It is better to be right
than to be happy...
right?
As part of an unusual experiment, the husband was
instructed to “agree with his wife’s every opinion and request without
complaint,” and to continue doing so “even if he believed the female
participant was wrong,” according to a report on the research that was
published Tuesday by the British Medical Journal.
The husband and wife were helping a trio of doctors
test their theory that pride and stubbornness get in the way of good mental
health. In their own medical practices in New Zealand, they had observed
patients leading “unnecessarily stressful lives by wanting to be right rather
than happy.”
If these patients could just let go of the need to prove to others
that they were right, would greater happiness be the result?
Based on the assumption that men would rather be
happy than be right, a husband was told to agree with his wife in all cases.
However, based on the assumption that women would rather be right than be
happy, the doctors decided not to tell the wife why her husband was suddenly so
agreeable.
Both spouses were asked to rate their quality of
life on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being the happiest) at the start of the
experiment and again on Day 6. It’s not clear how long the experiment was
intended to last, but it came to an abrupt halt on Day 12.
“By then the male participant found the female
participant to be increasingly critical of everything he did,” the researchers
reported. The husband could not take it anymore, so he made his wife a cup of
tea and told her what had been going on.
That led the researchers to terminate the study.
Over the 12 days of the experiment, the husband’s
quality of life plummeted from a baseline score of 7 all the way down to 3. The
wife started out at 8 and rose to 8.5 by Day 6. She had no desire to share her
quality of life with the researchers on Day 12, according to the report.
Still, the team was able to draw some preliminary
conclusions.
“It seems that being right, however, is a cause of
happiness, and agreeing with what one disagrees with is a cause of unhappiness,”
they wrote. They also noted that “the availability of unbridled power adversely
affects the quality of life of those on the receiving end.”
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