Howard weiss and james shaw found that people were happier doing a boring task when they were surrounded by people who said that the task was interesting than they were when the people around them talked about how boring the task was?

That statement is True. It's called emotional contagion.

Explanation:

Emotional contagion refers to a situation when the emotion felt by certain individuals affect the emotion of other individuals around them. This happened due to human ability to detect non-verbal communication (such as expression and body language). We picked up the non-verbal communication from other people and synchronize our behaviors with theirs.

because this was the year that the state of israel was formed