![]() Try asking a skeleton to meditate in an MRI machine and you will begin to see the problem. “Imperfect tools are a real pain, but they sure beat pounding nails with your teeth” (Gilbert, 2006).įrom the perspective of a historian who would hope to measure the happiness of the dead, however, the prospect of broken teeth is real. ![]() Gilbert invokes the wisdom of the builder. But the alternatives to perfection are still pretty good. It is true, as Dan Gilbert has remarked, that the nature of subjective experience is such that there will never be a “happyometer,” a perfectly reliable instrument that allows us to measure another person’s well-being with complete and total certainty. They range from the detailed scales and questionnaires that assess subjective well-being around the globe, to methods of experience sampling, to a variety of physical measures that capture the brain and body’s response to stimuli both internal and external. ![]() ![]() The tools available to social scientists hoping to measure the happiness of the living are now many and varied. ![]()
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