Professor Benno Torgler

Choose your homepage photo carefully. A study by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) happiness economists found people make strong judgements about your level of happiness from the picture you've chosen to represent yourself to the world.

While that may not be a problem for a lot of us, when you are a top happiness researcher and you are ranked the least happy out of 12 Nobel Prize winners, top economists and three other happiness researchers by more than 550 people, it could be.

QUT Professor Benno Torgler from the School of Economics and Finance said the study asked 554 Brisbane people to rate the level of happiness of the person in each of 12 colour photos taken from the websites of members of economics' pantheon.

"Half of the people had no information on the 12 researchers in the photos. The other half was told the photographed individual was a 'happiness researcher', 'top economic researcher' or a 'Nobel Prize winner in economics"," Professor Torgler said.

"The Brisbaneites rated a Nobel Prize winner as the happiest and a happiness researcher was the least happy of the 12 in the study which was called Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the happiest of them all?".

Professor Torgler said the tongue-in-cheek study focussed on the perception of others rather than self-reporting because the use of perception was common in economics.

"Economics uses perception in areas where direct measurements are limited, for example with corruption or tax evasion," Professor Torgler said.

"We decided to take the picture each researcher chose to put on his academic homepage as the 'mirror' to the outside world because it would be a good proxy for how they see themselves."

He said economists had investigated the superstar effect of sports and entertainment celebrities and it was time to investigate the superstars of academia.

"Since the beauty or sporting prowess of academic economists does not inspire investigation we thought we'd look at happiness because it is a key ingredient for a good life and factors such as wealth, status, job satisfaction and health are all reflected in happiness."

He said that while a happiness researcher had ranked last in the happiness stakes, overall these researchers were happier than Nobel Prize winners. However, providing more information to people interviewed did not lead to a significant change in the perceived happiness level.

Another interesting finding of the study was a gender difference.

"Women perceived these researchers to be happier than men did, which is interesting because only male economics superstars were shown," he said.

"We also found the participants who reported high self-happiness tended to perceive the researchers' happiness level as higher than those who reported themselves to be less happy."

The photos shown in the study were of Nobel Prize for Economics winners Joseph Stiglitz, Daniel Kahneman, Finn Kydland and Edmund Phelps; top-10 economists Robert Barro, Paul Krugman, Paul Romer and Jean Tirole; and top happiness researchers Ed Diener, Richard Easterlin, Bruno Frey and Andrew Oswald.

The Mirror, mirror on the wall study was published in the journal Kyklos and co-written with Professor Uwe Dulleck and former student Nemanja Antić.