itaibn0 comments on Happiness Logging: One Year In - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've also been suspicious of happiness surveys for a similar reason. One theory I have is that a large portion of the variation in happiness set-point is just that different people have different tendencies in answering "rate in 1-10"-type questions. It would be interesting to test how much does happiness set-point correlates with questions such as "rate this essay from 1 to 10". Another test for this theory that is far more like have actually been conducted already is to see how well happiness set-point correlates with neurological signals of happiness (the difficulty being here that the primary way to determine whether a neurological signal signals happiness is through self-report. Nonetheless, if the happiness set-point correlates with any neurological signal then it more likely that this signal plays a role in happiness than in inducing high number ratings).