The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

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.

just as secure babies are happier and more well-adjusted, secure adults enjoy happier, longer relationships as well as lower rates of divorce.22

Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.53

although traumas, crises, and tragedies come in a thousand forms, people benefit from them in three primary ways—the

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

One of the most common lessons people draw from bereavement or trauma is that they are much stronger than they realized, and this new appreciation of their strength then gives them confidence to face future challenges.

The second class of benefit concerns relationships. Adversity is a filter.

But adversity doesn’t just separate the fair-weather friends from the true; it strengthens relationships and it opens people’s hearts to one another. We often develop love for those we care for, and we usually feel love and gratitude toward those who cared for us in a time of need.

This change in ways of relating points to the third common benefit: Trauma changes priorities and philosophies toward the present (“Live each day to the fullest”) and toward other people.

I don’t want to ignore the pain that ripples out from each diagnosis of cancer, spreading fear along lines of kinship and friendship. I want only to make the point that suffering is not always all bad for all people. There is usually some good mixed in with the bad, and those who find it have found something precious: a key to moral and spiritual development.

The adversity hypothesis has a weak and a strong version. In the weak version, adversity can lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement, by the three mechanisms of posttraumatic growth described above.

The strong version of the hypothesis is more unsettling: It states that people must endure adversity to grow, and that the highest levels of growth and development are only open to those who have faced and overcome great adversity.

Because human beings were shaped by evolutionary processes to pursue success, not happiness, people enthusiastically pursue goals that will help them win prestige in zero-sum competitions. Success in these competitions feels good but gives no lasting pleasure, and it raises the bar for future success.

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. Pennebaker suggests34 that you write continuously for fifteen minutes a day, for several days.

Of course, children need limits to learn self-control, and they need plenty of failure to learn that success takes hard work and persistence. Children should be protected, but not spoiled.

If there is a special period for identity formation, a time when life events are going to have the biggest influence on the rest of the life-story, this is it. So adversity, especially if overcome fully, is probably most beneficial in the late teens and early twenties.

Elder once summarized his findings this way: “There is a storyline across all the work I’ve done. Events do not have meaning in themselves. Those meanings are derived from the interactions between people, groups, and the experience itself. Kids who went through very difficult circumstances usually came out rather well.”41 Elder found that a lot hinged on the family and the person’s degree of social integration: Children as well as adults who weathered crises while embedded within strong social groups and networks fared much better; they were more likely to come out stronger and mentally healthier than were those who faced adversity without such social support.

common piece of worldly wisdom is that life’s most important lessons cannot be taught directly. Marcel Proust said: We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.45

Ignorant people see everything in black and white—they rely heavily on the myth of pure evil—and they are strongly influenced by their own self-interest. The wise are able to see things from others’ points of view, appreciate shades of gray, and then choose or advise a course of action that works out best for everyone in the long run.

For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).

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.

if moral instruction imparts only explicit knowledge (facts that the rider can state), it will have no effect on the elephant, and therefore little effect on behavior.

virtue is, obviously, its own reward.

Franklin’s example implicitly posed this question for his contemporaries and his descendants: Are you willing to work now for your own later well-being, or are you so lazy and short-sighted that you won’t make the effort?

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.

Seligman noted that psychologists had created an enormous manual, known as the “DSM” (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ), to diagnose every possible mental illness and behavioral annoyance, but psychology didn’t even have a language with which to talk about the upper reaches of human health, talent, and possibility.

The classification is a tool for diagnosing people’s diverse strengths and for helping them find ways to cultivate excellence.

Peterson and Seligman suggest that there are twenty-four principle character strengths, each leading to one of the six higher-level virtues.19

In daring to be specific, in daring to be wrong, Peterson and Seligman have demonstrated ingenuity, leadership, and hope.

Here’s my favorite idea: Work on your strengths, not your weaknesses. How many of your New Year’s resolutions have been about fixing a flaw? And how many of those resolutions have you made several years in a row? It’s difficult to change any aspect of your personality by sheer force of will, and if it is a weakness you choose to work on, you probably won’t enjoy the process.

often you can use a strength to get around a weakness.

Virtue sounds like hard work, and often is. But when virtues are re-conceived as excellences, each of which can be achieved by the practice of several strengths of character, and when the practice of these strengths is often intrinsically rewarding, suddenly the work sounds more like Csikszentmihalyi’s flow and less like toil.

The happiness-as-cause hypothesis received direct support when the psychologist Alice Isen25 went around Philadelphia leaving dimes in pay phones. The people who used those phones and found the dimes were then more likely to help a person who dropped a stack of papers (carefully timed to coincide with the phone caller’s exit), compared with people who used phones that had empty coin-return slots.

We have all encountered something we failed to understand, yet smugly believed we understood because we couldn’t conceive of the dimension to which we were blind.

For many people, one of the pleasures of going to church is the experience of collective elevation.

Something about the vastness and beauty of nature makes the self feel small and insignificant, and anything that shrinks the self creates an opportunity for spiritual experience.

Maslow did not believe religions were literally true (as actual accounts of God and creation), but he thought they were based on the most important truths of life, and he wanted to unite those truths with the truths of science. His goal was nothing less than the reformation of education and, therefore, of society: “Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society.”

I believe it is dangerous for the ethic of divinity to supersede the ethic of autonomy in the governance of a diverse modern democracy.

Aristotle asked about aretē (excellence/virtue) and telos (purpose/goal), and he used the metaphor that people are like archers, who need a clear target at which to aim.13 Without a target or goal, one is left with the animal default: Just let the elephant graze or roam where he pleases. And because elephants live in herds, one ends up doing what everyone else is doing. Yet the human mind has a rider, and as the rider begins to think more abstractly in adolescence, there may come a time when he looks around, past the edges of the herd, and asks: Where are we all going? And why?

If people are like plants, what are the conditions we need to flourish? In the happiness formula from chapter 5, H(appiness) = S(etpoint) + C(onditions) + V(oluntary activities), what exactly is C? The biggest part of C, as I said in chapter 6, is love. No man, woman, or child is an island. We are ultrasocial creatures, and we can’t be happy without having friends and secure attachments to other people. The second most important part of C is having and pursuing the right goals, in order to create states of flow and engagement.

We get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them because, as Shakespeare said, “Joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling—you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in some larger enterprise the worth of which seems obvious to you.

The optimistic conclusion coming out of research in positive psychology is that most people can get more satisfaction from their work. The first step is to know your strengths. Take the strengths test27 and then choose work that allows you to use your strengths every day, thereby giving yourself at least scattered moments of flow. If you are stuck in a job that doesn’t match your strengths, recast and reframe your job so that it does.

If you can engage your strengths, you’ll find more gratification in work; if you find gratification, you’ll shift into a more positive, approach-oriented mindset; and in such a mindset it will be easier for you to see the bigger picture28—the contribution you are making to a larger enterprise—within which your job might turn into a calling.

Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves.

When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a field is healthy.

We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form.36

If evolution is all about survival of the fittest, then why do people help each other so much?

Darwin thought the answer was easy: Altruism evolves for the good of the group: