The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know.

This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.”

Imagine that it is 1970 and you are a four-year-old child in an experiment being conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford University. You are brought into a room at your preschool where a nice man gives you toys and plays with you for a while. Then the man asks you, first, whether you like marshmallows (you do), and, then, whether you’d rather have this plate here with one marshmallow or that plate there with two marshmallows (that one, of course). Then the man tells you that he has to go out of the room for a little while, and if you can wait until he comes back, you can have the two marshmallows. If you don’t want to wait, you can ring this bell here, and he’ll come right back and give you the plate with one; but if you do that, you can’t have the two. The man leaves. You stare at the marshmallows. You salivate. You want. You fight your wanting. If you are like most four-year-olds, you can hold out for only a few minutes. Then you ring the bell. Now let’s jump ahead to 1985. Mischel has mailed your parents a questionnaire asking them to report on your personality, your ability to delay gratification and deal with frustration, and your performance on your college entrance exams (the Scholastic Aptitude Test). Your parents return the questionnaire. Mischel discovers that the number of seconds you waited to ring the bell in 1970 predicts not only what your parents say about you as a teenager but also the likelihood that you were admitted to a top university. Children who wer...

Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.

“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”

Epiphanies can be life-altering,8 but most fade in days or weeks. The rider can’t just decide to change and then order the elephant to go along with the program. Lasting change can come only by retraining the elephant, and that’s hard to do.

The ultrasocial animals evolved into a state of ultrakinship, which led automatically to ultracooperation (as in building and defending a large nest or hive), which allowed the massive division of labor (ants have castes such as soldier, forager, nursery worker, and food storage bag), which created hives overflowing with milk and honey, or whatever other substance they use to store their surplus food.

Woody Allen once described his brain as his “second favorite organ,” but for all of us it’s by far the most expensive one to run. It accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 20 percent of our energy. Human brains grow so large that human beings must be born prematurely18 (at least, compared to other mammals, who are born when their brains are more or less ready to control their bodies), and even then they can barely make it through the birth canal. Once out of the womb, these giant brains attached to helpless baby bodies require somebody to carry them around for a year or two. The tripling of human brain size from the time of our last common ancestor with chimpanzees to today imposed tremendous costs on parents, so there must have been a very good reason to do it.

Robin Dunbar19 has demonstrated that within a given group of vertebrate species—primates, carnivores, ungulates, birds, reptiles, or fish—the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size.

“the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”

When my father drove me and my refrigerator up to college that first year, he told me that the most important things I was going to learn I would not learn in the classroom, and he was right. It took many more years of living with roommates, but I finally realized what a fool I had made of myself that first year. Of course I thought I did more than my share. Although I was aware of every little thing I did for the group, I was aware of only a portion of everyone else’s contributions. And even if I had been correct in my accounting, I was self-righteous in setting up the accounting categories. I picked the things I cared about—such as keeping the refrigerator clean—and then gave myself an A-plus in that category. As with other kinds of social comparison, ambiguity allows us to set up the comparison in ways that favor ourselves, and then to seek evidence that shows we are excellent co-operators. Studies of such “unconscious overclaiming” show that when husbands and wives estimate the percentage of housework each does, their estimates total more than 120 percent.21 When MBA students in a work group make estimates of their contributions to the team, the estimates total 139 percent.22 Whenever people form cooperative groups, which are usually of mutual benefit, self-serving biases threaten to fill group members with mutual resentment.

Manichaeism.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun.”32 That is, the world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners. All of these are human creations which, though real in their own way, are not real in the way that rocks and trees are real. These human creations are like fairies in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: They exist only if you believe in them. They are the Matrix (from the movie of that name); they are a consensual hallucination.

The great lesson that comes out of ancient India is that life as we experience it is a game called “samsara.” It is a game in which each person plays out his “dharma,” his role or part in a giant play. In the game of samsara, good things happen to you, and you are happy. Then bad things happen, and you are sad or angry. And so it goes, until you die. Then you are reborn back into it, and it repeats. The message of the Bhagavad Gita (a central text of Hinduism) is that you can’t quit the game entirely; you have a role to play in the functioning of the universe, and you must play that role. But you should do it in the right way, without being attached to the “fruits” or outcomes of your action. The god Krishna says: I love the man who hates not nor exults, who mourns not nor desires . . . who is the same to friend and foe, [the same] whether he be respected or despised, the same in heat and cold, in pleasure and in pain, who has put away attachment and remains unmoved by praise or blame . . . contented with whatever comes his way.33

Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. —EPICTETUS2

Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.

We can call this “the progress principle”: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”4

The human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels. The winner’s pleasure comes from rising in wealth, not from standing still at a high level, and after a few months the new comforts have become the new baseline of daily life. The winner takes them for granted and has no way to rise any further. Even worse: The money might damage her relationships. Friends, relatives, swindlers, and sobbing strangers swarm around lottery winners, suing them, sucking up to them, demanding a share of the wealth.

H=S+C+V The level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do.34 The challenge for positive psychology is to use the scientific method to find out exactly what kinds of C and V can push H up to the top of your potential range. The extreme biological version of the happiness hypothesis says that H = S, and that C and V don’t matter. But we have to give Buddha and Epictetus credit for V because Buddha prescribed the “eightfold noble path” (including meditation and mindfulness), and Epictetus urged methods of thought to cultivate indifference (apatheia) to externals. So to test the wisdom of the sages properly we must examine this hypothesis: H = S + V, where V = voluntary or intentional activities that cultivate acceptance and weaken emotional attachments.

Research shows that people who must adapt to new and chronic sources of noise (such as when a new highway is built) never fully adapt, and even studies that find some adaptation still find evidence of impairment on cognitive tasks. Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress.35 It’s worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life.

In another famous study, Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin gave benefits to residents on two floors of a nursing home—for example, plants in their rooms, and a movie screening one night a week. But on one floor, these benefits came with a sense of control: The residents were allowed to choose which plants they wanted, and they were responsible for watering them. They were allowed to choose as a group which night would be movie night. On the other floor, the same benefits were simply doled out: The nurses chose the plants and watered them; the nurses decided which night was movie night. This small manipulation had big effects: On the floor with increased control, residents were happier, more active, and more alert (as rated by the nurses, not just by the residents), and these benefits were still visible eighteen months later. Most amazingly, at the eighteen-month follow-up, residents of the floor given control had better health and half as many deaths (15 percent versus 30 percent).40 In a review paper that Rodin and I wrote, we concluded that changing an institution’s environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness.

beeps) during meals, or (worst of all) during

The keys to flow: There’s a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle).

Pleasures are “delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components,”50 such as may be derived from food, sex, backrubs, and cool breezes. Gratifications are activities that engage you fully, draw on your strengths, and allow you to lose self-consciousness. Gratifications can lead to flow. Seligman proposes that V (voluntary activities) is largely a matter of arranging your day and your environment to increase both pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures must be spaced to maintain their potency.

Just try this thought experiment. Which job would you rather have: one in which you earned $90,000 a year and your coworkers earned on average $70,000, or one in which you earned $100,000 but your coworkers earned on average $150,000? Many people choose the first job, thereby revealing that relative position is worth at least $10,000 to them. Now try this one: Would you rather work for a company that gave you two weeks of vacation a year, but other employees were given, on average, only one; or would you prefer a company that gave you four weeks of vacation a year, but other employees were given, on average, six? The great majority of people choose the longer absolute time.56 Time off is inconspicuous consumption, although people can easily turn a vacation into conspicuous consumption by spending vast amounts of money to impress others instead of using the time to rejuvenate themselves. Frank’s conclusions are bolstered by recent

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parents to include peers as adolescents begin turning to each other for emotional support. But it’s only at the end of adolescence, around the ages fifteen to seventeen, that all four components of attachment can be satisfied by a peer, specifically a romantic partner.

Oxytocin has been oversimplified in the popular press as a hormone that makes people (even ornery men) suddenly sweet and affectionate, but more recent work suggests that it can also be thought of as a stress hormone in women:27 It is secreted when women are under stress and their attachment needs are not being met, causing a need for contact with a loved one. On the other hand, when oxytocin floods the brain (male or female) while two people are in skin-to-skin contact, the effect is soothing and calming, and it strengthens the bond between them. For adults, the biggest rush of oxytocin—other than giving birth and nursing—comes from sex.28 Sexual activity, especially if it includes cuddling, extended touching, and orgasm, turns on many of the same circuits that are used to bond infants and parents. It’s no wonder that childhood attachment styles persist in adulthood: The whole attachment system persists.

service; only some fine tuning during a few years of childhood play and learning is needed. In humans, however, the rapid rate of embryonic brain growth continues for about two years after birth, followed by a slower but continuous increase in brain weight for another twenty years.32 Humans are the only creatures on Earth whose young are utterly helpless for years, and heavily dependent on adult care for more than a decade. Given the enormous burden that is the human child, women can’t do it on their own. Studies of hunter-gatherer societies show that mothers of young children cannot collect enough calories to keep themselves and their children alive.33 They rely on the large quantity of food as well as the protection provided by males in their peak years of productivity. Big brains, so useful for gossip and social manipulation (as well as hunting and gathering), could therefore have evolved only if men began chipping in. 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, onc...

True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever. You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older than thirty; but many young people in Western nations are raised on it, and it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff at it.

This is the urge that Plato captured in The Symposium, in which Aristophanes’ toast to love is a myth about its origins. Aristophanes says that people originally had four legs, four arms, and two faces, but one day the gods felt threatened by the power and arrogance of human beings and decided to cut them in half. Ever since that day, people have wandered the world searching for their other halves. (Some people originally had two male faces, some two female, and the rest a male and a female, thereby explaining the diversity of sexual orientation.) As proof, Aristophanes asks us to imagine that Hephaestus (the god of fire and hence of blacksmiths) were to come upon two lovers as they lay together in an embrace, and say to them:

For the religious right, hell on earth is a flat land of unlimited freedom where selves roam around with no higher purpose than expressing and developing themselves.