Why are the Irish still so upbeat?

Friday, April 27, 2012

Trinity College is running a series of fascinating experiments to determine our true levels of happiness, writes Jonathan deBurca Butler

HAPPINESS. To millions of Americans its pursuit is a constitutional right. According to John Lennon it was a warm gun. While to TV-watchers in the 1970s and ’80s it was a cigar called Hamlet.

Today, defining happiness is probably harder than ever. Advertising tells us that our happiness depends on having this or looking like that. But by the time you are old enough to realise that happiness is not dependent on how much you spend you’re so laden down with debt that you are the opposite of where you thought you’d be — unhappy. So what exactly is happiness? Is it the same for everyone? And why, if we are to believe the pollsters, are Irish people so consistently content?

An exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin aims to answer just some of those questions. Starting today, Happy? is inviting members of the public to take part in a selection of experiments which it is hoped will tell us more about one of our main goals in life.

“We’re trying to look at what causes happiness, what are the experiences of it and, if you like, what are its consequences,” says curator Malcolm MacLachlann. “Such a commonly used term as happiness can be really obvious to everybody but not very distinctive to anybody. So we’re trying to look behind the smiley face to see what the determinants are and also to see what it is actually useful for.”

MacLachlann is an associate professor of psychology at Trinity College Dublin. This year the department is celebrating its 50th anniversary and Happy? is the main event.

“Rather than having just experts on happiness we have invited experts from different fields to come in and look at what happiness means within their own particular domains,” MacLachlann explains. “I deal with aid and social capital and how helping others benefits us. If you look at the Asian tsunami some years ago, Ireland was the most generous country in the world per capita in terms of its giving. So we have high levels of social capital in terms of our willingness to reach out and help other people. From my perspective, that’s a key ingredient of happiness. So I’ll be looking at why people make donations to aid agencies and what they are trying to get out of it.”

MacLachlann’s project, Happy to Help, is one of 11 experiments that have been designed specifically for the exhibition. Others aim to find out if a sense of humour makes us more attractive, if witnessing a good deed can cheer us up or if the language a person uses can give us an insight into their well-being.

Of course, happiness for a Buddhist monk and a hedonistic rock star are going to be very different. Or are they? One of the exhibition’s experiments plans to look at the different components of happiness and see if there is indeed a magic formula. Called Cause and Effect, the survey also hopes to map happiness throughout Ireland in an effort to see how people’s happiness differs up and down the land. Is a Cork person’s happiness different from a Kerry person?

Even in these days of doom and gloom, Irish people score consistently well in so-called happiness indices. In a recent survey by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 73% of people in Ireland said they were satisfied with their life; well above the OECD average of 59%. Whether the OECD has a full understanding of the term ‘Ah sure I’m grand’ is open to debate, but other indices bare their findings out.

In 2011 the United Nations Human Development Index had Ireland in seventh place, which was incidentally two places ahead of Germany, while another UN report issued earlier this month placed us at 10th. “We seem to have a sort of resilient happiness,” says MacLachlann. “If you look at the situation Ireland finds itself in, in terms of socio-economic factors, we are certainly happier than can be explained in wholly economic terms. It seems what’s important to people is more than just economics.”

“As Jack Brown said, ‘Happiness is not just the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them’,” says MacLachlann. “So we always seem to have a lot of problems in socio-economic terms but our ability to deal with them is obviously pretty good if we look at our level of happiness in all these indices.”

Whether we really are happy or not is something the curators hope to get to the bottom of when they launch a National Happiness Experiment during the exhibition. The scientists are going to text people certain questions over a few months and evaluate their responses, perhaps even generating a ‘mood-o-meter’ to display how the country is feeling.

With the European Football Championships just around the corner, that particular experiment might just throw up some very interesting data indeed.

* Happy? runs from today until Jun 3. Admission is free. See www.sciencegallery.com

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