The Happiness Regime
Corporations now create such positions as “chief happiness officer.” They draw on neuroscience to track employees’ moods and hire behavioural consultants to craft programs to cheer up the members of their workforce. Governments keep statistics on national wellbeing and offer optimism coaching to the unemployed. At least one municipality experimented with “positive psychology” programs in schools to inculcate the habits of optimism in children.
The happiness movement ignores such social and political conditions as income inequality and a hypercompetitive culture that contribute to a general malaise. It tends to view depression and other disaffectionrelated disorders as individual problems to fix with medication or therapy.
A History of Happiness
The concept of happiness as a tool of business and government manipulation dates back to the 18thcentury Enlightenment. In his doctrine of economic utilitarianism, philosopher Jeremy Bentham (17481832) argued that government policies should bring the most happiness to the greatest number of people. But how could anyone measure the levels of happiness that particular actions might produce? Bentham suggested measuring people’s pulse rates to reveal their inner feelings. This foreshadowed today’s efforts to quantify emotions by monitoring heart rates, brain waves and eye movements. Bentham advocated using the vicissitudes of the marketplace as a model of the mind and its desires. This became a reality in the 19th century.
The Money Metric
In the 1870s, economic theorist William Stanley Jevons (18351882) showed how money could serve as an emotional yardstick. His innovation redefined the concept of market value. Instead of regarding a product’s value as the sum of the materials and the work that went into producing it, Jevons identified value as a subjective judgment that a consumer reached independently. As a result, the prices of goods serve as a barometer of public attitudes and desires.
Jevons tried to imagine a method for measuring the amount of pleasure a person exacted from a purchase. One scholar conceived of a machine called the “hedonimeter.” But economists who follow the markets lost interest in subjective feelings. For them, it was enough to track which items sparked consumer preferences.
“Behaviorism”
At the dawn of the 20th century, psychologists in America moved even further from abstract and metaphysical issues. The behaviourist tradition took this trend to the extreme. Championed by American Psychological Association president John B. Watson (18781958), behaviourism taught psychologists that they didn’t need to probe for patients’ feelings. They could learn all they needed to know by observing people’s responses to various stimuli. Watson eliminated the roles of inner drives, desires and perceptions, declaring he could explain all human behaviour as the result of conditioning.
His contentions drew the interest of the field of advertising. In 1920, Watson joined the J. Walter Thompson ad agency where he pursued the idea that the function of an effective ad was not to extol the product but to “trigger” emotions through stimuli.
Watson didn’t care what customers wanted. He believed he could tell them what they wanted by triggering the appropriate emotions. As a hedge against Watson’s cockiness, the Thompson agency supplemented his behavioural approach with surveys of consumer attitudes. With sound survey methods, marketers could learn what people wanted and market those desires back to them through triggerladen behaviourist advertising.
Return of the Measurers
In the second half of the 20th century, economists and policymakers increasingly used marketbased metrics to calculate people’s attitudes about issues outside the marketplace. By establishing a monetary value for everything – including nature – they sought to use economics to settle public legal disputes, such as issues surrounding the extent of Exxon’s liability in the 1989 Alaskan oil spill.
Researchers calculated the economic toll by surveying US citizens about how much they would be “willing to pay” to have prevented the spill. They reinterpreted citizens’ desire for a clean coast in terms of market value. Such an expansion of money metrics beyond the market sparked interest in measuring levels of happiness. If economists could gauge happiness, they could compare the happiness levels of people with different incomes and compute a correlation between pleasure and money. With that correlation as a benchmark, they could establish the monetary value of nonmarket commodities – like clean air or a library – by measuring the pleasure they provide. British officials used this technique to determine the value of cultural institutions.
Unhappy Workers
Worker disengagement is a major threat to productivity. The Gallup organization believes unhappy workers’ frequent absences and apathetic performance cost the US economy more than $500 billion a year in lost tax revenues, lost productivity and health care costs. Governments worry because lower productivity leads to faltering economies and lower tax receipts.
If unhappy workers lose their jobs, the government may have to provide unemployment benefits. Countries with socialized health care may face more costs because many unhappy workers also have lowlevel mental health problems that can intensify amid the uncertainty of unemployment. Contending with mental disorders consumes 3% to 4% of GDP in the US and Europe. Most of the mental and physical problems that workers suffer are “nonspecific” complaints that fall under the rubric of “stress.” Studies by psychologist Robert Kahn in the 1960s suggest that the roots of workplace stress may lie in the structure of the workplace itself, where hierarchical organizational ladders and lack of worker autonomy provoke feelings of disempowerment. Yet, instead of modifying that structure, management chose to focus on modifying workers trying to fix their unhappiness.
A booming business in happiness consultancy sprang up to help companies and government agencies meet that goal. “Happiness gurus” now offer motivational psychology and meditation practices for disengaged workers and for managers who fear burnout. One top happiness guru even recommends laying off the 10% of workers who demonstrate the least zeal for the happiness syllabus, claiming that the surviving employees suddenly become “superengaged.”
Others keep tabs on happiness through surveillance. Managers evaluate employees through algorithmic analysis of office emails. Increasingly managers are turning to realtime health data to monitor performance. One company offers a wearable device that tracks and archives data on such variables as an employee’s tone of voice. These managers look at happiness as a “resource.” Wellbeing becomes merely a means of achieving profits, status or power. Managers view experiences like office friendship as valuable only because they can extract the happiness friendship brings as fuel for their next business challenge.
Technology’s Influence
Many experts are optimistic about their ability to manipulate mood because modern technology opens opportunities for monitoring and interpreting population behaviour. Experts can access a vast repository of granular data, thanks to technological innovations and societal changes such as:
The rise of big data – People’s daily transactions with businesses, government, as well as the networked “smart” infrastructure, produce behavioural records that institutions can use to analyze.
The rise of “narcissism” – People often lack the patience to answer surveys and polls. Yet they happily offer their “thoughts, tastes, likes, dislikes and opinions” on Facebook, which preserves their entries in its data banks.
“Emotionally intelligent” computers – Researchers can now program or “teach” computers to deduce moods and attitudes based on people’s behaviours. Analysts designed algorithms to uncover underlying emotions in Twitter and Facebook posts. Programs also can read emotions in facial expressions captured on surveillance cameras. Tesco supermarkets experimented with surveillance systems that interpret customers’ moods and show display ads appropriate to each customer’s state of mind.
Society may realize Bentham’s dream of discovering how to stimulate measurable increases in happiness, but then society itself would become a laboratory where policymakers access enormous stores of psychological data. An ominous indication of the future came in 2014 when Facebook revealed the results of an “emotional contagion” experiment in which the company tried to regulate users’ moods by secretly modifying their newsfeeds.
Consequences
The drive to cultivate happiness focuses on seeing people as damaged entities in need of repair. It ignores the context in which individual unhappiness arose, disregarding whether the emotion is a reasonable response to a condition of people’s lives. The medicalized view of the mind may contribute to this problem.
Many psychologists describe the link between mental illness and feelings of disempowerment. Perhaps the view of the mind as a broken thing to fix with behavioural treatment or pharmaceutical intervention encourages the passivity associated with being disempowered. To address this sense of being powerless, society must face the “social, political and economic institutions” that cause it.
Research traditions try to incorporate the context of people’s lives into how they are treated for depression and disengagement. The “community psychology” tradition, for instance, tries to understand individuals within the context of their society. Some clinical psychologists also explore sociological and political influences on emotion. Throughout the history of capitalism, these sociological perspectives have inspired movements to reform social and economic institutions.
Challenging the status quo is difficult, and the focus of such campaigns tends to eventually shift to changing people’s experience of the status quo. To address the happiness deficit effectively, people need to feel that they have the agency and empowerment to speak for themselves, to state what they like or dislike about their jobs, and to stop relying on experts’ measurements to explicate their feelings. For that to happen, powerful people would have to hear criticism without labelling it as a symptom of unhappiness and trying to cure it. In fact, seeing criticism or complaining “as a form of ‘unhappiness’ or ‘displeasure’ is to bluntly misunderstand what those terms mean, or what it means to experience and exercise them.”
To create alternatives, society should “demedicalize” misery. As psychiatrists and clinical psychologists know, the problem of unhappiness doesn’t originate within people apart from the context of their lives. Society should redirect some expenditures from the happiness budget and use those resources, instead, to re-engineer the structure of political and economic institutions.
For instance, you could reshape the structure of your business, dropping the hierarchy in favour of “cooperative control.” When employees have input into their work, they don’t need happiness exercises to appreciate their own worth.
Source: William Davies
Edited by : Palak Ranga
