What Happy People Do Not Do

By RONI CARYN RABIN
Pub­lished: Novem­ber 19, 2008
NYTIMES

Although peo­ple who describe them­selves as happy enjoy watch­ing tele­vi­sion, it turns out to be the sin­gle activ­ity they engage in less often than unhappy peo­ple, said John Robin­son, a pro­fes­sor of soci­ol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land and the author of the study, which appeared in the jour­nal Social Indi­ca­tors Research.

While most large stud­ies on hap­pi­ness have focused on the demo­graphic char­ac­ter­is­tics of happy peo­ple — fac­tors like age and mar­i­tal sta­tus — Dr. Robin­son and his col­leagues tried to iden­tify what activ­i­ties happy peo­ple engage in. The study relied pri­mar­ily on the responses of 45,000 Amer­i­cans col­lected over 35 years by the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago’s Gen­eral Social Sur­vey, and on pub­lished “time diary” stud­ies record­ing the daily activ­i­ties of par­tic­i­pants.

“We looked at 8 to 10 activ­i­ties that happy peo­ple engage in, and for each one, the peo­ple who did the activ­i­ties more — vis­it­ing oth­ers, going to church, all those things — were more happy,” Dr. Robin­son said. “TV was the one activ­ity that showed a neg­a­tive rela­tion­ship. Unhappy peo­ple did it more, and happy peo­ple did it less.”

But the researchers could not tell whether unhappy peo­ple watch more tele­vi­sion or whether being glued to the set is what makes peo­ple unhappy. “I don’t know that turn­ing off the TV will make you more happy,” Dr. Robin­son said.

Still, he said, the data show that peo­ple who spend the most time watch­ing tele­vi­sion are least happy in the long run.

Since the major pre­dic­tor of how much time is spent watch­ing tele­vi­sion is whether some­one works or not, Dr. Robin­son added, it’s pos­si­ble that ris­ing unem­ploy­ment will lead to more TV time.