Inductivist

Are Whites happier if they value their ethnic identity? General Social Survey participants were asked, "How important is your ethnic group membership to your sense of who you are?" About 39% of Whites who answered "very important" are very happy compared to around 30% of the other three levels of ethnic importance. 

These numbers are consistent with the theory that individuals are happier if they feel a strong connection to their race or ethnicity. The connection gives them a sense of meaning and value that goes beyond the isolated individual. 

What is interesting is that this theory is typically applied to non-Whites, and most advocates of this
perspective do not want Whites to identify strongly with their race. What is even more interesting is
that racial pride does not even appear to work for Blacks. Look at the numbers below. Blacks who 
place the least value on racial identification are the happiest. (A larger sample would be nice.)

And other races? The sample is too small, but it looks like the racially proud might be happier.

The stereotype of the proud White is that he is mentally disturbed and thus likely to be unhappy.
GSS data suggest the opposite.

People who are racially mixed often say they feel like they are in a racial "no man's land," neither one race nor the other. Are they less happy than people of only one race? Let's look at Black-Whites first (2021 GSS data): 

Mean happiness for White-Blacks (2.02) is slightly higher than the mean for Whites (1.96) or Blacks (1.90). Those who say their "race" is both Hispanic and White are less happy (1.78) than Whites (1.97) or Hispanics (2.08).

The same pattern is found for those who say they are both White and Native American: a mean of 1.82 versus 1.97 for Whites and 1.91 for Natives.

Finally, I merged Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans together and found that the White-NE Asian group tended to be less happy (1.78) than either Whites (1.97) or NE Asians (2.01). 

So with the exception of Black-Whites, people of mixed race tend to be a little less happy than those of one race. There is some support here for the contention that having a mixed identity is not conducive to happiness. 

A common claim by liberals and anti-Christians is that Christians are unhappy because the religion is repressive. 

The General Social Survey Survey asks people how happy they are overall these days with answers ranging from not too happy (1) to pretty happy (2) and very happy (3). Here are the means for various Christians and those with no religion:

All five Christian groups have higher happiness averages than the "nones." 

What about devout Christians? Maybe they are the miserable ones.

Mean happiness rises with more frequent "repression" (church attendance). 

The research literature in general reports that religiosity is associated with a wide range of positive characteristics, but that doesn't stop smug, ignorant anti-Christians from going on about how religion is harmful. 

Feminism is a form of liberation that should make you happy, right? Wrong. Here is the relationship among white women between being happy and voting for Hillary in 2016 (GSS data):























Women who voted for Trump are significantly more likely to be very happy. Marriage is probably the reason why: married white women tend to vote Republican, and married women are happier. Look:




















Gloria Steinem famously said, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." A fish doesn't need a bicycle unless she likes being happy. 

The General Social Survey asked respondents, "When you think about yourself, how important is your ethnic group membership to your sense of who you are? Answers ranged from very important (4) to not important at all (1).  They were also asked about how generally happy they are these days with answers ranging from very happy (3) to not too happy (1). Here are the means for happiness listed by level of ethnic identification (sample size = 1,087):

Mean happiness

How important is your ethnicity?
Very   2.28
Moderate   2.23

In the last post, General Social Survey data indicated that researcher Paul Dolan was wrong in claiming that single, childless women are happier than married women with kids.  In the old days, I would have focused, at least some, on the Durkheimian idea that social roles shape characteristics like one's level of happiness.  I was trained as a sociologist, and it has been my instinct to see social forces as important.

Years of study have convinced me that it is time to focus more on biological forces. The correlation between marriage and well-being need not be causal: people who are genetically happy might simply select themselves into marriage.  In fact, the correlations between marriage and a host of positives--greater financial success, mental and physical health, lower mortality, less risky behavior, less crime, and longer longevity--might be due to common genes which cause the correlations.

A study by Johnson et al. (2004) supports this idea.  Analyzing data on a sample of over 7,000 adults that included more than 2,500 twin pairs, they found that certain heritable traits predict marriage, and that much of the link between being married and being happy is due to genes. 

Specifically, they found the following traits for married versus single women: married women are more affectionate, nervous, careful, and traditional, and they feel like they are treated fairly by others. On the flip side, single women are less sociable, more risk-taking; they're calmer, more modern, and they think they are treated unjustly by others.

The profile of married men versus single men is very different: married men are cheerful, active, persistent, decisive, persuasive, aggressive, and traditional. They are less prone to fantasy, and they think that people treat them fairly.  Single men tend to be the opposite: They are sullen, indecisive, undisciplined, passive, modern, prone to fantasy, and they feel they are treated unfairly. 

All of these traits are strongly influenced by genes. According to the study, the heritability of being married is about .7, meaning that 70% of whether or not people are married is due to variation in genes.

So it looks like married people, especially men, tend to be happier because of their personalities. Affectionate, sociable women seek out marriage, and so do cheerful men who have the traits that lead to career success.  Married women seem drawn to comfort, security, and affection.  Men, in general, appear to be drawn to marriage, and the success-bound ones achieve it.

Single men and women are more modern, so they probably see marriage as less desirable, less expected, and both tend to be disagreeable. Single men might be less happy because they are less successful, and single women are more alienated, which is associated with sadness and mental health issues.  In addition, single women are risk-takers, and seem less drawn to the security and comfort of a permanent union.   

A piece in the Guardian reported that women are happiest if they stay single and childless, according to research done by London School of Economics professor Paul Dolan.

Dolan is wrong. The graph below displays 2000-2018 data from the General Social Survey (sample size = 12,254).  The bars indicates mean happiness (1 = not too happy, 2, = pretty happy, 3 = very happy).

 















Childless, never-married women are less happy than married women at all nine levels of family size.  A married women with eight or more kids is happier than a single, childless woman.  The difference between between the latter and married women as a whole is close to half a standard deviation, a good-sized gap.

Dolan claims married women only say they are happy when they are interviewed with their husband in the room.  I compared women who were interviewed in person with those who completed a self-adminstered questionnaire.  The results were the same for both groups. 

The last post showed that men with a minimum of one sexual partner in the past year are happier than men with nobody.  But does a man gain more happiness as the partners increase beyond one? Here's a graph showing mean happiness by partner number:

Writing about sexual inequality among males got me wondering about the bottom line: Are men who have no partners unhappy? 

As we discussed before, the General Social Survey asked people how many sexual partners they had in the past year. They also asked if the person was generally very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days.

The graph shows that men with at least one partner tend to be happier. Specifically, 32% with at least one partner is very happy, compared to only 23% of those with no one.

On the other extreme, 19% of the celibate guys were not too happy, while the number for the other group was only 11%.

So having a sex partner is associated with happiness. We just don't know what's causing what. I like to think that sex is not as important as elite culture assures us it is, but it could be the driving force here.

On the other hand, unhappy people might have less luck finding and holding on to partners. I suspect more and more that personality traits, which are grounded in brain wiring and are due to a large extent to genes, explain a lot.  It might be, for example, that people who score high on negative emotionality are more likely to find themselves alone. 

Liberals are so insensitive to reality, they don't realize that their advocacy of sexual freedom generates more rape. How? Despite the stereotype of getting jumped like Ford claims about Judge Kavanaugh, most rape is date rape. It's casual intimacy gone wrong. At some point in the seduction, the girl wants to stop, but the guy keeps going. The sequence is typically persuasion, pressure, then force.

So the more casual sexual interactions, the greater the odds of interactions that go south.

Sex liberationists would deny the connection -- again, these kinds of people are immune to reality --but if an honest one came along, perhaps he might argue it's worth it because free "love" generates so much overall happiness. Is that true?

One measure of lots of causal sex is the number of partners one had in the past year. The General Social Survey asks this question, so I looked to see if this and control variables predict being happy. Here are the ordinary least squares (OLS) results for almost 15,000 cases.

Being happy (standardized OLS coefficients)

Age  -.01
Male  -.01
White  .09***
Size of city   .01
Native-born  -.02*
Education  .12***
Church attendance  .11***
Liberalism  -.05***
Number of sex partners  -.01

* p < .05,  ***p < .001, two-tail test

So what predicts being happy?  Being white, an immigrant, educated, religious, and conservative. Race, education, and religious involvement are most important.

Age, sex, and city size don't matter, and people get nothing out of many sex partners.

Now you're thinking, maybe lots of partners don't make women happy, but c'mon, it's a man's paradise.

I ran the numbers for men only: the coefficient is negative (-.02) but the p-value is .074. In other words, more partners makes no difference in a man's happiness. Same thing if I run the numbers for women only.

Like Greg Cochran says: Sociologists are useful because if you take the position that is the opposite of theirs, you're probably right.

UPDATE: By the way, if you suspect that I added a bunch of controls to wipe out a positive partners/happiness correlation, you're wrong: it's -.02 (and not significant).

You constantly hear Rush Limbaugh claiming that liberals are miserable people. Is this true?

The  General Social Survey asked 3,322 people: 1) who they voted for in 2012 and 2) how happy they are, generally speaking. Here's the breakdown:

Percent Very Happy
Obama Voters  27.9%
Romney Voters  36.8%

Percent Not Too Happy
Obama Voters  13.9%
Romney Voters  9.3%

The idea that youth brings happiness is a common belief. After all people usually enjoy the greatest health, attractiveness and freedom while they are young. The graphs below show that older men and women are not less happy. In fact, male happiness peaks in the late 60s and early 70s and then drops. For women, the pattern seems more or less flat. There's a little increase in the 20s and a decline after 70.

Men, n = 22,129



 
Women, n = 28,065

This Time columnist thinks that homemakers are so unhappy (and angry), social change is called for. What does the GSS say about their level of unhappiness?

I included mothers since the 2000 survey to maximize sample size. Respondents were asked how happy they are these days. Answers range from "very happy" (1) to "pretty happy" (2) to "not too happy" (3). I calculated means for mothers of all work statuses. Higher means indicate more sadness (sample size = 5,286).


Mean sadness score

Full-time 1.82
Part-time 1.78
Temporarily not working 1.90
Laid off 2.05*
Retired 1.82
School 1.83
Keeping house 1.83

*significantly sadder than full-timers


According to GSS data, there is no difference in mean level of happiness between mothers working full-time and homemakers.

TGGP directs us to an excellent GSS study by James Lindgren which shows that redistributionists (liberals) are more racist, angrier, less altruistic, and less happy than anti-redistributrionists (conservatives):

In debates over the roles of law and government in promoting the equality of income or in redistributing the fruits of capitalism, widely different motives are attributed to those who favor or oppose capitalism or income redistribution. According to one view, largely accepted in the academic social psychology literature (Jost et al. 2003), opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance, a desire to dominate other groups. According to another view that goes back at least to the nineteenth century origins of Marxism, anti-capitalism and a support for greater legal efforts to redistribute income reflect envy for the property of others and a frustration with one’s lot in a capitalist system.


In this paper I expand and test the social dominance thesis using sixteen nationally representative General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center between 1980 and 2004. Because few questions of interest were asked in most years or of most respondents, the sample sizes used for analyses vary from 535 to 15,743.

I first show that respondents who express traditionally racist views (on segregation, interracial marriage, and inborn racial abilities) tend to support greater income redistribution. Traditional racists also tend to oppose free-market capitalism and its consequences, wanting the government to guarantee jobs for everyone and fix prices, wages, and profits. Next, I report a similar pattern for those who express intolerance for unpopular groups on the fifteen Stouffer tolerance questions (regarding racists, homosexuals, communists, extreme militarists, and atheists). Those who express less tolerance for unpopular groups tend to favor income redistribution and oppose capitalism.

Then I present the results of six full latent variable structural equation models. The latent variables traditional racism (Model 1: r=.27) and intolerance (Model 2: r=.31) predict the latent variable income redistribution. Similarly, the latent variables traditional racism (Model 3: r=.33) and intolerance (Model 4: r=.36) predict anti-capitalism. Controlling for education, income (log), gender, and age (Models 5 and 6), the effects of the racism and intolerance predictors on redistribution and intolerance are reduced, but remain significant. Thus the preference against income redistribution, for example, is not just the result of income or education - rather, the data are consistent with racism and intolerance continuing to play a small, but significant role in explaining the support for income redistribution and anti-capitalism. The data are broadly inconsistent with the standard belief in the social psychology literature that pro-capitalist and anti-redistributionist views are positively associated with racism.

I then explore an alternative hypothesis, showing that, compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework.

Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.

Evidence from sixteen national representative samples from 1980 through 2004 tends to suggest that Social Dominance Orientation has been in part misconceived. In the United States, segments of the academic community seem to have reversed the relationship between pro-capitalism and income redistribution on the one hand, and racism and intolerance on the other. Those who support capitalism and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be better educated, to have higher family incomes, to be less traditionally racist, and to be less intolerant of unpopular groups. Those who oppose greater redistribution also tend to be more generous in donating to charities and more likely to engage in some other altruistic behavior. The academic assumption that anti-capitalism and opposition to income redistribution reflect an orientation toward social dominance seems unwarranted.

The MIDUS Study asked people how closely they identify with their race. Answers ranged from "very strongly" to "not at all." I correlated the answers with various psychological measures about how often you felt a certain way in the past 30 days:

Correlations

Whites (sample size = 3,530-4,354)
Sad -.02
Hopeless -.01
Worthless -.01
In good spirits -.01
Peaceful .00
Felt belonging -.02
Felt proud -.05
Felt confident .02

All emotions are unrelated to race loyalty. Your first reaction might be that there is not enough variation in white identity to allow a correlation: few whites identify with their race. I was surprised myself at the distribution:

Percent who identify with race

Very closely 46.2
Somewhat close 36.1
Not very close 8.2
Not at all 9.5

All I can say is, wow.  I say wow because the GSS has led me to believe that whites don't care about race. When asked if they identify with their ethnic group versus just being an American, 95 percent of whites answer just American. But when asked about race identity without opposing it against an American identity, 82 percent of whites say yes (very close or somewhat close). A very different picture. Anyway, getting back to the previous issue, there is plenty of variation here.

Perhaps the absence of correlations is due to the fact that white consciousness is currently stigmatized. Let's look at blacks:

Blacks (sample size = 141-225)
Sad -.04
Hopeless -.04
Worthless .06
In good spirits .13
Peaceful -.08
Felt belonging -.07
Felt proud .09
Felt confident -.01

Basically the same story. According to MIDUS, there is no psychological payoff to racial solidarity.

Everyone is going on about how catty Maureen Dowd has gotten, and how she must be really unhappy. It makes me wonder if liberal women are more miserable than others.

The General Social Survey asks respondent's about their general happiness, and it turns out that mainstream conservatives have the lowest rate of unhappiness, and the pattern is the same for both sexes:

Percent "not too happy"

Extremely conservative 14.5*
Conservative 9.8
Slightly conservative 10.2
Moderate 12.2*
Slightly Liberal 12.1*
Liberal 12.8*
Extremely liberal 17.7*

*significantly higher than conservatives 

Why this pattern?  Happiness depends heavily on personality; happy people might be drawn to conservatism. A good marriage and a good job both predict being happy. More conservatives might have these. And they might also get a boost from greater religiosity. Extreme conservatives, by contrast, might have more disagreeable personalities and might be more alienated from contemporary society.

This graph summarizes GSS data on happiness and the importance of one's ethnicity among whites (N = 1,087):

















You can see that whites who say their ethnicity is very important are more likely than other groups to be very happy (not statistically significant, however).

After reading the comments in the last post, I wondered if Muslim women are less happy than the men.  I put together the table shown above from World Values Survey data. Looking at the six surveyed countries, women are just as happy. (The surveys were conducted at some point in the past 5 years which helps explain the lower happiness numbers in Iraq. As they say, war is hell).     

In a recent post on unhappiness on immigration, I was told that I should have assessed how happy immigrants would have been if they had remained in their home countries (and that I lied because I didn't do that). I guess since I'm religious, readers assume I have access to God or something because He's probably the only one that can answer that question.

Bound as I am to the mortal sphere, I put together a table that lists the numbers from the earlier post in the left column, and the percent of those in the home country who are "not very happy," or "not all all happy" (as opposed to very or quite happy). These data are from the World Values Survey.  You can see that some countries were not asked the question that their counterparts in America were asked.

In 7 of the 11 eleven countries, a higher percentage of immigrants are unhappy than folks back home. In only 4 of 11 countries are people happier here.

Of course, these immigrants might actually have been more miserable had they remained home, so let's get it out there that I'm a liar in this post too.

Leaving your family, friends, and way of life to come to America is bound to take its toll on you. Imagine living the rest of your life in, say, Japan. You'd be a fish out of water for a very long time.

The General Social Survey for many years has asked respondents how happy they are. Answer-choices include "very happy," "pretty happy," and "not too happy." While only 11.6% of native-born Americans report that they are not too happy, 16.9% of immigrants feel that way. That's a statistically significant difference. And it varies by country of origin:


Percent of immigrants in America who are not happy (N = 31,869)

Puerto Rico 29.2
Africa 28.9
West Indian 28.6
Spain 24.6
Arab 21.1
France 19.0
Italy 17.8
Mexico 17.2
China 16.4
Japan 16.3
Scotland 16.0
Russia 14.7
England/Wales 12.9
Poland 12.3
India 10.6
Philippines 10.2
Ireland 10.0
Germany 7.7

Groups differ a great deal. Germans and Irish immigrants are just as happy as native-born Americans, but Puerto Ricans and Africans are 2 1/2 times as likely to suffer from unhappiness. People who are educated and speak English do better.  

Immigrants lose more than familiar customs and proximity to loved ones over here. At Secular Right, Heather MacDonald recently described how African immigrants are mistreated by native-born blacks, and I know that some Mexican Americans do the same thing to immigrants from Latin America.

People argue that immigration might not be particularly good for Americans, but it's good for the immigrants. Says who? For an extra buck, you make yourself miserable? You cut your children off from relatives back home? You exchange one mess for another, and lose your way of life in the meantime. Think twice about it, folks.