Quantitative psych people are well versed in how to think about and model latent variables. They don’t go “oh shit! can’t measure happiness, I guess we’d better just make stuff up.”
I’m plenty critical of the research coming out of psych, but to pretend that the field remains naive to even the most basic principles of modeling is a bit ridiculous (and like you said, lazy)
So yes I do think the majority of psych researchers are making stuff up (through p-hacking and other nefarious means) in order to get funding and tenure
1. https://replicationindex.com/2018/11/20/how-replicable-is-ps...
I don't know if arguments about "real" science are especially useful. The nature of science has changed a lot of over time and will presumably keep changing. It takes us into questions of whether fields that can't do experiments are "real" science, for example. It also assumes replicability is the only way science can't be "real" but there are some fields (e.g. COVID research!) where papers are usually replicable but that is meaningless because the methodology is unsound in other ways, i.e. you'd just be replicating their mistakes.
The biggest problems driving non-replicable research are the fact that so much "science" is now really just data analysis, and finding some spurious correlation that just about nudges over some arbitrary and very weak threshold for significance can be considered "science", even without anyone doing any kind of double check or followup. No real world experiment needs to be done at any point. And in some fields the connection to reality has been completely lost - public health is filled with papers that make predictions about the future trends in public data, and nobody ever follows up with papers that compute the correlation between the predictions and measured values. It would be easy, but they generally don't do it.
That doesn't seem particularly terrible in comparison to scientific reproducibility in other fields. What am I missing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Not to belabor this but to note the irony here: there is probably a similar psychological (ehem) phenomenon that happens to a psyc grad student who lets their presumptions bleed into their interpretation of a measurement.
> The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
R. Feynman
> If I ask you 3 seconds apart, though [...] would you not expect consistent results?
I completely agree with your original comments about lazy writing by the OP. But these all seem besides the point.
Our bodies and minds go through all sorts of states, some cognitively introspectable, some not.
"Happiness", whatever it may be, is what it is and need not conform to your presumptions. That's the point of studying it. Nothing about its fluctuations or the way these are felt by an individual are a problem per se with the research. It just means it's hard to do, and we may not know a whole bunch about it.
As far as I am aware, there is no psychological measure/test which is not subjective. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
To me, this is why neurology is hard science and psychology is soft science.
This point seems to slip through these types of discussions, because people want to keep changing the focus of the research. When you change the topic from subjective experience to, say, neural properties, you're not studying the same thing anymore.
There are plenty of measures of subjective experience of happiness. We can debate the merits of these measures, but they exist. They're reproducible and you can scale them over time or across people.
If someone says they are miserable, and rates themself a 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, this has to be subjective. Are they lying? Perhaps, but then too maybe that radio signal you obtained is a microwave next door.
Units on many psychological measures could be obtained (see test equating) but there's not enough agreement on which measures to use, and in fact, use of multiple measures is encouraged because of variation in what might be an appropriate target of study (hedonic versus eudaimonic well-being for instance). Units in psychology are somewhat similar to where units of temperature were in the 18th or maybe 19th century.
I go for a run most days and my watch asks me how I feel afterward. I don't answer, because I really have no idea whether my "Good" answer one day corresponds to a "Good" answer on another day. Often, it probably doesn't. In my view, talking about subjective well-being is anything but simple.
It’s subjective because it cannot be universally and independently measured.
It’s not possible to measure the happiness of two individuals such that I can compare them against each other quantitatively and define who of the two is happier.
I can do that, however, with basically every physical measurement.
Can you even do this with happiness? What is a unit of happiness?
For length, MSA can be easily conducted. For happiness, what metrology system are you going to use? What's the proposed measurement method?
[1] MSA: https://www.metrology-journal.org/articles/ijmqe/pdf/2010/02...
Say what you want about stellar kinematics, but measuring meters simply is not so fraught as this.
That being said, I’d argue “2001 dollars” is a unit, not “dollars”. You’ll often see data in econ journals cite something in that type of unit.
Another angle on this is that comparing wealth across time is nontrivial (and the money isn’t to blame). How do you compare the value of a iPhone in 2020 to a landline in 1980? It’s possible, but nontrivial. Our units (in some messy imperfect way) reflect that (and other factors).
Why though? Why dollars in a particular year, rather than dollars in general? Sure the value of a dollar changes from year to year, but the value of a dollar also changes constantly in any given year too. Over the past year, the value of a US dollar relative to a Euro has fluctuated by more than 10 cents. In fact the relative values of currencies fluctuate constantly, near-enough to instantaneously. But this isn't reflected in the pricing of most consumer goods; the price of common household goods in a grocery store might vary a few times a week, but not thousands of times an hour. So in one context the value of a dollar seems to vary constantly, but in another context the value of a dollar is substantially more stable. So a dollar doesn't even have a set particular value at any instant in time; it depends on what kind of store you're standing in.
If happiness is a metric with units even worse than this, then I see little hope for any scientific study of happiness.
(If you’re asking about the units for wealth: USD, Euros, etc)
So it's not like it can assess this number for an individual, at least not without first comparing and contrasting it with every other person in some sample group.
In other words, a true unit of happiness, would allow a completely independent measure of any one individual's current state of happiness. Imagine something like a thermometer for happiness, you point it at someone and it reads out the units of happiness (over-simplifying the application to make the point). Therefore we're not even close to knowing what this is or how to measure it, and the way we really communicate around it is by using our own subjectivity of it and making correlations.
The ladder question (a common tool for measuring SWB) is this:
Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top.
The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (ladder-present)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...
While you need „second“ to define the „meter“, the former is not derived from other units but from an observation of nuclear reactions in Caesium.
> How does one measure happiness? Psychologists can’t use a ruler or a microscope, so they invent an arbitrary scale.
All scales are arbitrary. We measure length in meters for no reason other than the meter is a nicely human-sized measurement. I'd maybe even argue that the definition of a scale is that it's arbitrary, a mapping of /something/ onto the number line chosen in a way that the numbers are within "human" range.
The real difference being highlighted isn't anything to do with measurement, it's just a difference in dimensions. It's very obvious how we can compare 2 things in space-time dimensions, either they happened at different times that we can map onto our time scale, or they occupy different sizes in space that we can map onto our space scale. Emotions aren't quantifiable in these dimensions, but that doesn't mean we cannot create a space in which they are.
If the author would argue that happiness isn't a "thing" in the way "this piece of paper" or "1945" is, I think that argument can be had, and has been taking place over thousands of years of philosophy. To not even raise the question, but (in my eyes) to assume the answer as obvious, is, as I said, lazy writing.