One point I recall from the book Stumbling on Happiness is (and here I’m paraphrasing from poor memory; plus the book is from 2006 and might be hopelessly outdated) that when you e.g. try to analyze concepts like happiness, a) it’s thorny to even define what it is (e.g. reported happiness in the moment is different from life satisfaction, i.e. a retrospective sense that one’s life went well), and b) it’s hard to find better measurable proxies for this concept than relying on real-time first-person reports. You might e.g. correlate happiness w/ proportion of time spent smiling, but only because the first-person reports of people who smile corroborate that they’re indeed happy. Etc. Put differently, if first-person reports are unreliable, but your proxies rely on those first-person reports, then it’s hard to find a measure that’s more reliable.
One point I recall from the book Stumbling on Happiness is (and here I’m paraphrasing from poor memory; plus the book is from 2006 and might be hopelessly outdated) that when you e.g. try to analyze concepts like happiness, a) it’s thorny to even define what it is (e.g. reported happiness in the moment is different from life satisfaction, i.e. a retrospective sense that one’s life went well), and b) it’s hard to find better measurable proxies for this concept than relying on real-time first-person reports. You might e.g. correlate happiness w/ proportion of time spent smiling, but only because the first-person reports of people who smile corroborate that they’re indeed happy. Etc. Put differently, if first-person reports are unreliable, but your proxies rely on those first-person reports, then it’s hard to find a measure that’s more reliable.