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.

The Science Fictions podcast is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. At worksinprogress.co you can read issue after issue of fascinating articles bursting with ideas on how humans made scientific and technological progress in the past, and how we can keep it going. You can also check out their selection of other podcasts at podcast.worksinprogress.co.

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.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sciencefictionspod.substack.com/subscribe

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