This doesn't affect the main point of your post, but I think the height example is potentially misleading because the SD for height is low and humans are in a pretty narrow band of absolute heights. But that doesn't seem to be true for happiness or other psychological traits.
This is an interesting argument. Certainly it's true that with a larger standard deviation the same effect size corresponds to a large absolute difference. But I find it very hard to compare the standard deviation of height to that of happiness... I actually find it pretty plausible that one might be much larger than another (and I consider this a real weakness of the general focus on effect sizes) but not sure how to make this argument with any confidence.
Funny, I received this piece at the same time I received my beta access to https://consensus.app/search/ , a project I'm very interested in. And my first criticism of it is quite well exemplified by your post:
Although it's great to get an overview and a bibliography on a subject, A whole bunch of scientific studies seeming to support a point does not necessarily close the very specific question we are asking. And it feels a bit naive to think otherwise. Had I tried to answer your question with this tool, I also would have come up with a monumental "yes, of course": https://consensus.app/results/?q=Does+gratitude+increase+happiness%3F
I agree that when there's a large body of work, you can usually cherry-pick studies to get basically whatever solution you want. The standard solution to that is to look at meta-analyses instead, which is what I did here. (I don't know much about consensus, but most of those quotes don't seem to directly answer the question, or are kind of ambiguous. A meta analysis is basically a person summarizing the literature in a proven structured way, so for now at least, I certainly trust meta-analyses more than consensus.)
This doesn't affect the main point of your post, but I think the height example is potentially misleading because the SD for height is low and humans are in a pretty narrow band of absolute heights. But that doesn't seem to be true for happiness or other psychological traits.
This is an interesting argument. Certainly it's true that with a larger standard deviation the same effect size corresponds to a large absolute difference. But I find it very hard to compare the standard deviation of height to that of happiness... I actually find it pretty plausible that one might be much larger than another (and I consider this a real weakness of the general focus on effect sizes) but not sure how to make this argument with any confidence.
I wonder how much of the happiness-gratitude correlation is just having more stuff to be grateful for.
Funny, I received this piece at the same time I received my beta access to https://consensus.app/search/ , a project I'm very interested in. And my first criticism of it is quite well exemplified by your post:
Although it's great to get an overview and a bibliography on a subject, A whole bunch of scientific studies seeming to support a point does not necessarily close the very specific question we are asking. And it feels a bit naive to think otherwise. Had I tried to answer your question with this tool, I also would have come up with a monumental "yes, of course": https://consensus.app/results/?q=Does+gratitude+increase+happiness%3F
I agree that when there's a large body of work, you can usually cherry-pick studies to get basically whatever solution you want. The standard solution to that is to look at meta-analyses instead, which is what I did here. (I don't know much about consensus, but most of those quotes don't seem to directly answer the question, or are kind of ambiguous. A meta analysis is basically a person summarizing the literature in a proven structured way, so for now at least, I certainly trust meta-analyses more than consensus.)