Facebook's "Gross National Happiness Index" Measures How Happy We Are

A team of Facebook data scientists are using Facebook -- and the information we share about ourselves on the site-- to create a "Gross National Happiness Index" that measures how happy we are and tracks our happiness over time.

How does it work?

The Index mines our status updates for keywords and, based on the sentiments expressed in them (such as, "I'm so sad about MJ", or "I'm so thrilled it's almost Halloween!") measures the overall mood of people from the US on Facebook. A member of Facebook's data team explains in a blog post:

To protect your privacy, no one at Facebook actually reads the status updates in the process of doing this research; instead, our computers do the word counting after all personally identifiable information has been removed.

For our Gross National Happiness index, we adapted a collection of positive and negative emotion words built by social psychologists. Examples of positive or happy words include "happy," "yay" and "awesome," while negative, or unhappy words, include "sad," "doubt" and "tragic." We also did a brief survey of some Facebook users, which showed that people who use more positive words, relative to the number of negative words, reported higher satisfaction with their lives.

Here's a screengrab of the Index:

A few of the interesting findings so far:

Some of the happiest days include U.S. national holidays like Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, social holidays like Halloween and religious holidays including Christmas and Easter.

Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2008--when the U.S. was celebrating the election of President Barack Obama--was over twice as happy as the average Wednesday.

The index also shows two remarkably unhappy days. The lowest was Jan. 22, 2008, which was the day the Asian stock market crashed and coincidentally the same day as the tragic death of actor Heath Ledger. The recent death of cultural icon Michael Jackson on June 25, 2009, came in as the second least happy day in the past two years.

The New York Times also reports:

There is a 9.7 percent increase in happiness on Fridays compared with the worst day of the week, Monday.

Read more about the Index on the Facebook blog, or at the New York Times .

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Comments

[ashelikescake]

11:48 PM on 10/12/2009

This is meaningless. All I see in this data is that everyone on facebook wished everyone else an obligatory "Happy _____ Day."

[MiddleRoadLiberal]

03:36 PM on 10/13/2009

Nice catch. I also wonder if "thanks" is considered a happy word in their count.

[Suzie Heumann]

06:05 PM on 10/12/2009

Well, Yippee for Thanksgiving. At least I think it means we're willing to acknowledge that we're thankful for our abundance. Gratitude, especially as a daily practice, is very important for our happiness. Find 5 things every day you are grateful for and say them or wirte them down.
But, here's another reason why Thanksgiving might be the 'happy day'. In studies that have tested different substances as aphrodisiacs the top one is a combination of pumpkin pie spices and licorice. This combo is said to increase a man's erection by up to 40% in strength via blood flow! Cinnamon is known as a blood vessel dilator so what with gut memories, emotional memories, your bad-boy boyfriend wanting to have sex in your childhood single bed and the sheer gratitude of being able to live in the struggles of life these days - well, who wouldn't be happy!

[DragonMama]

08:14 PM on 10/26/2009

or... more computer-minded, it could be all those people updating their statuses to be "Happy Thanksgiving" combined with some "yay" comments about the food.

[SelenesMom]

05:31 PM on 10/12/2009

This is too poor a use of data for words. Of course the fact that some bazillion or so people all wrote to each other on one day saying "Did you hear, Michael Jackson died? What a bummer" doesn't mean that on that day, all those bazillions of people were actually particularly bummed out!

Why does FB even employ data scientists? Hm.

[LMPE]

02:54 PM on 10/12/2009

Bhutan has a national policy of gross national happiness.

[Quinton Cartwright]

01:10 PM on 10/12/2009

Consider the BS that you write on your friends FB pages and you will realize that most of the crap you really care about isn't put in your status and alot of people put up "Happy Halloween" or "Happy New Year". On the one hand, big party/sex days, but on the other hand the percentage of the population that takes advantage of this is probably too small to cause the spikes shown in the graph ergo I don't think they properly negated the use of the word happy in comparison to actual happiness. For example if you took out all of the happies or goods that weren't connected to a holiday or occasion, I would be more impressed. As it stands this is worthless.

[IndependentHappiness]

01:03 PM on 10/12/2009

The index is insightful, however not really accurate, in my humbler opinion. They don't take into consideration factors like sarcasm and others, because they judging happiness by number of "happy" words and emotes.

Nevertheless, its still very interesting project to keep an eye on, no one before launched that kind of index.

IndependentHappiness.com

[David M]

12:12 PM on 10/12/2009

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You can also learn more about the iPhone app on our Facebook page.

[nielsincolumbus]

11:44 AM on 10/12/2009

So this proves that we like holidays and Fridays and don't like Mondays. Wow! What insight! Next they can prove that people post song-lyrics in lieu of real updates and that hump-day falls in the middle of the week. What a waste of Facebook resources and HuffPo space.

[lauram]

10:20 AM on 10/12/2009

Facebook, you're late to the party. People have been talking about the importance of a gross national happiness index for decades. It would be far more relevant to most people than the idiotic dow jones industrial average, which we are told about every day (and yes, some derive ALL their wealth from stocks, but most americans only derive a tiny percent of wealth and income thru stock funds). But a happiness index somehow doesn't make the daily news even though it's relevant to everyone. Why would that be?

Maybe the same reason we get a whole sports section to newspapers and teevee w/the excruciating minutiae of every box score, but can't find out how politicians are voting on matters that actually impact us every day.

http://www.gnh-movement.org/

[Ginny S]

08:39 AM on 01/23/2010

People have been talking about Gross National Happiness for decades -- but lately, it's turning into more than just talk!

Not just in Bhutan, either. In fact, the fifth international GNH conference was held in Brazil in November '09.

And, there is a brand new but growing movement here in the states: www.gnhusa.org

We're starting in Vermont because a) that's where a lot of us live! and b) it's a small state, and amenable to such progressive ideas us using a GNH filter for formulating public policy.

Check out our website for more info. And, join our Facebook group! That's the Gross National Happiness American Project. Lots of info there, too.