“Eavesdropping on Happiness” Revisited: A Pooled, Multisample Replication of the Association Between Life Satisfaction and Observed Daily Conversation Quantity and Quality
It is now a well established and consensually acknowledged fact that social relationships are key to well-being. What is much less clear, however, and what remains a source of considerable debate is whether it is primarily the quantity or the quality of our social encounters that matters. Several gold-standard experience-sampling studies show a linear relationship between how much time people spend interacting with others and how happy they tend to be. However, other researchers have argued that the quality of everyday social encounters may be more important than the frequency with which people engage in social contact.
Individuals with higher well-being tend to spend less time alone and more time interacting with others (e.g., greater conversation quantity) and engage in less small talk and more substantive conversations (e.g., greater conversation quality). To test the robustness of these effects in a larger and more diverse sample, we used Bayesian integrative data analysis to pool data on subjective life satisfaction and observed daily conversations from three heterogeneous adult samples, in addition to the original sample (N = 486). We found moderate associations between life satisfaction and amount of alone time, conversation time, and substantive conversations, but no reliable association with small talk. Personality did not substantially moderate these associations. The failure to replicate the original small-talk effect is theoretically and practically important, as it has garnered considerable scientific and lay interest
Milek, A., Butler, E. A., Tackman, A. M., Kaplan, D. M., Raison, C. L., Sbarra, D. A., Vazire, S., & Mehl, M. R. (2018). "Eavesdropping on Happiness" Revisited: A Pooled, Multisample Replication of the Association Between Life Satisfaction and Observed Daily Conversation Quantity and Quality. Psychological science, 29(9), 1451–1462. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618774252
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