You don't think there is huge social significance in preventing divorce? Some very smart young people I know can't attend great colleges that have admitted them, because their parents are divorced and not in agreement about paying their college expenses. Loss of human talent hurts all of us.
I think there's incredible value in preventing divorce. I also think this study is bullshit.
I know this is a bit of a strawman, but what have we really learned here? That if you tell your kids to smile in their yearbook photo, they'll have a happy marriage? Sorry, I just don't see any value in this correlation at all...seems like it's almost as likely to be random as meaningful.
Edit: Instead of just downvoting me, could someone explain what I'm missing?
I'll upvote you as much as I can, and explain why I think the study is worth doing. Just like Alexander Fleming when he first saw a zone in a culture dish where bacteria wouldn't grow,
a scientist who notices an interesting correlation has some new issue to investigate. The next issue to investigate is why some young people smile for their yearbook photos and some do not. Yet another issue to investigate is whether that characteristic is malleable in each individual. And of course all the causation issues need to be sorted out--do people stay with spouses who smile a lot, even if the spouses are louts, while good spouses who are glum get dumped? There is a lot to investigate here, but the investigation could reduce an important problem. At the very least, a marriage counselor prioritizing which client to devote the most vigorous interventions to might start asking clients to bring in their high school yearbooks and talk about how they felt about having their pictures taken, to get them talking about other issues.
But, yes, I agree that one of the first things to be done here is to attempt to replicate the finding.
