1: “Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past,” Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write in The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.
The only problem with this approach?
People’s “memories are full of holes,” the authors write.” Just try to remember what you had for dinner last Tuesday, or who you spoke with on this date last year, and you’ll get an idea how much of our lives is lost to memory.”
And, we forget more details as the months and years go on.
Not only that, but “research shows that the act of recalling an event can actually change our memory of it,” they note.
“In short, as a tool for studying past events,” Bob and Marc write, “the human memory is at its best imprecise, and at its worst, inventive.”
But what if we had the power to observe entire lives over time?” What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age,” the authors write, “to see what really matters to a person’s health and happiness, and which investments really paid off?”
2: That’s what the Harvard Study of Adult Development has done.
“For eighty-four years (and counting), the Harvard Study has tracked the same individuals, asking thousands of questions and taking hundreds of measurements to find out what really keeps people healthy and happy,” write Bob and Marc, the current Director and Associate Director of the Study.
Beginning in 1938, Arlie Bock, “Harvard’s professor of hygiene and chief of Student Health Services, wanted to move away from a research focus on what made people sick to a focus on what made people healthy.”
He recruited a group of 268 sophomores from Harvard College. The members were “selected because they were deemed likely to grow into healthy and well-adjusted men,” Bob and Marc recount.
About 50 percent of the young men chosen for the Study attended Harvard on scholarship. Others came from affluent families. “Some could trace their roots in America to the founding of the country, and 13 percent had parents who had immigrated to the U.S.,” they note.
A second group of 456 inner-city Boston boys were chosen because “they were children who grew up in some of Boston’s most troubled families and most disadvantaged neighborhoods,” the authors write. At the age of 14, they had mostly avoided “the paths to juvenile delinquency that some of their peers were following.”
This second Study was comprised mostly (60 percent) of children who had at least one parent who had immigrated to the U.S. “Their modest roots and immigrant status made them doubly marginalized,” the authors note. This project was started by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, a lawyer and a social worker, to better understand the factors that allowed these teenagers to avoid delinquency.
These two Studies began independently but later merged and now operate together.
“When they joined their respective studies,” Bob and Marc write, “all of the inner-city and Harvard participants were interviewed. They were given medical exams. Researchers went to their homes and interviewed their parents.”
As time went on, the teenagers became adults.” They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors,” they observe. “Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia. Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the very top, and some made that journey in the opposite direction.”
The findings of the Study are so notable because they are so unusual.
“Prospective, life-spanning studies like this are exceedingly rare,” the authors write. “Participants drop out, change their names, or move without notifying the Study. Funding dries up, researchers lose interest. On average, most successful prospective longitudinal studies maintain 30 to 70 percent of their participants. Some of these studies only last several years.
“By hook and by crook the Harvard Study has maintained an 84 percent participation rate for 84 years, and it’s still in good health today.”
Most studies of human beings are “cross-sectional.” They “take a slice out of the world at a given moment and look inside, much the way you might cut into a layer cake to see what it’s made of,” Bob and Marc note. “Most psychological and health studies fall into this category because they are cost efficient to conduct.”
“Longitudinal” studies are altogether different. They look at life over time. They take a long time.
“There are two ways to do this,” the authors note. “The first we’ve already mentioned, and it’s the most common: you ask people to remember the past. This is known as a retrospective study.”
But retrospective studies are flawed because our memories are flawed.
The Harvard Study is different. It “has recorded the experience of its participants’ lives more or less as they were happening, from childhood troubles, to first loves, to final days,” they write.
The Study has expanded and evolved over time and now includes three generations and more than 1,300 descendants of its original 724 participants.
3: Yesterday, we looked at the central finding of the Study: “Through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health, and longevity. . . One thing continuously demonstrates its broad and enduring importance: Good relationships.”
Bob and Marc write: “It’s a choice that has been found in one study after another to contribute to enduring joy and flourishing lives. But it’s not always an easy one to make. As human beings, even with the best intentions, we get in our own way, make mistakes, and get hurt by the people we love. The path to the good life, after all, isn’t easy, but successfully navigating its twists and turns is entirely possible.
“The Harvard Study of Adult Development can point the way.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I surprised by the findings of the Harvard Study? How might I apply the key lesson around the importance of relationships?
Action: Discuss with a family member or friend.
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