The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

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.

Evolution cannot design anything from scratch. Evolution is a process in which bones and hormones and behavioral patterns that were already coded for by the genes are changed slightly (by random mutation of those genes) and then selected if they confer an advantage on an individual.

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.

passionate love is a “wildly emotional state in which tender and sexual feelings, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy coexist in a confusion of feelings.”

Berscheid and Walster define companionate love, in contrast, as “the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined.”38 Companionate love grows slowly over the years as lovers apply their attachment and caregiving systems to each other, and as they begin to rely upon, care for, and trust each other.

If the metaphor for passionate love is fire, the metaphor for companionate love is vines growing, intertwining, and gradually binding two people together.

People are not allowed to sign contracts when they are drunk, and I sometimes wish we could prevent people from proposing marriage when they are high on passionate love

6.1 The Time Course of the Two Kinds of Love (Short Run)

True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other.42

6.2 The Time Course of the Two Kinds of Love (Long Run)

Some modern leaders, such as the Dalai Lama, accept romantic love and its attendant sexuality as an important part of life.

Rather, Christian love has focused on two key words: caritas and agape. Caritas (the origin of our word “charity”) is a kind of intense benevolence and good will; agape is a Greek word that refers to a kind of selfless, spiritual love with no sexuality, no clinging to a particular other person.

Caritas and agape are beautiful, but they are not related to or derived from the kinds of love that people need. Although I would like to live in a world in which everyone radiates benevolence toward everyone else, I would rather live in a world in which there was at least one person who loved me specifically, and whom I loved in return.

First, there may be a kind of hypocritical self-interest in which the older generation says, “Do as we say, not as we did.” Buddha and St. Augustine, for example, drank their fill of passionate love as young men and came out only much later as opponents of sexual attachments.

In the late nineteenth century, one of the founders of sociology, Emile Durkheim, performed a scholarly miracle. He gathered data from across Europe to study the factors that affect the suicide rate. His findings can be summarized in one word: constraints. No matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds, and obligations were more likely to kill themselves.

People living alone were most likely to kill themselves; married people, less; married people with children, still less. Durkheim concluded that people need obligations and constraints to provide structure and meaning to their lives:

Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.

recent work on giving support shows that caring for others is often more beneficial than is receiving help.

We need to interact and intertwine with others; we need the give and the take; we need to belong.

An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationship...

7 The Uses of Adversity

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the “adversity hypothesis,” which says that people need adversity, setbacks, and perhaps even trauma to reach the highest levels of strength, fulfillment, and personal development.

People who suffer from PTSD are changed, sometimes permanently: They panic or crumble more easily when faced with later adversity. Even if we take Nietzsche figuratively (which he would have much preferred anyway), fifty years of research on stress shows that stressors are generally bad for people,3 contributing to depression, anxiety disorders, and heart disease.

Most psychopaths are not violent (although most serial murderers and serial rapists are psychopaths). They are people, mostly men, who have no moral emotions, no attachment systems, and no concerns for others.5

The reality that people often wake up to is that life is a gift they have been taking for granted, and that people matter more than money.

Dan McAdams has suggested that personality really has three levels,17 and too much attention has been paid to the lowest level, the basic traits. A second level of personality, “characteristic adaptations,” includes personal goals, defense and coping mechanisms, values, beliefs, and life-stage concerns (such as those of parenthood or retirement) that people develop to succeed in their particular roles and niches. These adaptations are influenced by basic traits:

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The third level of personality is that of the “life story.”

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We can’t stop ourselves from creating what McAdams describes as an “evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth.”18 Although the lowest level of personality is mostly about the elephant, the life story is written primarily by the rider.

Many people change their goals in the wake of adversity; they resolve to work less, to love and play more. If in those first few months you take action—you do something that changes your daily life—then the changes might stick. But if you do nothing more than make a resolution (“I must never forget my new outlook on life”), then you will soon slip back into old habits and pursue old goals. The rider can exert some influence at forks in the road; but the elephant handles daily life, responding automatically to the environment.

In the thousands of life stories McAdams has gathered, several genres are associated with well-being. For example, in the “commitment story,” the protagonist has a supportive family background, is sensitized early in life to the sufferings of others, is guided by a clear and compelling personal ideology, and, at some point, transforms or redeems failures, mistakes, or crises into a positive outcome, a process that often involves setting new goals that commit the self to helping others. The life of the Buddha is a classic example.

London and Chicago seized the opportunities provided by their great fires to remake themselves into grander and more coherent cities. People sometimes seize such opportunities, too, rebuilding beautifully those parts of their lives and life stories that they could never have torn down voluntarily. When

The psychologist Mel Lerner has demonstrated that we are so motivated to believe that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get that we often blame the victim of a tragedy, particularly when we can’t achieve justice by punishing a perpetrator or compensating the victim.26

in general, the ability to make sense of tragedy and then find benefit in it is the key that unlocks posttraumatic growth.27

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.

When a crisis strikes, people cope in three primary ways:29 active coping (taking direct action to fix the problem), reappraisal (doing the work within—getting one’s own thoughts right and looking for silver linings), and avoidance coping (working to blunt one’s emotional reactions by denying or avoiding the events, or by drinking, drugs, and other distractions).

The key to growth is not optimism per se; it is the sense making that optimists find easy. If you can find a way to make sense of adversity and draw constructive lessons from it, you can benefit, too. And you can learn to become a sense maker by reading Jamie Pennebaker’s Opening Up.30

What mattered was what people did afterward: Those who talked with their friends or with a support group were largely spared the health-damaging effects of trauma.

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.

Pennebaker discovered that it’s not about steam; it’s about sense making. The people in his studies who used their writing time to vent got no benefit. The people who showed deep insight into the causes and consequences of the event on their first day of writing got no benefit, either: They had already made sense of things. It was the people who made progress across the four days, who showed increasing insight; they were the ones whose health improved over the next year.

You have to use words, and the words have to help you create a meaningful story. If you can write such a story you can reap the benefits of reappraisal (one of the two healthy coping styles) even years after an event. You can close a chapter of your life that was still open, still affecting your thoughts and preventing you from moving on with the larger narrative.

Trusted friends who are good listeners can be a great aid to making sense and finding meaning.

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.

Write about what happened, how you feel about it, and why you feel that way. If you hate to write, you can talk into a tape recorder.

Younger children know some stories about themselves, but the active and chronic striving to integrate one’s past, present, and future into a coherent narrative begins only in the mid to late teens.

So adversity, especially if overcome fully, is probably most beneficial in the late teens and early twenties.

Even young men who had not been doing well before serving in World War II often turned their lives around afterward, but people who faced their first real life test after the age of thirty (for example, combat in that war, or financial ruin in the Great Depression) were less resilient and less likely to grow from their experiences. So adversity may be most beneficial for people in their late teens and into their twenties.

In the area of research known as “life-span development,” 44 there are few simple rules in the form of “X causes Y.” Nobody, therefore, can propose an ideal life course with carefully scheduled adversity that would be beneficial for everyone. We can say, however, that for many people, particularly those who overcame adversity in their twenties, adversity made them stronger, better, and even happier than they would have been without it.

But wisdom is based—according to Robert Sternberg,46 a leading wisdom researcher—on “tacit knowledge.” Tacit knowledge is procedural (it’s “knowing how” rather than “knowing that”), it is acquired without direct help from others, and it is related to goals that a person values. Tacit knowledge resides in the elephant.

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).