The Secret to Happiness?

Hi. I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, we're pitting facts against finding happiness. That's right. There's claims out there that all kinds of things can make us happy, from making money to having kids to buying your dream home. But what actually works? What does it take to have a happy life? To find out, Harvard has been running this amazing study which has tracked hundreds of people for decades. It's actually the longest running scientific study into happiness. And as a result, we now have all of these awesome insights into how we can not only be happier, but healthier too. And so today on the show, we're chatting with the guy who has been the director of this study for more than two decades. His name is Professor Bob Waldinger, he's also a psychiatrist, and he co wrote a book about this study. Bob is going to tell us what a lot of us get wrong in searching for the good life, and ultimately, how science can help us all to be happy. Here's Bob. Well, the biggest finding is that the people who stayed healthiest and happiest the longest were the people who were Come on. I'm not gonna give it away that easily. You gotta listen to the episode. Science spills the beans on how to be happy just after the break. Welcome back. Today, we're talking about the world's longest running study into happiness. It's officially called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. At the start of the study, pretty much everyone was a white guy. Eventually, they let in women. And a lot of their findings have been repeated by different groups all around the world. So, let's jump in. Here's Professor Bob Waldinger. Bob, you are the director of this amazing study. For those who have never heard of it, what is kind of the driving question of this study? How do we live a good life? That's really it. And what are the conditions that predict who's gonna thrive as they go through their life and who isn't? That's what we were asking. So set the scene, of how this study began. It's the 1930s. Who are scientists picking to study? Well, there were two separate studies that didn't actually know about each other. One was a study of Harvard College undergraduate students, 19 year olds who were thought by their deans to be fine, upstanding specimens. And so they were, chosen to study normal development from adolescence to young adulthood. And of course, now we, you know, we've realized how ridiculous that is. If you wanna study normal development, you study all white guys from Harvard. No. So, but the other group was also a study of normal development, but it was a study of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods and their most troubled families. So families known for, domestic violence, parental illness, mental illness, known to social service agencies for so much trouble. …