Valley PR Blog

Do you know what makes you happy?

By Linda VandeVrede on August 6th, 2010 In Weekend Reading

There’s a professor at Northeastern University, Alan Mislove, who has been conducting studies on the information in twitter and what it reveals about happiness across users. So according to his research, the happiest people are in states like California and Florida. Arizona wasn’t mentioned. 

He admits that the methodology is not completely accurate, because it only looks at occurrences of terms such as ”unhappy” or “happy” - and it can’t really interpret them in context. So a phrase like “I am not happy” would be incorrectly interpreted as “happy.” 

Twitter, therefore, is an unexpected research tool into people’s attitudes, so that implies some possibilities for PR people to discern quickly what the general opinion of an issue is, as they prepare their research for issues or product launches.

If you think you know what makes you happy, think again, and read Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. The big take away is that when people make predictions about their reactions to future events, “they tend to neglect the fact that their brains have performed the filling in trick as an integral part of the active imagination.” He gives the example of being invited to attend a party.  Even though you don’t want to attend with your spouse, you go, and surprisingly, end up having a wonderful time.

“Why? Because the party involved cheap beer and hula hoops, rather than classical music and seaweed crackers. It was precisely our style, and we liked what we predicted we’d hate because our prediction was based on a detailed image that reflected our brain’s best guess, which was in this case, dead wrong. The point here is that when we imagine the future, we often do so in the blind spot of our mind’s eye, and this tendency can cause us to misimagine the future events whose emotional consequences we are attempting to weigh.”

The book was a game changer for me. Keep this research in mind next time you are trying to predict a future action or event and whether or not it will make you happy — no matter how intuitive you are, you could be dead wrong.

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