The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Posttraumatic growth usually involves, therefore, the growth of wisdom.

For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD).

8 The Felicity of Virtue

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the rider can be successful only to the extent that it trains the elephant

This claim, which I will call the “virtue hypothesis,” is the same claim made by Epicurus and the Buddha in the epigraphs that open this chapter: Cultivating virtue will make you happy.

Maxims are carefully phrased to produce a flash of insight and approval. Role models are presented to elicit admiration and awe. When moral instruction triggers emotions, it speaks to the elephant as well as the rider.

They all knew that virtue resides in a well-trained elephant. They all knew that training takes daily practice and a great deal of repetition. The rider must take part in the training, but if moral instruction imparts only explicit knowledge (facts that the rider can state), it will have no effect on the elephant, and therefore little effect on behavior.

Moral education must also impart tacit knowledge—skills of social perception and social emotion so finely tuned that one automatically feels the right thing in each situation, knows the right thing to do, and then wants to do it. Morality, for the ancients, was a kind of practical wisdom.

Organismic value processing carl rogers. On becomingva person

There is no morality in nature; there is only causality. But the rational part of us, Kant said, can follow a different kind of law: It can respect rules of conduct, and so people (but not lions) can be judged morally for the degree to which they respect the right rules.

This simple test, which Kant called the “categorical imperative,” was extraordinarily powerful. It offered to make ethics a branch of applied logic, thereby giving it the sort of certainty that secular ethics, without recourse to a sacred book, had always found elusive.

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.

Although no specific virtue made every list, six broad virtues, or families of related virtues, appeared on nearly all lists: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence (the ability to forge connections to something larger than the self).

Peterson and Seligman suggest that there are twenty-four principle character strengths, each leading to one of the six higher-level virtues.19 You can diagnose yourself by looking at the list below or by taking the strengths test (at www.authentichappiness.org). 1. Wisdom: • Curiosity • Love of learning • Judgment • Ingenuity • Emotional intelligence • Perspective 2. Courage: • Valor • Perseverance • Integrity 3. Humanity: • Kindness • Loving 4. Justice: • Citizenship • Fairness • Leadership 5. Temperance: • Self-control • Prudence • Humility 6. Transcendence: • Appreciation of beauty and excellence • Gratitude • Hope • Spirituality • Forgiveness • Humor • Zest

The genius of Peterson and Seligman’s classification is to get the conversation going, to propose a specific list of strengths and virtues, and then let the scientific and therapeutic communities work out the details. Just as the DSM is thoroughly revised every ten or fifteen years, the classification of strengths and virtues (known among positive psychologists as the “un-DSM”) is sure to be revised and improved in a few years.

Here’s my favorite idea: Work on your strengths, not your weaknesses. How many of your New Year’s resolutions have been about fixing a flaw? And how many of those resolutions have you made several years in a row?

But it would be naive to think that doing the right thing always feels good.

These two processes—kin altruism and reciprocal altruism—do indeed explain nearly all altruism among nonhuman animals, and much of human altruism, too.

People who do volunteer work are happier and healthier than those who don’t; but, as always, we have to contend with the problem of reverse correlation: Congenitally happy people are just plain nicer to begin with,24 so their volunteer work may be a consequence of their happiness, not a cause.

Happy people are kinder and more helpful than those in the control group.

The psychologist Jane Piliavin has studied blood donors in detail and found that, yes, giving blood does indeed make people feel good, and good about themselves. Piliavin26 has reviewed the broader literature on all kinds of volunteer work and reached the conclusion that helping others does help the self, but in complex ways that depend on one’s life stage.

A longitudinal study27 that tracked volunteering and well-being over many years in thousands of people was able to show a causal effect: When a person increased volunteer work, all measures of happiness and well-being increased (on average) afterwards, for as long as the volunteer work was a part of the person’s life. The elderly benefit even more than do other adults, particularly when their volunteer work either involves direct person-to-person helping or is done through a religious organization. The benefits of volunteer work for the elderly are so large that they even show up in improved health and longer life.

In old age, when social networks are thinned by the deaths of friends and family, the social benefits of volunteering are strongest (and indeed, it is the most socially isolated elderly who benefit the most from volunteering).30 Furthermore, in old age, generativity, relationship, and spiritual strivings come to matter more, but achievement strivings seem out of place,31 more appropriate for the middle chapters of a life story; therefore, an activity that lets one “give something back” fits right into the story and helps to craft a satisfying conclusion.

Scientific research supports the virtue hypothesis, even when it is reduced to the claim that altruism is good for you.

Durkheim, the sociologist who found that freedom from social ties is correlated with suicide32 also gave us the word “anomie” (normlessness). Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of value.

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Anomie breeds feelings of rootlessness and anxiety and leads to an increase in amoral and antisocial behavior.

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You can grow vegetables hydroponically, but even then you have to add nutrients to the water. Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language—a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.

Given how easy it is to divide people into hostile groups based on trivial differences,36 I wondered whether celebrating diversity might also encourage division, whereas celebrating commonality would help people form cohesive groups and communities.

Moral diversity, on the other hand, is essentially what Durkheim described as anomie: a lack of consensus on moral norms and values. Once you make this distinction, you see that nobody can coherently even want moral diversity.

Our conclusion from this study is that diversity is like cholesterol: There’s a good kind and a bad kind, and perhaps we should not be trying to maximize both. Liberals are right to work for a society that is open to people of every demographic group, but conservatives might be right in believing that at the same time we should work much harder to create a common, shared identity.

9 Divinity With or Without God

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With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are blind.

The metaphor that has most helped me to understand morality, religion, and the human quest for meaning is Flatland, a charming little book written in 1884 by the English novelist and mathematician Edwin Abbot.3 Flatland is a two-dimensional world whose inhabitants are geometric figures. The protagonist is a square.

Now imagine yourself happily moving around your two-dimensional social world, a flat land where the X axis is closeness and the Y axis is hierarchy (see figure 9.1). Then one day, you see a person do something extraordinary, or you have an overwhelming experience of natural beauty, and you feel lifted “up.” But it’s not the “up” of hierarchy, it’s some other kind of elevation. This chapter is about that vertical movement. My claim is that the human mind perceives a third dimension, a specifically moral dimension that I will call “divinity.”

(I myself am a Jewish atheist.) Rather, my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.

But at the other extreme, the effort to create a three-dimensional society and impose it on all residents is the hallmark of religious fundamentalism.

most cultures are very concerned about food, sex, menstruation, and the handling of corpses.

Animals that routinely eat or crawl on corpses, excrement, or garbage piles (rats, maggots, vultures, cockroaches) trigger disgust in us: We won’t eat them, and anything they have touched becomes contaminated. We’re also disgusted by most of the body products of other people, particularly excrement, mucus, and blood, which may transmit diseases among people.

Imagine visiting a town where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex “doggie-style” in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.

Shweder’s research on morality 14 in Bhubaneswar and elsewhere shows that when people think about morality, their moral concepts cluster into three groups, which he calls the ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community, and the ethic of divinity. When people think and act using the ethic of autonomy, their goal is to protect individuals from harm and grant them the maximum degree of autonomy, which they can use to pursue their own goals. When people use the ethic of community, their goal is to protect the integrity of groups, families, companies, or nations, and they value virtues such as obedience, loyalty, and wise leadership. When people use the ethic of divinity, their goal is to protect from degradation the divinity that exists in each person, and they value living in a pure and holy way, free from moral pollutants such as lust, greed, and hatred.

Eliade’s most compelling point, for me, is that sacredness is so irrepressible that it intrudes repeatedly into the modern profane world in the form of “crypto-religious” behavior. Eliade noted that even a person committed to a profane existence has privileged places, qualitatively different from all others—a man’s birth-place, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.

Even atheists have intimations of sacredness, particularly when in love or in nature. We just don’t infer that God caused those feelings.

When any . . . act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also.

Jefferson went on to say that the physical feelings and motivational effects caused by great literature are as powerful as those caused by real events.

My students and I have used a variety of means to induce elevation and have found that video clips from documentaries about heroes and altruists, and selections from the Oprah Winfrey show, work well.

Subjects in the admiration condition were more likely to report feeling chills or tingles on their skin, and to report feeling energized or “psyched up.” Witnessing extraordinarily skillful actions gives people the drive and energy to try to copy those actions.27 Elevation, in contrast, is a calmer feeling, not associated with signs of physiological arousal.

Oxytocin causes bonding, not action. Elevation may fill people with feelings of love, trust,30 and openness, making them more receptive to new relationships; yet, given their feelings of relaxation and passivity, they might be less likely to engage in active altruism toward strangers.

He noticed that he shed two kinds of tears in church. The first he called “tears of compassion,” such as the time he cried during a sermon on Mothers’ Day on the subject of children who were abandoned or neglected. These cases felt to him like “being pricked in the soul,” after which “love pours out” for those who are suffering. But he called the second kind “tears of celebration”; he could just as well have called them tears of elevation: There’s another kind of tear. This one’s less about giving love and more about the joy of receiving love, or maybe just detecting love (whether it’s directed at me or at someone else). It’s the kind of tear that flows in response to expressions of courage, or compassion, or kindness by others.

When this happens, people find themselves overflowing with love, but it is not exactly the love that grows out of attachment relationships.32 That love has a specific object, and it turns to pain when the object is gone. This love has no specific object; it is agape. It feels like a love of all humankind, and because humans find it hard to believe that something comes from nothing, it seems natural to attribute the love to Christ, or to the Holy Spirit moving within one’s own heart. Such experiences give direct and subjectively compelling evidence that God resides within each person. And once a person knows this “truth,” the ethic of divinity becomes self-evident.

Virtue is not the only cause of movement on the third dimension. The vastness and beauty of nature similarly stirs the soul. Immanuel Kant explicitly linked morality and nature when he declared that the two causes of genuine awe are “the starry sky above and the moral law within.”33