女人比男人更幸福？
The difficult question of happiness

　　How happy are you with your life? Yes, it’s back to “happynomics”, because a new paper suggests that one of the oldest findings in the field may be an artefact of the way this question is often asked.         
　　First, some background. Happiness – “subjective well-being” – is often measured by asking survey respondents how satisfied they are with their lives, taken as a whole. Sometimes this is a multiple choice question: “very happy, fairly happy, or not very happy?” The most influential paper in happiness economics, Richard Easterlin’s 1974 “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?”, extensively discusses evidence from surveys of this kind, in which very few American respondents said that they were “not very happy”. Almost half said they were “very happy”, the most blissful response available.          
　　People, then, are generally happy with life – too happy, perhaps, for a three-point scale. Easterlin is often quoted as having proved that economic growth does not lead to happiness, but perhaps we should say he pointed out that economic growth might not eliminate misery.          
　　Another fascinating titbit from the old Easterlin paper, based on a 1965 survey: 53 per cent of the British respondents were “very happy” but only 20 per cent of West Germans and 12 per cent of the French. Income per head was similar at the time, as it is today. What could explain such an extraordinarily large difference? Language? Culture? Something else?         
　　More modern research often uses a 10- or 11-point scale of happiness, often a “Likert scale”, which offers a statement such as “I am satisfied with my life as a whole these days”, and asks respondents to say how strongly they agree or disagree. Clearly this allows for shades of grey, although problems remain: Bill Gates can earn 100,000 times more than you do, but even if that makes him 100,000 times happier, there’s no way for him to express that joy on a 0-10 scale.          
　　And there’s another problem with Likert scales: maybe something about an integer scale itself distorts the survey results? There’s an alternative: the VAS, or visual analogue scale, which replaces the 0-10 options with a single line. The respondents can mark where they would place themselves on the line between an extremely satisfactory life and an extremely unsatisfactory one.          
　　Raphael Studer and Rainer Winkelmann, economists at the University of Zurich, used a randomised trial to tease out differences between the two scales. Some respondents were asked to report their happiness on a Likert scale and then, a month later, on a visual scale. Others were given the visual scale first and the Likert scale a month afterwards.        
　　There were broadly similar responses to a Likert and a visual scale. But there were intriguing differences. One was that Likert respondents tended to cluster around seven and eight, being positive but avoiding extremes. The visual scale attracted a greater variety of responses; the usual findings were borne out (the middle-aged are less happy; the married are happier) but the size of each effect appeared bigger on the visual scale.         
　　And there was one really odd result. We have long believed that women are happier than men, on the basis of decades of answers to Likert-type questions. The recent foray into happiness research by the UK’s Office for National Statistics used a 0-10 scale and replicated exactly this finding. But in Studer and Winkelmann’s randomised trial, this tendency disappeared. Women and men, who had answered differently on the Likert scale, pointed to the same point on the visual scale.         
　　The authors conclude that the long-standing finding that women are happier than men is simply an artefact of the way the question is asked. How fortunate that nobody had been recommending gender reassignment surgery to all men as the secret of happiness.        
　　你对生活的幸福感有多高？没错，这又回到了“幸福经济学”的问题，因为一项新的研究显示，这个领域最古老的发现之一或许只不过是通常的提问方式所造成的假象。
　　先来了解一些背景。幸福——“主观的福祉”——的衡量方式通常是询问受访者，总体来说，他们对生活的满意程度有多高。有时它会以选择题的方式出现：“很幸福，还算幸福，不是很幸福？”幸福经济学领域最具影响力的论文——理查德•伊斯特林(Richard Easterlin)1974年所著《经济增长能提升人类福祉吗？》(Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?)对这类调查的结果进行了深入的探讨。在这类调查中，受访的美国人很少有人选择“不是很幸福”。近一半的人说，他们“很幸福”，在调查者提供的选项中，这是幸福感最高的一项。
　　于是得出结论，大体来说，人们的生活还是幸福的——对选项为三个等级的调查来说，也许是太幸福了。人们常常说伊斯特林证明了经济增长并不能提升幸福感，或许我们应该说，他的意思是经济增长不一定能消除不幸。
　　伊斯特林上述文章中还谈到一个有趣的情况，根据1965年的一项调查，53%的英国受访者认为自己“很幸福”，而在西德和法国，这一比例分别仅为20%和12%。这些国家当时的人均收入十分接近，现在也是如此。那是什么导致了如此巨大的差异呢？语言？文化？还是其他因素？ 
　　现在的研究往往采用10个或是11个等级（通常利用“李克特量表”(Likert scale)）来衡量人们的幸福感，这类调查会列出诸如“最近我对自己的生活大体感到满意”这样的说法，并要求受访者回答他们对此说法的认同或是不认同程度。显然，这种方式为中间地带留出了空间，不过问题依然存在：比尔•盖茨(Bill Gates)挣的钱可能是你的十万倍，但即便他的幸福感因此比你高出十万倍，他也无法通过10个等级的选项来表达他的这种幸福感。
　　李克特量表还存在另一个问题：整数型量表本身或许就扭曲了调查结果？对此，有一种变通方法：视觉模拟评分法（visual analogue scale，简称VAS）。它用一条直线取代了0-10的评分等级。从对生活极其满意到极其不满意，受访者可以在直线上标出他们认为自己所处的位置。
　　苏黎世大学(University of Zurich)的两名经济学家拉斐尔•斯蒂德(Raphael Studer)和雷纳•温克尔曼(Rainer Winkelmann)通过一项随机试验，找出了两种评分方式的差异。他们让一组受访者先是按照李克特量表来衡量自己的幸福感，一个月后，再用VAS进行评估。另一组受访者采用的顺序则恰好相反。 
　　有一个结果着实令人意外。研究人员数十年来进行的李克特式调查让我们一直以来都认为，女性的幸福感要高于男性。英国国家统计局(Office for National Statistics)近日在一项对幸福感的调查中列出了0-10级的选项，结果再次证实了这一看法。而在斯蒂德和温克尔曼的随机试验中，这一趋势却消失了。女性和男性虽然此前在李克特量表中有着不同的回答，但在VAS中，二者的得分值却不相上下。 
　　两位作者得出结论：长期以来人们通过研究认为女性幸福感高于男性的看法，只不过是提问方式所造成的假象。在向男人们传授幸福秘诀时，幸好还没有人建议他们去做变性手术。 
                  译者:薛磊