I can see a few compelling arguments for it, but personally I'd be very wary of concluding causation from this relationship. The two things are very complicated and have many confounding variables involved. I see it just as likely that the correlation is spurious, and people exposed to advertising have lower life satisfaction for a variety of complex reasons incidental to the ads themselves.
Capitalism affords many opportunities for someone to be unhappy and unsatisfied; advertising may cause this or simply exacerbate what is already there.
I'm disappointed with the way HBR reported this. The researchers are explicitly quoted as saying they found a "negative connection", which, yes, is an inverse correlation. No matter how intuitively compelling, you can't just extrapolate that to a conclusion of causation as the author of this article proceeded to do right in the introduction.
Edit: Why is this being downvoted? Do you disagree with my point that we can't extrapolate causation from correlation, or do find my comment to be off topic?
Capitalism affords many opportunities for someone to be unhappy and unsatisfied; advertising may cause this or simply exacerbate what is already there.
I'm disappointed with the way HBR reported this. The researchers are explicitly quoted as saying they found a "negative connection", which, yes, is an inverse correlation. No matter how intuitively compelling, you can't just extrapolate that to a conclusion of causation as the author of this article proceeded to do right in the introduction.
Edit: Why is this being downvoted? Do you disagree with my point that we can't extrapolate causation from correlation, or do find my comment to be off topic?