- Rhizome
- Journal
- Artbase
- Community
- Programs

## Happiness Experiment (2012)

by Ben Coonley

Tweet

An interactive YouTube video based on an experimental philosophy study titled "The Ordinary Concept of Happiness (and others like it)" by Jonathan Phillips, Luke Misenheimer, and Joshua Knobe.

Tags: annotations choose-your-own adventure cognitive science experiment Experimental Philosophy Happiness Interactive Jonathan Phillips Joshua Knobe Justine Kolata Laurie Santos Luke Misenheimer Philosophy psychology research Sarah Hailey unhappiness video Yale YouTube

###### Full Description

This is second in a series of works I've made to illustrate/recreate recent studies in experimental philosophy. This work, which consists of five short interactively linked YouTube videos, examines how people understand other peoples' relative happiness and unhappiness. The original study suggests that value judgements about lifestyle choices may figure into a person's understanding of whether or not someone can be considered "happy," but NOT into whether or not someone can be considered "unhappy."

I use the interactive annotations features of YouTube to create inter-video polls, so that viewers of the video can take part in a "within-subjects version" of the original study. If the work generates a critical number of page views the statistics generated by the YouTube video will be compared to the data in the original study.

This project is based on an experimental philosophy study titled "The Ordinary Concept of Happiness (and others like it)" by Jonathan Phillips, Luke Misenheimer, and Joshua Knobe. Source: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jp677/LoveandHappiness.pdf

The video is narrated by Laurie Santos, an associate professor of psychology and head of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory (CapLab) at Yale.

###### Work metadata

- Year Created: 2012
- Submitted to ArtBase: Monday May 28th, 2012
- Original Url: http://youtu.be/SPkcOBEuUD0
- Work Credits:
  - Ben Coonley, primary creator

Want to see more?
Take full advantage of the ArtBase by Becoming a Member

###### Artist Statement

Have you ever wondered if a star-fucking, social-climbing, party rocker can be considered truly "happy"? Can she be considered as happy as say, Joan Cleaver? What if these two characters possess the exact same psychological states as one another? Can they be equally happy? Like many people, I would presume that the answer to all questions is "yes...of course (duh)!" But a recent study from the burgeoning field of experimental philosophy suggests that folk intuitions on the subject of others' happiness–and, perhaps more interestingly, unhappiness–are more complex than you might imagine. In this 5-part interactive YouTube video, I illustrate some of the findings of this study.

###### Related works

###### Comments

This artwork has no comments. You should add one!