Correlations, Causes and Heuristics in Surveys of Life Satisfaction

Satisfaction with life domains is more highly correlated with interpersonal than with intrapersonal comparisons (Emmons and Diener, 1985). The hypothesis of the present studies is that the high correlations reflect inferences of social comparison from global satisfaction. Paradoxically, such inferences are most likely in private domains (love life, friends), where social information is scarce and relatively unimportant as a determinant of satisfaction. Study I replicates the Emmons-Diener findings, but also finds that subjects judge recent changes more important than social standing as a determinant of life satisfaction, especially in private domains. Study 1I examines an order effect in judgments of satisfaction. As hypothesized the correlation between social comparison and global satisfaction is higher (in private domains only) when global satisfaction is judged first than when the order of judgment is reversed. The main goal of the study of subjective well-being is to understand the causes of human happiness and misery. This goal has often been sought through the correlational analysis of people's evaluations of various aspects of their lives. The correlational analysis accepts the ratings of particular life domains as valid indications of satisfaction in these domains, and assumes that the overall evaluation of happiness or wellbeing is based on these constituent assessments. Both assumptions are called into question by an alternative approach to judgments of wellbeing (e.g., the "judgment model" of Schwarz and Strack, 1991), which Diener (1989) has labeled "constructionist." The central idea of the constructionist approach is that answers to well-being surveys are not read-outs of stable internal states, but instead represent ad hoc constructions, evoked by the specific question in its particular context. Responses are understood as outcomes of a cognitive process which involves interpretation, memory search, evaluation, and editing (see also Tourangeau, 1984; Hippler et aL, 1987). An important implication of this view is that correlations between judgments of different variables may reflect the heuristic use of one judgment to make another, rather than a causal effect of one of the Social Indicators Research 27:221--234, 1992. 9 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 222 CRAIG R. FOX A N D DANIEL KAHNEMAN judged variables on the other. The present report is concerned with a particular case of this ambiguity in the interpretation of correlational results. A basic finding of well-being research is that objective circumstances and actual achievements are poor predictors of satisfaction with financial status, grades, physical condition, and other life domains (Argyle, 1987). Instead, satisfaction is mainly determined by an explicit or implicit comparison of the current state to some reference norm or standard. One tradition of research has emphasized the role of social comparisons in determining feelings of satisfaction or relative deprivation (e.g., Crosby, 1982; Festinger, 1954). Another tradition has emphasized comparisons to an adaptation level, which is mainly determined by the individual's personal history (e.g., Brickman and Campbell, 1971; Helson, 1964). The starting point of our inquiry is a seemingly straightforward question: What is the relative importance of social comparisons and individual history in the evaluation of satisfaction with particular domains of life? Evidence on the relative importance of interpersonal and intrapersonal comparisons is scant and inconsistent. A large study of financial well-being conducted by Dutch economists (van de Stadt et al., 1985) concluded that comparisons to the individual's past have substantially greater weight than comparisons to reference groups in determining satisfaction. However, a study by Emmons and Diener (1985) favors the opposite conclusion. The present note discusses the findings of the Emmons-Diener study.m Emmons and Diener (1985) presented 149 students with detailed questions about their satisfaction with 11 domains of their lives. The criterion variable for each domain was a satisfaction rating, worded as follows: "Please rate below how satisfied you are with each area of your life presently." The analysis focused on the prediction of this variable from other measures obtained in the same questionnaire, including selfreports of social (interpersonal) comparisons and recent change (intrapersonal comparisons). Table I presents a subset of the data reported in Table HI of the Emmons-Diener (1985) study. The salient finding is that for most domains social comparison ratings predict satisfaction much better than do ratings of recent change. The first-order correlations (not shown C A U S E S A N D H E U R I S T I C S 223 T A B L E I Standardized beta weights predicting satisfaction f rom E m m o n s and Diener (1985) Social Recent Domain compar ison change Fr iends 0.46 b 0.14 a Love life 0.57 a 0.14 b Grades 0.25b 0.19 b Hous ing 0.15 a 0.00 Physical attractiveness 0.39 b 0.03 Standard of living 0.27 b 0.06 Family 0.29 b 0.08 Recreat ion 0.34b 0.12 Religion 0.25 b 0.06 Courses 0.07 0.240 Future career 0.31 b 0.18b Sum across domains 0.49 b 0.03 a p < 0.05 b p < 0.01 N = 149 here) support the same conclusion: over the 11 domains, the average correlation of satisfaction with a measure of social comparison was 0.64, whereas the average correlation of satisfaction with a measure of recent change was only 0.30. These results suggest that social comparisons dominate intrapersonal contrasts in determining satisfaction. Emmons and Diener appreciated the need for caution in interpreting these correlational findings; they concluded their brief discussion of the results with the following observation: "One topic for future research is to uncover the direction of the influence between social comparison and subjective well-being. It is plausible that in some cases a feeling of well-being leads to high social comparison estimates; in other cases the influence may occur in the other direction, and frequently the influence may be bidirectional." (p. 163) As is often the case, however, this note of caution was dropped in secondary references to the study, which portray social comparison as the strongest predictor -and by implication the most important cause of satisfaction (Diener, 1984: Smith et al., 1989). Predicting and explaining global variables by their more specific constituents is intuitively appealing. In the context of well-being research, 224 CRAIG R. FOX AND DANIEL KAHNEMAN this intuition suggests that global satisfaction with life should be explained by satisfaction with various life domains, and that satisfaction with each domain should be explained in turn by more specific measures, such as evaluations of interand intrapersonal comparisons. However, the constructionist perspective suggests caution. In this approach, difficult judgments are made by using the most accessible relevant information and by relying heuristically on simpler judgments or on other accessible cues such as current mood (Schwarz and Clore, 1983). Global judgments will therefore be derived from more specific constituents mainly to the extent that the latter are more accessible or easily judged. Conversely, if global satisfaction with a particular domain is more easily judged than social comparison, the global judgment could serve as a heuristic for the specific. It is plausible to assume, for example, that most people are keenly aware of their own happiness or misery in the domain of love, but relatively ignorant of the love lives of others. In the absence of more direct information about other people, one's own satisfaction can be used to guess how one compares to others. It is such social ignorance that permits many lovers to describe themselves as "the happiest person in the world". The present account suggests the perverse hypothesis that the correlation between judgments of social comparison and of global satisfaction may be especially high in domains where people know little about others. In such cases, of course, subjective social comparison is an ad hoc construction that plays little or no part in the causation of satisfaction. These speculations were prompted by two striking results in Table I: the beta weight for social comparison is highest for love life, and notably low for grades. These results appear to contradict the everyday observation that social comparison looms larger in academic achievement than in love. Intrigued by this curious pattern, we carried out two studies to examine whether correlations accurately reflect the relative importance of interpersonal and intrapersonal comparisons in global satisfaction.