Happiness & Television

Relevant, straightforward research is what I like. Because of that I've been meaning to post this for awhile, but I haven't had time to give this study the attention it deserved, until now.

But first I want to give you a brief background of the events leading up to this post. What Happy People Don't Do (11/19/08) piqued my interest while browing the NYTimes website, but if you look at the article, there isn't a lot of identifying information about the original study, if, for example, one wanted to find it and analyze it for oneself. I tried to email the columnist, but of course, she has no email. I tried to email NYT and got no response. So. Helpful.

Then I came across this random article Happy People Watch Less TV (11/24/08) on a site where the leading stories are "Britney's Ex in Jail" and "Katie Holmes Declares That She Wears The Pants". Unexpected!

FINALLY, I found the original article here, just waiting to be downloaded. I'm not even sure how that happened. I might have blacked out.

Anyway, the point is that it's found! And I read it and it's interesting. Both the NYT article and the other one gloss over the results, but the conclusions by researchers John Robinson and Steven Martin are more poignant.

Firstly, the methods are pretty fascinating. They looked at the data from the General Social Survey or GSS conducted in 1975 and 1985, which surveyed more than 45,000 people. However, researchers used two different kinds of methods to obtain information about people's happiness during daily activities. Some people recorded their relative happiness for each activity the following day, while others recorded their happiness throughout the day in a diary. It may not seem like much of a difference, but there is a lot of evidence showing that as we get farther away from our experiences, our constructed memories of events can alter/be altered by our remembered feelings. For a more thorough explanation, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert is a good read.

After analyzing the results from two major studies, Robinson and Martin found that people who reported being "very happy" engaged in significantly more social activities, religious participation and newspaper reading.

"The major exception," they explain, "was for TV viewing." It was the only activity to correlate significantly lower with happiness, and actually could be seen as a predictor of general unhappiness.

The study couldn't affirmatively comment on causation, but it does offer two possible interpretations:

1. TV watching causes unhappiness: TV viewing is enjoyable enough, but it ultimately fills time that could be spent doing more productive activities--things that could increase long term happiness.
   
2. Unhappiness causes TV watching: "TV is not judgmental nor difficult, so people with few social skills or resources for other activities can engage in it." People who don't participate in many social activities or go to church or read the newspaper (random?) are more likely to be unhappy and watch TV to fill their time.

So really, it's a chicken and egg situation. Are we watching TV because we're unhappy, or is TV making us that way?

Robinson and Martin suggest that more specific studies look at TV viewing to answer the question. Personally, I'm not sure that there is going to be one answer. There are many different motivations for watching TV, which can change day to day as well.

If nothing else, it seems important to think about why we're watching TV. Is our favorite show on? Are we doing it because we're bored? Is it for a class?

Maybe just the simple act of evaluating our decision to turn on the TV can eliminate needless consumption and we can find more productive activities to occupy our time.