Does watching TV make us happy?
Introduction
Watching TV is a very important activity, carried out by most people in the majority of countries. On average, people in Europe spend 226 min watching TV a day, in the United States TV viewing, on average, amounts even to 297 min per day (IP Germany, 2005). In many countries nowadays, watching TV occupies on average almost as much time as working. As it is a totally voluntary, freely chosen activity, it seems obvious that people enjoy it, because they would not do it otherwise. They are more satisfied with having the opportunity to watch TV to the extent they do rather than watching less TV or none at all.
This implication is shared by standard neoclassical economic theory. Individuals are assumed to know best what provides them with utility and are free to choose the amount of TV consumption that suits them best. By revealed preference, it follows from the fact that individuals watch so much TV as has been empirically observed that it provides them with considerable utility.
Recent developments, particularly in behavioral economics, cast doubt on this conclusion. The theory of revealed preference has been questioned (see, for instance, Sen, 1982, Sen, 1995): it is, in general, not possible to infer the utility produced by observing behavior, because individuals do not always act rationally. More concretely, anomalies and biases in behavior have been identified (e.g. Thaler, 1992), which undermine the direct link between observed behavior and the utility gained. Individuals may also be subject to habits which they do not have fully under control. They may consume some goods, such as drugs, alcohol or tobacco to a greater extent than they find to be good for themselves. They are subject to a self-control problem (e.g. Schelling, 1984), again interfering with the direct relationship proposed by revealed preference theory. As Gruber and Mullainathan (Gruber & Mullainathan, 2005) empirically show, (predicted) smokers, according to their own evaluation, consider themselves to be better off if smoking was restricted by a tax. Finally, individuals may systematically mispredict the utility derived from future consumption (e.g. Loewenstein et al., 2003, Loewenstein and Schkade, 1999). In particular, happiness research (for a survey, see Frey and Stutzer, 2002a, Frey and Stutzer, 2002b, Layard, 2005) has empirically shown that individuals overestimate the utility of future income (e.g. Easterlin, 2001), at the same time as they underestimate the utility of personal interactions (Frey & Stutzer, 2004). The consumption decisions made by individuals are systematically distorted according to their own evaluations.
This paper studies the strong notion that TV viewing is a case in which the theory of revealed preference does not fully apply: many people watch more TV than they consider good for themselves. The extent of TV viewing is not generally utility maximizing.
The case for mistakes in TV consumption choice can be formulated within a systematic framework: individuals are subject to a self-control problem, mainly induced by the fact that watching TV offers immediate benefits (e.g. entertainment and relaxation) at very low immediate marginal costs. Many costs (e.g. not enough sleep, underinvestment in social contacts, education or career) are only experienced in the future. Individuals with time inconsistent preferences are therefore unable to adhere to the amount of TV viewing they planned or which, in retrospect, they would consider optimal for themselves. This tendency is aggravated when people mispredict future costs because they underestimate utility from socializing and neglect changes in preference due to TV consumption. Extensive TV viewing is, according to this alternative view, the result of mispredicting utility and a self-control problem, leading to a lower level of individual utility than what could be achieved.
It is very difficult to discriminate between the view of optimal TV watching and the view of over-consumption based on observed behavior. How is it possible to assess from the outside whether 4 h TV viewing a day are too much and are actually regretted by the consumer? Neither is there conclusive information about optimal consumption behavior in TV viewers’ reaction to price changes. Whether or not people consistently allocate their time and income, they will react to relative price changes in the consumption of TV watching in the direction predicted by standard economics. Only if people adhere to external commitment devices that limit their future choice sets, their observed behavior indicates that they are subject to self-control problems. Yet, there exists only anecdotal and no systematic evidence for the use of such self-commitment devices (e.g. people put an uncomfortable chair in front of their TV or cancel their cable subscription in order not to watch too much TV or even get rid of their TV).
We pursue a completely different approach and propose data on subjective well-being to study whether people make systematic mistakes in their choice of time devoted to TV watching. Life satisfaction or reported subjective well-being can serve as a proxy for experienced utility as suggested by happiness research. Based on this methodology, it is in principle possible to study whether higher TV consumption lowers an individual’s utility or well-being as suggested by the pessimistic view about people’s TV watching. In our analysis, we explore to what extent standard information on individual TV consumption and subjective well-being can inform the debate.
The empirical analysis studies data from the first wave of the European Social Survey. This is an exceptionally rich data set providing information for more than 42,000 people from 22 different countries for 2002/03. The baseline econometric estimate lends support to the hypothesis of over-consumption: excessive TV viewers, on average, report lower life satisfaction. This negative correlation holds even after controlling for a large number of covariates of individual well-being.
We are aware that this correlation does not imply causation. The causality issue can neither be resolved with an extensive set of control variables in a multiple regression analysis nor with panel data. Instead one would want to study large scale changes in people’s opportunities to watch TV that are set from outside. We are not aware that suitable data, such as a natural experiment, exist. Instead two other aspects of the interrelation between TV consumption and subjective well-being are studied: (i) Whether the utility costs of extensive TV consumption depend on the opportunity cost of time. (ii) Whether TV viewing affects people’s preferences and beliefs.
We find that particularly individuals with time constraints, who watch TV for many hours, report lower life satisfaction and that watching TV is positively related to people’s material aspirations, as well as to anxiety levels, and negatively related to their financial satisfaction, to their trust in others, as well as to the perceived relative frequency of social activities. Section 2 of this paper discusses TV viewing as a major activity in modern life.
Section 3 develops the basic testable hypothesis. The following Section 4 presents the data and Section 5 gives the results of the basic econometric estimates and integrates them into the existing literature on TV and happiness. The next section deals with the possibility of reverse causation and addresses the role of opportunity costs of time and of changes in preferences and beliefs. Section 7 concludes.
Section snippets
TV viewing
Leisure activity today is dominated by television. The reduction in (paid and unpaid) working hours achieved over the past decades, resulting in more leisure time, has to a large extent been replaced by watching television. According to time use studies (Robinson & Godbey, 1999, p. 338–347, see also Aguiar and Hurst, 2007, Bittman, 1998, Gershuny, 2000, Goodin et al., 2005), the average leisure time of adult Americans (19–64 years of age) over the period 1965–1995 rose by 6.2 h from 34.8 to 41 h.
Basic hypothesis: Watching too much TV
Two opposite views are possible when qualifying the huge amount of leisure time spent in front of the TV. At first glance, it might seem obvious that watching TV produces high individual utility. TV watching is a voluntary activity and people can freely decide how much time they want to devote to it. However, an alternative view does not take consumer sovereignty as given but takes the possibility of a systematic error in TV consumption into account. In fact, studies suggest that TV viewing is
Data on TV consumption and life satisfaction
In order to empirically address the basic hypothesis on TV over-consumption, the first wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) is used. The ESS is a survey that was carried out in 22 European countries in 2002/2003. In each country, about 1200–3000 people were interviewed. For 338 observations, data for life satisfaction or television viewing is missing, resulting in a sample of 42,021 observations.
In addition to life satisfaction and television viewing time, the ESS includes a large number of
Partial correlation between TV viewing and life satisfaction
Table 1 reports the partial correlation between TV consumption and reported life satisfaction. In the first specification, a ordinary least squares estimator is applied. In view of the categorical nature of the dependent variable, a second specification is added, estimating an ordered probit. The similarities in the relative size of the coefficients indicate that the least squares estimator delivers a satisfactory approximation of the partial correlation. As the least squares results are easier
The role of opportunity costs of time and changes in preferences and beliefs
This section presents two extensions of the basic analysis on the statistical relationship between TV viewing and life satisfaction: (a) Opportunity costs of time are taken into account to assess the reduction in well-being due to self-control problems. (b) A path analysis is conducted to get an idea of the different ways that TV consumption can affect life satisfaction.
Concluding remarks
Hardly anybody would deny that watching TV provides pleasure, at least part of the time, and that TV programs create focal points for personal discussions. However, many people report that they would like to spend less time watching TV. Observed consumption behavior might thus be a weak indicator for individuals’ pleasure from TV viewing.
This paper addresses the issue that long hours of TV viewing may indicate imperfect self-control, as well as misprediction of the long-term costs of TV
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for helpful remarks from Matthias Benz, Giacomo Corneo, Carol Graham, Jonathan Gruber, Silke Humbert, Simon Lüchinger, Susanne Neckermann, Martha Starr, Fred Zimmerman and the co-editor Daniel Read.
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