grab and a way to have everything they want and still keep singing. In one
of the shops — I always lose arguments — they offer a “Frozen” makeover service
for girls who want the look. Gary, the storefront operator who looked like an extra
from “Glee,” twirled, curled and generally outgirled the gaggle of tiny females
surrounding him. Nell played it cool — she knows her beauty secrets — but her eyes
widened when he showed her the book of hairstyles. “That one, please,” she said.
“Princess Nell, you will be the belle of all the balls in the universe,” Gary said.
“Just one ball would suffice,” I muttered, under my breath.
“Daddy’s getting a little tired, isn’t he, Princess Nell?”
“He’s always like that.”
“Well, we know all about tired daddies here. You just sit down, Daddy, and we’ll get
on with turning Nell into the princess she has always been.”
It was 35 dollars. And all these girls — complete strangers to what they had — were
primped, braided, gelled, glittered and generally, but equally, made to look like mini-
adult punk girls with no faith in natural beauty. Nell kept making faces at me from
the chair. Even though she couldn’t see it yet, she knew it was rubbish, but it was
“Frozen.” I found it a bit strange seeing all these small girls in a row, learning how
hard one has to work for every grain of enchantment. When Gary and the girls had
done with Nell, they all stood back, ready to spin the chair to the mirror. “Are you
ready, Princess?” he asked. And as one, the staff shouted, “Let it go!”
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Walt Disney wanted to build a place where trains could be any color of the rainbow. Big Thunder Mountain
Railroad’s roller coaster speeds in and out of canyons, waterfalls and tunnels in an area that spans nearly
200 feet.
“Cool, thank you,” she said, very politely, inspecting her new postapocalyptic
hairdo. “Can we go to Autopia now? I’m really desperate to drive.” It must be one
of the secrets of Disney that so many of their stories problematize childhood, as
opposed to celebrating it. Very few of the kids in Disney are just getting on with
being young. They are often ersatz children, like the Seven Dwarfs, or ageless
children who never grew up, like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, or children who
are made of wood, like Pinocchio, or children’s favorite stand-in, animals. And the
stylistics of Disneyland depend on the idea, not that childhood is an awfully great
adventure, but that adulthood is, especially American adulthood, with its cars,
its fantastic journeys, its fearful secrets and its love of prospecting for gold and
spending it. We went on the cars a few times, just so Nell could feel like a person in
control of her environment. She’d torn the princess hairdo out by now, and was free-
wheelin’ in some California of the mind, like a mini Joan Didion.
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Since Disney took over Marvel and Pixar, it has reinvigorated itself as the world’s
chief purveyor of happiness narratives. But has it changed human nature? Can
a $49 billion conglomerate still keep its flair for opening up hearts and minds? I
mean, if Disneyland is an alternative world, a better world than actuality allows,
how can it be preserved as such, without Real World Problems climbing over the
fence? My days in Disneyland helped cure my sickness, not because of any profound
(or even basic) medical provision, but because it reminded me that the bloods of
happiness are thicker than the waters of discontent. But when we got to Autopia, I
saw that children can be what Saul Bellow called “reality instructors,” perpetually
animating the world around them with harsh self-interest. Nell’s a mean driver,
and the boy in front was nervous and slow, and he kept stopping. I wanted to
bump him — I’m even meaner than she — but she got through it by turning him
into a figure of derision. You can give people sunshine, you can give them Mickey
wristbands linked to their parents’ credit cards, as they do at Disney World, but in
the end you can’t stop them wishing to drive off the tracks and smash their way
into an individual fantasy of their own. Disneyland, a bit like the garden in Milton’s
“Paradise Lost,” is a place with no need for a police force, because sin doesn’t exist
and can barely even be imagined. But for the sociopathic among us, the greatest
happiness of the greatest number will always find itself challenged by a basic wish
to drive your car off the rails and go harum-scarum into the sunset. We didn’t want
to hurt anybody, but we did want to assert our own sense of chaos amid the uniform
gladness. I might be a bad parent, but I applaud my daughter for that, for not being
a happiness machine.
Enchantment is a melting pot, but we remain ourselves in the end. Disneyland is
only a democracy for those who can afford to get in, and, even then, your spending
power will continue to put pressure on your sense of freedom. As we swept round
on the Golden Zephyr, I felt we were part of a simple factor of joy and on the
Grizzly River Run we held on to each other as if meeting the thrill together was
an unforgettable thing. In the Enchanted Tiki Room, when the mechanical birds
opened up and sang to us, I felt much more than myself, much more than the
emperor of ice cream and a lovely girl’s daddy: I felt transported into her realm of
astonishment as her eyes blazed with wonder. How lucky to be there. How amazing
to live in a world where Disney can do that and we can pay. There are alleged
to have been departmental stand-offs and a great variety of difficulties over the
modernizing of Disney’s resorts, and we won’t be going into them here, but it seems
to me that the main achievement of the MagicBand, the wristband that allows
customers to enter their hotel rooms, enter the parks and gain meals, is that it adds
to the heavenly unreality of the place. You feel you’re not paying. In paradise, there
is no need for money and no need for admonishment; one simply floats on an air of
entitlement, and hopes that human nature and human insufficiency won’t intrude.
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The greatest ride in Disneyland, as you might see, is the ride through one’s own
ambivalence. And that is how it should be. Disneyland is a beautiful attempt at the
impossible, and the impossible is not always beautiful. I hadn’t stopped coughing
by the time we made it to the first parade through Disneyland’s main thoroughfare,
but I’d stopped complaining about it, and at Nell’s instigation I was beginning to
see in Disney colors. The fireworks were part of it, the pink castle another, and
the parade floats, full of waving and dancing characters, came to seem the most
natural way to end a day of sweet experiences. “She looked at me,” Nell said of
the lady passing in the shape of a dancer from “Aladdin.” “He pointed at me,”
she said of one of the chimney sweeps on the “Mary Poppins” float, and I believed
her. In Disneyland, every child feels chosen, and why wouldn’t you empty your
bank account to see that happen, when the child is yours? Show-business values
abounded, and only a curmudgeon, or a writer, would choose to question the
authenticity of the performers’ smiles or ask how much they are being paid. Night
came on in a blaze of trumpets, and I simply didn’t care anymore. I had joined the
merry band, and fell into the happy void of my daughter’s capacity for wonder, as F.
Scott Fitzgerald understood it.
The structures of sentiment are nowhere better displayed. Disneyland is still in
essence a 20th-century domain of imminent perfection. I feel that many a father
before me, in his private self, hoped that, when the bomb comes, he would be in
the teacups with his daughter, gently turning, turning gently, while believing that
those odd streaks across the sky are merely the fireworks that nightly light up the
windows of Main Street. “Let’s go and find Mickey Mouse,” Nell said. And in that
moment the sky was ours and the evening too.
“Where will we find him, darling?”
And she smiled at me. “In his house, of course.”
A version of this article appears in print on July 19, 2015, on Page 76 of T Magazine with the headline: The
Happiness Project.
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Credits
The College Board acknowledges all the third-party content that has been
included in these materials and respects the Intellectual Property rights of
others. If we have incorrectly attributed a source or overlooked a publisher,
please contact us.
Page 5: Excerpt(s) from THE BOOK OF JOY: LASTING HAPPINESS IN A
CHANGING WORLD by Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, edited by Douglas
Carlton Abrams, copyright © 2016 by The Dalai Lama Trust, Desmond Tutu,
and Douglas Abrams. Used by permission of Avery, an imprint of Penguin
Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights
reserved.
Page 12: “On Virtue and Happiness,” from Utilitarianism by John Stuart Mill.
Public domain.
Page 16: Used with permission.
Page 22: Copyright © 2012, American Psychological Association
Page 41: “The Story of an Hour,” by Kate Chopin. Public domain.
Page 43: From T Magazine. © 2015 The New York Times Company. All rights
reserved. Used under license. Photo Credit: Daniel Stier
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