Learn whether smiling can actually make you feel happier and why it took John Harrison, a working-class clockmaker, to figure out longitude.
Learn whether smiling can actually make you feel happier and why it took John Harrison, a working-class clockmaker, to figure out longitude.
It Took a Working-Class Clockmaker to Figure Out Longitude by Ashley Hamer
Can smiling really make you happier? By Grant Currin
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/can-smiling-actually-make-you-happier-and-why-a-clockmaker-figured-out-longitude
ASHLEY HAMER: Hi. You're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity.com. I'm Ashley Hamer.
NATALIA REAGAN: And I'm Natalia Reagan. Today, you'll learn whether smiling can actually make you feel happier, and why it took a working class clockmaker to figure out longitude.
ASHLEY HAMER: Let's satisfy some curiosity. You might have heard that psychology is having a bit of a crisis. A lot of the studies that form the basis of what we believe about human behavior have proven very hard or impossible for other researchers to replicate. It's casting doubt on what we know about ourselves and our brains.
A poster child of this phenomenon is the facial feedback hypothesis, or the idea that the physical act of smiling can actually make you see the world in a happier light. Will it survive the replication crisis? Signs are looking-- well, you'll find out.
Some of the ideas behind the facial feedback hypothesis go all the way back to Darwin. But things really started in 1988. That was when a social psychologist had participants hold a pen in their mouths, and then rate how funny they found various Far Side Cartoons.
The participants who held the pen horizontally, which put their mouths in a smiling position, consistently rated the cartoons as funnier than the participants who held the pen like a drinking straw. It was a blockbuster study that caught public attention and became important to the psychology of emotion.
Then 2015 happened. That year, a group led by psychology researcher Brian Nosek, tried to replicate 100 psychology studies. And a large portion of them failed. That was the match that ignited the now infamous Replication Crisis.
A year later, a group of 17 labs tried to replicate the findings from the 1988 facial feedback study. None of them could do it. So where does that leave the facial feedback hypothesis? It's hard to say. But there are still a lot of researchers trying to figure it out.
One of those researchers vacuumed up all the data he could find, including from the 17 sets of experiments described in the 2016 paper, and analyzed it all together. When considered as a whole, that data suggests that smiling has a small but reliable effect on how people feel. But that answer may not be especially reliable either.
After all, those studies still have the same limitations as before like small sample sizes, selective sharing of only the most interesting results, and statistics that underplay the possibility that a result happened by chance.
The good news is that better data is on the way. A new project is bringing together a lot of researchers who work on this hypothesis. Even better, many of them have been critical of each other in the past.
That's by design, since it's possible that a diversity of viewpoints will lead to watertight experiments that deliver high quality data. The first stage of the project includes 21 labs in 19 countries. The progress of science marches on. And that's something to smile about.
NATALIA REAGAN: It's easy to pinpoint a location in the world today. But centuries ago, it wasn't that simple. It was so hard for sailors to know where they were, that thousands died in shipwrecks every year.
So how did we solve this problem? Not with better maps or better sextants, nope. In this case, a better clock saved the day. Here's how it happened.
In the 1700s, the British government was so desperate for a solution to their navigational troubles that they offered a massive cash prize of 20,000 pounds to anyone who could come up with a solution. In today's money, that's equivalent to 3.5 million pounds or $4.6 million. They called it the 1714 Longitude Prize. It's basically the XPRIZE of its day.
The key to this problem was finding a better way to measure longitude and latitude. These metrics are generally considered to be two sides of the same coin. But when it came to navigation in the 1700s, they were nothing alike.
Measuring latitude was easy. Use a sextant to measure the angle of the sun at its highest point, and you knew how far North or South you were from the equator. But longitude was a whole other ballgame.
The Earth rotates about 15 degrees every hour, so traveling East and West changes the time of Sunset. If you know the time where you are and the time in another known location, you can use the difference between them to work out your longitude. The problem was that clocks weren't very accurate, especially not on ships.
The state of the art clocks of the time use pendulums. And when you expose the steady beat of a pendulum to the chaos of the sea, well, you don't have a steady beat anymore. What is a sailor to do?
Enter John Harrison, a working class clockmaker with an eye on the longitude prize. He first developed a clock using two double ended pendulums, which worked OK but wasn't quite good enough to win the prize. Still, it had promise.
And the powers that be agreed to fund Harrison's future efforts. Good thing, too, since after two more models, he eventually hit upon the invention that would change the world. It was called H4. It looked sort of an oversized pocket watch but with much more powerful internal components that made it tick five times per second.
John was pushing 70 by this point, so his son William tested it out on a journey to Jamaica. It succeeded with flying colors. And Harrison won the prize. His marine chronometer eventually combined with more accurate celestial measurements to help sailors pinpoint their place on the planet. But it also marked a successful end to what some called the world's first crowdsourcing event.
Man, forget Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Who wants to solve a navigational flaw that has plagued us for millennia and get $4.6 million? Am I right?
So what did we learn today? Well, we learned that many psych studies have a tough time being replicated in what is referred to as a replication crisis. It's like a midlife crisis but, well, with experiments and such.
And this includes the facial feedback hypothesis that tested whether smiling makes you happier. It's hard to really tell if it really does. But I don't know. I think, per usual, more research and data are needed.
ASHLEY HAMER: I mean, I personally probably wouldn't be that happy if I had to hold a pen in my mouth all day.
NATALIA REAGAN: And you know what? As a scientist, I thought-- I love Far Side Comics, by the way. But people don't always have the same sense of humor.
ASHLEY HAMER: Right. It's really tough to measure humor, totally.
NATALIA REAGAN: But I think the Far Side is universally funny. But that might not hold weight with everybody.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah?
NATALIA REAGAN: Yeah.
ASHLEY HAMER: And we learned that determining longitude wasn't nearly as simple as figuring out latitude. It wasn't until the 1714 Longitude Prize, basically an XPRIZE, a crowdsourcing event, that an Englishman finally figured out how to make a clock that stayed accurate on the high seas. And that helped sailors figure out longitude and avoid being a victim of yet another shipwreck. Who knew that a more accurate clock was what you needed to know your place on the planet?
NATALIA REAGAN: Time is of the essence. And in this case, it really did solve all the problems honestly. Usually, time is what's causing problems, right? I mean, it's kind of wild to think that for a long time, they're just kind of like, we're just going to go out on a boat and see what happened.
Just who knows? Oh, look, an iceberg. Oh, no. Oh, shoot. Did anyone bring a lifeboat? Oh, OK. Well, tell my wife I loved her.
ASHLEY HAMER: Yeah. It definitely took a lot more bravery to live back then.
NATALIA REAGAN: Right?
ASHLEY HAMER: Amazing.
NATALIA REAGAN: Today's stories were written by Ashley Hamer and Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who's the managing editor of Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY HAMER: Scriptwriting and editing by Natalia Reagan. Our producer is Cody Gough.
NATALIA REAGAN: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY HAMER: And until then, stay curious.