The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

could not say it any more concisely than Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”1

I would know exactly what I should do, yet, even as I was telling my friends that I would do it, a part of me was dimly aware that I was not going to. Feelings of guilt, lust, or fear were often stronger than reasoning. (On the other hand, I was quite good at lecturing friends in similar situations about what was right for them.)

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.

Our intestines are lined by a vast network of more than 100 million neurons; these handle all the computations needed to run the chemical refinery that processes and extracts nutrients from food.9 This gut brain is like a regional administrative center that handles stuff the head brain does not need to bother with.

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

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

The alien hand may pick up a ringing phone, but then refuse to pass the phone to the other hand or bring it up to an ear. The hand rejects choices the person has just made, for example, by putting back on the rack a shirt that the other hand has just picked out.

Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person’s own neck and tries to strangle him.13

The day before his sentencing, he went to the hospital emergency room because he had a pounding headache and was experiencing a constant urge to rape his land-lady. (His wife had thrown him out of the house months earlier.) Even while he was talking to the doctor, he asked passing nurses to sleep with him. A brain scan found that an enormous tumor in his frontal cortex was squeezing everything else, preventing the frontal cortex from doing its job of inhibiting inappropriate behavior and thinking about consequences. (Who in his right mind would put on such a show the day before his sentencing?) When the tumor was removed, the hypersexuality vanished. Moreover, when the tumor grew back the following year, the symptoms returned; and when the tumor was removed again, the symptoms disappeared again.

Likewise, exposure to words related to the elderly makes people walk more slowly; words related to professors make people smarter at the game of Trivial Pursuit; and words related to soccer hooligans make people dumber.21

That’s something you have to think about consciously, first choosing a means of transport to the airport and then considering rush-hour traffic, weather, and the strictness of the shoe police at the airport.

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.

love this story, for its title above all else. Whenever I am on a cliff, a rooftop, or a high balcony, the imp of the perverse whispers in my ear, “Jump.” It’s not a command, it’s just a word that pops into my consciousness. When I’m at a dinner party sitting next to someone I respect, the imp works hard to suggest the most inappropriate things I could possibly say.

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.

“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.”7

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.

Of course, evolution has no designer, but minds created by natural selection end up looking (to us) as though they were designed because they generally produce behavior that is flexibly adaptive in their ecological niches. (See Steven Pinker12

This principle, called “negativity bias,”13 shows up all over psychology. In marital interactions, it takes at least five good or constructive actions to make up for the damage done by one critical or destructive act.

Over and over again, psychologists find that the human mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than to equivalent good things.

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.

Once again, bad is stronger and faster than good.

A flash of anger toward someone raises a filter through which you see everything the offending person says or does as a further insult or transgression. Feelings of sadness blind you to all pleasures and opportunities.

A person’s average or typical level of happiness is that person’s “affective style.” (“Affect” refers to the felt or experienced part of emotion.) Your affective style reflects the everyday balance of power between your approach system and your withdrawal system, and this balance can be read right from your forehead. It has long been known from studies of brainwaves that most people show an asymmetry: more activity either in the right frontal cortex or in the left frontal cortex. In the late 1980s, Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin discovered that these asymmetries correlated with a person’s general tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions. 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

“No,” she said, “I can be unhappy anywhere.”

In the summer of 1996, I tried on a pair of new eyes when I took Paxil, a cousin of Prozac, for eight weeks. For the first few weeks I had only side effects: some nausea, difficulty sleeping through the night, and a variety of physical sensations that I did not know my body could produce, including a feeling I can describe only by saying that my brain felt dry. But then one day in week five, the world changed color. I woke up one morning and no longer felt anxious about the heavy work load and uncertain prospects of an untenured professor. It was like magic. A set of changes I had wanted to make in myself for years—loosening up, lightening up, accepting my mistakes without dwelling on them—happened overnight. However, Paxil had one devastating side effect for me: It made it hard for me to recall facts and names, even those I knew well. I would greet my students and colleagues, reach for a name to put after “Hi,” and be left with “Hi . . . there.” I decided that as a professor I needed my memory more than I needed peace of mind, so I stopped taking Paxil. Five weeks later, my memory came back, along with my worries. What remained was a firsthand experience of wearing rose-colored glasses, of seeing the world with new eyes.

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.