The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

Once when a friend of mine with a negative affective style was bemoaning her life situation, someone suggested that a move to a different city would suit her well. “No,” she said, “I can be unhappy anywhere.” She might as well have quoted John Milton’s paraphrase of Aurelius: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

You can change your affective style too—but again, you can’t do it by sheer force of will. You have to do something that will change your repertoire of available thoughts. Here are three of the best methods for doing so: meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. All three are effective because they work on the elephant.

Change his style by getting married.

Suppose you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Would you take it? Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust; it even improves memory. Suppose, finally, that the pill is all natural and costs nothing. Now would you take it? The pill exists. It is meditation.

The goal of meditation is to change automatic thought processes, thereby taming the elephant. And the proof of taming is the breaking of attachments.

For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing. In chapter 5 I’ll question whether this is really a good tradeoff for most people.

For depressed patients, however, Beck found little evidence in the scientific literature or in his own clinical practice that this approach was working. The more space he gave them to run through their self-critical thoughts and memories of injustice, the worse they felt.

Depressed people are convinced in their hearts of three related beliefs, known as Beck’s “cognitive triad” of depression. These are: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless.”

Consider the depressed father whose daughter falls down and bangs her head while he is watching her. He instantly flagellates himself with these thoughts: “I’m a terrible father” (this is called “personalization,” or seeing the event as a referendum on the self rather than as a minor medical issue); “Why do I always do such terrible things to my children?” (“overgeneralization” combined with dichotomous “always/never” thinking); “Now she’s going to have brain damage” (“magnification”); “Everyone will hate me” (“arbitrary inference,” or jumping to a conclusion without evidence).

Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument.

When cognitive therapy is done very well it is as effective as drugs such as Prozac for the treatment of depression,38 and its enormous advantage over Prozac is that when cognitive therapy stops, the benefits usually continue because the elephant has been retrained. Prozac, in contrast, works only for as long as you take it.

Our culture endorses both—relentless self-improvement as well as authenticity—but we often escape the contradiction by framing self-improvement as authenticity.

why exactly should she be true to a self she doesn’t want? Why not change herself for the better? When I took Paxil, it changed my affective style for the better. It made me into something I was not, but had long wanted to be: a person who worries less, and who sees the world as being full of possibilities, not threats.

I therefore question the widespread view that Prozac and other drugs in its class are overprescribed. It’s easy for those who did well in the cortical lottery to preach about the importance of hard work and the unnaturalness of chemical shortcuts. But for those who, through no fault of their own, ended up on the negative half of the affective style spectrum, Prozac is a way to compensate for the unfairness of the cortical lottery.

Far from being a betrayal of that person’s “true self,” contact lenses can be a reasonable shortcut to proper functioning.

Buddha got it exactly right: You need a method for taming the elephant, for changing your mind gradually. Meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac are three effective means of doing so.

3 Reciprocity with a Vengeance

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Animals that fly seem to violate the laws of physics, but only until you learn a bit more about physics. Flight evolved independently at least three times in the animal kingdom: in insects, dinosaurs (including modern birds), and mammals (bats).

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Animals that fly seem to violate the laws of physics, but only until you learn a bit more about physics. Flight evolved independently at least three times in the animal kingdom: in insects, dinosaurs (including modern birds), and mammals (bats).

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Animals that live in large peaceful societies seem to violate the laws of evolution (such as competition and survival of the fittest), but only until you learn a bit more about evolution. Ultrasociality4—living in large cooperative societies in which hundreds or thousands of individuals reap the benefits of an extensive division of labor—evolved independently at least four times in the animal kingdom: among hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps); termites; naked mole rats; and humans.

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Animals that live in large peaceful societies seem to violate the laws of evolution (such as competition and survival of the fittest), but only until you learn a bit more about evolution. Ultrasociality4—living in large cooperative societies in which hundreds or thousands of individuals reap the benefits of an extensive division of labor—evolved independently at least four times in the animal kingdom: among hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps); termites; naked mole rats; and humans.

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Because nearly all animals that live in cooperative groups live in groups of close relatives, most altruism in the animal kingdom reflects the simple axiom that shared genes equals shared interests.

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They are all siblings. Those species each evolved a reproduction system in which a single queen produces all the children, and nearly all the children are either sterile (ants) or else their reproductive abilities are suppressed (bees, mole rats); therefore, a hive, nest, or colony of these animals is one big family.

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We humans also try to extend the reach of kin altruism by using fictitious kinship names for nonrelatives, as when children are encouraged to call their parents’ friends Uncle Bob and Aunt Sarah.

Bro. Sis.

Vengeance and gratitude are moral sentiments that amplify and enforce tit for tat.

A species equipped with vengeance and gratitude responses can support larger and more cooperative social groups because the payoff to cheaters is reduced by the costs they bear in making enemies.14 Conversely, the benefits of generosity are increased because one gains friends.

However, recent evidence suggests that there really could be an exchange organ in the brain if we loosen the meaning of “organ” and allow that functional systems in the brain are often composed of widely separated bits of neural tissue that work together to do a specific job.

Connects with Lisa Feldman barret

Two people come to the lab but never meet. The experimenter gives one of them—let’s suppose it’s not you—twenty one-dollar bills and asks her to divide them between the two of you in any way she likes. She then gives you an ultimatum: Take it or leave it. The catch is that if you leave it, if you say no, you both get nothing.

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. In other words, all over the animal kingdom, brains grow to manage larger and larger groups. Social animals are smart animals.

Gossip elicits gossip, and it enables us to keep track of everyone’s reputation without having to witness their good and bad deeds personally. Gossip creates a non-zero-sum game because it costs us nothing to give each other information, yet we both benefit by receiving information.

Gossip is overwhelmingly critical, and it is primarily about the moral and social violations of others.

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People do occasionally tell stories about the good deeds of others, but such stories are only one tenth as common as stories about transgressions.

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A second study revealed that most people hold negative views of gossip and gossipers, even though almost everyone gossips.

Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.

We want to play tit for tat, which means starting out nice without being a pushover, and we want to cultivate a reputation for being a good player.

Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life.

Including a five-dollar “gift check” along with a survey sent in the mail increases people’s willingness to complete the survey, even more than does promising to send them fifty dollars for completing the survey.

Reciprocity

Concession leads to concession. In financial bargaining, too, people who stake out an extreme first position and then move toward the middle end up doing better than those who state a more reasonable first position and then hold fast.27 And the extreme offer followed by concession doesn’t just get you a better price, it gets you a happier partner (or victim):

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.

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Accept the gift or concession with a feeling of victory—you are exploiting an exploiter—not mindless obligation.

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A theme of the rest of this book is that humans are partially hive creatures, like bees, yet in the modern world we spend nearly all our time outside of the hive. Reciprocity, like love, reconnects us with others.

4 The Faults of Others

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In these games, which are intended to be simple models of the game of life, no strategy ever beats tit for tat.

The Machiavellian version of tit for tat, for example, is to do all you can to cultivate the reputation of a trustworthy yet vigilant partner, whatever the reality may be.

About half of them used the coin. Batson knows this because the coin was wrapped in a plastic bag, and half the bags were ripped open. Of those who did not flip the coin, 90 percent chose the positive task for themselves. For those who did flip the coin, the laws of probability were suspended and 90 percent of them chose the positive task for themselves.

In other words, people who think they are particularly moral are in fact more likely to “do the right thing” and flip the coin, but when the coin flip comes out against them, they find a way to ignore it and follow their own self-interest. Batson called this tendency to value the appearance of morality over the reality “moral hypocrisy.”

From the person who cuts you off on the highway all the way to the Nazis who ran the concentration camps, most people think they are good people and that their actions are motivated by good reasons.

As Robert Wright put it in his masterful book The Moral Animal, “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse.”

The rider acts like a lawyer whom the elephant has hired to represent it in the court of public opinion.

we are fairly accurate in our perceptions of others. It’s our self-perceptions that are distorted because we look at ourselves in a rose-colored mirror.

In other words, subjects used base rate information properly to revise their predictions of others, but they refused to apply it to their rosy self-assessments. We judge others by their behavior, but we think we have special information about ourselves—we know what we are “really like” inside, so we can easily find ways to explain away our selfish acts and cling to the illusion that we are better than others.