I can’t think of a good theoretical reason why true effects should fall so significantly – like 40%. That’s striking. The same attenuation result holds, even including income/age/event prevalence.
“Intuitively, if wellbeing saturates at the top end, having a really positive thing happen to me genuinely might not move the needle as much.”
This is true. Another way of saying this is: “the true effects fall as you get happier”. But then, given reported happiness has stayed constant, why would the effects fall?
Hm, I don’t think I agree with you on linearity. Andrew Oswald was writing about this in 2008. One option is that the function is logistic/arctan: i.e,. quite concave/flat at high latent happiness levels. That is, you can’t shift reported happiness above a 10 (a ceiling effect), even if you get happier.
In this case: even if the reporting function is non-linear (and assuming true effect sizes are constant), why would the observed effects fall? Because people are getting happier. Again, this is a different way of saying rescaling is happening.
Hello, Huw!
I can’t think of a good theoretical reason why true effects should fall so significantly – like 40%. That’s striking. The same attenuation result holds, even including income/age/event prevalence.
“Intuitively, if wellbeing saturates at the top end, having a really positive thing happen to me genuinely might not move the needle as much.”
This is true. Another way of saying this is: “the true effects fall as you get happier”. But then, given reported happiness has stayed constant, why would the effects fall?
Hm, I don’t think I agree with you on linearity. Andrew Oswald was writing about this in 2008. One option is that the function is logistic/arctan: i.e,. quite concave/flat at high latent happiness levels. That is, you can’t shift reported happiness above a 10 (a ceiling effect), even if you get happier.
In this case: even if the reporting function is non-linear (and assuming true effect sizes are constant), why would the observed effects fall? Because people are getting happier. Again, this is a different way of saying rescaling is happening.