If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Have you ever wondered why your boss and major corporations are suddenly so obsessed with your personal happiness?
- Did you know that your emotions are being meticulously measured and turned into a powerful tool for economic profit?
- Are you curious about how the world’s most powerful organizations use neuroscience to influence your mood and your spending habits without your consent?
Listen to The Happiness Industry — Free Audiobook
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Key Takeaways from The Happiness Industry
- Discover how modern neuroscience and utilitarian philosophy objectively measure human happiness through physiological responses and financial transactions.
- Understand the biological link between spending money and happiness, and why capitalists use your brain's dopamine responses to commodify joy.
- Learn how clever advertisers exploit the neuroscience of anticipation, selling the emotional experience of a product rather than its physical features.
- Uncover how growing e-commerce and online advertising rely on sly behavioral analysis to track and manipulate your daily consumer habits.
- Find out why corporations and governments invest heavily in your health and wellness simply to combat costly employee burnout and maximize productivity.
Learning Tools
Reinforce what you learned from The Happiness Industry
Mind Map
The Happiness Industry
Quantifying Happiness+
The Money Connection+
Consumer Manipulation+
Workplace Productivity+
Weaponizing Social Bonds+
Surveillance and Big Data+
Actionable Advice+
Quiz — Test Your Understanding
Question 1 of 7
According to Jeremy Bentham, the founder of modern utilitarianism, what two metrics can be used to objectively observe the intensity of happiness?
Question 2 of 7
How do governments and the free market theoretically attempt to direct human behavior toward maximizing societal happiness?
Question 3 of 7
What did Stanford neuroscientist Brian Knutson discover regarding human pleasure and consumer products?
Question 4 of 7
Why are businesses and governments increasingly investing in the health and happiness of their employees?
Question 5 of 7
What is the primary mechanism behind the marketing strategy known as 'friendvertising'?
Question 6 of 7
In 2014, how did Facebook conduct an experiment on 'emotional contagion' among its users?
Question 7 of 7
What is the book's final actionable advice regarding happiness?
The Happiness Industry — Full Chapter Overview
- 1Recommendation
- 2Utilitarian thinkers hold happiness to be real and objective.
- 3We’re constantly told that money is the best sign of happiness.
- 4Contemporary market research delves into behavioral analysis to make us spend more.
- 5Governments and companies invest in health care to boost our productivity.
- 6Marketers exploit social relationships to their advantage.
- 7Our hyperconnected world allows businesses to monitor our happiness.
The Happiness Industry Summary & Overview
What makes you smile, laugh or feel like skipping down the street? Teams of professional psychologists, neuroscientists, marketers, economists and your boss all want to know. Why? So they can make sure you are a productive employee who buys lots of stuff! The Happiness Industry (2015) takes an in-depth look at how our happiness is studied, measured, and profited from – often without our knowledge or consent.
Who Should Listen to The Happiness Industry?
- Anyone interested in the role of happiness in modern society
- Readers who wonder how happiness works in the human brain
- People concerned about increasing invasions of privacy online
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