Hello! My name is Luciano Sewaybricker, and this is The underside of Happiness Podcast.
This is one of a few episodes I will record sharing my research on Happiness.
One of the articles I wrote, a few years ago, was this one called “What is subjective well-being? A critical analysis of the article subjective well-being, by Ed Diener”. A perfectly long and boring title, as a good scientific article must have.
In this work, I argued that both the substitution of Happiness for Well-Being in science and the foundation of Well-Being as an object are not rigorous. At least not as rigorous as expected.
And to support this claim, I analyzed a very important article by the late psychologist Ed Diener called “Subjective Well-being” from 1984.
Summarizing, Ed Diener organizes a diffuse universe of research, about happiness, life satisfaction, and well-being, as a reasonably circunscribed field of study. He also switches the key expression from happiness, which he defends is more erratic, to well-being, much more scientific.
Despite the Homeric effort of organization and Diener’s brilliant argumentation, the article has many inconsistencies in the use of expressions, lacks a good definition of the object in hand, and uses references kind of loosely.
I propose, in the end, that Diener is doing a “semantic surgery”, transporting the historical appeal that the idea of happiness has to well-being, but leaving out its messy and complex part. Producing in the end, very successfully, by the way, a scientific object that is both valuable and manageable, measurable, and comparable between and within person.
Be aware that this episode will have many quotes, so you might want to check the transcript later.
Without further ado, let`s jump to the analysis.
Introduction
Saying SWB is an important construct in psychology and in human sciences as a whole is now obvious, is a common sense.
Today, to study WB from its subjective perspective and talk about it is something that is easily understood. So easy that it doesn’t require much introduction, cause it is assumed that we have a common understanding of what it is.
However, if we go into details of this thing, Subjective Well-Being, we will find some debate around it, specially around the relation between well-being and its semantic correlates, like happiness and life satisfaction. Which one is broader, if one is a piece of the other, and so on. But well-being tends to be considered the broader one.
My question
Anyway, when I entered this field of study, in 2008, all of this wasn’t obvious to me. Actually, as a lay person, I was familiar with the use of happiness, not well-being. So I wondered when this trend around “well-being” started.
One of the first books I read while preparing my undergraduate thesis about the subject was “Work, Happiness, and Unhappiness” by Peter Warr.
And, in this book, Peter Warr questions the adequacy of using “well-being” instead of “happiness”. In favor of using happiness as a broader scientific term, he argued that, first, happiness exerts much more fascination on people; second, it has greater extent of meaning; third, has greater depth of philosophical investigations backing it up; and fourth, differently from well-being that implies certain passivity, happiness would have a more active connotative meaning.
And Warr’s argument resonated with me, a Portuguese-speaking person. His arguments seemed strong for Portuguese translations of well-being and happiness, “bem-estar” and “felicidade” respectively. I know that the English use of happiness and well-being is different, and, well, I don’t want to delve into that here.
Anyway, I wondered if I could find and analyze a seminal article or book that introduced this idea of “subjective well-being” in Psychology and, even more, that suggested substituting “happiness” for “well-being”. Despite knowing that there is no “THE” article or book solely responsible for this trend, I wanted to find one that influenced this considerably.
Ed Diener’s Article
And that is how I came up with the article called “Subjective Well-Being”, by the late psychologist Ed Diener, whom had the nickname of Dr. Happiness (which will be important for my case here – so save his nickname for later).
In this paper, Ed Diener is presenting not only the object “Subjective Well-Being” but also the field of study around “Subjective Well-Being”. He gives us a history of this field, presents a large ammount of research findings, and presents a path on how to move forward.
And this is a very influential paper indeed.
- In the Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research (2014), edited by Alex Michalos, it is written that “The term SWB was first introduced by Diener (1984).” (Michalos, 2014, p.6437).
- The own Ed Diener, started his research interests in his page for the University of Utah with “I pioneered work on subjective well-being…”. In the same page, he presents his 84-article as his first one about this topic.
- And on his obituary at the Journal of Happiness Studies, a Journal he helped found, is written: “Ed Diener’s seminal work on the conceptualization and operationalization of subjective well-being and life satisfaction, developed over a decade before the advent of Positive Psychology, shaped our understanding of well-being and helped establish happiness studies as a major topic within psychology.”
So, ok. Ed Diener is influential. But a bit more about his 84 article, “Subjective Well-Being”, specifically:
Diener himself wrote, in a 2009 collection of his works (called “The science of well-being: The collected works of Ed Diener”) that :
- “(…) the 1984 Psychological Bulletin article, which popularized the field among psychologists (…) has become a citation classic, with over 1,400 citations by 2008. (…) Since that article, the number of scholarly publications on subjective well-being has multiplied many times.” (Diener, 2009, p.4).
This could be seen as prepotent, but Diener is right. His 84 article is one of the most important ones in what Christopher Kullenberg & Gustaf Nelhans called “happiness studies”. In 2015, they analyzed Web of Science’s database for trends and the most influential researchers-papers in the field. And
- between 1990 and 1999, Ed Diener’s 84 article was the most cited one in the field.
- between 2000 and 2004, it was the third one (behind another article from him, from 85).
- and between 2005 and 2013, it was the fourth most cited (note: the first and the third in the list were his articles too).
By the end of 2024, his 84-article had over 30.000 citations on Google Scholar. Which is a lot for a theoretical paper.
(just as a reference, another highly influential and foundational paper, from Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, where they present Positive Psychology, has 32.800 citations since the year 2000).
So, yes, his work is important in the field. At least 30 years of highly influencing the field.
Now let’s move to a critical analysis of the paper and how this defense for “well-being” instead of “happiness” has been done.
My criticism and structure of questioning
But before doing that, just let me say that I’m not criticizing Ed Diener’s work or importance overall. Another important disclosure, it is a point of view (mine) of someone who hasn’t met Diener. So I don’t know first hand what were his intentions with the article… This is a critique solely based on the text.
Getting back to my main objective: what were Diener’s arguments (and their rigor) for moving forward with “well-being” instead of “happiness”?
The use of words and expressions: happiness and well-being
A first problematic point from a rigor standpoint, although it may have been a strategy by Ed Diener (I’ll argue that it was later on), is the lack of clarity he provides for the use of the terms happiness and well-being. Throughout the article, it’s difficult to discern the relationship between them—whether they are synonymous, complementary, or if one emconpasses the other. These possible relationships shift throughout the text.
For instance, at the very beginning of the article, Diener writes:
- “Throughout history philosophers considered happiness to be the highest good and ultimate motivation for human action. Yet for decades psychologists largely ignored positive subjective well-being, although human unhappiness was explored in depth.” (p.542).
In these sentences, two comparisons are being made. First, between the interests of philosophers and psychologists: the former considered happiness important, while psychologists largely ignored positive subjective well-being. In this first comparison, Diener suggests a nominal relationship between the two terms (even if they may differ): in philosophy, it’s called happiness; in psychology, it’s referred to as “positive subjective well-being.”
The second comparison is found in the passage: “Yet for decades psychologists largely ignored positive subjective well-being, although human unhappiness was explored in depth.” Here, interestingly, the relationship is one of opposition. The opposite of “positive subjective well-being” is presented as “unhappiness.” Well, another clear opposite of unhappiness is happiness.
A bit later, there’s a passage that adds to the confusion in this regard:
- “A third meaning of happiness comes closest to the way the term is used in everyday discourse – as denoting a preponderance of positive affect over negative affect (Bradburn, 1969). This definition of subjective well being thus stresses pleasant emotional experience.” (Diener, 1984, p.543)
That is, this “third meaning of happiness” is a definition of “subjective well-being,” suggesting that the two terms are synonymous. This is reinforced by the excerpt: “Many philosophers and social scientists have concerned themselves with defining happiness or well-being” (p. 543).
Another curious point is that Diener refers to Subjective Well-Being (SWB) at times as a field and at others as a specific object.
Once again, this can already be identified on the very first page of the article. He writes:
- “The literature on SWB is concerned with how and why people experience their lives in positive ways, including both cognitive judgements and affective reactions. As such, it covers studies that have used such diverse terms as happiness, satisfaction, morale, and positive affect.”
Here, it seems that SWB is a very broad, loose expression, not an object. On the other hand, a few lines later, he writes about the structure of the article:
- “In the first section of the article, recent work on measuring and conceptualizing SWB is reviewed.”
That is, SWB is presented as an object with defined contours, something measurable and comparable. Later on, this dimension of SWB as a scientific object becomes clearer when its two components are introduced:
- “In addition, work on measurement is helping to provide clearer definitions of the components of subjective well-being.”
- “How these two components [positive affect and life satisfaction] relate to one another is an empirical question, not one of definition.” (Diener, 1984, p. 543).
An object has components—unlike a field of study, doesn’t it?
Now, let’s look at the idea of SWB as a field of investigation, which is undoubtedly something important to Diener. His central point here is to argue that it is a promising field with many opportunities but also with a considerable amount of existing content. To give just two examples of passages where Diener indicates that it is at least a reasonably established field:
- “The area of subjective well-being has three hallmarks.” (Diener, 1984, p. 543).
- “Satisfaction with life and positive affect are both studied by subjective well-being researchers.” (Diener, 1984, p. 543).
For someone who is writing foundational work for a field (this is clear today, but I don’t think it was back then), there’s a significant challenge: there isn’t much unity in defining the object, in the terminology used for key themes, or in the investigative methods employed in prior research. In other words, Diener had to organize a somewhat erratic research universe. Doing so must have been an enormous task and, as I will argue, necessarily lacked rigor.
First, let’s remember that the article is from 1984, so its references are primarily from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.
Now, let’s examine the issues with the argument that there was a “well-organized field” of research:
- Diener states that a sign of the field’s importance is that, in 1973, the Psychological Abstracts International began listing “happiness” as an index term. In other words, it wasn’t SWB, but “happiness.”
- In another passage, he writes that, in 1974, the journal Social Indicators Research was founded, “with a large number of articles devoted to subjective well-being (SWB).” A search in the journal’s database for articles published between 1974 and 1984 with “subjective well-being” or “subject wellbeing” in the title returns 3 results. Searching for these terms within the body of the text yields 39 results.
It seems, then, that Diener is considering SWB as a broader, less circumscribed idea. This interpretation seems necessary to make sense of his claim that “over 700 studies have been published since Wilson’s review” (Diener, 1984, p.542), with Wilson’s work being the 1967 review Correlates of Avowed Happiness.
Other works Diener references to illustrate the field’s research, such as those by Andrews & Withey (1976), Bradburn (1969), and Campbell (1976), also use terminology inconsistently. While these works share the idea of evaluating people’s perceptions of well-being, the expression “subjective well-being” is rarely used. More common terms include “well-being,” “happiness,” and “life satisfaction.”
Another noteworthy point is that, in his effort to provide solid references for his claims, Diener cites 11 of his own works. Of these, 9 were (at the time) “in press” or “submitted,” and 2 had been presented at conventions. One of the unpublished works, which was fundamental to his argument, was never published.
- “For a comprehensive bibliography of the burgeoning SWB literature, see Diener and Griffin (in press).” (Diener, 1984, p.542)
History
What Diener says about the historical and philosophical aspects of these topics is particularly curious. When referring to the knowledge produced by ancient philosophers, for example, Diener separates it into two distinct histories. The first is an erratic, confusing history, which he associates with happiness and elaborates on further in the article, suggesting that it aligns with the everyday use of the word:
- “Unfortunately, terms like happiness that have been used frequently in daily discourse will necessarily have fuzzy and somewhat different meanings.” (p.543).
The second history is that of Subjective Well-Being (SWB), which is systematically presented throughout the article:
- “Although well-being from a subjective perspective has become a popular idea in the last century, this concept can be traced back several millennia.” (Diener, 1984, p.543).
The article itself is an attempt to provide an organized account of this history, as indicated by the chapter titles: “definitions of SWB,” “the structure of SWB,” and so on.
However, Diener was undertaking an impossible task in trying to differentiate SWB and happiness, as no such distinction existed. This is evident near the end of the article, where perhaps in a moment of oversight, he writes:
- “This review focuses on some of the more provocative psychological theories related to happiness.” (p.562).
Returning to the historical discussion of happiness, he states:
- “Wilson’s second major conclusion was that little theoretical progress in understanding happiness has been made in the two millennia since the time of the Greek philosophers.” (Diener, 1984, p.542).
It’s curious to think that “little theoretical progress” on happiness has occurred since Aristotle. Without questioning the Eurocentric aspects of this claim, there have been brilliant philosophers throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and even in the 20th century—phenomenologists, existentialists, and others.
What Diener is likely suggesting is limited progress in the quantitative understanding of happiness, which was not a central aim in philosophy after the disillusionment of utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham. Nonetheless, it’s not that philosophers lacked interest in measuring or producing knowledge about happiness; rather, the concept of “happiness” presented complexities that hindered such endeavors.
These complexities were not particularly compatible with the goal of advancing a quantitatively-driven field of research. This can be seen implicitly in the oversimplified presentation of Aristotle’s idea of eudaimonia or more explicitly when Diener writes:
- “Nevertheless, as measurement and other work proceeds, the most scientifically useful concepts will be those that can be measured and show, within a theoretical framework, interesting relationships to other variables.” (p.543).
Putting together a new field – semantic surgery
Let me try to tie this analysis together.
My point here is that Diener faced a significant challenge. He wanted to give scientific legitimacy to a realm of interest that was traditionally vague, confusing, erratic, and therefore undervalued in formal academic spaces. Talking about happiness was not considered a rigorous topic. So far, nothing too complicated—just talk about something else, like SWB. The problem, however, was (and still is) that happiness is a topic of widespread interest and has a history deeply rooted in philosophy and popular culture, even if it is not understood as rigorous.
In other words, Diener’s challenge was to establish an object of study with scientific rigor—something measurable—while ensuring it maintained broad relevance.
In a footnote to her bestseller The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky (2008, p.316) supports this hypothesis:
- “Ed Diener, the most distinguished and most widely published researcher in the field of subjective well-being, told me once that he coined the term subjective well-being because he didn’t think he would be promoted with tenure if his research were perceived as focusing on something as fuzzy and soft as ‘happiness.’”
In this sense, I understand Diener’s article as an effort at “semantic surgery,” attempting to extract from the idea of happiness what suited his purposes while discarding what did not. Obviously, Diener was successful in this endeavor (given the success he achieved), and structurally, his article is impeccable.
However, in the details, as I hope to have demonstrated here, the use of the terms is inconsistent, as is the relationship established between them. To summarize:
- There was no consolidated field of research on “SWB” or well-being that was distinct from happiness, as the terms were not clearly defined as objects of study.
- The studies cited by Diener made variable, if not erratic, use of these terms.
- Diener offers a superficial presentation and examination of the history of the idea he seeks to discuss.
- Diener is imprecise in his use of the terms, leaving room for them to be considered synonymous, complementary, or supplementary.
So, I believe, despite its undeniable influence, the 1984 article shouldn’t be mentioned as a rigorous presentation of either an object or a field of study. I know this word might be too strong, but Diener was inventing both.
Conclusion
And I believe that this invention, through the “semantic surgery” with happiness, created two major problems that persist to this day in what we call the Science of Well-Being:
- The notion that the complexity surrounding the idea or word “happiness” makes it unviable for rigorous research, causing a rupture or crisis between current scientific research and various philosophical traditions.
- The illusion that this is a well-defined field with thematic, object, and methodological unity, when it is not, leads to some problems. Some quick examples:
- There are more than a thousand instruments mapped by the World Database of Happiness (Veenhoven, 2024) assessing different constructs, such as well-being as psychological (Ryff, 1989), subjective (Diener et al., 1985), eudaimonic, hedonic (Ryan & Deci, 2001), relational (McCubbin et al., 2013), ecological (McGregor et al., 2003), sustainable (O’Mahony, 2022), and existential (Wong, 2023).
- Miles-Jay Linton, Paul Dieppe, and Antonieta Medina-Lara (2016) identified 196 distinct constructs being assessed in 99 self-report well-being instruments.
- Similarly, Seth Margolis and colleagues (2021) found correlations between .50 and .79 among traditional instruments in the field, suggesting proximity but not empirical unity between the constructs being assessed.
I hope that this analysis, based on the article I wrote with Gustavo Massola a couple of years ago (spoiler: in portuguese), influence you to read Diener’s 84 article again and think about its influence in our field of study.
Hope you liked. Let me know what you think.
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References:
Diener, Ed (1984). Subjective Well-Being. Psychological Bulletin, 95(3), 542-575. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2162125
Diener, Ed (2009). The science of well-being: The collected works of Ed Diener (vol. 37). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2350-6
Kullenberg, C., & Nelhans, G. (2015). The happiness turn? Mapping the emergence of “happiness studies” using cited references. Scientometrics, 103, 615-630. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1536-3
Linton, M. J., Dieppe, P., & Medina-Lara, A. (2016). Review of 99 self-report measures for assessing well-being in adults: exploring dimensions of well-being and developments over time. BMJ open, 6(7), e010641. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-010641
Margolis, S., Schwitzgebel, E., Ozer, D. J., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2021). Empirical relationships among five types of well-being. In .T. Lee, L.D. Kubzansky, and T.J. VanderWeele, eds., Measuring Well-Being (2021), Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 460-92.
University of Utah Webpage: https://psych.utah.edu/people/faculty/diener-edward.php
Journal of Happiness Studies obituary: https://link.springer.com/journal/10902/updates/19129702
The Underside of Happiness 