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How To Buy Happiness
Elizabeth Corcoran, Forbes
Bad news for the luxury goods market: Spending money on tchochkes doesn’t make you happier, but giving money away just might.
That conclusion, in a study published Thursday in the journal Science, flies in the face of what most people–and, certainly, advertisers–typically believe.
It’s far easier to measure income than happiness. Even so, researchers around the world have reported that even though real income has surged around the globe, reported “happiness” levels have stayed relatively flat. That spurred Elizabeth W. Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to explore the ways that more money might lead to more happiness.
(20 March 2008)
Related at at the Guardian: The path to happiness: it is better to give than receive:
Professor Stephen Joseph, of the University of Nottingham – an expert in the psychology of happiness who was not involved in the study – said: “Most of the research in the past has said money isn’t that important in terms of happiness. The things that are important are things to do with relationships, with other people, and things that help to promote meaning, the purpose in life. I think that’s what this study speaks to.”
Although the clear implication of the study is that altruistic spending will make you happier, Joseph said it would be wrong to use the research to formulate advice. “Being prescriptive about how people spend their money, even if it is for seemingly worthwhile causes, is a very dangerous path to go down. Research like this describes society – it doesn’t tell us what society ought to be.”
Professor Ruut Veenhoven, of Erasmus University in Rotterdam, said the study showed that the economic view of human motivation was incorrect. “This may come as a surprise for economists who have learned that humans are essentially egoists,” he said. So why don’t people give more money away to make themselves even happier? “Often people don’t know what really makes them happy,” he said. “Doing nice things to other people isn’t so bad after all.”
New horizon: what we can expect as nature changes
John Vidal, Guardian
· Forecast identifies threats and opportunities
· Rising demands putting pressure on habitats
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Artificial life forms, robots that mimic natural processes, and even people who spend all day in front of the computer and rarely experience the real outdoors, may all fundamentally affect the quality of nature in Britain over the next 45 years.
According to 35 environmental scientists, drawn from the government as well as colleges and charities, a host of new threats and opportunities for UK biodiversity is gathering pace as technologies develop, social habits alter and the possibility of large-scale responses to phenomena like climate change grows.
The scientists have drawn up a list of 25 factors, including the rising demand for food and biofuels, thought to be having an immediate effect. These, say the scientists, are already putting worse pressure on the habitats of birds and mammals.
Others factors, such as sea-level rise, extra fire risk and extreme weather events, are looming with climate change.
But many more challenges, identified in the “horizon-scanning” report, come from what now appears science fiction. Environmental manipulation could be a quick-fix way to mitigate climate change, scientists say.
(20 March 2008)
The United States of TMI [Too Much Information]
Scott Berinato, CSO Online
Lead paint in toys. Brain-eating amoeba. Identity theft. Drowning in sand. We know more than ever about the risks all around us. Do we know what disclosing them all is doing to us?
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… Here’s the paradox that rises from all of this: As an individual and consumer, I like disclosure. I want every corporate and civic entity I place trust in to be accountable. I want journalists and scientists to unearth the risks I’m not being told about. At the same time, while any one disclosure of a threat may be tolerable, or even desirable, the cumulative effect of so much disclosure is, frankly, freaking me out.
So I started to wonder, at what point does information become too much information? Is more disclosure better, or is it just making us confused and anxious? Does it enable us to make better decisions, or does it paralyze us? What do the constant reminders of the ways we’re in danger do to our physical and mental health?
… Psychologists call this behavior “learned helplessness”–convincing ourselves that we have no control over a situation even when we do. The experiments arose from research on depression, and the concept has also been applied with regards to torture. It also applies to risk perception. Think of the risks we learn about every day as little shocks. If we’re not given levers that reliably let us escape those shocks (in the form of putting the risk in perspective or giving people information or tools to offset the risk, or in the best case, a way to simply opt out of the risk), then we become Dog C. We learn, as Fischoff said, that the world is out of control. More specifically, it is out of our control. What’s more, sociologists believe that the learned helplessness concept transfers to social action. It not only explains how individuals react to risk, but also how groups do.
… Control is the thing, both Fischoff and Slovic say. It’s the countervailing force to all of this risk disclosure and the learned helplessness it fosters.
We have many ways of creating a sense of control. One is lying to ourselves. “We’re pretty good at explaining risks away,” says Slovic. “We throw up illusory barriers in our mind. For example, I live in Oregon. Suppose there’s a disease outbreak in British Columbia. That’s close to me, but I can tell myself, ’that’s not too close’ or ’that’s another country.’ We find ways to create control, even if it’s imagined.” And the more control–real and imagined–that we can manufacture, Slovic says, the more we downplay the chances a risk will affect us.
Conversely, when we can’t create a sense of control over a risk, we exaggerate the chances that it’ll get us. For example, in a column (near the bottom), Brookings scholar Gregg Easterbrook mentions that parents have been taking kids off of school buses and driving them to school instead. Part of this is due to the fact that buses don’t have seat belts, which seems unsafe. Also, bus accidents provoke sensational, prurient interest; they make the news far more often than car accidents, making them seem more common than they are.
Yet, buses are actually the safest form of passenger transportation on the road. In fact, children are 8 times less likely to die on a bus than they are in a car, according to research by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). That means parents put their kids at more risk by driving them to school rather than letting them take the bus.
Faced with those statistics, why would parents still willingly choose to drive their kids to school? Because they’re stupid? Absolutely not. It’s because they’re human. They dread the idea of something out of their control, a bus accident. Meanwhile, they tend to think they themselves won’t get in a car accident; they’re driving.
(1 February 2008)
Long essay. CSO Magazine is “the Resource for Security Executives.” CSO stands for Chief Security Officer
Contributor Wag the Dog writes:
There’s no mention of energy security nor of cliamte change risks. However the psychologoical perspective on risk disclosure is instructive and should be a consideration when educating the wider public on peak oil and sustainability issues.
