[Epistemic status: I'm only moderately confident in this post. While I read a lot of happiness research for this, my reading covers only a small fraction of it all, and I can't even be sure that it was a representative sample.]
The Scientific Revolution has provided powerful tools for uncovering truths about the world. From John Snow’s work on cholera, to the Nurses’ Health Study, to the Human Genome Project, scientific inquiry has yielded profound insights into health, disease, and human genetics.
However, in some fields, the impact of these methods has been mixed. In happiness research, we’ve tried to use the tools of science to better understand the nature of happiness, and, perhaps most importantly, how we can obtain more of it. But at least some of the scientific research has led us astray. So, let's examine the scientific literature on happiness, evaluate its accuracy, and explore its overall impact.
The Crumbling Happiness Pie
A widely cited model in happiness research is known as the "Happiness Pie." Introduced in 2005 by Sonja Lyubomirsky et al. in their paper "Pursuing Happiness," this model neatly divides the sources of human happiness into three slices:
50% is determined by genetic set points
40% is determined by intentional activity, including conscious decisions and mindset
10% is determined by circumstances
These numbers are, of course, approximations, and I imagine even the authors would agree that these categories can't be separated as cleanly as the model suggests. We should view this breakdown as a rough estimate rather than a precise measurement. Even so, I don’t believe these numbers—on their face, they just seem wrong. Attributing four times as much effect to our intentional activity as to our circumstances strikes me as implausible.
Just to illustrate the intuition behind my skepticism, here’s an example:
Consider the case of a talented, driven woman working in a male-dominated industry. Despite impressive qualifications and a strong work ethic, she finds herself repeatedly passed over for promotions, watching less capable male colleagues rise above her. In addition, she endures a constant barrage of sexual harassment from her co-workers, customers, and superiors—lewd comments and even implicit threats of retaliation if she speaks up. This toxic work environment takes a heavy toll on her mental health, but she can't leave without damaging her career because her industry relies so heavily on recommendations, and she fears her current employers would retaliate with negative references. This has eroded her self-esteem and left her feeling trapped and powerless. The daily struggle to maintain professionalism in the face of such blatant harassment and abuse leaves her emotionally exhausted and deeply angry.
Although it's a fictional narrative, elements of it are all too real for many women. No amount of gratitude journaling, power poses, or positive thinking is going to make up for this. And those possible hypothetical activities are certainly not going to be four times as significant as the circumstances. And this woman's experience, as blood-boiling as it is, doesn't even come close to the worst experiences a person could have.
So, based on intuition alone, I was skeptical of the claim that only 10% of our happiness is determined by our circumstances. Upon examining the original paper, I found that it cites two sources for this claim: Argyle, 1999, and Diener et al., 1999. “Argyle, 1999” is a book chapter that, in turn, cites another book: "Social Indicators of Well-Being" by Frank Andrews and Stephen Withey1. That book discusses a study of some measures of life circumstances, such as income and the life-cycle stage, but that study never claims to encompass all of life's possible circumstances. Here's the relevant section from Andrews and Withey:
The usefulness of various classification variables (Sex, Race, Age, Income, Education, Family life-cycle stage, etc.) for accounting for differences in people's sense of general well-being was also explored. None of these variables individually was able to account for more than 6 percent of the variance [in life satisfaction], and jointly they accounted for less than 10 percent of its variance.
You can see the game of telephone that was played here. Andrews and Withey described a study of demographic factors and by the time it got to Lyubomirsky et al., it became a claim about the cumulative effects of a person’s circumstances. Some external circumstances, such as income and marital status are included, but many are not. Things like sexual harassment wouldn’t be covered in the actual study but got included by Lyubomirsky et al. through the game of telephone.
The other citation in the original happiness pie paper, “Diener et al., 1999”, is Subjective Well-Being: Three Decades of Progress by Diener et al. This doesn’t investigate the 10% number directly, but makes references to it, ultimately pointing to the same source as the first citation:
Yet, researchers are often disappointed by the relatively small effect sizes for the external, objective variables that were explored in most early studies. Campbell, Converse, and Rodgers (1976) found that demographic factors (e.g., age, sex, income, race, education, and marital status) accounted for less than 20% of the variance in [subjective well-being]. Andrews and Withey (1976) could only account for 8% by using these variables.
So this citation provides no additional corroboration beyond the first one. Overall, the 10% number seems surprisingly unfounded. This, in turn, casts doubt on the claim that 40% of happiness is attributable to intentional activities. They calculated that percentage by assuming that intentional activities account for the remainder after the shares attributed to genetic set points and circumstances were determined, so 100% - 50%2 - 10% = 40%. But once we see how flawed the 10% figure is, the rest of the pie begins to crumble.
Social Desirability Bias in Happiness Research
There's good reason to be skeptical of self-improvement research in general. These areas are particularly susceptible to social desirability bias, a tendency where people provide answers they believe are more socially acceptable rather than truthful. There's a more socially acceptable narrative—namely that you're in charge, you can do it, and you can be anything you want. The idea that happiness is largely within our control is a more appealing message. It's the kind of optimistic thinking that garners popularity, book deals, and invitations to give inspirational talks. No one wants to hear grumpy Mr. It's-Mainly-Genetics-and-Environment give a TED Talk.
This situation creates a conflict of interest, though not in the traditional sense. Imagine if Big Tobacco funded a study concluding "Cigarettes are totally fine, guys!" We'd all roll our eyes so hard we'd risk retinal detachment. But happiness research has its own sneaky conflict of interest—let's call it Big Optimism. In happiness research, the conflict of interest is baked into the cultural zeitgeist itself: an overwhelming bias towards individual agency and self-improvement. This creates a market demand for research emphasizing personal control over happiness. The gravity well of "you can control your happiness!" is so strong that even well-meaning researchers risk getting pulled into its orbit.
This also leads to overblown claims. For example, gratitude journals likely have some effect, but it’s limited. If Lyubomirsky truly believed that “gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation,” as she says in her book, then bring in a bunch of people with negative emotions, envy, and hostility and make them write gratitude journals. Let’s see what the effect size is. I’m betting it will be better than nothing, but far short of what we could call an “antidote.” An antidote to a snakebite doesn’t make you slightly better; it saves your life.
Internal vs. External Goals
As part of my efforts to better understand happiness, I’ve been trying to understand the impact of how we frame our goals. For example, imagine two people: Intira and Xavier. Intira has internal goals—that is, she wants to be the best version of herself. Xavier has external goals—that is, he compares himself to others and wants to crush everyone else in the competition. Who do you think is happier?
You probably guessed Intira and that matches the findings of numerous studies on internally vs. externally motivated goals. These studies suggest that pursuing intrinsic goals (personal growth, relationships, community contribution) leads to greater well-being compared to chasing extrinsic goals (wealth, fame, image). As one study put it, "A relative focus on external goals is either negatively or neutrally related to well-being, whereas a focus on intrinsic goals is associated with greater well-being."
Great news, right? We've cracked the code to happiness! Just adopt more intrinsic goals, and you'll be on your way to a life of contentment and fulfillment.
Except... can you really just decide to change your fundamental motivations? For those who have always been externally motivated, can they simply decide to become internally motivated?
While I have found mountains of research telling me what correlates with happiness, I’ve found surprisingly little on whether we can intentionally manipulate these factors to increase happiness. It's as if we've spent decades meticulously mapping out a treasure island, only to realize we don’t have a boat to get there.34
The study I'm looking for—the one that would really answer this question—is simple: Find a bunch of extrinsically motivated people, tell them to adopt intrinsic goals, and see what happens. That's it. No fancy framing, no complex interventions. Just a straightforward "Hey, try caring about different stuff, and let's see if it makes you happier." But this study doesn't seem to exist.5
Where does this leave us? The scientific research on goals and happiness hasn't significantly changed my views. Most of the studies’ results matched what I would have intuitively guessed, so I’m left close to where I started. In short, it’s the boring answer: You can change your goals to some degree, but there’s a limit. The precise limit varies by person and context. There doesn’t seem to be any universal trick for this.
For example, if you find yourself stuck in traffic every day, you can't just decide that there's nothing you'd rather do than exist in a morass of gridlock for the rest of your life. You just don’t have that much control over your goals.
However, if you think the only thing that matters is getting into the NBA and you don’t get in, you may be devastated for a while, but most people will be able to form new goals. Much of this will happen naturally, without conscious intervention. And, of course, external factors, like having a family, can naturally change your goals.
I just want to highlight these limitations for the next time you see someone on a TED stage talking about how they found the secret to happiness. They're probably not lying; it probably did work for them. But they're also probably an outlier. The lesson from the talk should be more about survivorship bias than what could make you happy. You're not going to see the guy who's been miserable his whole life giving a TED Talk about how nothing worked for him.
Traditional Wisdom vs. Modern Research
My main point is that scientific research hasn't significantly advanced our understanding of happiness. Pretty much everything I’ve read in happiness research has matched my intuitions, and, unfortunately, the parts that didn’t turned out to be unconvincing6. To be clear, I’m not saying we don’t know anything about happiness. On the contrary, I’m saying we know quite a lot, it’s just that we didn’t learn it from science.
I think people naturally develop a good understanding of happiness. We know that social relationships, exercise, mindfulness, and prosocial behavior are all good for us. ClearerThinking has a post outlining 11 different approaches that people can use to be more happy. I think it’s a great list. But notice that none of these insights required modern scientific methods to be discovered. Our ancestors figured out most of these principles through observation and wisdom accumulated over generations.7
Take meditation, for example. Numerous scientific studies have shown its benefits for well-being. But this isn't a new discovery—Buddha recognized and taught the value of mindfulness practices thousands of years ago. Similarly, science has recently emphasized the importance of gratitude and appreciation. Yet, if you read the first book of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, you'll find it's entirely devoted to expressing gratitude to people who influenced him.
In fact, I would argue that Buddha and Marcus Aurelius are the two greatest happiness researchers of all time. Despite centuries of subsequent investigation and the advent of modern scientific methods, we've made surprisingly little progress since then.
Buddha and Aurelius didn't need p-values or peer review to recognize the power of positive thinking—they simply observed and reflected on human nature. Modern science has largely “confirmed” what they figured out millennia ago. But I say “confirmed” in quotes because the standard of using statistics and publishing in a peer-reviewed academic journal before something is “confirmed” is a made-up standard. We’ve decided this is what makes something “scientifically confirmed”, but I doubt Buddha's followers were saying, “This seems right, but we don’t really know until someone does a chi-squared test and publishes it in PNAS.”
So when I criticize some of the scientific research on happiness, I’m not necessarily contradicting it—I’m not saying you shouldn't laugh, stand tall, give hugs, and make friends. I’m saying most of it is stuff we already know—it’s fancy studies with electron microscopes to confirm that water is, indeed, wet.
In addition, too much of the research I could find stops with finding correlations. Noting that some things are more common in happy people is very different from showing that you can tell someone to "live a life full of laughter" and they will become happier. Correlation, causation, and effective intervention are three very different beasts. Compare these three:
Study shows that laughter is correlated with happiness.
Study shows that laughter causes happiness.
Study shows that you can tell people to laugh more and they will become happier.
There’s lots of research at the first step, some at the second step, and very little that I’ve found at the third step, which is what we actually need.
Science Is Self-correcting, But Can Still Be Damaging
Now, you might argue, "But isn't science self-correcting? Sooner or later, someone will find the mistake and we’ll converge on the solution. Doesn't that solve the problem?" Well, yes and no. Science does indeed have built-in error-correction mechanisms, and this is a good thing. But let’s look at the happiness pie to see how it falls short.
A 2019 study by Brown and Rohrer found "several apparent deficiencies in [Lyubomirsky et al.'s] chain of arguments on both the empirical and the conceptual level." Brown and Rohrer didn’t try to re-slice the happiness pie and find the “correct” size for the intentional activity slice because they knew there wouldn’t be a single value, but they say that 5% is just as reasonable an estimation as 40%, which is the value Lyubomirsky et al. claimed. That’s a huge difference.
Brown and Rohrer concluded that "there is little empirical evidence for the variance decomposition suggested by the 'happiness pie,' and that even if it were valid, it is not necessarily informative with respect to the question of whether individuals can truly exert substantial influence over their own chronic happiness level." I agree on all counts.
In a subsequent study by two of the original three happiness pie authors, they acknowledged that they had overstated our ability to control our own happiness.
So, science corrected itself. Great! Problem solved, right? Not quite. While it's commendable that Lyubomirsky et al. revised their claims, the correction came well over a decade after the initial research gained widespread influence. In that time, countless individuals may have adjusted their lives based on the flawed understanding that they could control nearly half of their happiness through intentional activity.
How many people placed their faith in that 40%, only to be disappointed? How much money was spent on self-help books, seminars, or happiness programs that promised more control than was realistic? The real harm in self-improvement research lies not just in its errors, but in the consequences of believing them. If the value of such research comes from finding answers that truly help people, then promoting incorrect answers must, conversely, cause harm. How many pursued that supposedly significant slice of controllable happiness, only to find it was a mirage? And how many, after failing to gain substantial control over their happiness, blamed themselves for that failure?
Takeaways
"Surprising" Findings Are Usually Wrong
Every field makes mistakes. But the difference with happiness research is that when the dust settled and the corrections were made, we ended up right back where we started—with conclusions that largely match our intuitions. Science took us on a wild goose chase and it took 15 years to undo. The revised findings didn't teach us anything new; they just confirmed what many of us suspected all along.
There’s a dynamic that’s common throughout science journalism: the studies that make headlines are often those that contradict our intuitions. "Scientists discover happiness isn't what you think!" sounds a lot more exciting than "Scientists confirm what you already knew about being happy." This is not a big deal when we’re talking about black holes and our intuitions aren’t very good. But because our basic intuitions about happiness are generally correct, then the most attention-grabbing research is also the most likely to be wrong.
Trust Your Intuitions
Thus, when you encounter a headline proclaiming, "The key to happiness is not what you think!", it’s probably worth objecting: "Actually, it probably is what I think." If you're familiar with the basics of well-being—like those outlined on the ClearerThinking page (seriously, check it out)—you're likely better off trusting your instincts than chasing after every counterintuitive finding that makes a splash in the media.
This doesn’t bode well for happiness research. The net impact of the scientific method in happiness research has often been, at best, neutral—merely confirming what we already knew—and at worst, actively misleading. It's as if we've been using sophisticated scientific tools to rediscover the wheel, while occasionally convincing people that the best shape for a wheel is actually square. (Side note: Did you know that square wheels are possible?).
Here's a rule of thumb that might save you some time (and possibly disappointment): Be extra cautious of "surprising" happiness research. If a study's findings dramatically conflict with your intuitions about well-being, it's more likely that the study is flawed than that you've been fundamentally wrong about happiness all along.
To save anyone else the time of tracking everything down, here’s the path: “Argyle, 1999” is Chapter 18 of Well-Being: Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, a collection of articles edited by Daniel Kahneman et al. The chapter is Causes and Correlates of Happiness by Michael Argyle. You can read some of it on Google Books. You can also find the relevant section on Project Muse. That references Social Indicators of Well-Being by Andrews & Withey (1976). Unfortunately, the reference is to the entire book with no additional details provided. The only way to get that for free is to go through a university, though you can read some of it on Google Books.
Attributing only 50% of happiness to the genetic set point is disputed, as I describe below, but it’s the number they used.
The closest I’ve found is a paper by Vansteenkiste et al., which shows that framing tasks in terms of intrinsic goals leads to better outcomes. But that's not quite the same as people actually changing their deep-seated motivations. They demonstrate the impact of externally imposed goal framing, but they don't examine whether individuals can consciously shift their goal orientations from extrinsic to intrinsic, nor do they assess the long-term effects on happiness.
Another study did attempt to directly manipulate individuals' goals, but not in the way I’m looking for. They gave people who were already intrinsically motivated additional external motivations. The goal manipulation backfired in this case and these people ended up performing worse because of it.
I had a whole deep dive into neuroplasticity and meditation as well. I cut it because it felt too tangential, but in case you were optimistic about it, much of the same applies: There is no reason to believe that the science of neuroplasticity is going to lead the way to a breakthrough in human happiness.
It makes me wonder: has it been conducted but got buried in a file drawer somewhere because of its null result? Or perhaps researchers would say that it’s not worth doing because the result is too obvious: “Of course that won’t work. You can’t just tell people to have better goals.”
I agree that it probably wouldn’t work, but even a negative result would be useful. It would provide a valuable baseline for evaluating other research. It would set an upper bound on the efficacy of interventions aimed at changing goal orientations, tempering expectations for related studies. It would be a much-needed filter in popular science communication, ideally reducing the spread of misleading or overly optimistic interpretations of goal-focused happiness research and remedies. When new studies emerge that seem to suggest easy ways to change goals or boost happiness, both researchers and science communicators would have a clear reference point to say “Yes, having XYZ type of goal does correlate with happiness, but we know we’re limited in our ability to change our goals, so what’s the point?”
I know this sounds like confirmation bias, and to a degree, it is. It is true that I only deeply looked into the studies that surprised me, but had I looked deeper into those I agreed with and found them wanting, I would be left where I started either way.
Note that I’m only referring to “low-tech” interventions in this post. By “low-tech”, I mean things like gratitude journals, breathing exercises, sharing, and having friends. I'm not including things like pharmacological interventions, ultrasonic brain stimulation, gene editing, etc. Roughly speaking, things that were available to people millennia ago count as low-tech.