1: Marc Schulz has been a professor at a prestigious women’s college for over twenty-five years.
He also serves as Associate Director of The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the world’s longest scientific study of happiness.
Every year, “a new cohort of bright, excited students ask to participate in his research on well-being and how people’s lives evolve across time,” Marc and Robert Waldinger write in their book The Good Life, which summarizes the key learnings from the study.
“Ananya, from India, was one of these students,” they note. “She was interested particularly in the links between adversity and adult well-being. Marc told Ananya about the Harvard Study’s rich data on hundreds of people spanning their entire adult lives.
“But they were male, White, and born more than seven decades before Ananya,” they note. “She wondered out loud what she could learn from the lives of people so different from her—especially old White men born a long time ago.”
Marc’s suggestion? Read through the file of just one of the participants in the Harvard Study. Then, they would discuss the following week.
2: Which leads to one of the big questions the authors pose: What do the lives of a group of white men “who grew up in America in the middle of the twentieth century have anything to say about modern women or people of color, about people from entirely different countries, cultures, and backgrounds?”
The answer to this question is also the central lesson the authors learned from the Harvard Study: “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.”
Ananya did what Marc suggested. She read through the files of one of the Harvard Study participants. The following week, she showed up for their meeting full of enthusiasm. Before Marc had a chance to speak, she told him she wanted to do her research on the men in the Harvard Study.
What sparked this change? “The richness of the life documented in the files she read,” Marc and Bob explain.
“Even though the particulars of this one participant’s life were so different from her own in so many ways,” they explain, “Ananya saw reflections of herself in his psychological experiences and challenges.”
3: Could two places be more different than Evans County, Georgia, and the eastern coast of Finland? These were two of the five places where longitudinal studies looking at people’s lives over time had been conducted, similar to the Harvard Study, as outlined in an influential paper published in the journal Science.
The objective was to learn if there was a causal link between social connection and the risk of death at any age.
“There are probably few greater contrasts than the life of a Black woman who grew up in the American South in the 1960s and the life of a White man living on the shore of a frozen lake in Finland,” Bob and Marc observe.
“At just about any level of experience you can imagine, one would expect to see some major differences.”
Some of the initial findings were what we might expect: “For both men and women, geography and race mattered, as they do in many studies,” the authors write. “Individuals in Evans County had the highest mortality rates in the study on average, and those in eastern Finland had the lowest.
“Within Evans County, Blacks had a higher risk of dying at any point in their lives than Whites did, though that difference was relatively small, they note, “when compared to the difference between Finland and Evans County. Taken together, these differences are stark and meaningful.”
Yet, the research also revealed some real surprises: “The data for the men and women in all five locations display a remarkably similar pattern: people who were more socially connected had less risk of dying at any age.”
“Replication” is the term scientists use when findings are uniform across different locations and demographic groups. It is “the holy grail of research.”
Which is the case of this research, the authors explain: “Whether you were a Black woman in rural Georgia or a White man in Finland, the more connected you were to others, the lower your risk of dying in any given year.”
Mic drop.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What strategies can I employ to improve the quality and depth of the key relationships in my life?
Action: Discuss this with a family member or friend.
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