Brain Rules for Baby (John Medina) / quote 56 of 91
The Grant Study: relationships make us happy
Since 1937, researchers for the Harvard Study of Adult Development have exhaustively collected intimate data on several hundred people. The project usually goes by the moniker the Grant Study, named for the department store magnate W. T. Grant, who funded the initial work. The question they are investigating: Is there a formula for “the good life”? What, in other words, makes people happy? Vaillant has been the project’s caretaker for more than four decades, the latest in a long line of scientific shepherds of the Grant Study. His interest is more than just professional. Vaillant himself is a self-described “disconnected” parent. Married multiple times, he has five children, one of whom is autistic and four of whom don’t speak to him very often. His own father committed suicide when he was 10, leaving him with few happy examples to follow. So he’s a good man to lead the search for happiness. The project’s scientific godfathers, all of whom are now dead, recruited 268 Harvard undergraduates to the study. They were all white males, seemingly well-adjusted, several with bright futures ahead of them—including longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and President John F. Kennedy. Their lives were to be stretched out like a rack for years so that teams of professionals, including psychologists, anthropologists, social workers, even physiologists, could keep track of everything that happened to them. And that’s what they did. With an initial thoroughness the Department of Homeland Security might envy, these men have endured exhaustive medical checkups every five years, patiently taken batteries of psychological tests, tolerated in-person interviews every 15 years, and returned questionnaires every other year, for nearly three-quarters of a century. Though supervised unevenly over the decades by what best might be called a tag team of researchers, the Grant Study is probably the most thorough research of its type ever attempted. And what did they come up with after all these years? What in the end constitutes the good life? Consistently makes us happy? I’ll let Vaillant, in an interview with the Atlantic, speak for the group: “The only thing that really matters in life [is] your relationships to other people.” After nearly 75 years, the only consistent finding comes right out of It’s a Wonderful Life. Successful friendships, the messy bridges that connect friends and family, are what predict people’s happiness as they hurtle through life. Friendships are a better predictor than any other single variable. By the time a person reaches middle age, they are the only predictor.