Part 1: News Media Featuring Psychological Research
The news article Can Pursuing Happiness Make You Unhappy credited by the CC0 Public Domain speaks about the discovery that people who actively pursue happiness are actually less happy than those who appreciate their lives at the moment. The research questions being addressed in this study were how pursuing happiness and being in the state of happiness influenced people’s perception of time. The methodology was varied between test groups, as the participants in one group were asked to create a list or think about things that made them happy, and another group watched a dull movie in order to measure the reward of happiness as a goal to be achieved. Afterwards, the two groups were asked to report how much free time they felt that they had.
The research findings concluded that people who pursue happiness began to think that their time was scarce. It seemed that happiness was an unattainable goal that lessened the participant’s free time; but for those in the second group who already felt like they achieved happiness through watching a comedy, their sense of free time was felt longer than those who used happiness as a goal to reach. These findings can be applied to the real world by showing that people who constantly try to obtain the goal of happiness will feel unhappy, as they will feel like they have little free time to truly appreciate their aspirations and goals. This will bleed into social interaction, as the article reported that those who try to pursue happiness were less likely to volunteer and were less helpful to others.
There were no limitations reported in the news article’s account of the study.
Part 2: Psychological Research Featured in News Media
The study, “Vanishing Time In the Pursuit of Happiness” conducted by Aekyoung Kim and Sam J. Maglio questioned if actively pursuing happiness interferes with how much time the pursuer feels is available. The study was conducted with four different groups to see the effects of happiness-seeking on the amount of time the participants felt that they had. Depending on the group, the participants were asked to write down a list of 10 things that made them a happy person, or 10 things that would make them happy. The resources used were writing utensils, along with questionnaires that asked the participants about how much time they felt that they had after completing the activity.
In the fourth study that was conducted, the researchers separated 100 randomly picked participants from the website Mechanical Turk into two groups. One group was made to seek happiness through writing a list of 10 things that would make them happier, while the other group wrote a list of 10 things that showed they were happy in order to make them feel as though happiness was a goal that they had already achieved. After the lists were written, the groups then rated how much time they felt that they had on a scale of negative five (meaning that they had no time) through positive five (they had plentiful time). In addition, the participants read either positive or negative statements which spoke about the availability of time and were told to rate how much they agreed or disagreed with the statement ranging from a scale of one through seven.
The research findings showed that the more the participants focused on being happy, the less free time they felt that they had. Though this was proven to be true, the group that was made to feel happy was shown to think of happiness as a goal that was already pursued, which prevented the feeling of losing time. These findings prove themselves to be applicable to the real world, as the researchers pointed out that actively pursuing happiness could have a negative effect on an individual’s well being.
There were no limitations to the study mentioned in the research paper.
Part 3: Critical Comparison between Research and News Articles
The research article and news article have many similarities between the two. The news article focused on the fourth study performed by the researchers, and asked the reader the same question as the research question; if the pursuit of happiness will cause the individual to feel like their time is scarce. Both articles point out the major aims of the research project, as both came to the conclusion that viewing happiness as a goal to be obtained would ultimately lead an individual feeling as though there was little time left in their day. The news article and research article put major stress on the point of telling the public to be content with the present rather than actively seeking out future gratifications, as both said in their final paragraphs that actively pursuing happiness could ultimately lead to individuals' well being dwindling. Neither article reported on major limitations or issues faced during the conduction of the study.
Although there are similarities between the two articles, there are also stark differences. For example, the news article did not go into detail about the other three studies that were performed in the research article; it only briefly mentioned that other studies occurred in the opening paragraph. In addition, the news article failed to mention the results that were found in research studies one and three, while only briefly mentioning the results of study two. In the research article, the researchers went into great detail about the methods, procedures, major findings, and implications of all four studies; things that were either scarcely mentioned or completely left out of the news article. Each section of the research study was given its own abstract, methods, and discussions paragraph, along with the specific number of participants used in each stage of the study. For example, section two specifically mentioned that they recruited 117 undergraduate students for the study of goal achievement effects on happiness and time; which are important details that the news article left out. In addition, there was a general abstract and discussion positioned at the beginning and end of the paper, in order to collect all the ideas and knowledge to be discussed and found in the article.
The research article also gave an uplifting perspective to their findings, as the results of the second study focused on the role of goal achievement, as they found that the act of looking for happiness actually removed the feeling of time being scarce if the goal of happiness was achieved. The researchers also made it evident that their findings were concrete, as their thorough explanations and documentation of the experiments made it difficult for the reader to try to think of any other reason for the feeling of missing time.
Altogether, the news report was accurate and factual but was missing a lot of key information to give the full picture of the study. It shared its strengths by giving plentiful information on the fourth study, but it gave a basic, bare-boned report on the other three findings. Although the information that was reported on was accurate, the journalists limited the article by leaving out many key details, like how many participants took part in the study, how many groups were created for each sectioned portion of the study, or the overall findings and their relations to each other. The news article stressed heavily only the findings of the participants of the fourth study, which was that actively pursuing happiness caused the participants to feel like they had less time. Due to the minimalistic information found in the news report, it can be inferred that the impact of the news article could be damaging to the public. Without the results and final findings of the second study, the audience would not know that seeing happiness as a goal that has already been obtained was found to reverse the notion of time being scarce. By viewing yourself as an already happy person, your perception of time was found to be more abundant than if you actively pursue happiness. The absence of this information could lead to a more pessimistic view on life for the reader, as being told that achieving happiness is an unattainable goal without any uplifting evidence provided would lead a reader to believe that there is no way to truly be happy in life. Although, the news report did stress the findings of the study that actively looking to be happy was not beneficial for the participants, which could encourage an audience to be grateful for what they have in the present, instead of constantly looking towards the future.
In conclusion, both articles are accurate in their view of happiness being achievable with a sense of gratitude for the present, although the news article leaves this finding up to the reader to discover.