Category: Happiness

All personality types benefit from this type of conversation.

Having more meaningful or ‘deep’ conversations makes people happier, research finds.

Whether extravert or introvert, people who exchanged more meaningful information about relationships, politics or whatever, were happier.

At the other end of the scale, trivial chat or ‘small talk’ had no link to happiness, one way or the other.

Professor Matthias Mehl, who led the study, said:

“We do not think anymore that there is an inherent tension between having small talk and having substantive conversations.

Small didn’t positively contribute to happiness, and it didn’t negatively contribute to it.

With this study, we wanted to find out whether it is primarily the quantity or the quality of our social encounters that matter for one’s well-being.”

For the study, small recording devices were used to capture snippets of everyday conversation from 486 volunteers.

Professor Mehl explained the difference between small talk and a substantive conversation in their study:

“We define small talk as a conversation where the two conversation partners walk away still knowing equally as much — or little — about each other and nothing else.

In substantive conversation, there is real, meaningful information exchanged.

Importantly, it could be about any topic — politics, relationships, the weather — it just needs to be at a more than trivial level of depth.”

Personality had no effect on how much of a happiness boost people got from deep conversations, Professor Mehl said:

“We expected that personality might make a difference, for example that extroverts might benefit more from social interactions than introverts or that substantive conversations might be more closely linked to well-being for introverts than for extroverts, and were very surprised that this does not seem to be the case.”

Although small talk was not linked to happiness, it is still necessary, said Professor Mehl:

“I think of it like this: In every pill, there’s an inactive ingredient, and it’s a nice metaphor, because you cannot have the pill without the inactive ingredient.

We all understand that small talk is a necessary component to our social lives.

You cannot usually walk up to a stranger and jump right into a deep, existential conversation because of social norms.”

Perhaps, says Professor Mehl, people could be prescribed a deep conversation as a treatment:

“I would like to experimentally ‘prescribe’ people a few more substantive conversations and see whether that does something to their happiness.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Milek et al., 2018).

Time or money, which do you prioritise?

Putting greater value on your time than your money is linked to more happiness, a study finds.

Slightly over half of the participants in the study valued their time over their money.

The remainder valued their money over their time.

The conclusions come from six studies with over 4,600 people.

Ms Ashley Whillans, who led the research, said:

“It appears that people have a stable preference for valuing their time over making more money, and prioritizing time is associated with greater happiness.”

The older people were, the more likely they were to value their time.

Ms  Whillans said:

“As people age, they often want to spend time in more meaningful ways than just making money.”

People were given a series of scenarios that pitted time against money.

For example, they were asked to choose between having a more expensive apartment and shorter commute or cheaper apartment and longer commute.

Or, they were asked: would you choose a job with longer hours and higher starting salary or lower hours and lower starting salary.

While both of these are major decisions for most people, the time/money split also held for more everyday decisions.

Neither people’s income nor gender affected whether they were more swayed by time or money.

However, people at the very bottom end of the income spectrum were not included in the research.

Some people may have to prioritise money in order to survive.

Ms  Whillans said:

“Having more free time is likely more important for happiness than having more money.

Even giving up a few hours of a paycheck to volunteer at a food bank may have more bang for your buck in making you feel happier.”

The study was published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science (Whillans et al., 2015).