Reacción a "Reactions: The five strategies to increase happiness most often reported in the media lack sound scientific basis"

This paper is not so much about the “strategies for happiness”  but more a reflection of how research practices have changed. It has become more and more common to pre-register empirical studies, while there is a growing focus on power analyses.

The conclusion the authors reach that – when assessed against the current standard for empirical rigour – only few studies are up to scratch. On this basis, not a lot can be said about the question, whether the different “happiness strategies” are effective.

We cannot conclude that all the other empirical work, often published before these new standards were established, are useless. Indeed, for many research questions meta-analyses exist that suggest effectiveness of such approaches and that – to some extent at least – can mitigate for the lack of pre-registration or for low power. 

It makes sense for the authors to flag up that there may be the misconception (by journal editors or funders) that these research questions have been settled. If we take the current standard, they haven’t. But, if the scientific endeavour continues, this will always be the case: the standards will continue shifting. 

It is useful to keep this in mind and avoid becoming extremist by “binning” everything that has been done before. That’s not what the authors are doing, but what could be read into their results.