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

by Jonathan Haidt

Psychologists since Freud had shared a nearly religious devotion to the idea that personality is shaped primarily by childhood environment. This axiom was taken on faith: The evidence for it consisted almost entirely of correlations—usually small ones—between what parents did and how their children turned out, and anyone who suggested that these correlations were caused by genes was dismissed as a reductionist. But as twin studies revealed the awesome reach of genes and the relative unimportance of the family environment that siblings share,30 the ancient happiness hypothesis grew ever more plausible. Maybe there really is a set point31 fixed into every brain, like a thermostat set forever to 58 degrees Fahrenheit (for depressives) or 75 degrees (for happy people)? Maybe the only way to find happiness therefore is to change one’s own internal setting (for example, through meditation, Prozac, or cognitive therapy) instead of changing one’s environment? As psychologists wrestled with these ideas, however, and as biologists worked out the first sketch of the human genome, a more sophisticated understanding of nature and nurture began to emerge. Yes, genes explain far more about us than anyone had realized, but the genes themselves often turn out to be sensitive to environmental conditions.32 And yes, each person has a characteristic level of happiness, but it now looks as though it’s not so much a set point as a potential range or probability distribution. Whether you operate...

When Martin Seligman founded positive psychology in the late 1990s, one of his first moves was to bring together small groups of experts to tackle specific problems. One group was created to study the externals that matter for happiness. Three psychologists, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ken Sheldon, and David Schkade, reviewed the available evidence and realized that there are two fundamentally different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake.33 Conditions include facts about your life that you can’t change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). Conditions are constant over time, at least during a period in your life, and so they are the sorts of things that you are likely to adapt to. Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are the things that you choose to do, such as meditation, exercise, learning a new skill, or taking a vacation. Because such activities must b...

One of the most important ideas in positive psychology is what Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, Schkade, and Seligman call the “happiness formula:” H = S + C + V The level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the...

The challenge for positive psychology is to use the scientific method to find out exactly what kinds of C and V can push H up to the top of your potential range. The extreme biological version of the happiness hypothesis says that H = S, and that C and V don’t matter. But we have to give Buddha and Epictetus credit for V because Buddha prescribed the “eightfold noble path” (including meditation and...

It turns out that there really are some external conditions (C) that matter. There are some changes you can make in your life that are not fully subject to the adaptation principle, and that might make you lastingly happier. It may be worth striving to achieve them.

Noise. When I lived in Philadelphia, I learned a valuable lesson about real estate: If you must buy a house on a busy street, don’t buy one within thirty yards of a traffic light. Every ninety-five seconds I had to listen to forty-two seconds of several people’s musical selections followed by twelve seconds of engines revving, with an impatient honk thrown in once every fifteen cycles. I never got used to it, and when my wife and I were looking for a house in Charlottesville, I told our agent that if a Victorian mansion were being given away on a busy street, I would not take it. Research shows that people who must adapt to new and chronic sources of noise (such as when a new highway is built) never fully adapt, and even studies that find some adaptation still find evidence of impairment on cognitive tasks. Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress.35 It’s worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life.

Commuting. Many people choose to move farther away from their jobs in search of a larger house. But although people quickly adapt to having more space,36 they don’t fully adapt to the longer commute, particularly if it involves driving in heavy traffic.37 Even after years of commuting, those whose commutes are traffic-filled still arrive at work with higher levels of stress hormones. (Driving under id...

Lack of control. One of the active ingredients of noise and traffic, the aspect that helps them get under your skin, is that you can’t control them. In one classic study, David Glass and Jerome Singer exposed people to loud bursts of random noise. Subjects in one group were told they could terminate the noise by pressing a button, but they were asked not to press the button unless it was absolutely necessary. None of these subjects pressed the button, yet the belief that they had some form of control made the noise less distressing to them. In the second part of the experiment, the subjects who thou...

In another famous study, Ellen Langer and Judith Rodin gave benefits to residents on two floors of a nursing home—for example, plants in their rooms, and a movie screening one night a week. But on one floor, these benefits came with a sense of control: The residents were allowed to choose which plants they wanted, and they were responsible for watering them. They were allowed to choose as a group which night would be movie night. On the other floor, the same benefits were simply doled out: The nurses chose the plants and watered them; the nurses decided which night was movie night. This small manipulation had big effects: On the floor with increased control, residents were happier, more active, and more alert (as rated by the nurses, not just by the residents), and these benefits were still visible eighteen months later. Most amazingly, at the eighteen-month follow-up, residents of the floor given control had better health and half as many deaths (15 percent versus 30 percent).40 In a review paper that Rodin and I wrote, we concluded that changing an institution’s environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness.

Shame. Overall, attractive people are not happier than unattractive ones. Yet, surprisingly, some improvements in a person’s appearance do lead to lasting increases in happiness.42 People who undergo plastic surgery report (on average) high levels of satisfaction with the process, and they even report increases in the quality of their lives and decreases in psychiatric symptoms (such as depression and anxiety) in the years after the operation. The biggest gains were reported for breast surgery, both enlargement and reduction. I think the way to understand the long-lasting effects of such seemingly shallow changes is to think about the power of shame in everyday life. Young women whose breasts are much larger or smaller than their ideal often report feeling self-consciousness every day about their bodies. Many adjust their posture or their wardrobe in an attempt to hide what they see as a personal deficiency. Being freed from such a daily burden may lead to a lasting increase in self-confidence and well-being.

Relationships. The condition that is usually said43 to trump all others in importance is the strength and number of a person’s relationships. Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people.

For now, I’ll just mention that conflicts in relationships—having an annoying office mate or roommate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse—is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict;45 it damages every day, even days when you don’t see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.

There are many other ways in which you can increase your happiness by getting the conditions of your life right, particularly in relationships, work, and the degree of control you have over stressors. So in the happiness formula, C is real and some externals matter. Some things are worth striving for, and positive psychology can help identify them. Of course, Buddha would adapt fully to noise, traffic, lack of control and bodily deficiencies, but it has always been difficult, even in ancient India, for real people to become like Buddha. In the modern Western world, it is even harder to follow Buddha’s path of nondoing and nonstriving. Some of our poets and writers in fact urge us to forswear that path and embrace action wholeheartedly: “It is vain to say that human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.” (CHARLOTTE BRONTË, 1847)

Not all action, however, will work. Chasing after wealth and prestige, for example, will usually backfire. People who report the greatest interest in attaining money, fame, or beauty are consistently found to be less happy, and even less healthy, than those who pursue less materialistic goals.

So what is the right kind of activity? What is V in the happiness formula? The tool that helped psychologists answer that question is the “experience sampling method,” invented by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “cheeks sent me high”), the Hungarian-born cofounder of positive psychology. In Csikszentmihalyi’s studies,48 people carry with them a pager that beeps several times a day. At each beep, the subject pulls out a small notebook and records what she is doing at that moment, and how much she is enjoying it. Through this “beeping” of thousands of people tens of thousands of times, Csikszentmihalyi found out what people really enjoy doing, not just what they remember having enjoyed. He discovered that there are two different kinds of enjoyment. One is physical or bodily pleasure. At meal times, people report the highest levels of happiness, on average. People really enjoy eating, especially in the company of others, and they hate to be interrupted by telephone calls (and perhaps Csikszentmihalyi’s beeps) during meals, or (worst of all) during sex. But you can’t enjoy physical pleasure all day long. By their very nature, food and sex satiate. To continue eating or having sex beyond a certain level of satisfaction can lead to disgust.

Csikszentmihalyi’s big discovery is that there is a state many people value even more than chocolate after sex. It is the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities. It is what people sometimes call “being in the zone.” Csikszentmihalyi called it “flow” because it often feels like effortless movement: Flow happens, and you go with it. Flow often occurs during physical movement—skiing, driving fast on a curvy country road, or playing team sports. Flow is aided by music or by the action of other people, both of which provide a temporal structure for one’s own behavior (for example, singing in a choir, dancing, or just having an intense conversation with a friend). And flow can happen during solitary creative activities, such as painting, writing, or photography.

The keys to flow: There’s a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle). You get flash after flash of positive feeling with each turn negotiated, each high note correctly sung, or each brushstroke that falls into the right place.

In the flow experience, elephant and rider are in perfect harmony. The elephant (automatic processes) is doing most of the work, running smoothly through the forest, while the rider (conscious thought) is completely absorbed in looki...

Drawing on Csikszentmihalyi’s work, Seligman proposes a fundamental distinction between pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures are “delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components,”50 such as may be derived from food, sex, backrubs, and cool breezes. Gratifications are activities that engage you fully, draw on you...

Seligman proposes that V (voluntary activities) is largely a matter of arranging your day and your environment to increase both pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures must be spaced to maintain their potency. Eating a quart of ice cream in an afternoon or listening to a new CD ten times in a row are good ways to overdose and deaden yourself to future pleasure. Here’s where the rider has an important role to play: Because the el...

Pleasures should be both savored and varied. The French know how to do this: They eat many fatty foods, yet they end up thinner and healthier than Americans, and they derive a great deal more pleasure from their food by eating slowly and paying more attention to the food as they eat it.51 Because they savor, they ultimately eat less. Americans, in contrast, shovel enormous servings of high-fat and high-carbohydrate food into their mouths while doing other things. The Fre...

Variety is the spice of life because it is the natural en...

One reason for the widespread philosophical wariness of sensual pleasure is that it gives no lasting benefit. Pleasure feels good in the moment, but sensual memories fade quickly, and the person is no wiser or stronger afterwards. Even worse, pleasure beckons people back for more, away from activities that might be better for them in the long run. But gratifications are different. Gratifications ask more of us; they challenge us and make us extend ourselves. Gratifications often come from accomplishing something, learning something, or improving something. When we enter a state of flow, hard work becomes effortless. We want to keep exerting ourselves, honing our skills, using our strengths.

Seligman suggests that the key to finding your own gratifications is to know your own strengths.

One of the big accomplishments of positive psychology has been the development of a catalog of strengths. You can find out your strengths by taking an ...

Recently I asked the 350 students in my introductory psychology class to take the strengths test and then, a week later, to engage in four activities over a few days. One of the activities was to indulge the senses, as by taking a break for ice cream in the middle of the afternoon, and then savoring the ice cream. This activity was the most enjoyable at the time; but, like all pleasures, it faded quickly. The other three activities were potential gratifications: Attend a lecture or class that you don’t normally go to; perform an act of kindness for a friend who could use some cheering up; and write down the reasons you are grateful to someone and later call or visit that person to express your gratitude. The least enjoyable of the four activities was going to a lecture—except for those whose strengths included curiosity and love of...

Even though people were most nervous about doing the kindness and gratitude activities, which required them to violate social norms and risk embarrassment, once they actually did the activities they felt better for the rest of the day. Many students even said their good feelings continued on into the next day—which nobody said about eating ice cream. Furthermore,...

After conducting several variations of this experiment with similar findings each time, Van Boven and Gilovich concluded that experiences give more happiness in part because they have greater social value: Most activities that cost more than a hundred dollars are things we do with other people, but expensive material possessions are often purchased in part to impress other people. Activities connect us to others; objects often separate us.

So now you know where to shop. Stop trying to keep up with the Joneses. Stop wasting your money on conspicuous consumption. As a first step, work less, earn less, accumulate less, and “consume” more family time, vacations, and other enjoyable activities.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this the “paradox of choice”:61 We value choice and put ourselves in situations of choice, even though choice often undercuts our happiness. But Schwartz and his colleagues62 find that the paradox mostly applies to people they call “maximizers”—those who habitually try to evaluate all the options, seek out more information, and make the best choice (or “maximize their utility,” as economists would say). Other people—“satisficers”—are more laid back about choice. They evaluate an array of options until they find one that is good enough, and then they stop looking. Satisficers are not hurt by a surfeit of options. Maximizers end up making slightly better decisions than satisficers, on average (all that worry and information-gathering does help), but they are less happy with their decisions, and they are more inclined to depression and anxiety.

The point here is that maximizers engage in more social comparison, and are therefore more easily drawn into conspicuous consumption. Paradoxically, maximizers get less pleasure per dollar they spend.

According to legend,64 Buddha was the son of a king in northern India. When he was born (as Siddhartha Gautama), the king heard a prophecy that his son was destined to leave, to go into the forest and turn his back on the kingdom. So as the boy grew into adulthood, his father tried to tie him down with sensual pleasures and hide from him anything that might disturb his mind. The young prince was married to a beautiful princess and raised on the upper floors of the palace, surrounded by a harem of other beautiful women. But he grew bored (the adaptation principle) and curious about the world outside. Eventually, he prevailed upon his father to let him go for a chariot ride. On the morning of the ride, the king ordered that all people who were old, sick, or crippled were to retreat indoors. Yet one old man remained on the road, and the prince saw him. The prince asked his chariot driver to explain the odd-looking creature, and the driver told him that everyone grows old. Stunned, the young prince returned to his palace. On the next day’s excursion, he saw a sick man, his body hobbled by disease. More explanation, more retreating to the palace. On the third day, the prince saw a corpse being carried through the streets. This was the last straw. Upon discovering that old age, disease, and death are the destiny of all people, the prince cried, “Turn back the chariot! This is no time or place for pleasure excursions. How could an intelligent person pay no heed at a time of disas...

Another reason for Buddha’s emphasis on detachment may have been the turbulent times he lived in: Kings and city-states were making war, and people’s lives and fortunes could be burned up overnight. When life is unpredictable and dangerous (as it was for the Stoic philosophers, living under capricious Roman emperors), it might be foolish to seek happiness by controlling one’s external world. But now it is not. People living in wealthy democracies can set long-term goals and expect to meet them.

Many Western thinkers have looked at the same afflictions as Buddha— sickness, aging, and mortality—and come to a very different conclusion from his: Through passionate attachments to people, goals, and pleasures, life must be lived to the fullest. I once heard a talk by the philosopher Robert Solomon, who directly challenged the philosophy of nonattachment as an affront to human nature.69 The life of cerebral reflection and emotional indifference (apatheia) advocated by many Greek and Roman philosophers and that of calm nonstriving advocated by Buddha are lives designed to avoid passion, and a life without passion is not a human life.

I do not mean to question the value or relevance of Buddhism in the modern world, or the importance of working on yourself in an effort to find happiness. Rather, I would like to suggest that the happiness hypothesis be extended—for now—into a yin-yang formulation: Happiness comes from within, and happiness comes from without.

To live both the yin and the yang, we need guidance. Buddha is history’s most perceptive guide to the first half; he is a constant but gentle reminder of the yin of internal work. But I believe that the Western ideal of action, striving, and passionate attachment is not as misguided as Buddhism suggests. We just need some balance (from the East) and some specific guidance (from modern psychology) about what to strive for.

Harlow took his students to the little zoo in Madison, Wisconsin, which had a small number of primates. Harlow and his first graduate student, Abe Maslow, couldn’t run controlled experiments using so few animals. They were forced instead to observe, to keep their minds open, and to learn from species closely related to human beings. And one of the first things they saw was curiosity. The apes and monkeys liked to solve puzzles (the humans gave them tests to measure physical dexterity and intelligence), and would work at tasks for what seemed to be the sheer pleasure of it. Behaviorism, in contrast, said that animals will only do what they have been reinforced for doing. Harlow sensed he had found a flaw in behaviorism, but he couldn’t prove it with anecdotes from the local zoo.

In that makeshift lab, for the next thirty years, Harlow and his students infuriated behaviorists by demonstrating with ever more precision that monkeys are curious, intelligent creatures who like to figure things out. They follow the laws of reinforcement to some degree, as do humans, but there is much more going on in a monkey brain than the brain of a behaviorist could grasp.

For example, giving monkeys raisins as a reward for each correct step in solving a puzzle (such as opening a mechanical latch with several moving parts) actually interferes with the solving, because it distracts the monkeys.6 They enjoy the task for its own sake.

In 1955, Harlow conceived the bold idea of starting his own breeding colony of rhesus monkeys. Nobody had ever created a self-sustaining breeding colony of monkeys in the United States, let alone in the cold climate of Wisconsin, but Harlow was undeterred. He allowed his rhesus monkeys to mate, and then he took away the children within hours of their birth—to save them from infections in the crowded lab. After much experimentation, he and his students created an artificial baby formula full of nutrients and antibiotics. They found the optimum pattern of feeding, light and dark cycles, and temperature. Each baby was raised in its own cage, safe from disease. Harlow had in a way realized Watson’s dream of a baby farm, and the crop grew large and healthy-looking. But when the farm-raised monkeys were brought into the company of others, they were stunned and unnerved. They never developed normal social or problem-solving skills, so they were useless for experiments. Harlow and his students were stumped. What had they forgotten?

The clue was in plain sight, clutched in the monkeys’ hands, until finally a grad student, Bill Mason, noticed it: diapers. The cages in the baby hatchery were sometimes lined with old diapers to provide bedding material and protect the babies from the cold floor. The monkeys clung to the diapers, especially when they were afraid, and took them along when they were carried to new cages. Mason proposed a test to Harlow: Let’s expose some young monkeys to a bundle of cloth and a bundle of wood. Let’s see whether the monkeys just need to hold on to something, anything, or whether there’s something special about the softness of the cloth. Harlow loved the idea, and, as he thought it over, he saw an even grander question: Were the diapers really substitutes for mothers? Did the monkeys have an innate need to hold and be held, a need that was utterly starved in the baby farm? If so, how could he prove it? Harlow’s proof became one of the most famous experiments in all of psychology.

Harlow put the milk hypothesis to a direct test. He created two kinds of surrogate mother, each one a cylinder about the size of an adult female rhesus monkey, complete with a wooden head that had eyes and a mouth. One kind was made of wire mesh, the other was covered with a layer of foam and then a layer of soft terrycloth. Each of eight baby rhesus monkeys was raised alone in a cage with two surrogate mothers, one of each kind. For four of the monkeys, milk was delivered only from a tube coming through the chest of the wire mother. For the other four, the tube came through the chest of the cloth mother. If Freud and Watson were right that milk was the cause of attachment, the monkeys should attach to their milk givers. But that’s not what happened. All the monkeys spent nearly all their time clinging to, climbing on, and pushing themselves into the soft folds of the cloth mother. Harlow’s experiment7 is so elegant and so convincing that you don’t need to see statistics to underst...

Harlow argued that “contact comfort” is a basic need that young mammals have for physical contact with their mother. In the absence of a real mother, young mammals will seek out whatever feels most like a mother. Harlow chose the term carefully, because the mother, even a cloth mother, provides com...

There’s no need to derive the bond from milk, reinforcement, libido, or anything else. Rather, the attachment of mother and child is so enormously important for the survival of the child that a dedicated system is built into mother and child in all species that rely on maternal care.

As Bowlby began to pay more attention to animal behavior, he saw many similarities between the behaviors of baby monkeys and baby humans: clinging, sucking, crying when left behind, following whenever possible. All these behaviors functioned in other primates to keep the child close to mom, and all were visible in human children, even the “pick me up” signal of upstretched arms.

Attachment theory begins with the idea that two basic goals guide children’s behavior: safety and exploration. A child who stays safe survives; a child who explores and plays develops the skills and intelligence needed for adult life. (This is why all mammal babies play; and the larger their frontal cortex, the more they need to play).12 These two needs are often opposed, however, so they are regulated by a kind of thermostat that monitors the level of ambient safety. When the safety level is adequate, the child plays and explores. But as soon as it drops too low, it’s as though a switch were thrown and suddenly safety needs become paramount. The child stops playing and moves toward mom. If mom is unreachable, the child cries, and with increasing desperation; when mom returns, the child seeks touch, or some other reassurance, before the system can reset and play can resume.

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.

When children are separated from their attachment figures for a long time, as in a hospital stay, they quickly descend into passivity and despair. When they are denied a stable and enduring attachment relationship (raised, for example, by a succession of foster parents or nurses), they are likely to be damaged for life, Bowlby said. They might become the aloof loners or hopeless clingers that Bowlby had seen in his volunteer work.

Bowlby’s theory directly contradicted Watson as well as the Freuds (Sigmund and Anna): If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own. The power of love over fear was well expressed in t...

Even in a culture where women share mothering duties for all the children in the extended family household, Ainsworth observed a special bond between a child and his own mother. The mother was much more effective as a secure base than were other women.