The scientific formula of happiness was discovered! and refuted

An article in an important psychology journal cited a quantitative figure for happiness - 2.9013 good events for every bad event. Other researchers studied the incarnation of the number and along the way revealed failures in editing journals in fields other than exact sciences

It is said that the humanities and social sciences envy their friends, the life sciences, for the precision, certainty and lack of doubt with which they can present their findings. After all, the numbers have an aura of credibility, of absolute essence, as if they are data that exists beyond any doubt just by virtue of the way they are presented. Everything can be converted into numbers and expressed using them: the properties of substances, their chemical composition, as expressed in the periodic table, and even fields that are distant from each other such as music on the one hand and the code of life, DNA, on the other. In numbers it is possible to express speeds on scales far apart from each other in an abysmal manner, from the speed of light to the speed of growth of a geological layer. Numbers express absolutely and clearly the price of bread in the supermarket, the state of the world economy, the distance between origin and destination and the time it will take you to travel between them. Although statisticians and economists admit (or brag) that by manipulating numbers they can prove everything and the opposite of everything, but among the general public, numbers have a unique charm: the number gives a sense of certainty, completeness and security. The numbers in the lab results tell if your blood tests are within the normal range or not. There is no third option.

A number, as long as it is not part of an overly complex equation or a multi-data graph, seems impossible to interpret, distort or bias. It poses as a stubborn fact that cannot be ignored. Our confidence in numbers reaches to the point that we take numbers and try to use them to create theories that try to make predictions about chaotic fields. Weather forecasting, for example, is such a complicated matter. Despite the existence of many numerical data such as the strength of the wind, the amount of precipitation and the level of air pollution, it is difficult to predict the weather (remember the last haze storm?) and yet we use the weather forecast again and again. If this is the case with the weather, just think how complicated it must be trying to find a numerical formula for happiness; A formula that will crack human biochemistry and assure us that if we behave in a certain way, with mathematical precision, we will create happiness.

But since there is nothing better than a number to give us happiness, this is what psychologist Barbara Frederickson found (with her writing partner, Marcial Losada, a management consultant from Chile) in an article she published in 2005 in the well-respected psychology journal "American Psychologist". According to Frederickson, happiness is achieved by creating an exact mathematical ratio of 2.9013 good events for every one bad event. It is this attitude that differentiates between happiness and unhappiness. For example, if three bad events happened to you today, eight good events are not enough to balance the negative feeling created by the three bad events. Watch a good movie; Have a relaxing conversation with a friend; Go out to a restaurant; Do some jogging. This way you will reach the desired ratio between good and bad events, nine good events compared to three bad events on the same day: three to one. There is an exact mathematical ratio of 2.9013 to 1 between events that create happiness and events that create unhappiness. If you maintain this attitude, you will make your day - and your life - happy, with your own hands. The answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" It is not 42, as Douglas Adams wrote in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", but 2.9013.

Frederikson and her partner's article, "Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing" (Positive Affect and the Complex Dynamics of Human Flourishing), received hundreds of references in articles and studies and is considered a groundbreaking article that was an important part of the establishment of a new school of thought, "The Psychology of Happiness". Based on the theory formulated and detailed in the article, the federal government authorities in the United States allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for the treatment of soldiers, in the spirit of this "positive psychology".

Nick Brown, a resident of Strasbourg in France, a tall, thin man with a mustache, was already fifty years old and had a long career behind him in training computer professionals. When he enrolled on a course in psychology at the University of East London, Brown was not looking for an alternative career in academia; He was just trying to diversify his life a little. In this course, Brown read the article by Frederickson and Losada. When he read the sources on which the article was based, Brown noticed that this ratio appears in several sources unchanged - 2.9013 good events for every one bad event. It sounded strange to him. His intuition rebelled against this apparent precision. This seemed to him an unreasonable level of precision when it comes to human psychology. Psychology shouldn't be that precise, Brown felt. In the human systems of consciousness and emotion it is difficult to find characteristics that can be defined in such precise numbers. Even the levels of hormones that indicate calm versus stress - dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, among others - differ significantly from person to person, even when they report the same emotional states, in the same words. If the concepts of good and bad are so relative, and if their definition varies significantly from person to person, it is not possible that happiness is created in all of us in the same way and in the same relative doses, of good events versus bad events, Brown thought.

When he read Frederickson's sources, Brown found that the ratio mentioned in them - 2.9013 to 1 - was an arbitrary ratio, with no basis in experiments or observations in the field of psychology. This relationship is taken from a theory from the field of physics, a theory of relationships between materials, a theory that had no connection to psychological research. Brown realized that the sources on which the theory claims to be based, in fact do not support it, but he did not know how to prove it. He just had a gut feeling. The numbers were great on him; The mathematics in the articles was beyond his understanding; And he lacks the appropriate background in psychological theories, a background that is required to challenge the validity of the original article - an article on the mathematics of happiness. Brown knew that if he tried to challenge the professor's findings, something worse would happen to him than denunciation, scorn and ridicule: no one would pay attention to him and his arguments. After all, he was nothing more than an anonymous computer guy, lacking any academic or research status. He needed partners from the academy, who would present his case. And he began to look for such partners.

Brown did some Googling and found a number of mathematicians and psychologists who might be interested in his gut feeling. Among other things, Brown wrote to mathematician and physicist Alan Sokal from New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted a clever gibberish article to a liberal journal, an article that included a collection of meaningless phrases, just to prove that this journal would publish any article that supported his postmodern agenda, even if it was an article without meaning and meaning. The journal published the article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", and Sokal published a rebuttal to his article, a text that severely embarrassed the journal. Nick Brown also found the veteran psychologist Harris Friedman from the University of Florida, who pained the old humanistic psychology's push against the "positive psychology" of Frederickson and her colleagues, a psychology that claimed to bring happiness like a magic wand based on scientific findings without sufficient foundation and mathematical theories that did not prove the connection between the human soul.

Brown, Sokal and Friedman wrote an article called "The Complex Dynamics of Wishful Thinking" in which they traced the roots of Frederickson's theory and found the basic flaws in this theory. They submitted the rebuttal article to the "American Psychologist" - the same journal that published Frederickson's original article. The road to publication was not easy: when the article was submitted for the first time, it was rejected by the journal's editors, and not without reason: Barbara Fredrickson was one of the senior editors of this journal. The two senior authors of the article, Sokal and Friedman, addressed the journal's directors and publishers, above the heads of the journal's editorial board, and stated that if the journal does not publish the article, another journal will publish it, and the shame that will fall on the part of the journal "The American Psychologist" - as well as the extent The lack of professionalism attributed to him will be twofold. Under this threat, the article was finally published, in 2012.

In response to the rebuttal article, Frederickson admitted that she did not understand the mathematics behind the original article she wrote in 2005, and relied on the system of the journal "The American Psychologist" and the peer review process. She expected that her colleagues, the reviewers of the article, would alert her if it turned out that she had an error in the mathematical subject. It turned out that the critics of Frederickson's article - those whose peer review process was supposed to overcome the errors in it - did not understand enough mathematics to confirm or deny the validity of the basic assumptions in the original article. They trusted her that she knew what she was writing, and she trusted them.

Fredrickson tried to defend herself against the criticism by pointing out the importance of the field of happiness research and the importance of trying to find indicators to measure happiness, even if her specific indicators were imprecise. She probably didn't come out of this whole story happy, even if that day she tried to apply her theories and console herself by talking with a friend, jogging wildly in the woods or watching a good movie.

Science is a method for researching the truth, but it is impossible to create science without an establishment and in every establishment there are politics, hierarchies, organizations and struggles, at the base of which are quite a few professional ambitions and a desire to become famous. These can also lead an esteemed researcher to demonstrate cognitive bias, to the point of being blind to findings that contradict the theory he supports or ignoring the need to verify the correctness of his conclusions before publication. Thus the credibility of the scientific method may be harmed precisely by those entrusted with its application. Robots and computers do help in conducting experiments and analyzing their results, but they still do not produce articles and do not receive an academic degree. Only humans engage in scientific research and publish articles in scientific journals and professional literature that promotes the field of research. The case of Frederickson and her article demonstrates the problematic nature of this. It is troubling that if it weren't for Nick Brown - a part-time master's degree student - it would not have become clear how flimsy and baseless the psychological theory that was raised about Ness is and on the basis of which money was spent, experiments were carried out by federal authorities in the United States and many people were treated - almost without success, as which were confirmed by follow-up studies on the same patients.

A number is just what it is. It instills confidence, and it is difficult to challenge the way the researchers arrived at it, especially in view of our limited understanding of mathematics and our inability to check the proofs of the researchers, respected professors in their field, who devoted their entire lives to research, and whose prestige depends on proving their correctness. These dynamics and knowledge gaps give researchers control over the situation and a hold on our consciousness. We believe in numbers so much that we forget that they can also be used ignorantly, not to mention manipulatively. Fredrickson and Losada took this logic one step further (across the abyss, one might say): Fredrickson used - probably in good faith - incorrect data provided to her by Losada, but due to the lack of proficiency in mathematics among the examiners of the article, the operators of the peer review, and the general public of psychologists who read and cited the article , the article was given an aura of reliability, accuracy, certainty and the absence of doubts - all the emotional terms that lie at the base of our attitude towards the world of numbers. In the gray area and the many complexities and possible interpretations of human psychology, Frederikson tried to create an accurate definition of human emotion, but regarding the essence of happiness and the ways to reach it, it seems that there is still a long way to a definition as decisive and without doubts as there is in other fields of science such as the effect of interest rates on inflation , the speed of light or the distances between the stars.

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