25 Jun Happiness Linked to Respect not Money
by Rick Nauert from PsychCentral
Hit songs have been written on the topic, employees regularly believe management needs to provide more of it, and now research confirms that life happiness is related to how much you are respected and admired by your surrounding peers.
In a new study, Cameron Anderson, a psychological scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and colleagues confirmed that overall happiness in life is related to how much you are respected and admired by those around you and not by income or education.
“We got interested in this idea because there is abundant evidence that higher socioeconomic status — higher income or wealth, higher education — does not boost subjective well-being (or happiness) much at all. Yet at the same time, many theories suggest that higher status should boost happiness,” said Anderson.
So if higher socioeconomic status doesn’t equate with a greater sense of well-being, then what does?
Anderson and his colleagues hypothesized that higher sociometric status — respect and admiration in your face-to-face groups, such as your friendship network, your neighborhood, or your athletic team — might make a difference in your overall happiness.
“Having high standing in your local ladder leads to receiving more respect, having more influence, and being more integrated into the group’s social fabric,” Anderson said.
Anderson and his colleagues designed four experiments to test this hypothesis…
…read the full and original article HERE