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

by Jonathan Haidt

Research on the evolution of altruism and cooperation has relied heavily on studies in which several people (or people simulated on a computer) play a game. On each round of play, one person interacts with one other player and can choose to be cooperative (thereby expanding the pie they then share) or greedy (each grabbing as much as possible for himself). After many rounds of play, you count up the number of points each player accumulated and see which strategy was most profitable in the long run. In these games, which are intended to be simple models of the game of life, no strategy ever beats tit for tat.4 In the long run and across a variety of environments, it pays to cooperate while remaining vigilant to the danger of being cheated. But those simple games are in some ways simple minded. Players face a binary choice at each point: They can cooperate or defect. Each player then reacts to what the other player did in the previous round. In real life, however, you don’t react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator? Thus Niccolo Machiavelli, whose name has become synonymous with the cunning and amoral use of power, wrote five hundred years ago that “the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearance...