Read Online The Happiness Industry by William Davies - Free Book Online

giver feel happier. Equally, the mental habit of feeling grateful delivers positive mental benefits. The advice is to stop thinking so much of oneself – but the justification is ultimately a self-centred one.
    As was clear from the Christakis seminar in the Cabinet Office throne-room, social networks are now recognized as tools of health policy. They are ways in which the pleasures and pains ofour minds and bodies can be influenced. The utilitarian project has historically been dependent on some rather crude carrots and sticks – punishments to deliver pain, money and physical pleasures to deliver happiness. Now, thanks to the growing reach of medical research and policy, it is the people we socialize with who are becoming the latest instruments of psychophysical improvement. We now know that socially isolated people experience more physical pain following a hip operation than those who are more socially connected. 11 Adopting a positive outlook is known to aid recovery from medical illness and reduce the risk of it arising.
    Driven particularly by neuroscience, the expert understanding of social life and morality is rapidly submerging into the study of the body. One social neuroscientist, Matt Lieberman, has shown how pains that we have traditionally treated as emotional (such as separating from a lover) involve the same neurochemical processes as those we typically view as physical (such as breaking an arm). Another prominent neuroscientist, Paul Zak (known in the media as Dr Love), has focused on a single neurochemical, oxytocin, which he argues is associated with many of our strongest social instincts, such as love and fairness. Scientists at the University of Zurich have discovered that they can trigger a sense of ‘right and wrong’ by stimulating a particular area of the brain. 12 Social science and physiology are converging into a new discipline, in which human bodies are studied for the ways they respond to one another physically.
    It would seem a little perverse to suggest that policy-makers ignore this evidence of the impact of social networks and altruism on health. And if positive psychology can generate just a little more mutual concern, through self-help and cognitive tips, then why not? Yet there is still a danger lurking in this worldview,which is the same problem that afflicts all forms of social network analysis. In reducing the social world to a set of mechanisms and resources available to individuals, the question repeatedly arises as to whether social networks might be redesigned in ways to suit the already privileged. Networks have a tendency towards what are called ‘power laws’, whereby those with influence are able to harness that power to win even greater influence.
    A combination of positive psychology with social media analytics has demonstrated that psychological moods and emotions travel through networks, much as Christakis found in relation to health behaviour. For example, through analysing the content of social media messages, researchers at Beihang University in China found that certain moods like anger tended to travel faster than others through networks. 13 A negative frame of mind, including depression itself, is known to be socially ‘contagious’. Happy, healthy individuals can then tailor their social relationships in ways that protect them against the ‘risk’ of unhappiness. Guy Winch, an American psychologist who has studied this phenomenon, advises happy people to be on their guard. ‘If you find yourself living with or around people with negative outlooks,’ he writes, ‘consider balancing out your friend roster’. 14 The impact of this friend-roster-rebalancing on those unfortunates with the ‘negative outlooks’ is all too easy to imagine.
    There is something a little sad that the fabric of social life is now a problem which is addressed within the rubric of health policy. Loneliness now appears as an objective