Circumstances influence happiness as much as personality

ITHACA, N.Y. – Cornell University psychology researchers have found that happiness does not depend as much on personality as many surveys suggest. In fact, objective circumstances and behaviors, such as wealth and health, influence happiness as much as subjective psychological traits, like how outgoing someone is.

Their analysis shows that happiness and satisfaction surveys overstate the importance of psychological traits because they are measured similarly, asking respondents to rate themselves using scales or multiple-choice questions, sometimes the same questions.

But a methodological change – simply asking someone how they’re doing – enables a fairer comparison. In written responses to such an open-ended question in one large study, personality’s huge advantage relative to circumstances and behaviors disappeared.

“If we look at the research, it suggests that people are just happier because they have a happy personality,” said William Hobbs, assistant professor of psychology and government. “Our study suggests that’s not the case, that there are many drivers of happiness. For some it has to do with personality, for others it has to do with saving money, exercising or spending time with family and friends.”

Hobbs is the lead author of “For Living Well, Behaviors and Circumstances Matter Just as Much as Psychological Traits,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Anthony Ong, professor of psychology in the College of Human Ecology and professor of gerontology in medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, is a co-author.

Their findings could inform happiness research as well as policies that increasingly are asked to demonstrate happiness benefits. They suggest that policies targeting circumstances and behaviors – for example, trying to reduce inequality or smoking – may be more valuable than interventions focused on psychology, which would be difficult to change on a large scale.

To test whether open-ended questions better capture circumstances’ influence on happiness, the researchers tapped the only nationally representative longitudinal study that has systematically included an open-ended question about well-being. From 2004 to 2016, the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study asked, “What do you do to make life go well?”

Hobbs and Ong scored more than 1,000 responses using a large language model to assess whether they reflected thriving, struggling or suffering, a scale used in Gallup surveys. Analyzing answers to the open-ended question, the researchers found that all the measures of circumstances and psychological traits were correlated roughly equally with how happy people said they were.

“If we don’t use self-ratings and closed-ended questions to study happiness, then things like health and money and to some extent social connectedness are just as strongly associated with happiness as personality,” Hobbs said. “If we correct for this methodological problem, then they look about the same.”

Closed-ended questions remain an essential tool for researchers to systematically track life’s ups and downs and compare results. But Hobbs and Ong said the open-ended approach they evaluated “appears to be a uniquely promising addition to the well-being and wellness studies repertoire … [and] provides a view of well-being from the perspective of survey respondents.”

Hobbs said advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence now make it possible to ask people if they are happy in different ways, while still having replicable ways of scoring responses. Language models could introduce new biases, he said, but still be more independent and enable fairer comparisons between personality and circumstances than existing measures.

“Perhaps the best way to see whether someone is doing well,” the researchers concluded, “is to ask them.” 

For additional information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.

Cornell University has dedicated television and audio studios available for media interviews.

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