Mindwandering = Unhappiness?
06.03.13 Filed in: Opinion
If you know me, you’ll know that I’m a big follower of TED talks (TED.com) - lots of extremely interesting stuff to be learned there.
Recently, I came across a talk by Matt Killingsworth. He’s put together an “app” to measure happiness using a smartphone - users get “pinged” several times per day and answer a couple of simple questions to get a quantification of their happiness and also wether they were mind-wandering at the time.
In his talk, he presents a graph which which he demonstrates that “people are substantially less happy” when they are mind-wandering. The visual of this bar graph is quite striking, however - as happens often with graphs - one needs to read “between the bars” to get the whole picture. If you look on the left side, you’ll see the scale, which doesn’t go from 0 to 100% as would be expected, but from 52 to 68%. Why? Only Mr. Killingsworth knows for sure.
It certainly produces an initial “wow, look at the difference” effect visually - and if you don’t look at the scale, that will stick with you. Once you do realize the graph scale, however, the difference between the happiness level of focussed vs. mind-wandering is reduced to 66 vs. 57%… that’s 9% difference, certainly not “substantial” in my book. In fact, as with every set of scientific data, there is certain error factor that needs to be calculated into any experiment. With a subjective answer system like the app used here, an error of 10% seems pretty reasonable - which would indicate that his point that mind-wandering causes unhappiness is completely moot!
Later on, there is another bar graph that shows the correlation between happiness when focussed, and three types of mind-wandering: positive, neutral and negative. According to Mr. Killingsworth, the data seems to implicate that any type of mind-wandering leads to unhappiness - from the data, though, the level of happiness when focussed is identical to the level when doing positive mind-wandering (65%)… I’m wondering wether he has an issue interpreting his own data?
Another thing that bothers the scientific side of me is the selected group: only owners of smartphones with mobile internet access can take part in the study. This limits the selection of participants to a reduced segment of the population. Wether or not someone with a smartphone is more or less happy, or does more or less mind-wandering, is beyond me - but I’m quite certain it affects the outcome.
While the idea behind the experiment is great and certainly the topic is well worth researching, Mr. Killingsworth’s interpretation of that data is, in my opinion, quite lacking.
Recently, I came across a talk by Matt Killingsworth. He’s put together an “app” to measure happiness using a smartphone - users get “pinged” several times per day and answer a couple of simple questions to get a quantification of their happiness and also wether they were mind-wandering at the time.
In his talk, he presents a graph which which he demonstrates that “people are substantially less happy” when they are mind-wandering. The visual of this bar graph is quite striking, however - as happens often with graphs - one needs to read “between the bars” to get the whole picture. If you look on the left side, you’ll see the scale, which doesn’t go from 0 to 100% as would be expected, but from 52 to 68%. Why? Only Mr. Killingsworth knows for sure.
It certainly produces an initial “wow, look at the difference” effect visually - and if you don’t look at the scale, that will stick with you. Once you do realize the graph scale, however, the difference between the happiness level of focussed vs. mind-wandering is reduced to 66 vs. 57%… that’s 9% difference, certainly not “substantial” in my book. In fact, as with every set of scientific data, there is certain error factor that needs to be calculated into any experiment. With a subjective answer system like the app used here, an error of 10% seems pretty reasonable - which would indicate that his point that mind-wandering causes unhappiness is completely moot!
Later on, there is another bar graph that shows the correlation between happiness when focussed, and three types of mind-wandering: positive, neutral and negative. According to Mr. Killingsworth, the data seems to implicate that any type of mind-wandering leads to unhappiness - from the data, though, the level of happiness when focussed is identical to the level when doing positive mind-wandering (65%)… I’m wondering wether he has an issue interpreting his own data?
Another thing that bothers the scientific side of me is the selected group: only owners of smartphones with mobile internet access can take part in the study. This limits the selection of participants to a reduced segment of the population. Wether or not someone with a smartphone is more or less happy, or does more or less mind-wandering, is beyond me - but I’m quite certain it affects the outcome.
While the idea behind the experiment is great and certainly the topic is well worth researching, Mr. Killingsworth’s interpretation of that data is, in my opinion, quite lacking.
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