Happiness in the Age of Comparison

Humans are social animals. Being with other people can make us happy, but it can also make us unhappy, depending on how we interact and think of each other. So do others make us happier, or less happy? Chicago Booth’s Thomas Talhelm has conducted research on how different cultures think about happiness. His findings about rice-growing communities in China shed light on the behavior of social-media users in the West, and raise the question of what we are really measuring when we try to measure people’s happiness.