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Harvard study director Robert Waldinger provides the data-backed answer to what makes people live happier and longer lives and shares the choices anyone can make to start feeling more fulfilled right now.
In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Molly Liebergall chats with Robert Waldinger, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, about his new book The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness (Simon & Schuster, January 2023), cowritten by Marc Schulz. After tracking thousands of people over the course of 85 years, the Harvard study has found the factor that correlates with good living: good relationships. Waldinger, the study’s current director, shares what the happiest (and unhappiest) participants had to say about regret and fulfillment and how to put their lessons into practice. An edited version of the conversation follows.
This is, as far as we know, the longest study of human life that’s ever been done: the longest study of the same people going through their entire adult lives.
It is based at Harvard Medical School and at Massachusetts General Hospital. We are in our 85th year, and we’ve covered three generations: grandparents, parents, and children, who are now baby boomers. We have studied over 2,000 people altogether in this 85-year longitudinal research project. It began in 1938 in Boston with two groups, or studies, that didn’t even know about each other.Economic conditions outlook, September 2024
One was a study of Harvard College sophomores, 19-year-olds who were judged by their deans to be fine, upstanding young men—all White men from Harvard. It’s the most politically incorrect sample we could ever have, but in 1938 that’s what we had.
Similarly, the other study was started at Harvard Law School by Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, a law professor and social worker, respectively. They were interested in juvenile delinquency, and particularly why some children born to disadvantaged and troubled families managed to stay on good developmental paths as they grew up.
Almost all research had been on what goes wrong in human development, so these were revolutionary for their time. We’ve since expanded, we now have gender balance, meaning as many women as men, but we don’t have any people of color because in 1938 the City of Boston was 97.4 percent Caucasian, so if you start a study in 1938, you start with all White people.