Maybe it’s the most important thing any scientist can study: what makes people happy? The trouble is, despite the importance, a lot of the science on “wellbeing” tends to be very rickety.
But did you know that even one of the best-known findings of wellbeing research—the midlife crisis, or “inverted U shape” of happiness over the lifespan—has been questioned? In this episode we discuss the controversy.
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Show notes
The American Psychologist paper that claimed to reveal the fluid dynamics of human happiness
Nick Brown and Alan Sokal’s devastating rebuttal
And coverage in The Guardian at the time
David Blanchflower’s original work on the inverted U-shape of happiness
And subsequent work that backs it up…
…and subsequent work that does not back it up
New paper that tries to work out why there are differing results
Afghanistan reporting the lowest wellbeing in recorded history
Our previous episode on the weird phenomenon of collider bias
Credits
We’re grateful to Dr. Julia Rohrer of Leipzig University for talking to us for this episode (though as usual, if there are mistakes, they’re ours and not hers). The Science Fictions podcast is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
