Gumption

Snoop: An Investigation into Possessions, Perceptions, Projections and Personalities

Sam Gosling's new book - Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You - blends an engaging and accessible overview of some of the key concepts and research findings in personality psychology and environmental psychology with what amounts to a collection of short detective stories. Snoopology, the art and science of determining "which of your tastes and habits provide particular portals into your personality", attempts to differentiate what our stuff really says about us from what most people might think our stuff says about us.

A snoopologist looks for three basic types of clues to personality - one's "unique pattern of thinking, feeling and behaving that is consistent over time" - in the personal spaces (e.g., bedrooms and bathrooms in the home, and offices or cubicles at work) that we inhabit:

• identity claims: posters, awards, photos, trinkets and other mementos that make deliberate symbolic statements about how we see ourselves that can be for our benefit (self-directed identity claims) or intended for others (other-directed identity claims)
• feeling regulators: family photos, keepsakes, music, books and videos that help us manage our emotions and thoughts
• behavior residue: the physical traces left in the environment by our everyday actions (e.g., objects on our desks, on our floors or in our garbage)

The "big five" personality traits, which I first encountered (and wrote about) in the context of YouJustGetMe, a web site for guessing these traits (and an associated ICWSM 2008 paper on which Sam was co-author), are here enumerated along with well-known icons who exemplify these traits:

• Openness: Leonardo da Vinci; creative, imaginative, abstract, curious, deep thinkers, inventive and value arts and aesthetic experiences.
• Conscientiousness: RoboCop; thorough, dependable, reliable, hard-working, task-focused, efficient, good planners.
• Extraversion: Axel Foley (Beverly Hills Cop); talkative, energetic, enthusiastic, assertive, outgoing, sociable.
• Agreeableness: Fred Rogers; helpful, selfless, sympathetic, kind, forgiving, trusting, considerate, cooperative.
• Neuroticism: Woody Allen; anxious, easily ruffled or upset, worried, moody.

In exploring what it really means to know someone, Sam reviews some of the work by Dan McAdams, including McAdams' book, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, which describes three levels of intimacy:

• traits: the "big five" dimensions of personality listed above
• personal concerns: roles, goals, skills and values
• identity: the thread that ties the experiences of our past, present and future into one narrative

In discussing these levels of intimacy, Sam notes that Arthur Aron has developed a two-person "sharing game" consisting of a sequence of 36 questions that slowly escalate the level of disclosure between two people, enabling them to progress from the first to the second level of intimacy. Unfortunately, the sharing game does not appear to be available online (though a journal paper describing the system is available for a fee),

The "sharing game" reminds me of OneKeyAway, a dating service that adds some new twists to "lock-and-key" parties, in which women are given locks and men are given keys - both worn on lanyards around their necks - and prizes are awarded to couples who find matching locks and keys, offering incentives to both easily engage and disengage throughout the course of a party. I've written an entire blog post about lock-and-key parties and OneKeyAway; here I'll simply note a few relevant items. OneKeyAway introduces two interesting dimensions: a 64-question online questionnaire, which covers topics such as relationship expectations, emotional responsiveness, personal behaviors and habits, hobbies, sexual orientation and preferences, religion and substance; and a MatchLinC keyfob-like device that encodes those responses and is handed out at an event. Participants can "zap" each other - point their MatchLinCs at each other and press a button (vs. inserting a key in a lock), and a red, amber or green light on the device signals their relative compatibility. Couples can, of course, strike up a conversation whether the devices say they are compatible or incompatible (both of which are potentially interesting conversation topics if they find each other attractive). The real power is in the questionnaire, which primes the participants to delve into topic areas that are more likely to lead to progressive disclosure and increasing levels of intimacy.

I don't know whether music is one of the topics in the OneKeyAway questionnaire, but it does frequently rank among the topics that appears to be most conducive to enabling people to connect with and relate to each other. Summarizing a number of related psychological experiments, Sam observes that

music consistently trumps books, clothing, food, memories and television shows in helping people get to know each other.

Elsewhere in the book, he notes that

Web sites are extraordinarily good places to learn about people - perhaps the best of all places.

The book includes a handy table (shown right) to indicate just how well we can really learn about people's personality traits through different channels.

These, in turn, reminded me of some earlier ruminations about music and personality, that were inspired by earlier encounters with the work of Sam and his colleagues, and gives me renewed hope that we'll be able to effectively transmute Strands' early core competencies in music recommendation into broader and deeper recommendations that help people discover and enjoy other people, places and things around them (an explicit part of our mini-manifesto for Strands Labs, Seattle).

The sharing game, OneKeyAway and talking about music preferences can help people move from traits to personal concerns, but to really enable people to know each other at the deeper level of identity, McAdams says we have to set the stage for the telling of a story ... their story: "an inner story of the self that integrates the reconstructed past, perceived present and anticipated future to provide a life with unity, purpose and meaning". This dimension reminds me of my experience in The Mankind Project, where we regularly seek to differentiate data, judgments, feelings and wants. One of the tools we use to do this is careful use of language, or as we like to put it, clear, direct, concise and truthful (CDCT) communication. We often preface our remarks with "the story I make up about X" to help us remember that the judgments we have about people - others and ourselves - typically take the form of narratives we construct based on relatively sparse data, filled in with a multitude of judgments, in our relentless effort to make sense of the world. We also emphasize the use of "I" statements - which is consistent with the findings of James Pennebaker reported in the book that a person's use of first-person pronouns is correlated with honesty (and, interestingly, complex thinking).

Returning to the topic of making sense of people, Gosling reports that the famous Rorschach ink-blot test, in which people describe what they see in ink-blot patterns, is actually not very helpful in assessing personality. A more helpful test is the Picture Story Exercise (PSE) - or Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) - in which people make up a spontaneous story about a random series of pictures, revealing repressed aspects of their personality, especially their motivations and needs for achievement, affiliation and power. Personality seepage can also be effectively captured and analyzed through body movements such as jumping, walking and dancing. Wryly noting that "we sometimes say more with our hips than with our lips", Sam reports on a study by Karl Grammer, at the Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology, in which analysis of videotapes and interviews conducted in nightclubs showed that the tightness of a woman's clothing, the amount of skin it reveals, and the "explosiveness" of her movement on the dance floor are all correlated to estrogen levels (indicating fertility, and thus, attractiveness, evolutionarily speaking).

Of course, physiological components of attractiveness are often combined with - or covered up or compensated by - other, more deceptive, dimensions of the outer layers of appearance and behavior we project. This reminds me of some of Judith Donath's insights into the application of signaling theory to social networks, in which she distinguishes among the relative costs and benefits of handicap signals, index signals and conventional signals, and explores how fashion is largely a manifestation of the latter, relatively inexpensive, type of signal.

Fortunately, however, for those of us who are concerned or obsessed with authenticity, Sam claims that our behavioral residue is difficult to consciously manipulate, and underneath whatever appearances we may try to cultivate, our real personalities persistently try to express themselves. This is corroborated by experimental results from Self-Verification Theory, which suggests that people want to be seen as they really are (or at least as they see themselves), even if that means that "negative" aspects of their personalities are seen.

One of the more controversial chapters in the book addresses the issue of stereotypes. Given that we can only perceive narrow aspects of others' personalities, we naturally tend to fill in the gaps of the stories we make up about them with information based on our perceptions others who we judge similar, based on gender, race, or where they live (e.g., with respect to red states and blue states). Unfortunately, for those of politically correct persuasion, many of these stereotypes do have at least a kernel of truth. For example, women tend to score higher in the Big Five trait of neuroticism than men, i.e., they tend to be more anxious, less even-tempered, less laid-back, more emotional and more easily stressed tan men, and it turns out that, generally speaking, conservatives are "neurologically more resistant to change" and liberals are more extroverted.

And music stereotypes turn out to be very helpful in forming correct impressions of people, although not all music genres are created equal, with respect to the personality traits their fans inadvertently reveal. For example, affinity for Contemporary Religious music turns out to be much more revealing about personality, values and alcohol and drug use than a love of Soul music or, more surprisingly to me, Rap.

Another dimension that reveals aspects of our personalities is hoarding. Sam notes that we have "an ingrained instinct to collect stuff" (which may be why Amy Jo Kim includes "collections" as one of the five key elements of what makes online games - and online social networking - so addictive). He shares a definition of hoarding as "the repetitive collection of excessive quantities of poorly usable items of little or no value with failure to discard those items over time". With the caveat that "little or no value" is a rather subjective label, I must admit that I tend to hoard books, academic papers and wines. This, in turn, leads to a discussion of what our workspaces say about us ... but I'm going to hold off saying more about that (for now) ... I've been composing this blog in bits and pieces for over a month now, and I want to wrap it up (and if anyone has actually read this far, you may be thinking the same thing). [In fact, given the change in default formatting that TypePad has instituted in the interim, this blog post didn't even get assigned a usable URL, so I've had to repost it :-(]

However, before closing, I will note that in the "What Counts?" column of the May 2008 issue of Conscious Choice, a few interesting statistics - from a TreeHugger article on "Spring Cleaning: '101 Reasons to Get Rid Of It'" - are listed:

• 1.4 Million: Americans who suffer from hoarding or clutter.
• 80: Percentage of things Americans own that they never use.

Unfortunately, it's not clear what proportion of the 1.4 million sufferers are the actual hoarders and how many are family, friends and/or coworkers of the hoarders ... for example, I think my wife suffers much more from my hoarding than I do.

Just to come [nearly] full circle again, the issue starts out with a letter from the editor entitled Fire and Rain, that talks about the way that music influences us,

I can’t help but pay special attention to the songs that randomly pop into my head. ... Music has the magical ability to transport and transform us in ways that impress me on a daily basis.

I've just finished - and plan to write another long blog post about - another fabulous book: This is Your Brain On Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel Levitin ... in which he talks about how and why some music gets stuck in our heads ... and a variety other aspects of our obsession with music ... and which offers an interesting complement to some of the insights that Sam shares in his book.

Returning to Sam's book, one issue that came up repeatedly (for me) throughout the book was the difference between what our words and actions really say about us, and how others generally interpret what our words and actions say about us. Sam notes a number of scientific experiments that have shown that we often make mistaken assumptions about people. But if most people make the same inferences - however mistaken - about others, won't this have an effect on their interactions with them ... and eventually, on their personalities? As Sam notes in the book:

Attractive people may be treated differently in social interaction, a phenomena that actually leads to differences in how they behave and how they seem themselves.

Theodor Adorno noted a similar phenomena in his 1951 book, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (which I read about in a recent Wall Street Journal book review, Capitalism and its Malcontent):

The sound of any woman's voice on the telephone tells us whether the speaker is attractive. It reflects back as self-confidence, natural ease and self-attention all the admiring and desirous glances she has ever received.

So if others' assumptions about us affects their behavior toward us, and their behavior affects our behavior, and our behavior over time affects our personalities, won't others' assumptions - however erroneous - affect our personalities? Do we tend to become more of the people others' see us as? I'm reminded of the lyrics from a Lyle Lovett song: "If I were the man that you wanted, I would not be the man that I am" ... but I digress...

I don't mean to say that personality and social psychology does not yield many interesting interesting insights - indeed, Sam's book is one of the most interesting books I've ever read - I just wonder how much impact these insights will have on society. How much does what our behavior really mean matter, in comparison to how others interpret our behavior (and its residue)? Should we be doing more scientific experiments or conducting more polls? Would we rather be right or happy (or popular)?

Of course, if snoopology catches on, perhaps more of us can be right, happy and popular - about and with each other.

UbiComp 2008 Workshops

We are happy to announce 9 workshops that will be held at UbiComp 2008, the Tenth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, in Seoul, South Korea, on September 21, the day before the main conference program, which will take place September 22-24.

Workshops provide an excellent opportunity to discuss and explore emerging areas of ubiquitous computing research with a group of like-minded researchers and practitioners. The workshops at UbiComp 2008 cover many interesting and exciting aspects of ubiquitous computing, including devices and perception, evaluation, vehicular computing, design and integration principles, ubiquitous network islands, ambient information systems, ubiquitous sustainability, automated journeys and intelligent work environments. The goal of the workshops is to share understandings and experiences, to foster the development of research communities, to learn from each other and to envision future directions.

The submission deadline for workshop position papers is Friday, June 27, 2008. All workshops will be held on Sunday, September 21st. More information about workshops is included below, and is also available on the workshops web site (http://ubicomp.org/ubicomp2008/workshops.shtml).

We also want to note that there are a number of other, previously announced tracks in the conference that are still open to participation (until June 27):

• Panels
• Demonstrations
• Interactive Posters
• Videos
• Doctoral Colloquium
• Student Volunteers

More information about the conference - including these participation categories - can be found at the conference web site (http://ubicomp.org/ubicomp2008/).

W1. Devices that Alter Perception (DAP 2008)

Sensors, actuators, implants, wearable computers, and neural interfaces can do more than simply observe our bodies; these devices can alter and manipulate our perceptions. This workshop will promote design and critique of systems with the explicit intent of altering the human percepts. Participants will be asked to present position papers or demonstrations concerning devices that act on phenomena related to the process of perception. The goals of the workshop are to: (1) better understand the process of perception (2) aid those developing devices by sharing designs (3) debate of ethical and social issues that are unique to devices that operate below or upon awareness.

W2. Ubiquitous Systems Evaluation (USE '08)

USE '08 aims to bring together practitioners from a wide range of disciplines to discuss best practice and challenges in the evaluation of ubiquitous systems. Recognised evaluation strategies are essential in order that the contribution of new techniques can be quantified objectively. Experience has shown that evaluating ubiquitous systems is extremely difficult; approaches tend to be subjective, piecemeal or both. Individual approaches to evaluation risk being incomplete and comparisons between systems can be difficult.

W3. Ubiquitous Inter- and Intra-Vehicular Computing (UIIVC 2008)

Modern vehicles have a high number of intra-vehicle communication systems and buses connecting hundreds of sensors, delivering information at high data rates. As such, the sensor density in modern cars makes them an interesting ubiquitous computing environment. Besides mobile phones, modern vehicles are the most ubiquitous and most widely deployed mobile sensor node systems. The idea of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication is to interconnect these sensor-equipped vehicles to collaboratively share a subset of this information. This enables novel types of applications in the areas such as safety, traffic efficiency and comfort. V2x communication poses many research challenges on applications, communication technologies such as IEEE 802.11p WLAN and cellular networks, networked sensing systems, privacy, security and other research fields relevant to ubiquitous computing. Workshop topics will address research from all these domains in a vehicular environment.

W4. 2nd International Workshop on Design and Integration Principles for Smart Objects (DIPSO 2008)

Tagging everyday objects with sensors, actuators and building an instrumented environment are recent practices in industry and academia. In fact, the smart object domain has matured over the years. The combination of Internet and technologies like near field communications, real time localization, sensor networking etc. are bringing smart objects into commercial use. Several successful prototypes and applications have already demonstrated and deployed. However, the lack of commonality among the design principles and the underlying infrastructures of these projects is hindering the exciting future of smart object systems. We believe the primary reason behind this phenomenon is one missing rationale for the design and integration of smart objects. Now it is the time to focus on current practices and align on some key issues to continue the rapid progress of smart objects. DIPSO 2008 seeks to follow the earlier DIPSO workshop, co-located with Ubicomp 2007 and will look at the existing smart object systems to extract and extrapolate the best practices to rationalize the design and integration principles for smart objects.

W5. Connecting Ubiquitous Islands using Mobile and Next Generation Networks

This workshop will discuss the topic of connecting islands of ubiquitous computing technology using wide-area networks, and how the requirements from the services operating in those islands impact the network technology and systems. This workshop will discuss what it would take to leverage existing networks together with emerging services to create truly ubiquitous connectivity.

W6. Ambient Information Systems

Ambient Information Systems describe a large set of applications that publish information in a highly non-intrusive manner, following on from Mark Weiser's concept of calm technology. Building on the success of AIS2007 at Pervasive 2007, this workshop will bring together researchers working in the areas of ambient displays, peripheral displays, slow technology, glanceable displays, and calm technology, to discuss and collaborate on developing new design approaches for creating ambient information systems. We are calling for paper submissions describing early-stage and mature research on Ambient Information Systems and for demonstrators across the spectrum from technology to art and design.

W7. Ubiquitous Sustainability: Citizen Science & Activism

In this workshop we want to explore new approaches to bring about real environmental change by looking at the success of empowering technologies that enable grassroots activism and bottom up community participation. Ubiquitous computing is transforming from being mostly about professional communication and social interaction to a sensor rich personal measurement platform that can empower individuals and groups to gain an awareness of their surroundings, engage in grassroots activism to promote environmental change, and enable a new social paradigm - citizen science. This workshop brings together fresh ideas and approaches to help elevate individuals to have a powerful voice in society, to act as citizen scientists, and collectively learn and lobby for change worldwide.

W8. Automated Journeys

Computing technology now pervades those moments of our day when we move through our cities. Mobile phones, music players, vending machines, contact-less payment systems and RFID-enabled turnstiles are de rigueur on our daily journeys. This workshop aims to examine these augmented journeys, to reflect on the public, semi-public and private technologies available to us in them, and to speculate on what innovations might be to come. Taking as our starting point cities such as Seoul, we aim to take seriously the developments in mobile technology as well as the advancements in autonomous machinery and how these mesh with our urban journeys. Through collaborative fieldwork, group discussion and a hands-on design brainstorming session, the workshop's empirical focus will be directed towards producing 4 envisagements that either speculate and/or critically reflect on technological futures.

W9. UbiWORK: Design and Evaluation of Smart Environments in the Workplace

This workshop is the fourth in a series of UbiComp workshops on smart environment technologies and applications for the workplace. It offers a unique window into the state of the art through the participation of a range of researchers, designers and builders who exchange both basic research and real-world case experiences; and invites participants to share ideas about them. This year we focus on understanding appropriate design processes and creating valid evaluation metrics for smart environments (a recurrent request from previous workshop participants). What design processes allow integration of new ubicomp-style systems with existing technologies in a room that is in daily use? What evaluation methods and metrics give us an accurate picture, and how can that information best be applied in an iterative design process?

Johathan Keats on Art, Science and Religion

Jonathan Keats gave a curiously engaging presentation on "Extraterrestrial Aesthetics, Divine Genetics, and Other Thought Experiments" at the Art, Technology and Culture Colloquium of UC Berkeley's Center for New Media Monday night. Jonathan noted that both art and science are too inwardly focused, so he uses art to tease out nuances in science, and science to tease out nuances in art, with a style of conceptual art that was introduced as a "purposeful rejection of pragmatism."

Among the projects he covered was the quest to pass a law that couldn't be broken (collecting petition signatures in Berkeley for Aristotle's law of identity), the creation of a futures market for neurons in his brain (a new type of brain trust), the founding of the International Association for Divine Taxonomy (an attempt to genetically engineer God) and the buying and selling of real estate in the extradimensionalities identified through string theory.

Jonathan has raised some interesting questions in each of the projects he has undertaken. What I found most interesting, though, were the more general insights Jonathan shared about art, science and religion. His observation that art is interesting for its ambiguity, its open-endedness and the questions it raises contrasts with the goals of science, which are more focused on certainty, decisiveness and the questions it answers.

These distinctions reminded me of themes raised by James Carse in his book Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, in which the author notes that

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continiuing the play ... Finite players play within boundaries, infinite players play with boundaries ... Finite players are serious; infinite players are playful.

At first, I pondered how science might be considered a finite game, and art might be considered an infinite game. But upon further reflection, this distinction breaks down. While much of science might be described as incremental -- filling in the details within boundaries (previously defined by other scientists) -- some scientific advances represent paradigm shifts where boundaries are shifted in signficant ways. And although the many notable works of art also stretch boundaries, I believe that much art is rather incremental as well.

Curiosity is a trait that Jonathan emphasized several times during his talk, a trait that is shared by both artists and scientists. The differences may lie more in the way that curiosity is channeled, and in the perspectives that people adopt in facing the unknown(s).

Jonathan's observations about openness and embrace of ambiguity suggest that the distinctions are largely attitudinal -- how one goes about creating art or science ... or religion, which seems much more closely aligned with science, and its quest for certainty, decisiveness and answering questions, differing primarily on what constitutes a basis for declaring victory ... the kind of declaration that is absent from art and other infinite games.

The Art, Science, Business and Politics of Happiness

The Wall Street Journal ran an article entitled "Happiness, Inc." in this week's Weekend Edition, which described how research into happiness is being applied in business contexts.  I've encountered a whole bunch of happiness-related pieces recently, and this one prompted me to weave them together.

The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, by His Holyness the Dalai Lama, has long been on my reading list.  I haven't read it yet, but I have several friends who have recommended it, and its the kind of book that I want to have on my bookshelf almost for the title alone.  I have read -- and highly recommend -- the two top-rated books in the Amazon.com "happiness" category: The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, by Don Miguel Ruiz, and How Full is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life, by Tom Rath and Donald Clifton (which I review in more detail here).  What I believe all these books have in common is the notion that, like an artist, one has to follow one's instincts and natural inclinations to find and express one's truth, regardless of what the critics might say.

Happiness is increasingly the purview of science, as well.  The late Donald Clifton, a co-author of the How Full is Your Bucket? book I noted above, was one of the early proponents of positive psychology -- the study and promotion of positive rather than negative ways of thinking -- but Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness : Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, appears to be its chief spokesperson, at least with respect to the popular press.  His approach to focusing on things that bring people joy was mentioned in the WSJ article as a sales strategy adopted by employees of David's Bridal stores in their interactions with joyful yet highly stressed customers.

The article also mentions a number of new ways to measure happiness.  Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University, uses brain imaging technology to measure a subject's neurophysiological processes -- such as oxygen flow through the brain -- while playing a videogame.  Sensory Logic videotapes people when they are exposed to a new product, then slices the videotapes into segments of 1/30th of a second, and analyzes several dimensions of facial expressions to distinguish true smiles from social smiles, to help determine whether prospective customers are being truthful or just being nice [leading me to wonder how happiness researchers would answer the question "Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?"].

These approaches seem more likely to yield useful information than many of the surveys I've read about over the years that are based on people's self-reporting of happiness.  The article mentions two studies reported by David Blanchflower. an economics professor at Dartmouth College, which attempt to determine the monetary value of a healthy, stable relationship.  One suggests that, all else being equal, single or unhappily married people have to earn $100,000 more than happily married people to achieve a similar level of happiness; another suggests that someone having sex on a monthly basis would have to earn $50,000 more than someone having weekly sex with a monogamous partner to be as happy.  The article then goes on to speculate about how such findings may figure into divorce settlements.

The Pew Research Center published a report entitled Are We Happy Yet?, in which 3,014 U.S. adults were asked how happy they were, and the results suggests a population that is happier than I would have expected, based on the facial expressions and interactions I have observed:

• 34%: "very happy"
• 50%: "pretty happy"
• 15%: "not too happy"

In slicing and dicing the data, they found a number of interesting correlations:

• Married people are happier than unmarrieds.
• People who worship frequently are happier than those who don't.
• Republicans are happier than Democrats.
• Rich people are happier than poor people.
• Whites and Hispanics are happier than blacks.
• Sunbelt residents are happier than those who live in the rest of the country.

and a number of interesting non-correlations:

• People who have children are no happier than those who don't, after controlling for marital status.
• Retirees are no happier than workers.
• Pet owners are no happier than those without pets.

These are interesting, but I have doubts about the self-reporting of happiness (the common exchange "How are you doing?" / "Good, thanks" comes to mind).  I remember a study I heard about years ago reporting that 85% of U.S. adult males rate themselves "above-average" drivers; I can't find a reference now, but I did discover a study of 50,000 business leaders that reported that 85% of leaders rate themselves in the "top 20%" in comparison to their peers.  Perhaps a happiness survey that was combined with some of the other types of measurement (brain waves and/or facial expressions) would yield more convincing results.  Of course, I have my own bias, based in part on the books I mentioned at the outset: I believe the most important factor in happiness is attitude, which is difficult to measure ... I imagine asking "How would you rate your attitude?" would be as nebulous as asking "How happy are you?" (or "How good a driver / leader are you?").

There are a variety of other studies that show that money can buy happiness, that money can't buy happiness (the latter of which was published on the same day as the Pew study ... which, as noted above, showed that money can buy happiness), and that the correlation between money and happiness varies considerably across differerent countries.

One country, Bhutan, has placed Gross National Happiness as a cornerstone of its national policy, articulating four pillars through which to promote this goal:

• good governance
• cultural preservation
• environmental conservation
• economic development

An insightful article by Jeff Greenwald in Yoga Journal, entitled Happy Land, explores these four dimensions, the implicit and explicit tradeoffs they entail, and the challenges Bhutan faces as it struggles to maintain its focus on happiness in the face of increasing exposure to western perspectives on happiness.  The article concludes with a question of priorities that resonates with issues that I have raised in several posts ... and brings this back full circle again to the Dalai Lama:

How might the United States change if our government and people set aside the mantle of a superpower and focused on happiness as the ultimate goal of our national and individual lives? It's a frustrating subject, as the resources to create such a society are clearly within our means. But resources are not enough. The crucial thing, as the Dalai Lama has pointed out, is motivation—and ours has been compromised by decades of corporate greed, personal materialism, and sitcom reruns.