14 DAY TRIAL // A bit late but better than nothing, Facebook decided that it can put the mountains of data it gathers every second to good use and has released an analysis on people's happiness based on their relationship status. Valentine's Day has come and gone, but maybe Facebook postponed the release because the results weren't that optimistic. Well, not exactly, it turns out that people in relationships are generally happier than singles. Not much of a surprise here, but the Facebook data team did uncover some other, unexpected results.
"It’s Valentine’s Day, and for Data Scientists and others alike, it’s the perfect time to ask the question: Does having that someone special really make us happy?," asks Facebook intern Lisa Zhang. "The result is mostly a case of data showing what we already know: Just as expected, people who are in a relationship or marriage do seem to be happier than everyone else. People who are in a relationship seem less happy compared to married folks, but there is less variation in both positivity and negativity amongst married people. Married people, however, tend to be older, and we know from other studies that people do become happier as they age," she says.
Facebook analyzes the status updates of its users to determine their happiness, with a method that counts the number of 'happy' words used as opposed to the 'negative' ones. The data team then correlated the users' happiness with their reported relationship status to see if there was a connection.
The initial results, explained above, aren't going to surprise anyone, except maybe the part where married people are happier than the ones in a relationship. Or maybe the part where men are happier when married than women. Then again, men tend to be happier than women when in almost all kinds of relationships and are also more negative when in an open relationship, widowed or have set their statuses to 'it's complicated'.
The really interesting part is that, according to Facebook data, people in open relationships are the worst off, generally being significantly more negative than singles. What's more, men are the ones who don't like it the most and 40 percent more women list themselves as being in an open relationship than men. In the end, even with the most rigorous of methods, counting the number of positive words in someone's writings may not be the most accurate way of determining their happiness. There's a bunch more data to be discovered in the actual graphs to the left, but take everything with a grain of salt.
