The Happiness Industry summary

Ever asked yourself the question, “Am I happy?” Ever realized that you’re not the only one who wants to know the answer? Time to learn who – other than your mom – is so keen to find out. Hint, these aren’t self-help blinks, but a journey into e-commerce, neuroscience and big data.

The Happiness Industry is full of valuable insights into a world in which happiness has become a commodity that can be quantified in an MRI or an algorithm.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

• what Jeremy Bentham had to say about happiness;
• how neuroscience, economics and happiness are interlinked; and
• which (hidden) incentives your government might have to make you happy.

From the early 1990s on, economists began to use (and abuse) research into the relationships between pleasure and money. Studies compared the happiness of people with different levels of income, with the controversial, but perhaps unsurprising, findings that the richer are indeed happier.

Research into the topic continued, with neuroscientists taking the lead. Further studies revealed that a pleasurable activity corresponds with an increase in dopamine levels in the brain.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that activates the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. One of these centers is the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain that also triggers decisions to purchase a product.

In light of this, some neuroscientists have proposed that every buying decision is actually the result of specific neural pathways in the brain. Perhaps, then, when we spend $10 on a pizza, or $500 on a new tech gadget, we receive an equivalent quantity of dopamine as a reward.

Of course, it’s important to consider who is carrying out such research, and why. Economists, business leaders and marketers would all be absolutely thrilled if they could prove that money wields power over the chemical processes of happiness.

So long as capitalism exists, there will be people trying to link psychological happiness and money together! And happiness itself is becoming increasingly commodifed. Find out more in the following blinks.

How gullible are you? Most of us think we’re pretty tough to fool, but just think about all the products that you own. There might be several that you’re using right now. Why did you buy those particular headphones, or socks, or snack bars?

Because our brains are more easily swayed than we’d like to believe. Cunning advertising teams have made use of neuroscience to get inside your head and make you buy and then buy some more.

Brian Knutson, a Stanford neuroscientist, found that humans experience a significant amount of pleasure when anticipating receiving a product. In fact, thinking about having a product makes us happier than actually owning it.

Current advertising trends reflect this finding in their fixation on the experience of using a product, rather than the characteristics or features of the physical product itself.

For example, an ad for jogging shoes sells the experience of happy, carefree running, perhaps encapsulated in a smiling, toned female jogger running along a forest track. This approach is highly effective at increasing the anticipation of receiving the marketed product.

Marketers also make clever use of research into behavioral analysis. Advertisers have long known that they aren’t just selling a product, but seeking to generate a specific psychological response. Consumers’ feelings can be manipulated, and powerfully too.

John Watson (1878–1958), an American consumer psychologist, evoked feelings of purity and cleanliness in his ads for baby powder, making shrewd use of the profound emotions of young mothers. The ad was a success, but of course not all women were taken in by it.

That was one shortcoming of advertising in the past: even with focus groups and market research, it was tough to get a comprehensive picture of how your ads were received by the public.

Today, things have changed. With online advertising and growing e-commerce, behavioral analysis is being used more slyly than ever. Online, it’s incredibly easy to measure how consumers behave, and in turn, easier to get consumers to do what you want them to.

But it’s not just marketers that want to harness our happiness. Your employer does too.

Capitalist companies love making profits. But what happens when their employees don’t love their jobs? Dwindling enthusiasm and productivity are some of the greatest threats to any aspiring firm.

A study by Gallup revealed that as little as 13 percent of the global workforce are engaged in and enthusiastic about their jobs. A further study also found that a quarter of absenteeism is not the result of real sickness, but general burnout experienced by employees.

A lack of engagement doesn’t just mean suffering employees, but massive costs to businesses and governments too. Active disengagement, be it absenteeism, sickness or even just inertia when on the job, costs the US economy a whopping $550 billion a year.

Simply put, capitalism can’t sustain itself unless businesses can rally commitment from their employees. Why? Because productivity goes hand-in-hand with health and happiness.

Researchers estimate that companies can increase their output by 12 percent if employees feel happy. Findings also highlight the personal dangers of burnout for employees, leaving them at greater risk of heart attacks, strokes and nervous breakdowns, all of which are naturally disastrous for productivity.

With this in mind, some businesses make serious attempts to promote their employees’ happiness and health, hoping to improve their performance and reap the benefits. Executive wellness programs, for instance, are designed for the senior employees of companies in order to keep them fit enough to run the ship.

An increasing number of companies even employ specialist “happiness consultants” who guide managers to creating a cheerier workplace. Google, for example, has an in-house “jolly good fellow” to spread mindfulness and empathy in order to make employees healthier and happier, and, of course, maintain profits for the business.

Who are you more likely to believe: a pushy salesman, or one of your close friends? Word-of-mouth is one of the oldest forms of advertising. It’s stood the test of time because it works. But these days, it’s received a bit of a makeover.

Marketers today have figured out just how much use they can make of social bonds when advertising products. There are two main strategies. First, they deepen the “social” relationship between company and customer. How?

One highly effective tactic is corporate giving. This is nothing more than giving products and services away for free. Companies do this not out of generosity, but to win a customer’s favor and build up their own reputation in the market.

Even simpler is the technique of saying thank you. For example, Tesco, a leading UK supermarket chain, released YouTube videos with men in Christmas jumpers singing “thank you” as part of the brand advertising campaign. This marketing tactic boosted revenue and allowed Tesco to recover after an unsuccessful sales performance in 2011.

The second strategy that companies use to take advantage of social bonds is friendvertising. Friendvertising refers to the creation of images and videos with positive brand messages that appeal to social media users, who in turn share the ad with their online friends.

The most shared ad of 2013 was a three minute YouTube video called “Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches.” The beauty and skincare brand centered their ad on the positive message “you are more beautiful than you think,” something highly relatable and highly shareable. Online sharing is rather like a faster, wider-reaching version of word-of-mouth advertising.

This is something to remember next time you scroll through your feeds! You may have been subject to marketing campaigns without even realizing. Or your friends may have been turned into brand advocates, whether they were aware of it or not.

If you take a moment to think about the vast amount of digital information you create everyday, from your Google searches to Facebook likes to your Amazon.com purchases, it’s reasonable to say that it’s quite a lot of data. And data, like happiness, is rapidly becoming a commodity.

Our everyday digital transactions with retailers, governments and each other generate confidential data that is nevertheless used to analyze and predict human behavior. This makes it easier for scammers to hijack our credit cards, for example.

Despite this, we continue to pour out personal information online, often without a second thought. Think about it: there are 500 million new tweets per day on Twitter. This means that the risk of privacy invasion is high.

Our personal information, so sought after by companies and advertisers, is now, for the first time, readily available to them. Facebook sells information about our activity on Facebook to advertisers, for example. This information is analyzed and manipulated by marketers who ensure we see ads that match our tastes and interests, often with spooky accuracy.

Moreover, in 2014, Facebook published a paper on emotional contagion in social networks. Unbeknownst to us, Facebook had been using an automated system to identify positive or negative words in news feeds.

Facebook then experimented by altering levels of positive or negative content across the feeds of 700,000 users for a week to assess the impact on their emotions, based on their status updates. In other words, your happiness is constantly under surveillance.