The relationship of happiness and sport

Abstract

An informal inquiry among a considerable number of friends and acquaintances reveals a clear picture. When asked which relationship between happiness and sport is relevant to them, almost all of them immediately answered: “Doing sport raises happiness.” They pointed out that engaging in sport is good for health because it strengthens the body; induces people to enjoy fresh air; has a welcome disciplining function; and most importantly sets into motion chemical processes in the body bolstering satisfaction with life, thus increasing happiness. But is this really true? One could also argue that the causation goes into the opposite direction: Healthy – and therefore happier – people are able to engage in sport. Persons in ill health are unable, or unwilling, to do so. Hence, greater happiness leads people to do more sport, and not the other way round. Both directions of causation make sense, and they may exist at the same time. But it may also hold that only one of them applies, while the other does not. In this chapter, we make an effort to empirically inquire whether doing sport makes people happy, or whether happy people do more sport. It must immediately be stressed that it is most difficult, and in many cases impossible, to empirically identify the two causal links, i.e., to clearly separate the two countervailing inf luences. Our results should therefore be taken cautiously. More extensive and better data are needed to reach a satisfactory answer. In particular, it would be good to have more precise data on what kind of sport activity people engage in. The econometric estimates1 indicate that persons actively doing sport report higher happiness than those who do no sport. We find that this correlation between sport and reported subjective well-being is substantial. The more often people engage in sport, the higher the positive correlation with happiness. This result suggests that engagement in sport and happiness are directly related, and not only – as many people think – via the effect on physical health. In the causal analysis, we find that both directions of inf luence matter: Sport inf luences happiness in a strongly positive manner, while happiness has a smaller positive impact on engaging in sport. The causal effect of sport 15 The relationship of happiness and sport