Subjective well-being
Also known as: Happiness
How people evaluate and feel about their own lives.
What it means
Subjective well-being is the scientific term for happiness defined by people's own evaluations of their lives, comprising three components: frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and high cognitive life satisfaction. Treating these as separable matters because someone can be satisfied with life overall yet feel little day-to-day joy, or vice versa, and the components have partly different causes. SWB is moderately heritable, shows substantial stability via a personality-linked set point, and responds to circumstances less and more slowly than people predict because of hedonic adaptation. It is measured by self-report scales and experience sampling, with known biases from mood and question order. It matters because SWB is an outcome that behavioral interventions, policy, and the affective-forecasting literature all aim to improve, and people routinely mispredict what will raise it.
Examples
A person with a comfortable income reports high life satisfaction but, absorbed in a stressful job, experiences little positive emotion most days.
A new parent rates life satisfaction lower than before and feels exhausted most days, yet reports more moments of intense joy than at any point in the previous decade.
Six months after the promotion and the bigger house, daily mood ratings have drifted back to where they started — the change everyone was sure would last has quietly faded.
First described in Ed Diener (1984).
Where this comes up
- Feed the Self, Not Just the Shelf: The ROI of HappinessIn finance, we are trained to begin with a deceptively simple question before committing capital: What’s the return on…