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Measuring Smiles

 In his book The Happiness Industry, the author mentions an interesting social experiment: 

".. an experiment undertaken in the town of Port Phillip, Australia, which carried out an experiment in happiness measurement by stationing researchers around the streets who sought to record how much smiling they witnessed on the faces of those around them. A ‘smiles per hour’ value was produced from one day to the next."

Would it make a difference if the researchers smiled at the people they were observing and recorded if they smiled back. There is a high likelihood that they did. If increasing the number of smiles per hour is a goal that helps society in general, maybe volunteer smilers should be recruited to help bump up that metric. Of this type of metric of happiness, the author notes:

"The cultural effect of this is that certain indicators and measures of happiness take on a moral luminosity of their own. While happiness itself may remain invisible, a smile or a diagnosis of positive health acquires a sort of iconic value. The material symptom or indicator becomes a doorway into some inner being, granting it a magical quality."



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