Is it important to be happy?  A couple of recent studies suggest that focusing on one’s happiness may not be such an obviously beneficial idea.  It’s a counter-intuitive thought, at least in the United States, because we place so much emphasis on the importance of happiness.  We measure happiness in our clients and customers, in our employees, and in our audiences as speakers.  Indeed, the five-point scale of happiness is ubiquitous throughout US culture and in many places around the world.

Rating systems, from how well we liked our meal at any of thousands of restaurants to how well we liked our mortgage broker during the months of absurd demands for insane amounts of information in the form of paperwork that no one ever really looks at – I speak as one who recently endured this horrific, intrusive process – are everywhere.  How could anyone possibly expect me to give the process a positive rating?  And yet I got an angry call from the mortgage broker when I was severe in my criticism of the endless demands for pointless forms of information.  Go figure.

But I digress.  It’s a rare transaction these days that isn’t followed up with multiple demands for a rating of the experience, whether it’s buying a new water filter for your refrigerator or the wait time at the car dealer’s service department.

I’m always torn, because when the experience has been good, I naturally want to share the praise with the company and around the world.  But when the experience has been bad, I’m less inclined to help the organization out – in the case where presumably feedback is more important.  I should want to tell the company where it has fallen short, I suppose, but mostly I’m cross as a result of the experience and want nothing further to do with the organization.

As part of all these rating systems, companies have been eager to use AI to track our reactions by reading our facial expressions.  After all, if our ratings can be discovered in our facial expressions, then companies can just scan our faces on the way out of the store, cutting out the need to ask for our reactions on the survey forms.  And it’s here that real problems appear.  It turns out that facial expressions are not a good indicator for how we are feeling.  Recent research that studied the links between muscle movements in the face and felt emotions found that there were few connections.

The study’s authors were trying to develop AI systems that could read human emotions via the face.  The benefits of such a program would be obvious and widespread – and a little Orwellian.

But the study found that facial expressions are a highly unreliable indicator of the human feelings underneath.

This finding should really not astonish any grownups, because we all learn, once we’re out of our twenties, how to conceal our true emotions in settings and places where it serves us to be diplomatic and to feign interest in things that really don’t excite us.

So happiness and facial expressions have little to do with one another.  Noted. A deeper study of the effect of the pursuit of happiness revealed that the more emphasis a culture placed on happiness, the more likely the denizens of that culture were to be unhappy.  Somehow, putting stress on happiness causes us to feel its opposite.  Broadly speaking, the US and the UK – traditional English-speaking countries – place more emphasis on the importance of happiness than other European countries – and have more of a struggle when things don’t go well.  In other words, the harder you try to be happy the less happy you’re likely to be.

What does the pursuit of happiness have to do with public speakers? It’s a mistake to try to manage the happiness of your audience.  Your job is to tell them something interesting, to change their thinking perhaps, in order to change the world.  To do that, you may well have to make the audience unhappy.  In any case the pursuit of the audience’s happiness should not be your first priority.  You’re not the audience’s mood ring.  You are their gateway to new ways of thinking.  That is the fundamental problem with the whole emphasis on ratings in the speaking world – it pushes speakers to flatter and please the audience rather than challenge it.

Happiness should not be the goal and reading it from other people’s faces is a fraught task.  Instead, focus on changing minds.  That’s the true goal of public speaking.