When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working….
On average throughout all the quarter-million responses, minds were wandering 47 percent of the time. That figure surprised the researchers, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert.
“I find it kind of weird now to look down a crowded street and realize that half the people aren’t really there,” Dr. Gilbert says….
Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.
OK, first of all, Harvard researchers: Perhaps you can’t comprehend this from the comforts of your ivory tower, but none of the people who said they were having sex was actually having sex. No one’s stopping to answer your damn iPhone survey. I can practically guarantee that every single one of those respondents was a giggling middle-schooler.
Second, what? Just… what? So you’re trying to make broad sweeping conclusions about a field as complex and mysterious as psychology by asking people to rate their feelings on a scale of 1-to-100? What does that even mean?
How do I know how happy I am right now, out of 100? I’m pretty happy, but maybe I’ve never even achieved 100 happiness. And if my current psychological state is just amusement at how stupid your study is, does that count as happiness, even if it’s inherently snarky happiness? It’s all completely arbitrary.
Besides — you’re telling me that people whose minds wander are less happy. But how is it even possible to truly rate your current feelings on a 1-to-100 scale without comparing it to the ways you’ve felt at other times in your life? And then, if you’re thinking about those other times, isn’t your mind wandering?
And the quote from Dr. Gilbert. Really? So if I’m walking down the street and I’m thinking about anything besides walking down the street, that means I’m not really there? What? Is my mind not part of my physical person? I’m there, in the flesh, on the street. So is my mind. I just have other things to think about besides, “derp dee derp derp derp, I’m a walkin’ down the street!”
In fact, I often go for walks specifically to let my mind wander. And I love the walks when I am able to let my thoughts stray far from the activity and my physical setting, on tangents off tangents. Those are the times I feel most creative and confident.
So how about this, Harvard researchers: You continue your dumbf@#$ studies, and please, be mindful of every step along the way. When you make photocopies of your findings, just stand there by the photocopier thinking, “makin’ copies; makin’ copies; makin copies,” with every new print.
I’ll be here, daydreaming my damn life away and enjoying every minute of it.
Tedquarters 
I think I saw one almost as dumb in the paper the other day in USA today I think. Researchers that found teens who text a lot are more likely to try sex, drugs, and alcohol.
Is this really a surprise? I mean this seems like a no brainer right? The more popular kids with more friends are the ones texting and facebooking more, would alos be the ones most likely to be invited to parties where teens drink do drugs and have sex right?
Yet this simple fact is lost on all the “experts” conducting the study who blame everything from permissive or absent parents, race, and single parent households.
But I guess this shouldmt be a surprise either because the people conducting such a stupid research project probably were dorks themselves and had no clue what cool kids did in HS in the first place.
I’ve been trying to get a damn study about cerebral aneurysms published for years now and this garbage gets in a journal!?
I really get confused as to why people let these things bother them. Ah well.
I have no idea if this is a stupid study or not. It could be. Or it might not be. Don’t know anything about Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Killingsworth, and I haven’t read the actual study, and more than likely the same is true of John Tierney. One of the things you have to realize about scientific studies is this: you don’t always get what you want from them, but you still have to justify spending university resources on them (not to mention you want to see some return for your own time spent). Often there’s pressure to publish something, anything — many university professors without tenure have to publish once every so often just to keep their jobs. And, second, remember that science is a communal discourse. What might seem stupid to someone might help another scientist. And sometimes the stupid, obvious things need to be studied. It’s part of challenging the common wisdom, which any sabermetrician should appreciate.
I don’t know what the actual purpose of this study was. Maybe it was to help study the reliability and plausibility of the iPhone app (and before you automatically knock it, keep this in mind: it is extremely difficult to get people to respond to psych surveys except Psych 101 students eager for mandatory class credit; I will fault no one for trying to think outside the box for fresh participants). Maybe they actually care about whether people whose minds wander are less happy than those whose minds don’t, which I really don’t find to be so silly. Mind-wandering is a really tough thing to study, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there was a dearth of research in the study despite people believing mind-wandering to be a symptom of madness for ages now (ask Hamlet).
As for your disagreement with scale, I really can’t say anything other than it is empirically meaningful. Scales have been studied to death and they work. Don’t get too upset about the difference between a 100 and a 90. Nobody picks the 100. Or at least so few do that the psychologists don’t really care about them. The difference between a 70 and 60, 60 and 50, 50 and 40 is what’s important, and while one person’s 60 might be another’s 50, it doesn’t matter across hundreds or thousands of people. Seems strange, and it seems like it always leads to bad results but done right it leads to useful findings. It’s why social psychologists have to be statisticians, too.
Reading over my post above, it does seem a bit harsh. In truth, I wasn’t really bothered by the writeup of the study so much as I thought it was a pretty silly and vague conclusion, since — per the full Times article — it essentially says that if your mind wanders onto bad things it makes you unhappy but if your mind wanders onto good things it will make you happy. And to suggest that daydreaming ultimately causes unhappiness, to me, doesn’t pass the smell test at all.
Of course there’s some semantics at play, too, since Tierney conflates “daydreaming” and “mind-wandering,” and to me, they have different connotations.
My wife spent four years doing psychology research at a university so I’ve heard all about the pressure to publish and all that (also, from Ghostbusters). I take it you’re doing something similar?
Can you give me the spark-notes version of this? I was daydreaming during the article.
It’s important to remember that psychology is still a very new area of study; hence, stupid studies only come with the territory. But what’s dangerous about studies like this (and all studies) is that because they have a “scientific” base, they can be taken as fact. Here’s another psychological study: did you know that ice cream sales are directly proportional with crime rates? It’s an exercise in a correlational study that looks good but has no substance. It’s always important to take these studies–and anything scientific–with a grain of salt. That’s the essence of science, anyway: you try and disprove things until you can’t anymore.