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from the ad-viewing-quota-enforcement dept.
The University of Warwick's Andrew Oswald and his team compared survey data on the life satisfaction of more than 900,000 citizens of 27 European countries from 1980 to 2011 with data on annual advertising spending in those nations over the same period. The researchers found an inverse connection between the two. The higher a country's ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later. Their conclusion: Advertising makes us unhappy.
Oswald: We did find a significant negative relationship. When you look at changes in national happiness each year and changes in ad spending that year or a few years earlier—and you hold other factors like GDP and unemployment constant—there is a link. This suggests that when advertisers pour money into a country, the result is diminished well-being for the people living there.
HBR: What prompted you to investigate this?
[ . . . ] I can't help noticing the increasing amount of ads we're bombarded with. For me, it was natural to wonder whether it might create dissatisfaction in our culture [ . . . ] In a sense they're trying to generate dissatisfaction—stirring up your desires so that you spend more
[ . . . . ] exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate.
[ . . . . ] we controlled for lots of other influences on happiness. Second, we looked at increases or drops in advertising in a given year and showed that they successfully predicted a rise or fall in national happiness in ensuing years.
So always take two ad blockers before bedtime.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday January 16 2020, @05:22PM (2 children)
While correlation is not causation, it's a good hint that there's likely to be some causal relationship involved. In the case of ads there are so many causes of why they might make people unhappy that it's hard to chose which is the most significant.
No, this doesn't prove their case. But it means it's consistent with known evidence. There might be some other driving factor involved, and you are welcome to try to come up with a plausible one.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday January 17 2020, @04:10AM (1 child)
> While correlation is not causation, it's a good hint that there's likely to be some causal relationship involved.
No. No, it's not at all. You completely failed to understand "correlation is not causation". Out of all possible correlations, a minuscule proportion of them indicate a direct causal relationship. This can even be proven mathematically. For example, given one event that causes two events, and each of those causes two events, and so on, the total number of correlations among all the events is n*(n-1) (roughly n^2), and the total number of causations is 2n.
Realistically, the chance of correlation being due to direct causation is less than winning the lottery multiple times consecutively.
What correlation indicates is a potential area for further research.
> there are so many causes of why they might make people unhappy that it's hard to chose which is the most significant.
There are also factorials more causes where it's not the ads making people unhappy, but some unrelated factor (e.g., the weather or the proportion of tomatoes in industrial farming) that indirectly cause both ad spending and unhappiness.
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(Score: 3, Funny) by darkfeline on Friday January 17 2020, @04:13AM
I fucked up the math there because I'm slightly tipsy. A more sober Soylentil is welcome to fix it. My point still stands however.
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