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

by Jonathan Haidt

If you want to see the system in action, just try engaging a two-year-old in play. If you go to a friend’s house and meet her child for the first time, it should take only a minute. The child feels secure in his familiar surroundings, and his mother functions as what Bowlby called a “secure base”—an attachment figure whose presence guarantees safety, turns off fear, and thereby enables the explorations that lead to healthy development. But if your friend brings her son over to your house for the first time, it will take longer. You’ll probably have to walk around your friend just to find the little head hiding behind her thighs. And then, if you succeed in starting a game—making faces at him to make him laugh, perhaps—just watch what happens when his mother goes to the kitchen to get a glass of water. The thermostat clicks, the game ends, and your play partner scampers off to the kitchen, too. Harlow had shown all the same behavior in monkeys.13 Young monkeys placed with their cloth mother in the center of an open room full of toys eventually climbed down from mom to explore, but they returned often to touch her and reconnect. If the cloth mother was removed from the room, all play stopped and frantic screaming ensued.