Question: Can you measure happiness? If so, can you find out if one person is happier than another?

Sam Geen answered on 21 Jun 2013:

Sort of! Some people have tried to measure “Gross National Happiness” rather than “Gross National Product”, which measures how much money people make. The idea is that even if people are poorer, they can still have a good quality of life. For this, they measure a lot of things, like how many people complain about their job, how clean the environment is, how healthy people are, etc.

But in individual people, it’s difficult. There are different types of happiness – you can be content with your life, be excited by theme park rides, be happy about having a cake to eat, etc. However, there are chemicals that control happiness – for example, endorphins are a chemical released by the body when we’re healthy, comfortable and relaxed. They’re also produced when we’re excited or exercising, which leads to the “runner’s high”, where people run so much that they get an endorphin rush and feel happy.

But when you ask people whether they’re happy, it’s difficult to get an exact answer, plus sometimes people will pretend to be happier than they are (if you ask “how are you doing?” when you pass someone you know in the street, they will often say “OK” rather than say what’s bothering them). And people are happy for different reasons, so it’s difficult to compare two people and see who is happiest reliably.