Nailing our happiness colours to the wall

BELLA COUNIHAN

Happiness. Love. For most of us these are all lovely notions, floating in balloons of abstraction in the stratosphere; limited to art more than science. Measuring these thing looks like too hard basket material. But more and more that's exactly what we try to do. We want to know who is happier? When are we happier?
Just when this is about to give us a headache, social media comes once again to save the day. The USNational Happiness Index, landed on the shores of Facebook, will let us know for certain the peaks and troughs of positivity and could be a new frontier in "happiness science". It analyses anonymously the words used by US users in Facebook status updates and assesses their positivity and negativity, giving us a pretty graph of how the US is feeling on any given day.
The Facebook data team is even using the index to assess who is happier. After Valentine's day, the team analysed questions of love, including whether people in relationships are more likely to be positive. According to Facebook, the result, sadly enough for those lonely hearts, is that those partnered up are generally more happy, and those in a marriage are even happier than those simply "in a relationship". Curiously those in "open relationships" - whatever that means - are the least happy of all, sadder than even those who list themselves as widowed or "it's complicated". If you don't disclose your relationship status at all, then heaven help you
The science of happiness is actually an already established field. In economics and social research there have long been efforts to quantify and qualify our feelings. In Bhutan there is even a Gross National Happiness Movement, a philosophy and policy hybrid where the king and the Bhutanese government keep an eye on a gross national happiness index (as opposed to gross domestic product). The Bhutanese know that to improve national happiness you need to know how to measure it.
To a scientist of happiness, Facebook updates are a wet dream of data with 100 million posted words a day. One can analyse these to find who, where and when and how we are feeling. The creator of the index, Adam Kramer, a social psychology student at the University of Oregon (who happens to be 72 percent happier than the average American Facebook user) explains on his blog; "every day, through Facebook status updates, people share how they feel with those who matter most in their lives. These updates are tiny windows into how people are doing." From this angle it looks like social media could be the brave new frontier of the science of happiness.
But there might be a few problems with using this kind of social networking data to assess "happiness".
First, data sourced from status updates may well overstate positivity. Our Facebook updates, because of their semi-public nature, may prompt us to appear happier than we might otherwise be; a Facebook face to meet the faces that you meet if you will. Apologies to T.S Eliot there. The other issue is that not everyone uses their Facebook updates to actually say how they are feeling at that very moment. Status updates can also simply be links to other things in the news or quotes from somewhere else. A user, also a hip hop fan, may well pick out lyrics and use that as an update. For example Busta Rhymes' lyric: "Break ya f*ckin neck b*tches" as an update is seemingly negative but this could well be our user appreciating the Brooklyn rapper's confrontational style. Anyway, said user may be in enough trouble having committed one of the cardinal sins of Facebook - lyric updating.
Another issue might be categorising words as positive or negative. A few example of words used in the Facebook happiness index were "yay" and "awesome" for the positive indicators and "sad" and "tragic" for negative. But words depend on context not understood by a computer anonymously searching for terms. A word like "tragic", deemed to be an "unhappy" word, could be used in the context of Bill " is a Depeche Mode tragic" - not necessarily a negative thing. Or the word "yay" could easily be used in the context of Bill "has to go to work today. yay." Sarcasm underlies an unhappy day of work for Bill there.
But it is interesting to reflect on why we want to measure happiness in the first place. This index is a part of a wider trend among social researchers, economist and the Bhutanese, to nail our happiness colours to the wall. We want more and more to quantify, qualify, compare and even attribute a dollar value to abstractions like happiness. Why we are happy? When we are happy? Who is the happiest? It might be wise to remember that the analysed life is not always the happiest one.
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