This is great work:
“As expected, across these experiments, the researchers found that the more people smiled, the happier they reported being. But only some people. Surprisingly, for a section of the population, smiling actually reduced well-being. The more these people smiled, the less happy they were. This is like finding that there are some diners who, after consuming a four-course meal, feel less full!”
It makes perfect sense to me, and it’s related to what I told The Chronicle of Higher Education a while back, that some people don’t dispositionally approach happiness the same way. This finding is more at the implicit and affective level, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it corresponded to a different broad disposition toward happiness. For example these might be high-meaning people, less affectively driven.
It’s also something I plan to add to my Media Tips post: Many main effects are misleading. Some main effects are false for the majority of the population, meaning that an effect of the form X causes Y will often only be true for a minority of people. That’s not the case here, but we still see a significant population for whom a famous effect does not hold, and in fact is reversed. Significant correlations between X and Y do not require that X predict Y in the majority of cases, or that being high in X (assuming a continuous variable now, like a personality trait) means one is likely to be high in Y. A significant correlation does not mean that at all. It can be driven by 10% of the sample.
I’ve developed some new statistics, new coefficients, to help clarify what a correlation actually represents in many cases. These will be detailed in some upcoming journal articles, hopefully. It would apply nicely to the example above, and the pencil-in-the-mouth experiments.
Joe Duarte grew up in small copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology in 2015, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. For more from Joe, visit his new publication Valid Science.
You can also find him on 𝕏 and contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.