The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

Introduction: Too Much Wisdom

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“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

This ancient idea deserves respect, and it is certainly true that changing your mind is usually a more effective response to frustration than is changing the world. However, I will present evidence that this second version of the happiness hypothesis is wrong. Recent research shows that there are some things worth striving for; there are external conditions of life that can make you lastingly happier.

I’ll suggest that the happiness hypothesis offered by Buddha and the Stoics should be amended: Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without. We need the guidance of both ancient wisdom and modern science to get the balance right.

Quote in daylio book

Words of wisdom, the meaning of life, perhaps even the answer sought by Borges’s librarians—all of these may wash over us every day, but they can do little for us unless we savor them, engage with them, question them, improve them, and connect them to our lives.

1 The Divided Self

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If Passion drives, let Reason hold the Reins. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver’s father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing the driver on what he is doing wrong. For Freud, the goal of psychoanalysis was to escape this pitiful state by strengthening the ego, thus giving it more control over the id and more independence from the superego.

The image that I came up with for myself, as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.

We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job, but who often find themselves working at cross purposes.

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

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The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so.

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Gazzaniga’s “interpreter module” is, essentially, the rider.

This growth of the frontal cortex seems like a promising explanation for the divisions we experience in our minds. Perhaps the frontal cortex is the seat of reason: It is Plato’s charioteer; it is St. Paul’s Spirit. And it has taken over control, though not perfectly, from the more primitive limbic system—Plato’s bad horse, St. Paul’s flesh. We can call this explanation the Promethean script of human evolution, after the character in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans.

There is, however, a flaw in the Promethean script: It assumes that reason was installed in the frontal cortex but that emotion stayed behind in the limbic system. In fact, the frontal cortex enabled a great expansion of emotionality in humans.

When you feel yourself drawn to a meal, a landscape, or an attractive person, or repelled by a dead animal, a bad song, or a blind date, your orbitofrontal cortex is working hard to give you an emotional feeling of wanting to approach or to get away.18 The orbitofrontal cortex therefore appears to be a better candidate for the id, or for St. Paul’s flesh, than for the superego or the Spirit.

Vipassana meditators can retrain this area?

So what happens when these people go out into the world? Now that they are free of the distractions of emotion, do they become hyperlogical, able to see through the haze of feelings that blinds the rest of us to the path of perfect rationality? Just the opposite. They find themselves unable to make simple decisions or to set goals, and their lives fall apart.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality.

Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion (a major part of the elephant) does most of the work. When the neocortex came along, it made the rider possible, but it made the elephant much smarter, too.

Controlled processing requires language. You can have bits and pieces of thought through images, but to plan something complex, to weigh the pros and cons of different paths, or to analyze the causes of past successes and failures, you need words.

Evolution never looks ahead. It can’t plan the best way to travel from point A to point B.

The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.

Our brains, like rat brains, are wired so that food and sex give us little bursts of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that is the brain’s way of making us enjoy the activities that are good for the survival of our genes.

The automatic system has its finger on the dopamine release button. The controlled system, in contrast, is better seen as an advisor. It’s a rider placed on the elephant’s back to help the elephant make better choices. The rider can see farther into the future, and the rider can learn valuable information by talking to other riders or by reading maps, but the rider cannot order the elephant around against its will.

I believe the Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”26

Children who were able to overcome stimulus control and delay gratification for a few extra minutes in 1970 were better able to resist temptation as teenagers, to focus on their studies, and to control themselves when things didn’t go the way they wanted.

An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills.

Two people feel strongly about an issue, their feelings come first, and their reasons are invented on the fly, to throw at each other. When you refute a person’s argument, does she generally change her mind and agree with you? Of course not, because the argument you defeated was not the cause of her position; it was made up after the judgment was already made.

In moral arguments, the rider goes beyond being just an advisor to the elephant; he becomes a lawyer, fighting in the court of public opinion to persuade others of the elephant’s point of view.

We sometimes fall into the view that we are fighting with our unconscious, our id, or our animal self. But really we are the whole thing. We are the rider, and we are the elephant. Both have their strengths and special skills.

2 Changing Your Mind

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

The whole universe is change,” Aurelius had said.)

“No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by Fortune.”

Can you set yourself up to not need luck?

“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 most important words in the elephant’s language are “like” and “dislike,” or “approach” and “withdraw.”

We humans have a like-o-meter too, and it’s always running. Its influence is subtle, but careful experiments show that you have a like-dislike reaction to everything you are experiencing, even if you’re not aware of the experience.

(You can test your own elephant at: www.projectimplicit.com.)

Life is indeed what we deem it, but the deeming happens quickly and unconsciously.

Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.

We can’t just will ourselves to see everything as good because our minds are wired to find and react to threats, violations, and setbacks.

(The “like-o-meter” is a metaphor for this balancing process and its subtle moment-by-moment fluctuations.)

But because neural impulses move only at about thirty meters per second, this fairly long path, including decision time, could easily take a second or two. It’s easy to see why a neural shortcut would be advantageous, and the amygdala is that shortcut. The amygdala, sitting just under the thalamus, dips into the river of unprocessed information flowing through the thalamus, and it responds to patterns that in the past were associated with danger.

Brain can process negative information before positive.

Though the amygdala does process some positive information, the brain has no equivalent “green alert” system to notify you instantly of a delicious meal or a likely mate. Such appraisals can take a second or two. Once again, bad is stronger and faster than good. The elephant reacts before the rider even sees the snake on the path. Although you can tell yourself that you are not afraid of snakes, if your elephant fears them and rears up, you’ll still be thrown.

There is a two-way street between emotions and conscious thoughts: Thoughts can cause emotions (as when you reflect on a foolish thing you said), but emotions can also cause thoughts, primarily by raising mental filters that bias subsequent information processing.

So when Shakespeare’s Hamlet later offers his own paraphrase of Marcus Aurelius—“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so”22—he is right, but he might have added that his negative emotions are making his thinking make everything bad.

Fraternal twins don’t end up being 50 percent similar to each other; they end up with radically different brains, and therefore radically different personalities—almost as different as people from unrelated families.

In fact, happiness is one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality. Twin studies generally show that from 50 percent to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences.

People showing more of a certain kind of brainwave coming through the left side of the forehead reported feeling more happiness in their daily lives and less fear, anxiety, and shame than people exhibiting higher activity on the right side. Later research showed that these cortical “lefties” are less subject to depression and recover more quickly from negative experiences.29 The difference between cortical righties and lefties can be seen even in infants: Ten-month-old babies showing more activity on the right side are more likely to cry when separated briefly from their mothers.30 And this difference in infancy appears to reflect an aspect of personality that is stable, for most people, all the way through adulthood.