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

by Jonathan Haidt

When people pass along high-quality (“juicy”) gossip, they feel more powerful, they have a better shared sense of what is right and what’s wrong, and they feel more closely connected to their gossip partners.

Gossip paired with reciprocity allow karma to work here on earth, not in the next life.

The Hare Krishnas perfected the technique: They pressed flowers or cheap copies of the Bhagavad Gita into the hands of unsuspecting pedestrians, and only then asked for a donation. When Cialdini studied the Krishnas at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, he noticed that they routinely went around the garbage pails to collect and recycle the flowers that they knew would be thrown away. Few people wanted the flowers, but in the early days of the technique, most were unable just to accept them and walk on without giving something in return. The Krishnas grew wealthy by exploiting people’s reciprocity reflexes—until everyone learned about the Krishnas and found ways to avoid taking the “gift” in the first place. But legions of others are still after you. Supermarkets and Amway dealers give out free samples to boost sales. Waiters and waitresses put a mint on the check tray, a technique that has been shown to boost tips.24 Including a five-dollar “gift check” along with a survey sent in the mail increases people’s willingness to complete the survey, even more than does promising to send them fifty dollars for completing the survey.25 If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you (part of the elephant—automatic processes) moves your hand to your wallet to give something back.

Reciprocity works just as well for bargaining. Cialdini was once asked by a boy scout to buy tickets to a movie he didn’t want to see. When Cialdini said no, the scout asked him to buy some less expensive chocolate bars instead. Cialdini found himself walking away with three chocolate bars that he didn’t want. The scout had made a concession, and Cialdini automatically reciprocated by making a concession of his own. But rather than getting mad, Cialdini got data. He conducted his own version of the encounter, asking college students walking on campus whether they would volunteer to chaperone a group of juvenile delinquents to the zoo for a day. Only 17 percent agreed. But in another condition of the study, students were first asked whether they would volunteer to work for two hours a week for two years with juvenile delinquents. All said no, but when the experimenter then asked about the day trip to the zoo, 50 percent said yes.26 Concession leads to concession. In financial bargaining, too, people who stake out an extreme first position and then move toward the middle end up doing better than those who state a more reasonable first position and then hold fast.27 And the extreme offer followed by concession doesn’t just get you a better price, it gets you a happier partner (or victim): She is more likely to honor the agreement because she feels that she had more influence on the outcome. The very process of give and take creates a feeling of partnership, even in the person...

Reciprocity is an all-purpose relationship tonic. Used properly, it strengthens, lengthens, and rejuvenates social ties. It works so well in part because the elephant is a natural mimic. For example, when we interact with someone we like, we have a slight tendency to copy their every move, automatically and unconsciously.28 If the other person taps her foot, you are more likely to tap yours. If she touches her face, you are more likely to touch yours. But it’s not just that we mimic those we like; we like those who mimic us. People who are subtly mimicked are then more helpful and agreeable toward their mimicker, and even toward others.29 Waitresses who mimic their customers get larger tips.30 Mimicry is a kind of social glue, a way of saying “We are one.”

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...

Natural selection, like politics, works by the principle of survival of the fittest, and several researchers have argued that human beings evolved to play the game of life in a Machiavellian way.6 The Machiavellian version of tit for tat, for example, is to do all you can to cultivate the reputation of a trustworthy yet vigilant partner, whatever the reality may be.

The simplest way to cultivate a reputation for being fair is to really be fair, but life and psychology experiments sometimes force us to choose between appearance and reality. Dan Batson at the University of Kansas devised a clever way to make people choose, and his findings are not pretty. He brought students into his lab one at a time to take part in what they thought was a study of how unequal rewards affect teamwork.7 The procedure was explained: One member of each team of two will be rewarded for correct responses to questions with a raffle ticket that could win a valuable prize. The other member will receive nothing. Subjects were also told that an additional part of the experiment concerned the effects of control: You, the subject, will decide which of you is rewarded, which of you is not. Your partner is already here, in another room, and the two of you will not meet. Your partner will be told that the decision was made by chance. You can make the decision in any way you like. Oh, and here is a coin: Most people in this study seem to think that flipping the coin is the fairest way to make the decision. Subjects were then left alone to choose. About half of them used the coin. Batson knows this because the coin was wrapped in a plastic bag, and half the bags were ripped open. Of those who did not flip the coin, 90 percent chose the positive task for themselves. For those who did flip the coin, the laws of probability were suspended and 90 percent of them chose the ...

Folk wisdom from around the world concurs: Though you see the seven defects of others, we do not see our own ten defects. (Japanese proverb)8 A he-goat doesn’t...

People who are told that they have performed poorly on a test of social intelligence think extra hard to find reasons to discount the test; people who are asked to read a study showing that one of their habits—such as drinking coffee—is unhealthy think extra hard to find flaws in the study, flaws that people who don’t drink coffee don’t notice. Over and over again, studies show that people set out on a cognitive mission to bring back reasons to support their preferred belief or action. And because we are usually successful in this mission, we end up with the illusion of objectivity. We really believe that our position is rationally and objectively justified.

In fact, evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions.

As with other kinds of social comparison, ambiguity allows us to set up the comparison in ways that favor ourselves, and then to seek evidence that shows we are excellent cooperators.

People were quite happy to learn about the various forms of self-serving bias and then apply their newfound knowledge to predict others’ responses. But their self-ratings were unaffected. Even when you grab people by the lapels, shake them, and say, “Listen to me! Most people have an inflated view of themselves. Be realistic!” they refuse, muttering to themselves, “Well, other people may be biased, but I really am above average on leadership.” Pronin and Ross trace this resistance to a phenomenon they call “naive realism”: Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. If they don’t agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts or else that they are blinded by their interests and ideologies. People acknowledge that their own backgrounds have shaped their views, but such experiences are invariably seen as deepening one’s insights; for example, being a doctor gives a person special insight into the problems of the health-care industry. But the background of other people is used to explain their biases and covert motivations; for example, doctors think that lawyers disagree with them about tort reform not because they work with the victims of malpractice (and therefore have their own special insights) but because their self-interest biases their thinking. It just seems plain as day, to the naive realist, that eve...

If I could nominate one candidate for “biggest obstacle to world peace and social harmony,” it would be naive realism because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level: My group is right because we see things as they are. Those who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest. Naive realism gives us a world full of good and evil, and this brings us to the most disturbing implication of the sages’ advice about hypocrisy: Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.

With peace and harmony ascendant, Americans seemed to be searching for substitute villains. We tried drug dealers (but then the crack epidemic waned) and child abductors (who are usually one of the parents). The cultural right vilified homosexuals; the left vilified racists and homophobes. As I thought about these various villains, including the older villains of communism and Satan himself, I realized that most of them share three properties: They are invisible (you can’t identify the evil one from appearance alone); their evil spreads by contagion, making it vital to protect impressionable young people from infection (for example from communist ideas, homosexual teachers, or stereotypes on television); and the villains can be defeated only if we all pull together as a team. It became clear to me that people want to believe they are on a mission from God, or that they are fighting for some more secular good (animals, fetuses, women’s rights), and you can’t have much of a mission without good allies and a good enemy.

Baumeister examined evil from the perspective of both victim and perpetrator. When taking the perpetrator’s perspective, he found that people who do things we see as evil, from spousal abuse all the way to genocide, rarely think they are doing anything wrong. They almost always see themselves as responding to attacks and provocations in ways that are justified. They often think that they themselves are victims.

In another unsettling conclusion, Baumeister found that violence and cruelty have four main causes. The first two are obvious attributes of evil: greed/ambition (violence for direct personal gain, as in robbery) and sadism (pleasure in hurting people). But greed/ambition explains only a small portion of violence, and sadism explains almost none. Outside of children’s cartoons and horror films, people almost never hurt others for the sheer joy of hurting someone. The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism. Having high self-esteem doesn’t directly cause violence, but when someone’s high esteem is unrealistic or narcissistic, it is easily threatened by reality; in reaction to those threats, people—particularly young men—often lash out violently.29 Baumeister questions the usefulness of programs that try raise children’s self-esteem directly instead of by teaching them skills they can be proud of. Such direct enhancement can potentially foster unstable narcissism. Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism— the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end. The major atrocities of the twentieth century were carried out largely either by men who thought they were creating a utopia or else by men who believed they were defending their homeland or tribe from attack.30 Ide...

Judgmentalism is indeed a disease of the mind: it leads to anger, torment, and conflict. But it is also the mind’s normal condition—the elephant is always evaluating, always saying “Like it” or “Don’t like it.” So how can you change your automatic reactions? You know by now that you can’t simply resolve to stop judging others or to stop being a hypocrite. But, as Buddha taught, the rider can gradually learn to tame the elephant, and meditation is one way to do so. Meditation has been shown to make people calmer, less reactive to the ups and downs and petty provocations of life.35 Meditation is the Eastern way of training yourself to take things philosophically.

Cognitive therapy works, too. In Feeling Good,36 a popular guide to cognitive therapy, David Burns has written a chapter on cognitive therapy for anger. He advises using many of the same techniques that Aaron Beck used for depression: Write down your thoughts, learn to recognize the distortions in your thoughts, and then think of a more appropriate thought. Burns focuses on the should statements we carry around—ideas about how the world should work, and about how people should treat us. Violations of these should statements are the major causes of anger and resentment. Burns also advises empathy: In a conflict, look at the world from your opponent’s point of view, and you’ll see that she is not entirely crazy.

The human mind may have been shaped by evolutionary processes to play Machiavellian tit for tat, and it seems to come equipped with cognitive processes that predispose us to hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and moralistic conflict. But sometimes, by knowing the mind’s structure and strategies, we can step out of the ancient game of social manipulation and enter into a game of our choosing. By seeing the log in your own eye you can become less biased, less moralistic, and therefore less inclined toward argument and conflict.

Buddhism and Stoicism teach that striving for external goods, or to make the world conform to your wishes, is always a striving after wind. Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance. (Stoics and Buddhists can have relationships, jobs, and possessions, but, to avoid becoming upset upon losing them, they must not be emotionally attached to them.)

But recent research in psychology suggests that Buddha and Epictetus may have taken things too far. Some things are worth striving for, and happiness comes in part from outside of yourself, if you know where to look.

My underjoyed response to success turns out to be normal. And from an evolutionary point of view, it’s even sensible. Animals get a rush of dopamine, the pleasure neurotransmitter, whenever they do something that advances their evolutionary interests and moves them ahead in the game of life. Food and sex give pleasure, and that pleasure serves as a reinforcer (in behaviorist terms) that motivates later efforts to find food and sex. For humans, however, the game is more complex. People win at the game of life by achieving high status and a good reputation, cultivating friendships, finding the best mate(s), accumulating resources, and rearing their children to be successful at the same game. People have many goals and therefore many sources of pleasure. So you’d think we would receive an enormous and long-lasting shot of dopamine whenever we succeed at an important goal. But here’s the trick with reinforcement: It works best when it comes seconds—not minutes or hours—after the behavior. Just try training your dog to fetch by giving him a big steak ten minutes after each successful retrieval. It can’t be done.

Richard Davidson, the psychologist who brought us affective style and the approach circuits of the front left cortex, writes about two types of positive affect. The first he calls “pre-goal attainment positive affect,” which is the pleasurable feeling you get as you make progress toward a goal. The second is called “post-goal attainment positive affect,” which Davidson says arises once you have achieved something you want.3 You experience this latter feeling as contentment, as a short-lived feeling of release when the left prefrontal cortex reduces its activity after a goal has been achieved. In other words, when it comes to goal pursuit, it really is the journey that counts, not the destination. Set for yourself any goal you want. Most of the pleasure will be had along the way, with every step that takes you closer. The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than the relief of taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool. Yet people sometimes do just this. They work hard at a task and expect some special euphoria at the end. But when they achieve success and find only moderate and short-lived pleasure, they ask (as the singer Peggy Lee once did): Is that all there is? They devalue their accomplishments as a striving after wind. We can call this “the progress principle”: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “...

If I gave you ten seconds to name the very best and very worst things that could ever happen to you, you might well come up with these: winning a 20-million-dollar lottery jackpot and becoming paralyzed from the neck down. Winning the lottery would bring freedom from so many cares and limitations; it would enable you to pursue your dreams, help others, and live in comfort, so it ought to bring long-lasting happiness rather than one serving of dopamine. Losing the use of your body, on the other hand, would bring more limitations than life in prison. You’d have to give up on nearly all your goals and dreams, forget about sex, and depend on other people for help with eating and bathroom functions. Many people think they would rather be dead than paraplegic. But they are mistaken. Of course, it’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think. Because whatever happens, you’re likely to adapt to it, but you don’t realize up front that you will. We are bad at “affective forecasting,”5 that is, predicting how we’ll feel in the future. We grossly overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions. Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.

The winner’s pleasure comes from rising in wealth, not from standing still at a high level,

This is the adaptation principle at work: People’s judgments about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have become accustomed.

Adaptation is, in part, just a property of neurons: Nerve cells respond vigorously to new stimuli, but gradually they “habituate,” firing less to stimuli that they have become used to. It is change that contains vital information, not steady states.

Human beings, however, take adaptation to cognitive extremes. We don’t just habituate, we recalibrate. We create for ourselves a world of targets, and each ...

When we combine the adaptation principle with the discovery that people’s average level of happiness is highly heritable,11 we come to a startling possibility: In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you. Good fortune or bad, you will always return to your happiness setpoint—your brain’s default level of happiness—which was determined largely by your genes. In 1759, long before anyone knew about genes, Adam Smith reached the same conclusion: In every permanent situation, where there is no expectation of change, the mind of every man, in a longer or shorter time, returns to its natural and usual state of tranquility. In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to that state; in adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it.

If this idea is correct, then we are all stuck on what has been called the “hedonic treadmill.”13 On an exercise treadmill you can increase the speed all you want, but you stay in the same place. In life, you can work as hard as you want, and accumulate all the riches, fruit trees, and concubines you want, but you can’t get ahead. Because you can’t change your “natural and usual state of tranquility,” the riches you accumulate will just raise your expectations and leave you no better off than you were before. Yet, not realizing the futility of our efforts, we continue to strive, all the while doing things that help us win at the game of life. Always wanting more than we have, we run and run and run, like hamsters on a wheel.

Buddhism teaches that attachment leads inevitably to suffering and offers tools for breaking attachments. The Stoic philosophers of Ancient Greece, such as Epictetus, taught their followers to focus only on what they could fully control, which meant primarily their own thoughts and reactions. All other events—the gifts and curses of fortune— were externals, and the true Stoic was unaffected by externals.

people to withdraw into a cave. In fact, both doctrines have such enduring appeal precisely because they offer guidance on how to find peace and happiness while participating in a treacherous and ever-changing social world. Both doctrines are based on an empirical claim, a happiness hypothesis that asserts that striving to obtain goods and goals in the external world cannot bring you more than momentary happiness. You must work on your internal world. If the hypothesis is true, it has profound implications for how we should live our lives, raise our children, and spend our money. But is it true? It all depends on what kind of externals we are talking about.

The second biggest finding in happiness research, after the strong influence of genes upon a person’s average level of happiness, is that most environmental and demogr...

Try to imagine yourself changing places with either Bob or Mary. Bob is thirty-five years old, single, white, attractive, and athletic. He earns $100,000 a year and lives in sunny Southern California. He is highly intellectual, and he spends his free time reading and going to museums. Mary and her husband live in snowy Buffalo, New York, where they earn a combined income of $40,000. Mary is sixty-five years old, black, overweight, and plain in appearance. She is highly sociable, and she spends her free time mostly in activities related to her church. She is on dialysis for kidney problems. Bob seems to have it all, and few readers of this...

A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness.14 Part of this apparent benefit comes from “reverse correlation”: Happiness causes marriage. Happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness setpoint, both because they are more appealing as dating partners and because they are easier to live with as spouses.15 But much of the apparent benefit is a real and las...

Mary also has religion, and religious people are happier, on average, than nonreligious people.17 This effect arises from the social ties that come with participation in a religious community, as well ...

What Bob has going for him is a string of objective advantages in power, status, freedom, health, and sunshine—all of which are ...

White Americans are freed from many of the hassles and indignities that affect black Americans, yet, on average, the...

Men have more freedom and power than women, yet they are not on average any happier. (Women experience more depres...

The young have so much more to look forward to than the elderly, yet ratings of life satisfaction actually rise slightly with age, up to age sixty...

People are often surprised to hear that the old are happier than the young because the old have so many more health problems, yet people adapt to most chronic health problems such as Mary’s21 (although ailments that grow progressively worse do reduce well-being, and a recent...

People who live in cold climates expect people who live in California to be happ...

People believe that attractive people are happier than unattractive people,24 b...

The one thing Bob does have going for him is wealth, but here the story is complicated. The most widely reported conclusion, from surveys done by psychologist Ed Diener,26 is that within any given country, at the lowest end of the income scale money does buy happiness: People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than those who don’t. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller. The rich are happier on average than the middle class, but only by a little, and part of this relationship is reverse correlation: Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also because their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures.

Wealth itself has only a small direct effect on happiness because it so effectively speeds up the hedonic treadmill. For example, as the level of wealth has doubled or tripled in the last fifty years in many industrialized nations, the levels of happiness and satisfaction with life that people report have not changed, and depression has actually become more common.

Vast increases in gross domestic product led to improvements in the comforts of life—a larger home, more cars, televisions, and restaurant meals, better health and longer life—but these improvements became the normal conditions of life; all were adapted to and taken for ...

These findings would have pleased Buddha and Epictetus—if, that is, they found pleasure in such external events as being proved right. As in their day, people today devote themselves to the pursuit of goals that won’t make them happier, in the process neglecting the sort of inn...

One of the most consistent lessons the ancient sages teach is to let go, stop striving, and choose a new path. Turn inwards, or toward God, but for God’s sake stop t...

In the 1990s, the two big findings of happiness research (strong relation to genes, weak relation to environment) hit the psychological community hard, because they applied not just to happiness but to most aspects of personality.