The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

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

The Hare Krishnas perfected the technique: They pressed flowers or cheap copies of the Bhagavad Gita into the hands of unsuspecting pedestrians, and only then asked for a donation. When Cialdini studied the Krishnas at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, he noticed that they routinely went around the garbage pails to collect and recycle the flowers that they knew would be thrown away. Few people wanted the flowers, but in the early days of the technique, most were unable just to accept them and walk on without giving something in return.

So the next time a salesman gives you a free gift or consultation, or makes a concession of any sort, duck. Don’t let him press your reciprocity button. The best way out, Cialdini advises, is to fight reciprocity with reciprocity. If you can reappraise the salesman’s move for what it is—an effort to exploit you—you’ll feel entitled to exploit him right back. Accept the gift or concession with a feeling of victory—you are exploiting an exploiter—not mindless obligation.

In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you.

Happiness causes marriage. Happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness setpoint, both because they are more appealing as dating partners and because they are easier to live with as spouses.15 But much of the apparent benefit is a real and lasting benefit of dependable companionship, which is a basic need; we never fully adapt either to it or to its absence.16 Mary also has religion, and religious people are happier, on average, than nonreligious people.17 This effect arises from the social ties that come with participation in a religious community, as well as from feeling connected to something beyond the self.

A hundred years of further studies have confirmed Durkheim’s diagnosis. If you want to predict how happy someone is, or how long she will live (and if you are not allowed to ask about her genes or personality), you should find out about her social relationships.

But be careful with that pencil. Your good intentions could make things worse.

it’s only in the last fifteen years that researchers have gone beyond resilience and begun to focus on the benefits of severe stress.

“Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”

Third, religious faith and practice can aid growth, both by directly fostering sense making (religions provide stories and interpretive schemes for losses and crises) and by increasing social support (religious people have relationships through their religious communities, and many have a relationship with God). A portion of the benefits of religiosity33 could also be a result of the confession and disclosure of inner turmoil, either to God or to a religious authority that many religions encourage.

After being exposed to hours of case studies, classroom discussions about moral dilemmas, and videos about people who faced dilemmas and made the right choices, the child learns how (not what) to think. Then class ends, the rider gets back on the elephant, and nothing changes at recess. 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.

That experience taught me an important lesson. I think of myself as a fairly rational person. I found Singer’s arguments persuasive. But, to paraphrase Medea’s lament (from chapter 1): I saw the right way and approved it, but followed the wrong, until an emotion came along to provide some force.

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.

My research on the third dimension, however, has freed me from the myth and made it easy for me to think treasonous thoughts. Here’s one: If the third dimension and perceptions of sacredness are an important part of human nature, then the scientific community should accept religiosity as a normal and healthy aspect of human nature—an aspect that is as deep, important, and interesting as sexuality or language (which we study intensely). Here’s another treasonous thought: If religious people are right in believing that religion is the source of their greatest happiness, then maybe the rest of us who are looking for happiness and meaning can learn something from them, whether or not we believe in God.

THE ANCIENT CHINESE SYMBOL of yin and yang represents the value of the eternally shifting balance between seemingly opposed principles. As the epigrams above from Heraclitus and Blake show, this is not just an Eastern idea; it is Great Idea, a timeless insight that in a way summarizes the rest of this book.

A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents.