For living well, behaviors and circumstances matter just as much as psychological traits

In 2004 through 2016, three studies in the national Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) project asked participants the open-ended question “What do you do to make life go well?”. We use verbatim responses to this question to evaluate the relative importance of psychological traits and circumstances for predicting self-reported, subjective well-being. The use of an open-ended question allows us to test the hypothesis that psychological traits are more strongly associated with self-reported well-being than objective circumstances because psychological traits and well-being are similarly self-rated—meaning that they both ask respondents to decide how to place themselves on provided and unfamiliar survey scales. For this, we use automated zero-shot classification to score statements about well-being without training on existing survey measures, and we evaluate this scoring through subsequent hand-labeling. We then assess associations of this measure and closed-ended measures for health behaviors, socioeconomic circumstances, biomarkers for inflammation and glycemic control, and mortality risk over follow-up. Although the closed-ended measures were far more strongly associated with other multiple-choice self-ratings, including Big 5 personality traits, the closed- and open-ended measures were similarly associated with relatively objective indicators of health, wealth, and social connectedness. The findings suggest that psychological traits, when collected through self-ratings, predict subjective reports of well-being so strongly because of a measurement advantage—and that circumstance matters just as much when assessed using a fairer comparison.