The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

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

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.

When bad things happen to good people, we have a problem. We know consciously that life is unfair, but unconsciously we see the world through the lens of reciprocity. The downfall of an evil man (in our biased and moralistic assessment) is no puzzle: He had it coming to him. But when the victim was virtuous, we struggle to make sense of his tragedy. At an intuitive level, we all believe in karma, the Hindu notion that people reap what they sow. The

Psychologists have devoted a great deal of effort to figuring out who benefits from trauma and who is crushed. The answer compounds the already great unfairness of life: Optimists are more likely to benefit than pessimists.28 Optimists are, for the most part, people who won the cortical lottery: They have a high happiness setpoint, they habitually look on the bright side, and they easily find silver linings. Life has a way of making the rich get richer and the happy get happier.

old-fashioned Freudian notion of catharsis: People who express their emotions, “get it off their chests” or “let off steam,” are healthier. Having once reviewed the literature on the catharsis hypothesis, I knew that there was no evidence for it.31 Letting off steam makes people angrier, not calmer.

auto-biographical memory called the “memory bump.” 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. 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.

My 20-something crisis

adversity may be most beneficial for people in their late teens and into their twenties.

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. Second, wise people are able to balance three responses to situations: adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment), shaping (changing the environment), and selection (choosing to move to a new environment).

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). Each life course is so unpredictable that we can never know whether a particular setback will be beneficial to a particular person in the long run.

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.)

the “virtue hypothesis,” is the same claim made by Epicurus and the Buddha in the epigraphs that open this chapter: Cultivating virtue will make you happy. There are plenty of reasons to doubt the virtue hypothesis. Franklin himself admitted that he failed utterly to develop the virtue of humility, yet he reaped great social gains by learning to fake it. Perhaps the virtue hypothesis will turn out to be true only in a cynical, Machiavellian way: Cultivating the appearance of virtue will make you successful, and therefore happy, regardless of your true character.

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.

Do On to others as you wish them to do unto you

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...

in old age, generativity, relationship, and spiritual strivings come to matter more, but achievement strivings seem out of place,31 more appropriate for the middle chapters of a life story; therefore, an activity that lets one “give something back” fits right into the story and helps to craft a satisfying conclusion.

a culture that says that humans are not animals, or that the body is a temple, faces a big problem: Our bodies do all the same things that animal bodies do, including eating, defecating, copulating, bleeding, and dying. The overwhelming evidence is that we are animals, and so a culture that rejects our animality must go to great lengths to hide the evidence. Biological processes must be carried out in the right way, and disgust is a guardian of that rightness.

when people think about morality, their moral concepts cluster into three groups, which he calls the ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community, and the ethic of divinity.

When people think and act using the ethic of autonomy, their goal is to protect individuals from harm and grant them the maximum degree of autonomy, which they can use to pursue their own goals. When people use the ethic of community, their goal is to protect the integrity of groups, families, companies, or nations, and they value virtues such as obedience, loyalty, and wise leadership. When people use the ethic of divinity, their goal is to protect from degradation the divinity that exists in each person, and they value living in a pure and holy way, free from moral pollutants such as lust, greed, and hatred. Cultures vary in their relative reliance on these three ethics, which correspond, roughly, to the X, Y, and Z axes of figure 9.1. In my dissertation research15 on moral judgment in Brazil and the United States, I found that educated Americans of high social class relied overwhelmingly on the ethic of autonomy in their moral discourse,

People really do respond emotionally to acts of moral beauty, and these emotional reactions involve warm or pleasant feelings in the chest and conscious desires to help others or become a better person oneself. A new discovery in Sara’s study is that moral elevation appears to be different from admiration for nonmoral excellence. Subjects in the admiration condition were more likely to report feeling chills or tingles on their skin, and to report feeling energized or “psyched up.” Witnessing extraordinarily skillful actions gives people the drive and energy to try to copy those actions.27

Elevation, in contrast, is a calmer feeling, not associated with signs of physiological arousal.

Oxytocin causes bonding, not action. Elevation may fill people with feelings of love, trust,30 and openness, making them more receptive to new relationships; yet, given their feelings of relaxation and passivity, they might be less likely to engage in active altruism toward strangers.

For many people, one of the pleasures of going to church is the experience of collective elevation. People step out of their everyday profane existence, which offers only occasional opportunities for movement on the third dimension, and come together with a community of like-hearted people who are also hoping to feel a “lift” from stories about Christ, virtuous people in the Bible, saints, or exemplary members of their own community. When this happens, people find themselves overflowing with love,

the emotion of awe happens when two conditions are met: a person perceives something vast (usually physically vast, but sometimes conceptually vast, such as a grand theory; or socially vast, such as great fame or power); and the vast thing cannot be accommodated by the person’s existing mental structures. Something enormous can’t be processed, and when people are stumped, stopped in their cognitive tracks while in the presence of something vast, they feel small, powerless, passive, and receptive. They often (though not always) feel fear, admiration, elevation, or a sense of beauty as well. By stopping people and making them receptive, awe creates an opening for change, and this is why awe plays a role in most stories of religious conversion.

In a small gem of a book, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences,44 Maslow listed twenty-five common features of peak experiences, nearly all of which can be found somewhere in William James. Here are some: The universe is perceived as a unified whole where everything is accepted and nothing is judged or ranked; egocentrism and goal-striving disappear as a person feels merged with the universe (and often with God); perceptions of time and space are altered; and the person is flooded with feelings of wonder, awe, joy, love, and gratitude. Maslow’s goal was to demonstrate that spiritual life has a naturalistic meaning, that peak experiences are a basic fact about the human mind. In all eras and all cultures, many people have had these experiences, and Maslow suggested that all religions are based on the insights of somebody’s peak experience.

In The Curse of the Self,47 the social psychologist Mark Leary points out that many other animals can think, but none, so far as we know, spend much time thinking about themselves. Only a few other primates (and perhaps dolphins) can even learn that the image in a mirror belongs to them.48 Only a creature with language ability has the mental apparatus to focus attention on the self, to think about the self’s invisible attributes and long term goals, to create a narrative about that self, and then to react emotionally to thoughts about that narrative. Leary suggests that this ability to create a self gave our ancestors many useful skills, such as long-term planning, conscious decision making and self-control, and the ability to see other people’s perspectives. Because these skills are all important for enabling human beings to work closely together on large projects, the development of the self may have been crucial to the development of human ultrasociality. But by giving each one of us an inner world, a world full of simulations, social comparisons, and reputational concerns, the self also gave each one of us a personal tormenter. We all now live amid a whirlpool of inner chatter, much of which is negative (threats loom larger than opportunities), and most of which is useless.

The self is the main obstacle to spiritual advancement, in three ways. First, the constant stream of trivial concerns and egocentric thoughts keeps people locked in the material and profane world, unable to perceive sacredness and divinity. This is why Eastern religions rely heavily on meditation, an effective means of quieting the chatter of the self. Second, spiritual transformation is essentially the transformation of the self, weakening it, pruning it back—in some sense, killing it—and often the self objects.

quoted George Washington: “I am embarked on a wide ocean, boundless in its prospect and, in which, perhaps, no safe harbor is to be found.”4

everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail. If this really is all there is, why not embrace it, rather than throw it away?

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. In the modern world, people can find goals and flow in many settings, but most people find most of their flow at work.16 (I define work broadly to include anyone’s answer to the question “So, what do you do?” “Student” and “full-time parent” are both good answers). Love and work are, for people, obvious analogues to water and sunshine for plants.17

“effectance motive,” which he defined as the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one’s environment. Effectance is almost as basic a need as food and water, yet it is not a deficit need, like hunger, that is satisfied and then disappears for a few hours. Rather, White said, effectance is a constant presence in our lives: Dealing with the environment means carrying on a continuing transaction which gradually changes one’s relation to the environment. Because there is no consummatory climax, satisfaction has to be seen as lying in a considerable series of transactions, in a trend of behavior rather than a goal that is achieved.21 The effectance motive helps explain the progress principle: 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.”22

most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling.25 If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money, you look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead, and you probably pursue hobbies, which satisfy your effectance needs more thoroughly than does your work. If you see your work as a career, you have larger goals of advancement, promotion, and prestige. The pursuit of these goals often energizes you, and you sometimes take work home with you because you want to get the job done properly. Yet, at times, you wonder why you work so hard. You might occasionally see your work as a rat race where people are competing for the sake of competing. 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. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to “quitting time” nor feel the desire to shout, “Thank God it’s Friday!” You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy.

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. Happiness comes from getting these connections right. Happiness comes not just from within, as Buddha and Epictetus supposed, or even from a combination of internal and external factors (as I suggested as a temporary fix at the end of chapter 5). The correct version of the happiness hypothesis, as I’ll illustrate below, is that happiness comes from between.

Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely to be torn by internal contradictions and neurotic conflicts.34 You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life. Like the moviegoer who later finds out what she missed in the first half hour, your life will suddenly make more sense. Finding coherence across levels feels like enlightenment,35 and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life.

People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence.

You can’t just invent a good ritual through reasoning about symbolism. You need a tradition within which the symbols are embedded, and you need to invoke bodily feelings that have some appropriate associations. Then you need a community to endorse and practice it over time. To the extent that a community has many rituals that cohere across the three levels, people in the community are likely to feel themselves connected to the community and its traditions. If the community also offers guidance on how to live and what is of value, then people are unlikely to wonder about the question of purpose within life. Meaning and purpose simply emerge from the coherence, and people can get on with the business of living.

the “free-rider problem.” In groups in which people make sacrifices for the common good, an individual who makes no such sacrifices—who in effect takes a free ride on the backs of the altruists—comes out ahead. In the cold logic of these computer simulations, whoever accumulates the most resources in one generation goes on to produce more children in the next, so selfishness is adaptive but altruism is not. The only solution to the free-rider problem is to make altruism pay,

everything a person does is influenced not only by her genes but also by her culture, and cultures evolve, too. Because elements of culture show variation (people invent new things) and selection (other people do or don’t adopt those variations), cultural traits can be analyzed in a Darwinian framework46 just as well as physical traits (birds’ beaks, giraffes’ necks). Cultural elements, however, don’t spread by the slow process of having children; they spread rapidly whenever people adopt a new behavior, technology, or belief. Cultural traits can even spread from tribe to tribe or nation to nation, as when the plough, the printing press, or reality television programs became popular in many places in quick succession.

Cultural and genetic evolution are intertwined. The human capacity for culture—a strong tendency to learn from each other, to teach each other, and to build upon what we have learned—is itself a genetic innovation that happened in stages over the last few million years.47 But once our brains reached a critical threshold, perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 years ago,48 cultural innovation began to accelerate; a strong evolutionary pressure then shaped brains to take further advantage of culture. Individuals who could best learn from others were more successful than their less “cultured” brethren, and as brains became more cultural, cultures became more elaborate, further increasing the advantage of having a more cultural brain. All human beings today are the products of the co-evolution of a set of genes (which is almost identical across cultures) and a set of cultural elements (which is diverse across cultures, but still constrained by the capacities and predispositions of the human mind).49

(It only takes twenty generations of selective breeding to create large differences of appearance and behavior in other mammals.)50 In this way, genes and cultures co-evolve;51 they mutually affect each other, and neither process can be studied in isolation for human beings.

The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together; and despite the vast variation in the world’s religions, Wilson shows that religions always serve to coordinate and orient people’s behavior toward each other and toward the group as a whole, sometimes for the purpose of competing with other groups.

religious practices help members solve coordination problems. For example, trust and therefore trade are greatly enhanced when all parties are part of the same religious community, and when religious beliefs say that God knows and cares about the honesty of the parties. (The anthropologist Pascal Boyer53 points out that gods and ancestor spirits are often thought to be omniscient, yet what they most care about in this vast universe is the moral intentions hidden in the hearts of the living.) Respect for rules is enhanced when rules have an element of sacredness, and when they are backed up by supernatural sanction and the gossip or ostracism of one’s peers. Wilson’s claim is that religious ideas, and brains that responded to those ideas, co-evolved. Even if the belief in supernatural entities emerged originally for some other reason, or as an accidental byproduct in the evolution of cognition (as some scholars have claimed),54 groups that parlayed those beliefs into social coordination devices (for example, by linking them to emotions such as shame, fear, guilt, and love) found a cultural solution to the free-rider problem and then reaped the enormous benefits of trust and cooperation.

many religions preach love, compassion, and virtue yet sometimes cause war, hatred, and terrorism. From Wilson’s higher perspective, there is no contradiction. Group selection creates interlocking genetic and cultural adaptations that enhance peace, harmony, and cooperation within the group for the express purpose of increasing the group’s ability to compete with other groups. Group selection does not end conflict; it just pushes it up to the next level of social organization. Atrocities committed in the name of religion are almost always committed against out-group members, or against the most dangerous people of all: apostates (who try to leave the group) and traitors (who undermine the group).