The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

Evolution seems to have made us “strategically irrational” at times for our own good; for example, a person who gets angry when cheated, and who will pursue vengeance regardless of the cost, earns a reputation that discourages would-be cheaters. A person who pursued vengeance only when the benefits outweighed the costs could be cheated with impunity in many situations.

One of the most adventurous young psychologists, Robert Biswas-Diener (son of the happiness pioneer Ed Diener), has done just that. He has traveled the world interviewing people about their lives and how satisfied they are with them. Wherever he goes, from Greenland to Kenya to California, he finds that most people (with the exception of homeless people) are more satisfied than dissatisfied with their lives.

Many Western thinkers have looked at the same afflictions as Buddha—sickness, aging, and mortality—and come to a very different conclusion from his: Through passionate attachments to people, goals, and pleasures, life must be lived to the fullest. I once heard a talk by the philosopher Robert Solomon, who directly challenged the philosophy of nonattachment as an affront to human nature.69 The life of cerebral reflection and emotional indifference (apatheia) advocated by many Greek and Roman philosophers and that of calm nonstriving advocated by Buddha are lives designed to avoid passion, and a life without passion is not a human life. Yes, attachments bring pain, but they also bring our greatest joys, and there is value in the very variation that the philosophers are trying to avoid.

But I believe that the Western ideal of action, striving, and passionate attachment is not as misguided as Buddhism suggests.

For example, giving monkeys raisins as a reward for each correct step in solving a puzzle (such as opening a mechanical latch with several moving parts) actually interferes with the solving, because it distracts the monkeys.6 They enjoy the task for its own sake.

You just need to see the famous photo, now included in every introductory psychology book, in which a baby monkey clings to the cloth mother with its hind legs while stretching over to feed from the tube protruding from the wire mother.

Children need love to develop properly, he argued; children need mothers.

Bowlby’s first metaphor was the simplest cybernetic system of all—a thermostat that turns on a heater when the temperature drops below a set point.

two basic goals guide children’s behavior: safety and exploration. A child who stays safe survives; a child who explores and plays develops the skills and intelligence needed for adult life.

If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own. The power of love over fear was well expressed in the New Testament: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (I JOHN 4:18).

Even in a culture where women share mothering duties for all the children in the extended family household, Ainsworth observed a special bond between a child and his own mother. The mother was much more effective as a secure base than were other women.

Sex is for reproduction; lasting love is for mothers and children. So why are people so different? How did human females come to hide all signs of ovulation and get men to fall in love with them and their children?

But in the competitive game of evolution, it’s a losing move for a male to provide resources to a child who is not his own. So active fathers, male-female pair-bonds, male sexual jealousy, and big-headed babies all co-evolved—that is, arose gradually but together. A man who felt some desire to stay with a woman, guard her fidelity, and contribute to the rearing of their children could produce smarter children than could his less paternal competitors. In environments in which intelligence was highly adaptive (which may have been all human environments, once we began making tools), male investment in children may have paid off for the men themselves (for their genes, that is), and therefore became more common with each successive generation.

Because men and women in a relationship have many conflicting interests, evolutionary theory does not view love relationships as harmonious partnerships for childrearing;34 but a universal feature of human cultures is that men and women form relationships intended to last for years (marriage) that constrain their sexual behavior in some way and institutionalize their ties to children and to each other.

Rather, Christian love has focused on two key words: caritas and agape. Caritas (the origin of our word “charity”) is a kind of intense benevolence and good will; agape is a Greek word that refers to a kind of selfless, spiritual love with no sexuality, no clinging to a particular other person. (Of course, Christianity endorses the love of a man and a woman within marriage, but even this love is idealized as the love of Christ for his church—EPHESIANS 5:25) As in Plato, Christian love is love stripped of its essential particularity, its focus on a specific other person. Love is remodeled into a general attitude toward a much larger, even infinite, class of objects.

Caritas and agape are beautiful, but they are not related to or derived from the kinds of love that people need.

Monkeys and people need close and long-lasting attachments to particular others.

The extensive regulation of sex in many cultures, the attempt to link love to God and then to cut away the sex, is part of an elaborate defense against the gnawing fear of mortality.

FREEDOM CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH

Durkheim concluded that people need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives:

It’s not just that extroverts are naturally happier and healthier; when introverts are forced to be more outgoing, they usually enjoy it and find that it boosts their mood.

An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.

As a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit said, “Hell is other people.”57 But so is heaven.

When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent. —MENG TZU,1 CHINA, 3RD CENT. BCE What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

The first benefit is that rising to a challenge reveals your hidden abilities, and seeing these abilities changes your self-concept.

the third common benefit: Trauma changes priorities and philosophies toward the present (“Live each day to the fullest”) and toward other people.

It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats. It means that we might be dangerously overprotecting our children, offering them lives of bland safety and too much counseling while depriving them of the “critical incidents”12 that would help them to grow strong and to develop the most intense friendships. It means that heroic societies, which fear dishonor more than death, or societies that struggle together through war, might produce better human beings than can a world of peace and prosperity in which people’s expectations rise so high that they sue each other for “emotional damages.”

Most of the life goals that people pursue at the level of “characteristic adaptations” can be sorted—as the psychologist Robert Emmons19 has found—into four categories: work and achievement, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and generativity (leaving a legacy and contributing something to society).

psychologist Mel Lerner has demonstrated that we are so motivated to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get that we often blame the victim of a tragedy, particularly when we can’t achieve justice by punishing a perpetrator or compensating the victim.26

Those who talked with their friends or with a support group were largely spared the health-damaging effects of trauma.

And finally, no matter how well or poorly prepared you are when trouble strikes, at some point in the months afterwards, pull out a piece of paper and start writing.

When people older than thirty are asked to remember the most important or vivid events of their lives, they are disproportionately likely to recall events that occurred between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five.39 This is the age when a person’s life blooms—first love, college and intellectual growth, living and perhaps traveling independently—and it is the time when young people (at least in Western countries) make many of the choices that will define their lives.

Social networks didn’t just reduce suffering, they offered avenues for finding meaning and purpose (as Durkheim concluded from his studies of suicide).42 For example, the widely shared adversity of the Great Depression offered many young people the chance to make a real contribution to their families by finding a job that brought in a few dollars a week. The need for people to pull together within their nations to fight World War II appears to have made those who lived through it more responsible and civic minded, at least in the United States, even if they played no direct role in the war effort.43

We can say, however, that for many people, particularly those who overcame adversity in their twenties, adversity made them stronger, better, and even happier than they would have been without it.

Shelter your children when young, but if the sheltering goes on through the child’s teens and twenties, it may keep out wisdom and growth as well as pain.

Huck Finn runs away from his foster mother to raft down the Mississippi with an escaped slave; the young Buddha leaves his father’s palace to begin his spiritual quest in the forest; Luke Skywalker leaves his home planet to join the galactic rebellion. All three set off on epic journeys that make each into an adult, complete with a set of new virtues. These hard-won virtues are especially admirable to us as readers because they reveal a depth and authenticity of character that we don’t see in the obedient kid who simply accepts the virtues he was raised with.

What was his secret? Virtue. Not the sort of uptight, pleasure-hating Puritanism that some people now associate with that word, but a broader kind of virtue that goes back to ancient Greece. The Greek word aretē meant excellence, virtue, or goodness, especially of a functional sort. The aretē of a knife is to cut well; the aretē of an eye is to see well; the aretē of a person is . . . well, that’s one of the oldest questions of philosophy: What is the true nature, function, or goal of a person, relative to which we can say that he or she is living well or badly? Thus in saying that well being or happiness (eudaimonia) is “an activity of soul in conformity with excellence or virtue,”3 Aristotle wasn’t saying that happiness comes from giving to the poor and suppressing your sexuality. He was saying that a good life is one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential, and become what it is in your nature to become. (Aristotle believed that all things in the universe had a telos, or purpose toward which they aimed, even though he did not believe that the gods had designed all things.)

Dharma

He then printed a table made up of seven columns (one for each day of the week) and thirteen rows (one for each virtue), and he put a black spot in the appropriate square each time he failed to live a whole day in accordance with a particular virtue. He concentrated on only one virtue a week, hoping to keep its row clear of spots while paying no special attention to the other virtues, though he filled in their rows whenever violations occurred. Over thirteen weeks, he worked through the whole table. Then he repeated the process, finding that with repetition the table got less and less spotty. Franklin wrote in his autobiography that, though he fell far short of perfection: “I was, by the endeavor, a better and a happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”

A third feature of many ancient texts is that they emphasize practice and habit rather than factual knowledge.

There is no morality in nature; there is only causality. But the rational part of us, Kant said, can follow a different kind of law: It can respect rules of conduct, and so people (but not lions) can be judged morally for the degree to which they respect the right rules. What might those rules be? Here Kant devised the cleverest trick in all moral philosophy. He reasoned that for moral rules to be laws, they had to be universally applicable. If gravity worked differently for men and women, or for Italians and Egyptians, we could not speak of it as a law. But rather than searching for rules to which all people would in fact agree (a difficult task, likely to produce only a few bland generalities), Kant turned the problem around and said that people should think about whether the rules guiding their own actions could reasonably be proposed as universal laws. If you are planning to break a promise that has become inconvenient, can you really propose a universal rule that states people ought to break promises that have become inconvenient? Endorsing such a rule would render all promises meaningless. Nor could you consistently will that people cheat, lie, steal, or in any other way deprive other people of their rights or their property, for such evils would surely come back to visit you. This simple test, which Kant called the “categorical imperative,” was extraordinarily powerful. It offered to make ethics a branch of applied logic, thereby giving it the sort of certainty that...

These two philosophical approaches have made enormous contributions to legal and political theory and practice; indeed, they helped create societies that respect individual rights (Kant) while still working efficiently for the good of the people (Bentham). But these ideas have also permeated Western culture more generally, where they have had some unintended consequences. The philosopher Edmund Pincoffs14 has argued that consequentialists and deontologists worked together to convince Westerners in the twentieth century that morality is the study of moral quandaries and dilemmas. Where the Greeks focused on the character of a person and asked what kind of person we should each aim to become, modern ethics focuses on actions, asking when a particular action is right or wrong. Philosophers wrestle with life-and-death dilemmas: Kill one to save five? Allow aborted fetuses to be used as a source of stem cells? Remove the feeding tube from a woman who has been unconscious for fifteen years? Nonphilosophers wrestle with smaller quandaries: Pay my taxes when others are cheating? Turn in a wallet full of money that appears to belong to a drug dealer? Tell my spouse about a sexual indiscretion? This turn from character ethics to quandary ethics has turned moral education away from virtues and toward moral reasoning.

As the United States became more ethnically diverse in the 1970s and 1980s, and also more averse to authoritarian methods of education, the idea of teaching specific moral facts and values went out of fashion. Instead, the rationalist legacy of quandary ethics gave us teachers and many parents who would enthusiastically endorse this line, from a recent child-rearing handbook: “My approach does not teach children what and what not to do and why, but rather, it teaches them how to think so they can decide for themselves what and what not to do, and why.”15

Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them to reason well is like trying to make a dog happy by wagging its tail. It gets causality backwards.

at the University of Pennsylvania,

watched in horror as cows, moving down a dripping disassembly line, were bludgeoned, hooked, and sliced up. Afterwards, Rozin and I went to lunch to talk about the project. We both ordered vegetarian meals. For days afterwards, the sight of red meat made me queasy. My visceral feelings now matched the beliefs Singer had given me. The elephant now agreed with the rider, and I became a vegetarian. For about three weeks. Gradually, as the disgust faded, fish and chicken reentered my diet. Then red meat did, too, although even now, eighteen years later, I still eat less red meat and choose non-factory-farmed meats when they are available.

saw the right way and approved it, but followed the wrong, until an emotion came along to provide some force.

Although no specific virtue made every list, six broad virtues, or families of related virtues, appeared on nearly all lists: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence (the ability to forge connections to something larger than the self).

Peterson and Seligman suggest that there are twenty-four principle character strengths, each leading to one of the six higher-level virtues.19 You can diagnose yourself by looking at the list below or by taking the strengths test (at www.authentichappiness.org). 1. Wisdom: • Curiosity • Love of learning • Judgment • Ingenuity • Emotional intelligence • Perspective 2. Courage: • Valor • Perseverance • Integrity 3. Humanity: • Kindness • Loving 4. Justice: • Citizenship • Fairness • Leadership 5. Temperance: • Self-control • Prudence • Humility 6. Transcendence: • Appreciation of beauty and excellence • Gratitude • Hope • Spirituality • Forgiveness • Humor • Zest

Happy people are kinder and more helpful than those in the control group.

When a person increased volunteer work, all measures of happiness and well-being increased (on average) afterwards, for as long as the volunteer work was a part of the person’s life. The elderly benefit even more than do other adults, particularly when their volunteer work either involves direct person-to-person helping or is done through a religious organization.