Social Climate
Happiness versus unhappiness
By Mahar Mangahas
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:51:00 06/07/2008
Filed Under: Social Issues, Research, Poverty
MANILA, Philippines—The March 2008 Social Weather Survey, using a standard scale of many countries, found 34 percent of adult Filipinos Very Happy, 46 percent Fairly Happy, 16 percent Not Very Happy, and 3.6 percent Not At All Happy. (In Tagalog, the surveys of Social Weather Stations, or SWS, use “talagang masaya,” “medyo masaya,” “hindi masyadong masaya,” and “talagang hindi masaya.”)
Conventionally, the upper two categories are Happy, and the lower two are Unhappy. Thus happiness and unhappiness get measured at the same time. Out of every five adult Filipinos, four are happy and one is not. That is probably a little over the world average, for those who go for international contests. For me, what matters more is progress over time.
It so happens that the time-trend for Happy Filipinos is flat. The percentage started at 84 in July 1991. In 16 SWS surveys over 1991-2008, it ranged between 76 in August 2005, and 92 in April 1996. With three scores in the 70s, 12 in the 80s, and one in the 90s, it is clear that happiness is not a problem for most adult Filipinos.
Wouldn’t it be more meaningful to keep track of unhappiness instead? The unhappy minority are not so few—8 million Not Very Happy, and 2 million Not At All happy, or a total of 10 million. That’s a significant number to worry about, if such people deserve the collective worry of society.
The key issue is whether unhappiness is only a personal concern, or whether it is also a social concern, like hunger or poverty. The reason hunger and poverty are social concerns is that they are painful and harmful not only to the hungry and the poor, but also to the entire society.
Virtually everyone accepts that the government, in behalf of society, should aim to eradicate hunger and poverty. Thus the regular tracking of hunger and poverty is essential. (But targeting is not sufficient; aiming an unloaded gun is of no use.) But why should the government also aim to eradicate unhappiness? Surely it already has other more important things to do.
Unhappiness due to hunger. In the first quarter of 2008, as reported last May 5 by SWS, 15.7 percent of families suffered from hunger—broken down into 12.5 points “moderately hungry,” and 3.2 points “severely hungry.”
Unhappiness was 38 percent within the severely hungry, 29 percent within the moderately hungry, and 17 percent within the non-hungry—from a special tabulation by Clarence Magano of SWS.
One might also say that hunger was 24.8 percent among the unhappy, compared to only 13.4 percent among the happy, except that it is more reasonable to call hunger a cause of unhappiness than the other way around.
Unhappiness due to poverty. There is also a connection between poverty and unhappiness, but it is not as strong a determinant as hunger.
Among families that rated themselves as food-poor, unhappiness was 26 percent in March 2008. Among those that rated themselves as poor in general (which is less harsh than food-poor), unhappiness was smaller, at 23 percent. Both numbers are above the national unhappiness of 19 percent; they make sense.
In poor families, the happiness percentage in March 2008 was 77, only a few points below the average of 81 for all families in general. Some critics say this does not make sense, and is a flaw in the SWS surveys. My response is that they are not merely wrong, but most unkind and cruel, to think that happiness is incompatible with poverty.
One should be thankful that most of the poor, and even most of the hungry, still find a basis for happiness. This tendency is not peculiar to Filipinos.
According to the renowned psychologist Bob Cummins, what subjective indicators measure is happiness as a mood, rather than happiness as an emotion. A mood is something stable, whereas an emotion tends to be fleeting. Cummins explains the narrow variation of happiness in surveys, all over the world, by theorizing that happiness, as a mood, is controlled by a management system that he calls subjective well-being homeostasis.
Just as their physiological systems normally keep body temperature within a narrow range, people’s psychological systems normally work to keep happiness from extreme change. A homeostatic system is resilient, working to help people bounce back from unusually bad (or even unusually good) experiences.
Unhappy people seek help from external resources, the major ones being money and relationships. Cummins says that emotionally intimate relationships are the most powerful defense. Unhappy people also use internal resources such as the ability to rationalize or “explain away” a bad situation, to their advantage. (Would feeling a close relationship to God be an internal or an external resource? Either way, this homeostatic element would be very Filipino.)
Bob Cummins, professor of psychology at Deakin University and developer of the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index, is the incoming president of the International Society for Quality of Life Studies and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Happiness Studies.
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A new SWS book is out: “The Code of Muslim Personal Laws: What Influential Muslims and Shari’a Lawyers Think,” by Linda Luz Guerrero, Hamid Barra, Mahar Mangahas and Vladymir Joseph Licudine.
This SWS study, supported by The Asia Foundation, assembles views of a sample of 709 influential Muslim leaders, scholars and opinion leaders on the Code of Muslim Personal Laws. It aims to help strengthen respect for the rule of law and institutions of law and justice, and integrate Muslim Filipinos into the mainstream Philippine society.
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Contact SWS: www.sws.org.ph or mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph
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