Happiness is contagious

Posted on | January 14, 2011 | No Comments

Happiness is a fundamental part of human existence, like  empathy, altruism, love, hate and fear. Happiness is something that all of us try to reach. The word “happiness” and doing good in general has been used more and more in the past few years in the context of business and marketing. I suggest you read an excellent post by a colleague Dan Goodall on the topic. Building on that thought, Umair Haque argues that

Here’s the score: Striving to do more good is associated with greater profitability, equity and asset returns, and shareholder value creation

For sure profit is where the bottom line is for businesses. But what does doing good or “delivering happiness” actually mean especially from the social perspective?

First you would need to understand what constructs happiness. Social psychologists and sociologists too have taken many different approaches to this. There are two different paradigms that aim at explaining what constructs happiness or well-being: The theories that focus specifically on predicting happiness as the outcome variable and theories that focus on the related constructs of what happiness is made of.

In research, many attributes have been pointed out to correlate with happiness such as social interaction, extraversion, marital status, employment, health, democratic freedom, optimism and so on. I can recommend reading Cultural constructions of happiness: theory and emprical evidence, if you want to learn more. However, no matter what attributes of happiness or which cultural background you take, one thing is clear: Relationships are consistently found to be the most important correlation with human happiness.

What’s most interesting in this is that several studies have pointed out that happiness is actually contagious. A widely cited long-standing study published in the British Medical Journal aimed at evaluating if happiness can spread from person to person and if niches of happiness form within social networks. The study findings summarize:

While there are many determinants of happiness, whether an individual is happy also depends on whether others in the individual’s social network are happy. Happy people tend to be located in the centre of their local social networks and in large clusters of other happy people. The happiness of an individual is associated with the happiness of people up to three degrees removed in the social network. Happiness, in other words, is not merely a function of individual experience or individual choice but is also a property of groups of people.

People’s happiness depends on the happiness of others with whom they are connected. This provides further justification for seeing happiness, as a collective phenomenon. This gives an interesting insight to businesses: Happiness spreads, right, so what should you concentrate on? Making people happy? Sounds pretty obvious, but it’s easier said than done. On the other hand now that the world is more connected through the various networks on the web, there are more opportunities for happiness or unhappiness to spread.

What is key in the earlier mentioned study is that  the researchers reported that happiness spreads more consistently than unhappiness. I suppose you’ve noticed that if you walk into a store where the staff is energetic, smiling and seemingly in a good mood it sticks on you even after you have left the store. This would indicate that you should concentrate on the happy people: they will talk more about their positive experience, they are loyal and even help you in marketing your product.

The unhappy people shouldn’t be forgotten about either though as they are the ones who can be very vocal about their negative experience. Everyone probably has experienced the feeling of doing business with people who are negative or apathetic and how that negativity can get stuck on you and prevent you from seeing the positives.

Which actually brings up another interesting question central to comprehensive positive psychology: Why are some people happier than others? That’ll be worth another blog post in the near future

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