Imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?
Now, consider the question you probably just answered. What factors played into your answer? What sorts of things contribute to the best possible life for you, compared with the worst possible life for you? If we used your answer to that question as a measure of life satisfaction, what is it really measuring?
That's not an unimportant question. The first paragraph of this post is a commonly used way of measuring life satisfaction, known as the Cantril ladder (see here). It is used in the Gallup World Poll, and is recommended by the OECD as a way of measuring subjective wellbeing. When researchers (or governments, or others) measure life satisfaction or happiness, it is often the Cantril ladder that is being used.
The question of what the Cantril ladder measures was explored in this recent article by August Nilsson (Lund University), Johannes Eichstaedt (Stanford University), Tim Lomas (Harvard University), Andrew Schwartz (Stony Brook University), and Oscar Kjell (Lund University), published in the journal Scientific Reports (open access, with non-technical summary on The Conversation). Nilsson et al. looked at the framing of the Cantril ladder, and investigated how nearly 1600 people responded to different framings of the question, and the words that they used to describe the top and the bottom of the scale in those different framings, and where they would 'prefer to be' on the scale. The first framing was the traditional Cantril ladder. The second framing essentially replaced the ladder metaphor with the word "scale" (but left the rest intact). The third framing removed references to the "bottom" and "top" (as well as the ladder metaphor). The fourth framing did all of that plus changed "best possible life" to "happiest possible life" (and "worst possible life" to "unhappiest possible life"). And the fifth and final framing instead replaced "best possible life" to "most harmonious life" (and "worst possible life" to "least harmonious life").
Nilsson et al. found that:
The ladder and bottom-to-top scale anchor descriptions influenced respondents to use significantly more words from the LIWC dictionaries Power and Money when interpreting the Cantril Ladder... compared to when these anchors were removed. Of all the words respondents used to describe the top of the Cantril Ladder, 17.3% fell into the Power and Money dictionaries. This language was reduced by more than a third when the ladder was removed in the no-ladder condition (absolute difference of 6.0%, d = 0.35, p < 0.001), and more than halved when the bottom-to-top scale descriptions were removed too (absolute difference of 10.3%, d = 0.64, p < 0.001). Further, for the Cantril Ladder, words in the Power and Money dictionaries occurred 3.3 times as frequently compared to the alternative Harmony anchor condition (absolute difference of 12%, d = 0.77, p < 0.001).
They interpret those results as meaning that:
...the original Cantril Ladder influenced respondents to focus more on money in terms of wealth (whereas when the ladder framing was excluded, they focused more on financial security) than the other conditions.
Were you thinking about the financial aspects of life when you answered the question above? The results seem to suggest that is more common than thinking about social relationships or the various other contributors to our subjective wellbeing. Nilsson et al. don't explore the use of words other than in the 'Power' and 'Money' domains, but it would have been interesting to see some others to compare with.
It's not surprising that financial security, income, or wealth are important contributors to subjective wellbeing or life satisfaction. We should expect people to be better able to satisfy their needs when they have greater financial resources available to them. However, the results on research participants' preferred level on the ladder are genuinely surprising, because:
...over 50% did not prefer the highest level (of 10) in any of the study conditions, and less than a third preferred the top of the Cantril Ladder, which had a significantly lower average preferred level than all the other study conditions.
In other words, even though the top of the Cantril ladder is framed as the 'best possible life', around two-thirds of research participants said that they would prefer not to be at the top of the ladder. This proportion was lower (but still not zero) for other framings, as shown in Figure 4 from the article (where the dark blue part of the bar shows the proportion of research participants who responded that 10 was their preference):
What was your preferred level on the ladder? Did you want to have the best possible life (that is, 10 on the scale)? Or would you prefer to be somewhere just below the best possible life? What do you think about in answering the question on your preferred level? Maybe research participants want 'room to grow' and become even happier or more satisfied with their lives? I have no idea. Nilsson et al. have given us something to really think about here, but unfortunately the article doesn't go far enough in exploring why people don't prefer the top of the ladder. There is definitely scope for further follow-up research on this point.
In addition to being surprising, that last result may call into question how the Cantril ladder is interpreted (on top of the arguments about the validity of happiness data generally - see here, and here, and here). If the top of the scale is not the top of the scale, or if it is different for different research participants, then how do we interpret an average across all people responding to the question? That should make researchers worry, and makes follow-up research even more important.
[HT: New Zealand Herald, back in April]
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