The Nonlinear Library EA - Against a Happiness Ceiling: Replicating Killingsworth & Kahneman (2022) by charlieh943
May 29, 2024
10:17
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Against a Happiness Ceiling: Replicating Killingsworth & Kahneman (2022), published by charlieh943 on May 29, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Epistemic Status: somewhat confident: I may have made coding mistakes. R code is here if you feel like checking.
Introduction:
In their 2022 article, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Kahneman looked to reconcile the results from two of their papers. Kahneman (2010) had reported that above a certain income level ($75,000 USD), extra income had no association with increases in individual happiness.
Killingsworth (2021) suggested that it did.
Kahneman and Killingsworth (henceforth KK) claimed they had resolved this conflict. They hypothesized correctly that:
1. There is an unhappy minority, whose unhappiness diminishes with rising income up to a threshold, then shows no further progress
2. In the happier majority, happiness continues to rise with income even in the high range of incomes
1) refers to Kahnemann's leveling off finding; 2) refers to Kllingsworth's continued log-linear finding.
(More info on this discussion can be found in
Spencer Greenberg's thoroughly enjoyable blog post
. Spencer goes into the correlation/causation debate which I don't go into here.)
Here, I reproduce these findings from KK (2022) using a different dataset - the 2012 Health Survey for England. This dataset is smaller (n= 7,179, rather than 33,391), and uses a different collection technique. The NHS's wellbeing variable was collated from 14 individual responses to a self-questionnaire, whilst the KK variable uses experience-sampling: i.e. pinging participants at random points in the day.
KK regard experience sampling as the gold-standard, and whilst the NHS data had around 100,000 data points on wellbeing, the KK data had over 1.7 million experience-sampling reports.
So, you might be thinking: why bother to replicate the paper with worse NHS data? The first answer is a mixture of convenient access through my uni and personal curiosity.
Though, I also think this analysis had some useful insights for others too. The KK paper looked solely at hedonic wellbeing - asking participants, "how do you feel right now?". Whereas, the wellbeing scale here (WEMWBS) looks to capture hedonic and eudaimonic aspects, including questions about immediate emotional experience and life satisfaction. (More about the variable is here.[1]) Given this, taken together with other minor differences - e.g.
surveys versus experience pings; UK adults, rather than US employees -I felt it would be somewhat surprising if the KK findings replicated on the NHS data.
… And, they did.
Summary of Findings
Overall, I found similar results to Killingsworth and Kahnemann (2022) in 4 notable respects:
1. There is a linear relationship between log income and median happiness, although this relationship is small
2. For a large proportion of the population (i.e. at p=50, 70, 85), this log-linear relationship continued above a fairly high income threshold (£50,000 in 2012), and:
3. For a small minority (p=85) the slope of the log-linear graph increased slightly (although not significantly)
4. For a large minority of the population (p = 5, 10, … 35), extra income had no association with increased levels of happiness.
This constitutes a small update towards the KK findings, and thus against the view that there is a 'happiness ceiling' which the happiest in society have already reached.
Results
Before going into the results, I want to clarify two terms here:
1. Relative Leveling Off: the slope of the happiness against (log) income plot decreases after a certain income threshold.
2. Absolute Leveling Off: the slope of the happiness against (log) income plot is indistinguishable from 0 after a certain income threshold.
The 2022 paper uses an income threshold of $100,000. Accounting for historic e...
Epistemic Status: somewhat confident: I may have made coding mistakes. R code is here if you feel like checking.
Introduction:
In their 2022 article, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Kahneman looked to reconcile the results from two of their papers. Kahneman (2010) had reported that above a certain income level ($75,000 USD), extra income had no association with increases in individual happiness.
Killingsworth (2021) suggested that it did.
Kahneman and Killingsworth (henceforth KK) claimed they had resolved this conflict. They hypothesized correctly that:
1. There is an unhappy minority, whose unhappiness diminishes with rising income up to a threshold, then shows no further progress
2. In the happier majority, happiness continues to rise with income even in the high range of incomes
1) refers to Kahnemann's leveling off finding; 2) refers to Kllingsworth's continued log-linear finding.
(More info on this discussion can be found in
Spencer Greenberg's thoroughly enjoyable blog post
. Spencer goes into the correlation/causation debate which I don't go into here.)
Here, I reproduce these findings from KK (2022) using a different dataset - the 2012 Health Survey for England. This dataset is smaller (n= 7,179, rather than 33,391), and uses a different collection technique. The NHS's wellbeing variable was collated from 14 individual responses to a self-questionnaire, whilst the KK variable uses experience-sampling: i.e. pinging participants at random points in the day.
KK regard experience sampling as the gold-standard, and whilst the NHS data had around 100,000 data points on wellbeing, the KK data had over 1.7 million experience-sampling reports.
So, you might be thinking: why bother to replicate the paper with worse NHS data? The first answer is a mixture of convenient access through my uni and personal curiosity.
Though, I also think this analysis had some useful insights for others too. The KK paper looked solely at hedonic wellbeing - asking participants, "how do you feel right now?". Whereas, the wellbeing scale here (WEMWBS) looks to capture hedonic and eudaimonic aspects, including questions about immediate emotional experience and life satisfaction. (More about the variable is here.[1]) Given this, taken together with other minor differences - e.g.
surveys versus experience pings; UK adults, rather than US employees -I felt it would be somewhat surprising if the KK findings replicated on the NHS data.
… And, they did.
Summary of Findings
Overall, I found similar results to Killingsworth and Kahnemann (2022) in 4 notable respects:
1. There is a linear relationship between log income and median happiness, although this relationship is small
2. For a large proportion of the population (i.e. at p=50, 70, 85), this log-linear relationship continued above a fairly high income threshold (£50,000 in 2012), and:
3. For a small minority (p=85) the slope of the log-linear graph increased slightly (although not significantly)
4. For a large minority of the population (p = 5, 10, … 35), extra income had no association with increased levels of happiness.
This constitutes a small update towards the KK findings, and thus against the view that there is a 'happiness ceiling' which the happiest in society have already reached.
Results
Before going into the results, I want to clarify two terms here:
1. Relative Leveling Off: the slope of the happiness against (log) income plot decreases after a certain income threshold.
2. Absolute Leveling Off: the slope of the happiness against (log) income plot is indistinguishable from 0 after a certain income threshold.
The 2022 paper uses an income threshold of $100,000. Accounting for historic e...