Cornell University of the United States studied happiness among silver and bronze medalists in the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. Using TV relay broadcasts, the researchers measured the happiness of individual medalists on a scale of one to 10 when their final scores were announced. The average happiness index of a silver medalist was 4.8, while that of a bronze medalist was 7.1. This means third-place finishers were happier than runners-up. At the award ceremony, the happiness index of the bronze winner was 5.7 as opposed to 4.3 for the silver medalist. What explains this?

The answer lies in different standards. While a silver medalist aims for the gold, a bronze medalist has no such pressure. He or she tends to feel grateful and joy over getting a medal. Satisfaction based on achievement is relative, and can be called the relativity principle of happiness. Our ancestors seem familiar with this notion, with a saying that goes, “A person should know one’s place. Living not in accordance with one’s means only sows the seed of unhappiness.”

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I can totally empathize with being less satistfied at winning 2nd place than 3rd, 4th, or even 5th.  Almost succeeding at something sometimes feels, in my opinion, worse than obvious failure.

If I know I have a slim chance of succeeding at something, I can allow myself to relax and enjoy the experience, feeling pleasantly surprised at any resulting success.   I find myself far less able to appreciate a competition for its own sake when I can see perfection lying just beyond my grasp.  Then I can’t help but think, “If only I had done this, that, or the other, I could have come out on top at the end of all this.”  I try not to fall into this negative thought pattern, but it is difficult to avoid.

-MJ

[…] It is time for politicians to start focusing on the politics of wellbeing rather than the politics of wealth, one of the world’s leading psychologists told an audience in Auckland last night (April 22).Professor Martin Seligman, the pioneer of positive psychology, told an audience of 150 people attending a lecture at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, sponsored by Human Resource consultancy the Foresight Institute, that creating wealth was no longer enough.

Despite countries such as New Zealand, Australia and the United States being wealthier than ever before, they were all experiencing epidemics of depression, he said. New Zealand scored particularly badly in world rankings of wellbeing, usually placed at around 22 or 23, compared with Australia, which was usually placed around 8.

“Why is there so much pessimism and depression and lack of wellbeing?” he asked. “Given the prosperity of your nation, and given what’s happened in the past century, why is there so much depression? Depression is probably 20 times more common than it was 50 years ago.

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The Gallup World Poll asks an amazing battery of questions about the subjectively-experienced lives of people across the globe, and hence offers an unparalleled opportunity to contrast the subjectively-experienced lives of those in rich and poor countries.

This chart is my personal favorite, showing the proportion of people in each country who report having smiled or laughed a lot the previous day. Higher levels of economic development are clearly associated with more smiles and laughter. But equally, there are a lot of exceptions to this rule, and plenty of puzzles.

Laotians are more likely to smile than anyone else, and the Irish appear to have earned their national reputation as jolly japesters. My own country, Australia, comes in as the 29th of the 131 countries in the Smile Stakes, while the U.S. is a disappointing 45th.

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