“The Convergence of Positivity: Are Happy People All Alike?”, 2023-02-16 (; backlinks):
[OSF] More than a century ago Leo Tolstoy noted that happy families tend to be more similar to each other than unhappy families. Was this just a cognitive illusion, driven by his mind’s predisposition to see positive entities as more similar to each other, or did he make a profound observation about the world? If it is true, is the phenomenon limited to happiness, or is it a characteristic of positive traits more generally? This question has received attention in multiple fields, but not in psychology.
We ran 5 studies, testing the more general hypothesis that people who share some positive individual-difference trait are more alike than those who do not (The Convergence of Positivity Hypothesis), and we:
consistently [across 14 hypothesis tests] found empirical support for it. Happier, healthier, and richer people were more alike in their personality, values, and in various other domains.
The research approach we followed here departs from traditional behavioral science methods and proposes a different level of analysis, where valence and directionality play a central role. We speculate about why this pattern might exist and about the boundary conditions, including whether it extends beyond individual differences to a broader set of complex systems where positivity can be defined…While those results are well aligned with some previous finding on convergence of positivity in the mind, current theories in psychology do not predict such a pattern. We propose that this pattern emerges either as a consequence of a domain-general convergence of positivity principle or as a systematic bias on the side of researchers in choosing domains and constructing scales. Both of these possibilities are extremely intriguing and invite further investigation.
[Keywords: Anna Karenina Principle, convergence of positivity, individual differences, personality, success, values [J-factor of general fitness?]]