Predicting others’ happiness from brief personal memories

Abstract

Research suggests that people can predict others’ personality and emotions through various channels, but it is unknown whether strangers can accurately predict a target’s trait happiness from a brief written personal memory, and whether some content is more useful than others. Given the importance of understanding others, we conducted two pre-registered investigations of whether third-party readers could estimate the happiness of 5,169 targets who wrote a brief (average words = 61) personal or prosocial spending memory. We detected a small positive correlation between targets’ trait happiness and readers’ ratings in both conditions, with a larger correlation often found in the personal condition. We then conducted exploratory analyses to probe why certain spending memories facilitate greater trait happiness accuracy by examining word usage.