Publications
Publications
- 26 Feb 2015 - 28 Feb 2015
Is That All There Is to Happiness?
By: J. Phillips, C. Mott, Julian De Freitas, J. Gruber and J. Knobe
Abstract
Happiness researchers have started to converge on a conception of
happiness that involves some combination of high positive affect,
low negative affect, and high life satisfaction. We present three
studies which demonstrate that the ordinary understanding of
happiness diverges from this scientific definition: participants judge
that agents who live immoral lives aren’t fully happy even when
they fully satisfy the scientific definition. Study 1 demonstrates this
effect in mturkers, academic psychologists, and even happiness
researchers themselves. Study 2 investigates whether participants
were simply unwilling to attribute positive traits to immoral agents.
We successfully manipulated participants’ opinions of how good
happiness actually is (through exposure to scientific research), but
found that this did not moderate the effect. Study 3 illustrates that
the effect is also highly specific: morality does not influence
judgments of the agent’s general affect (as measured by a facial
morphing paradigm) but does shape judgments of happiness.
Keywords
Citation
Phillips, J., C. Mott, Julian De Freitas, J. Gruber, and J. Knobe. "Is That All There Is to Happiness?" Paper presented at the 16th Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Meeting, Long Beach, CA, United States, February 26–28, 2015.