You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

These days, it seems like a lot of folks, including us in the media, are obsessed with

finding ways to boost our happiness.

A few hours of free time a day, you can be fulfilled and happy.

Researchers found kids more connected to nature, tend to be happier, and with that...

Small tuck, it actually lifts up your day, makes you more positive, makes you happier.

How do we happy is Googled more often than how to get rich?

And Elizabeth Dunn is right in the center of it all.

I started studying happiness when I was only about 20 years old.

I was really fortunate that I got to experience really the cutting-edge research that was happening

in happiness science at that time, and I was just captivated by it.

Elizabeth became a leading happiness researcher in her own right, and now runs a lab at the

University of British Columbia.

But while she was studying things like how spending money on others can boost a person's

happiness, there was a big change going on in psychology and a lot of other scientific

fields, the replication crisis.

Basically, it was the growing discovery that a lot of studies could not be replicated,

because they had too few subjects and used flawed methodologies, like massaging the data.

Engaging in the kinds of practices that were very normal in the field at the time could

dramatically increase the false positive rate, that is, the likelihood that we would obtain

a statistically significant result for an effect that actually didn't exist.

Suddenly, the research that made up the foundation of disciplines like psychology was suspect.

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