BURST
It wouldn’t be far off to call Jason Payne “Dr. Happy.”
It is, after all, the subject of his post-doctoral studies at Simon Fraser University, where he turns data and information from surveys and interviews into statistical modelling of “well-being trajectories.” It’s a subject that has long fascinated him.
Example A: One of the first questions he posed to his girlfriend while on a date was “are you happy?”
It resulted in a marriage going on 10 years and three — soon to be four — children. “I’m not sure why that went over well, but it worked out,” he said, chuckling.
The elusive answer of what lies at the end of the pursuit of happiness has been debated for thousands of years. Even to this day, Payne saw many of his peers arguing, talking over each other, and espousing different schools of thought.
They usually coalesced around either hedonistic (the pursuit of pleasure, and less pain) or eudaemonic (seeking happiness through purpose or meaning in life) philosophies, he said.
It prompted Payne to do a study, recently published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, that tested these doctrines. He and his researchers surveyed more than 1,200 adults from Canada and the U.K.
What he found in his research was, that while both those viewpoints have merit either alone or combination, there was another factor that stood out.
“When people step back and evaluate whether their life is going well, they consider more than their emotional balance sheet,” he said. “They appear to ask themselves not just ‘do I feel good?’ but also ‘am I free?’”
His study, titled ‘Beyond hedonism: life satisfaction requires autonomy independent of affect,’ found that autonomy and the freedom to make one’s own choices is a far superior gauge in predicting “life satisfaction.”
Payne said the questions posed were direct and not open-ended, because “the problem with open-ended questions is (people) lie, they exaggerate, they delude themselves.”
Instead, they were asked things like: ‘In the past four weeks, how sad have you been? How angry have you been? How often do you feel good?
The answers measured people’s positive and negative feelings, their life satisfaction and three psychological traits: autonomy, competence and relatedness (feeling close and connected to others). It allowed them to collate the answers and use advanced statistical modelling to determine what influenced people’s satisfaction the most.
Autonomy stood out as the universal factor, while others could fluctuate in importance among people.
“What was really interesting about this need, the psychological need for freedom, was people seem to be drawing from that beyond the pleasant and unpleasant feelings,” Payne said. “We see that people do care if they’re happy or sad, but when they’re making their judgments (of happiness), they seem to be relying on how free they were to choose their situation above and beyond how it made them feel.
“Even after accounting for how good or bad people felt, those who felt more autonomous were more satisfied with their lives. Autonomy was the only psychological need that seems to contribute something that feelings alone did not explain.”
His findings can be applied to the workplace or life in general. Money in itself doesn’t bring happiness, but the freedom it brings can. Employers might have programs that are designed to improve feelings and mood, but if those programs restrict choice, they may backfire.
Payne pointed to the mask mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic as another example. While the goal was for the greater good, the fact they were mandatory and removed autonomy and choice could explain some of the backlash.
“Policy-makers looking to improve well-being should be mindful not only of potential direct outcomes, but also the second-order effects of not being free to choose the path to those outcomes,” he said.