[lbo-talk] more back-asswards perceptions

[Mike Ballard]

SA observed:
 
Daniel Kahneman wrote a great paper where he looked at subjective 
well-being -- which is typically measured by self-evaluated life 
satisfaction -- in the US and France. The US has famously high SWB; in 
France it's famously low. The difference is very large: half a standard 
deviation, the same size as the difference between an American employed 
person and unemployed person. DK asked whether this finding is credible 
and hypothesized that it was not. So he did something clever. He looked 
at subjective health status (where people rate whether they're in good 
health). Not surprisingly, across 100+ countries and hundreds of 
thousands of respondents, the correlation between SHS and SWB is 
extremely high -- 0.85. People who think they're very healthy are also 
very likely to say they're highly satisfied with their lives. And the 
same holds true with the US and France: American SHS is much higher than 
France's, by about the same margin as with SWB. The problem, of course, 
is that *objectively* Americans' health status is by almost every 
measure significantly worse than France's (heart disease, diabetes, 
obesity, mental health). Kahneman said it is therefore reasonable to 
conclude that subjective health status is substantially "reality-free" 
(his term). And since SHS is so tightly correlated with evaluated 
life-satisfaction, one has to conclude that the latter, too, is, at 
least cross-culturally, largely "reality-free."

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Very interesting.  Everytime I've been in France, I've noticed this odd thing, that people are always popping pills.  Women search through their purses for their bottle of prescription meds.  Yes, all have little bottles of pills.  It's like they think they're sicker than they are.  Of course, on the the other hand, you have Americans who are sicker than they think they are.  
 
Ah the psychological wonders and oddities of class society.
 
Mike B)

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