Psychological studies are often pseudoscientific. A lot of this stuff is just based on questionnaires (highly unreliable) and nothing truly beyond reproach. They should conduct actual health marker studies. Brain scans, levels of things like dopamine and oxytocin, overall physiological health and so on. People telling you they're happy and answering a line of questioning that implies they are is not scientific.
Also, this all flies in the face of basic science. Anyone who's studied any scientific field (even doctors) is told from day one that correlation does not mean causation. You cannot make conclusions based on correlations. You just can't. It can get the ball rolling and be the precursor for an actual clinical study but it cannot be used to make real conclusions. It is completely inappropriate for that but most people nowadays, being scientifically illiterate, don't realize this.
I will give you a simple, jokey example:
- I can display on a chart that children with bigger feet on average will display better math skills.
Would you have been able to glean any of that from the initial correlation? No. But that's a simple, jokey example. A more serious one would be what's going on with nutrition studies nowadays which are mostly epidemiological (correlative studies).
They'll make observations in America like "People who eat more meat die younger" then some scientifically illiterate journalist will grab this and tell people meat = you die younger and not be aware of confounding factors like the fact that people who eat meat in a place like America mostly get it via processed/junk foods and are usually less health conscious. More likely to smoke, more likely to drink and so forth. This is what's actually killing them and not the meat which we know mechanistically is not bad for humans at all and even a deep review of the correlative data finds no compelling evidence that it's bad for people. Hell, those correlative studies even get turned on their head if you go somewhere like Hong Kong where people who eat more meat tend to live longer.
The same applies here. The only way to make real conclusions is to have a clinical study which will never happen because it would have to look something like this:
- Control group of single people
- Single group living in an unhappy, unhealthy and generally draining environment
- Single group living in ideal emotional conditions and in peak physical health
- Married couples group where the clinicians deliberately make the relationships unhealthy/toxic
- Married couples group where the clinicians intervene with therapies and matchmaking to ensure the relationships are healthy
- Unmarried couples group where the clinicians deliberately make the relationships unhealthy/toxic
- Unmarried couples group where the clinicians intervene with therapies and matchmaking to ensure the relationships healthy
And then keep these people in essentially a highly controlled giant lab-like setting (like a controlled town environment) and monitor them closely to see their health markers. No simple questionnaires only but actually measure their health markers like I mentioned earlier and then you'd have to repeat this experiment with at least 2-4 generations of their descendants. All while making this study's groups randomly selected, representative of the overall population and statistically significant in number. Then and only then could you make real conclusions, abaayo.
A study like that will never be greenlit though because it would essentially require slavery to be carried out. Anything else is correlative gobbledygook you are wasting time trying to draw real conclusions from.
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