A Skeptical Look At “Happiness Doesn’t Follow Success: It’s the Other Way Round”
An exceedingly poor systematic review by Sonja Lyubomirsky nonetheless remains one of the best available in the positive psychology literature.
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This highly accessed article from CoyneoftheRealm, Mind the Brain is back. The archive was vandalized and this article required extensive reconstruction. During its absence, this article continued to be my most requested one. The story remains a thorough review and critique of Walsh, L. C., Boehm, J. K., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2018). Does happiness promote career success? Revisiting the evidence. It introduces the reader to some important criteria that will be useful for evaluating other systematic reviews.
The article was originally posted on Jul 10, 2019.
I spent more time probing a peer-reviewed review article about happiness and success, and a companion Aeon article than was warranted. I redeemed the time and effort by writing a long read. Maybe it will be useful to readers having the same questions Ido. Namely, (1) How seriously we should take the science in review articles from notable positive psychologists? (2) How seriously we should take claims of positive ps…