The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science

by Jonathan Haidt

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 Roman poet Ovid captured my situation perfectly. In Metamorphoses, Medea is torn between her love for Jason and her duty to her father. She laments: I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.7

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

In philosophy classes, I often came across the idea that the world is an illusion. I never really knew what that meant, although it sounded deep. But after two decades studying moral psychology, I think I finally get it. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun.”32 That is, the world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners. All of these are human creations which, though real in their own way, are not real in the way that rocks and trees are real. These human creations are like fairies in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: They exist only if you believe in them. They are the Matrix (from the movie of that name); they are a consensual hallucination.

The god Krishna says: I love the man who hates not nor exults, who mourns not nor desires … who is the same to friend and foe, [the same] whether he be respected or despised, the same in heat and cold, in pleasure and in pain, who has put away attachment and remains unmoved by praise or blame … contented with whatever comes his way.33

I’m in no position to say whether God, heaven, or an afterlife exists, but as a psychologist I am entitled to point out that belief in postmortem justice shows two signs of primitive moral thinking. In the 1920s, the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget20 got down on his knees to play marbles and jacks with children and, in the process, mapped out how morality develops. He found that, as children develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of right and wrong, they go through a phase in which many rules take on a kind of sacredness and unchangeability. During this phase, children believe in “immanent justice”—justice that is inherent in an act itself. In this stage, they think that if they break rules, even accidentally, something bad will happen to them, even if nobody knows about their transgressions. Immanent justice shows up in adults, too, particularly when it comes to explaining illness and grave misfortune. A survey21 of beliefs about the causes of illness across cultures shows that the three most common explanations are biomedical (referring to physical causes of disease), interpersonal (illness is caused by witchcraft, related to envy and conflict), and moral (illness is caused by one’s own past actions, particularly violations of food and sexual taboos).