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Publications
  • 26 Feb 2015 - 28 Feb 2015
  • Conference Presentation

Is That All There Is to Happiness?

By: J. Phillips, C. Mott, Julian De Freitas, J. Gruber and J. Knobe
  • Format:Print
  • | Language:English
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Abstract

Happiness researchers have started to converge on a conception of happiness that involves some combination of high positive affect, low negative affect, and high life satisfaction. We present three studies which demonstrate that the ordinary understanding of happiness diverges from this scientific definition: participants judge that agents who live immoral lives aren’t fully happy even when they fully satisfy the scientific definition. Study 1 demonstrates this effect in mturkers, academic psychologists, and even happiness researchers themselves. Study 2 investigates whether participants were simply unwilling to attribute positive traits to immoral agents. We successfully manipulated participants’ opinions of how good happiness actually is (through exposure to scientific research), but found that this did not moderate the effect. Study 3 illustrates that the effect is also highly specific: morality does not influence judgments of the agent’s general affect (as measured by a facial morphing paradigm) but does shape judgments of happiness.

Keywords

Moral Sensibility; Happiness; Personal Characteristics

Citation

Phillips, J., C. Mott, Julian De Freitas, J. Gruber, and J. Knobe. "Is That All There Is to Happiness?" Paper presented at the 16th Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Meeting, Long Beach, CA, United States, February 26–28, 2015.

About The Author

Julian De Freitas

Marketing
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