wrote:
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/happiness_formula/4771908.stm
Did you take the "Happiness Test" at that link?
I scored "Highly Satisfied." That and a couple
of bucks will get me a cuppa java at Starbucks. :-)
But this article brings up the same question for
me that another recently-posted article about
relative happiness as measured by *asking* people
whether they were happy or not did:
How meaningful is the result of such polling in
a cult community?
I'm not talking just about TM or real cults or
even just spiritual communitites here...for the
purpose of this question, you could include the
employees of a company whose PR image proudly
proclaims that it provides "a perfect work envir-
onment," or a small town that bills itself as
"the perfect place to live." What I'm suggesting
is that these self-polling data collection methods
are (or should be) suspect when they are used in
a community that exerts pressure on its members
to conform to a "group image" of some sort.
For example, I would suspect that you would have
a completely different set of answers to the
"how happy are you" test in Fairfield, depend-
ing on who was administering the test.
If it were being given by the TMO, you'd get the
expected "very happy" answers. But if the test had
absolutely nothing to do with the TMO, and the
people being asked the questions knew that the
data was theoretically never going to be seen by
people in the TM movement, I would expect you'd
get a more balanced "happy" to "fairly happy" set
of answers.
This tendency to answer poll questions the way
the questioners want you to answer them was a
well known and oft-discussed phenomenon in the
Psych and Sociology courses I took in college.
We even did one experiment in which half the class
was given a test to administer to subjects and told
that they were trying to prove Theorem A, and the
other half of the class was given the same test
to administer (without knowing it was the same),
and told that they were trying to prove Theorem
B (the opposite). Natch, the first group got
results proving Theorem A and the second group got
results proving the exact opposite, using the
exact same test. I never forgot that experiment,
and remain skeptical of all "polled" research data
to this day.
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