The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

belief in postmortem justice shows two signs of primitive moral thinking. In the 1920s, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget20 got down on his knees to play marbles and jacks with children and, in the process, mapped out how morality develops. He found that, as children develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of right and wrong, they go through a phase in which many rules take on a kind of sacredness and unchangeability. During this phase, children believe in “immanent justice”—justice that is inherent in an act itself. In this stage, they think that if they break rules, even accidentally, something bad will happen to them, even if nobody knows about their transgressions. Immanent justice shows up in adults, too, particularly when it comes to explaining illness and grave misfortune. A survey21 of beliefs about the causes of illness across cultures shows that the three most common explanations are biomedical (referring to physical causes of disease), interpersonal (illness is caused by witchcraft, related to envy and conflict), and moral (illness is caused by one’s own past actions, particularly violations of food and sexual taboos). Most Westerners consciously embrace the biomedical explanation and reject the other two, yet when illness strikes and Westerners ask, “Why me?” one of the places they often look for answers is to their own past transgressions. The belief that God or fate will dole out rewards and punishments for good and bad behavior see...