PDF Summary:The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt
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The Happiness Hypothesis explores the nature of human happiness, blending the philosophical and theological wisdom of ancient thinkers with insights from the field of positive psychology. Our satisfaction is driven by how our mental filters interpret the events in our lives, with the human brain perpetually divided against itself in the struggle between the desires created by our emotions and the attempts of reason to control them. The key to happiness is to use reason to focus the mind away from desires that will only bring fleeting happiness, while giving in to those desires that will bring lasting fulfillment.
(continued)... This will make people value their interactions with you more because you’ll be acting as a genuinely open and empathetic person. And, because of the reciprocity reflex, they’ll start doing the same for you—which will make for better and happier relationships, for you and them.
The Fleeting Joy of Achievement
Many religious traditions teach that self-denial is the route to happiness. Buddhism famously encourages its adherents to break all emotional attachments to things and refrain from all attempts to attain what they don’t have. Striving, according to this view, is the source of human unhappiness. But some things are worth striving for. The key is not to eliminate desire; it’s to start desiring the right things.
Our brains evolved to respond to immediate pleasures like food or sex (which both advance species success) with jolts of dopamine, which serve as a reinforcement mechanism. But the effects of any reinforcement mechanism are immediate and short-lived. The pleasure, instead, comes from the baby steps you take along the way. This is known as the progress principle. As a corollary, no single event is likely to permanently alter your affective style, because you’ll just reach a new plateau. This idea is known as the adaptation principle.
Striving for the Right Things
The progress and adaptation principles have important things to teach us about how we can increase our happiness. They tell us to focus more on the road to achieving a goal, not on the goal itself. Although some conditions of life are beyond the ability of an individual to alter, there are changes you can make to your life circumstances to bring lasting happiness.
Simple things like reducing exposure to unwanted noise, cutting down on commuting time, improving one’s perceived body deficiencies (like being overweight or being too skinny), and introducing more autonomy in one’s life have been shown to make people happier in the long term. Most of all, meaningful and joyful connections to other people are central to happiness. These are the things we should all strive for.
People are happiest when doing a task that is difficult, but closely aligned to their strengths. For a bodybuilder, this might be lifting a heavy weight; for a violinist, it might be practicing a particularly complex piece of music. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this state “flow,” or what we might call “being in the zone.”
The key to flow is that you are receiving constant positive feedback; the progress toward the goal sustains you. In flow, the elephant and rider are perfectly synchronized, with the elephant chasing what it wants and the rider guiding it along and spurring it to action.
Another effective way you can boost your happiness through striving for the right things is by shifting from conspicuous consumption to inconspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is when we buy visible, materialistic things for the purpose of demonstrating our wealth, prestige, or status to others. Inconspicuous consumption, by contrast, refers to the kind of spending we do for our benefit, on things that make us intrinsically happy. These are things, such as vacations, that we value for their own sake, not for what they convey about us relative to other people.
Embracing, in moderation, the pleasures of life and forging meaningful attachments is a key part of what it is to be human. Happiness can come from within; but it also comes from without.
Attachment Theory
People with lots of meaningful relationships and connections to other people have been shown to have better health outcomes and report being happier. But how do we form those connections? It turns out that a great deal of our relationship success later in life hinges on the quality of our connections as children.
Attachment theory states that children have two primary needs—safety and exploration. From an evolutionary perspective, both are necessary. Safety guarantees survival, while exploration enables children to develop the skills they need to succeed as adults and have children of their own.
This knowledge that the parent will always be there to act as a guardrail gives the child the sense of security she needs to develop independence. Accordingly, when children are deprived of their attachment figures, they become insecure and unable to develop the emotional security and independence needed to thrive in adulthood. Unconditional love does not inhibit the development of independence; it’s what makes it possible in the first place.
Thus, providing unconditional love to children will enable them to form healthy, stable connections as adults. Indeed, the research shows that our childhood attachment styles carry forward into our adult romantic relationships, setting the pattern for how we form bonds with other people for the rest of our lives.
The Case For Adversity
In thinking about how to maximize our happiness, we have to consider what makes us unhappy.
Research suggests that human beings need some amount of struggle in their lives in order to reach their full potential. People who suffer setbacks, even tragedies like the loss of a loved one, often find new strengths as a result of their experience.
Trauma survivors discover that they have a much stronger network of people who love and care for them than they previously thought. This discovery activates the reciprocity reflex—we feel a deeper love for and connection to people in our social network and want to foster even closer ties with them. And because we come to value these relationships more, we devote more of our energies to cultivating them, instead of seeking money or possessions.
Setbacks can alter one’s life story or self-narrative. This is the rider’s domain, the conscious reality we construct for ourselves about who we are and how we got to be that way. The experience of triumph over loss enables us to replace a story about our frustrated hopes or positive experiences turned sour with a more compelling story about overcoming adversity and using that experience to learn compassion and empathy for others. And in the end, this is a more fulfilling story to have about ourselves.
Our teenage years in particular are the period in our lives when our self-narratives begin to truly coalesce and some of our most important life experiences take place. Events that happen during this time are those we revisit the most throughout the rest of our lives, serving as a constant point of self-reference. Accordingly, some adversity in one’s teenage and early adulthood years, if properly overcome, can provide a real character-building boost to people later in life.
Cultivating Virtue
So far, we’ve talked mostly about how our interpretations of events or our relationships with other people influence our happiness. But we should also look inward. What are the innate qualities we should possess if we wish to be happy?
Virtue is defined as the cultivation of the best version of oneself. It is about fulfilling your potential, engaging in constant self-improvement, and striving toward the acquisition of a set of positive attributes or qualities. The specific virtues you aim for depend on your particular strengths and interests. The key to cultivating virtue—and, thus, cultivating happiness—is improvement, be it moral, intellectual, or even physical. And it’s intimately linked to human happiness.
Western moral philosophy, unfortunately, gives pride of place to rationalism and science. This has inculcated in the Western mind an aversion toward ideas of virtue based in feeling and habit. For the celebrants of reason, feeling was something to be conquered and overcome; the rider had to master the elephant, not merely coordinate with it. But you don’t reason your way toward good morals; instead, cultivating virtues leads you to use the powers of reason in a way that will lead to moral actions.
Positive Psychology
Positive psychology links ancient virtue theories with our modern understanding of how the human mind works. Positive psychology attempts to elevate the human experience and cultivate excellence, instead of merely treating disorder. The field identifies six core virtues that are celebrated across all civilizations:
- Wisdom: being intellectually curious and emotionally intelligent
- Justice: being fair
- Temperance: exercising self-control
- Courage: showing perseverance and commitment to principles
- Humanity: displaying kindness and love
- Transcendence: appreciating beauty
The cultivation of these virtues should be a joyful, enlightening experience. You are focusing on things you enjoy, which is intrinsically rewarding. The cultivation of virtue is its own reward.
Elevation and Religion
Some of our most powerful moments of joy come from our experiences with the divine or spiritual. We experience a sense of uplifting when we witness someone doing a good deed; we are often driven by a desire to follow suit and do good deeds of our own. It is often closely linked to religious or spiritual experiences that bring us closer to the realm of the divine. This is elevation, the feeling you get when you are:
- Experiencing awe and wonder by sharing moments of transcendence with others
- Becoming attuned with the most noble parts of yourself; and
- Witnessing phenomena that are larger than yourself and beyond the capacity of your limited mental structures to fully process
The feeling of experiencing God’s love as part of a congregation is a common manifestation of elevation. It’s why religion is found in every culture at every time across the world; it fulfills a basic human need to connect with something greater.
We’ve seen how important attachments and connections are to any individual’s enjoyment of life. By binding the individual to a community, connecting that individual to a higher purpose, and facilitating intrinsically rewarding altruistic behavior toward members of the group, religion has served as a great facilitator of human happiness.
Occupational Self-Direction
One of the essential conditions for a satisfied life is meaningful work. The most meaningful and satisfying work is that which people find intrinsically rewarding. Humans desire occupational self-direction—work that is complex and challenging, engages their interests or talents, and allows for a high degree of independence and autonomy. This kind of work harnesses the progress principle to maximize our happiness, rewarding us for each baby step we take toward the goal.
The Key to Happiness
We are responsible for creating the conditions for our own happiness. It is about finding the right balance between connecting to your community and connecting to yourself. Happiness comes from your attachments to the world around you, but it also comes from the cultivation of inner virtues—training the elephant to explore its full potential, while respecting its power over the rider.
But by aligning the rider with the elephant, you will discover your own path to purpose, meaning, and, ultimately, happiness.
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PDF Summary Introduction
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- Overcoming negativity by moving to the upper range of your affective style
- Practicing reciprocity and tearing down self-delusions
- Desiring the right things
- Improving your relationships
- Learning to overcome adversity
- Cultivating your virtues
- Discovering the divine or sacred in your life
- Living a purposeful life
Our analysis of all these strategies will blend insights from positive psychology, ancient and modern philosophy and religion, and evolutionary anthropology.
PDF Summary Chapter 1: The Split Mind
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This is because our autonomic nervous system, or “gut brain,” controls many bodily functions separately from the “head brain,” where conscious thought lives. The two simultaneously influence one another, but can also operate independently of one another.
Division 2: Left and Right Hemispheres
Our brains are divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere controls language and analytical tasks. The right side, meanwhile, recognizes patterns, and is most notably responsible for facial recognition. The two hemispheres are connected by a mass of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum.
We can see the split in action in patients who have had the corpus callosum severed or damaged in some way. This causes a literal “split-brain” syndrome in which the two hemispheres begin to function independently of one another. Thus, the left hand (which is controlled by the right hemisphere) might pick up objects that the patient has consciously put down with the right hand, and even attempt to physically restrain actions that the patient is consciously attempting to do with the right hand.
Neurologists have discovered that people with more brainwave activity in their left hemispheres...
PDF Summary Chapter 2: Overcome Negativity
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The first type of error could lead to instant death; in the second scenario, there was likely another source of water that could be found. Therefore, those individuals who had strong fear and aversion instincts had an inherent advantage that enabled them to pass this quality along to their offspring. It’s why we evolved to startle at sudden noises that frighten us but have no equivalent emotional or physical reaction to positive stimuli. It also informs our strong biases toward loss aversion, whereby we value the avoidance of losses more than we value equivalent gains.
These emotional cues color our thinking, causing the elephant to dominate the rider. A perceived threat will make us consciously evaluate all stimuli as possible threats; a rush of sadness will cause us to adopt a more bleak way of looking at the world as a whole.
(Shortform note: For a more detailed discussion of loss aversion, read our summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
Affective Style
The elephant determines our likes and dislikes, often in ways that we’re not consciously aware of. These emotional cues color our thinking,...
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Learn more about our summaries →PDF Summary Chapter 3: Do Unto Others
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This reflex is supported by two emotional sub-reflexes—gratitude and vengeance. Gratitude causes us to aid those who’ve aided us in the past; vengeance causes us to withhold aid from those who’ve been stingy or selfish, making it less likely that free riders will exploit the community’s altruism. This opens up the possibility of mutually beneficial cooperation, which makes the group as a whole stronger and strengthens social ties between members of a community.
(Shortform note: For a fuller discussion of reciprocity, read our summary of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.)
Altruism and Happiness
Will self-sacrifice for others (which has become synonymous with morality in much of western thought) also be self-rewarding?
To answer that, we should briefly look at the two main explanations for why humans engage in altruistic behavior.
- The first has its roots in evolution—your genes are more likely to survive if you’re altruistic toward people in your kin group. Reciprocity is also important, as others will respond to your...
PDF Summary Chapter 4: Adjusting Your Happiness
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Accepting a New Normal
There is a fundamental truth of human psychology that follows from the progress principle—no single event is likely to permanently alter your affective style, because you’ll just reach a new plateau. This idea is known as the adaptation principle.
In the long run, we are much more sensitive to positive or negative changes relative to our baseline than we are to absolute changes. We can see this in happiness studies comparing lottery winners with people who’ve become paraplegic due to injury or illness.
One might think that the lottery winners exist in a state of constant elation, while the paraplegics are trapped in a state of endless despair. And this is true—for the short period after winning the lottery or losing the use of one’s legs. But, after time, studies show that both groups adapt and settle into a new normal. Lottery winners become used to their new riches and find themselves no longer thrilled by their change in status (and often come to resent it because they are hounded by friends and relatives asking them for money). Meanwhile, paraplegics come to accept their condition and discover that life can have its joys even in their...
PDF Summary Chapter 5: Attachment
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In his research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Harlow observed that monkeys engaged in many problem-solving tasks for which there was no conditioned reinforcement—they simply enjoyed solving problems for the intrinsic joy they derived from them.
Harlow’s most famous experiment, however, was with baby rhesus monkeys who had been separated from their biological mothers. Harlow and his team of researchers wanted to test the behaviorists’ idea that the mothers’ sole purpose was to provide milk for their young. His team managed to create a milk formula that substituted for mothers’ milk, enabling a group of baby monkeys to be separated from their mothers. But Harlow found that these monkeys, raised without their mothers, were completely unable to socialize or form attachments once they were placed within a group.
This raised the idea that perhaps there was something about mother or mother-like figures that was crucial for development, beyond their ability to give milk. Accordingly, the team created two types of artificial mothers for the caged monkeys—one made of wire, one made of cloth. The monkeys would be raised alone in a cage with one of each type of artificial...
PDF Summary Chapter 6: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger
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The idea of inner change coming from tragedy and even near-death experiences is, of course, well-explored in the world of literature. In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the miserly and misanthropic Scrooge transforms into a benevolent, kind-hearted humanitarian once he is shown a vision of his own death by the Ghost of Christmas-Yet-to-Come—and how little he will be missed by those who knew him unless he changes his ways. Dickens was demonstrating knowledge of a great psychological truth.
Changing Your Personality and Self-Narrative
We’ve seen that some elements of our overall level of happiness are tied to built-in pieces of our personality, like our affective style. But can adversity play a role in altering one’s personality? To answer that, we need to examine exactly what an individual’s personality is made of. Personality appears to consist of three levels:
- Basic traits
- Characteristic adaptations
- Self-narratives
The basic traits of one’s personality consist of what psychologists call the “big five”—neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. These basic traits are squarely within the elephant’s...
PDF Summary Chapter 7: Cultivate Your Virtues
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From a psychological perspective, this was rather insightful. Moral instruction that guided an individual to develop an intuitive understanding of how to properly conduct oneself in all situations—and to want to do the right thing—demonstrated a sophisticated understanding by the ancient thinkers of the need for the rider to tame the elephant and guide it toward the pursuit of the right things.
Where the West Went Wrong
Intellectual developments like the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, however, set western civilization on a different course. These movements, building on the foundation laid by the ancient Greeks, placed rationalism and science at the center of the western intellectual tradition.
As a result, western ideas of virtue shifted away from feeling and habit. For the celebrants of reason, feeling was something to be conquered and overcome; the rider had to master the elephant, not merely coordinate with him. But we know that this is not possible and reflects a misunderstanding of how the human mind works. The elephant leads the rider, not the other way around. While we may think that our beliefs and opinions derive from a rational study of the...
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PDF Summary Chapter 8: Divinity
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Separating the Disgusting From the Divine
This notion of cleanliness connects us to the divine, elevating us above the animals (who, after all, perform the same crude biological functions we do). Our disgust at impurity and our desire to conceal or sanitize many aspects of our animal behavior, whether it is the elimination of waste or the act of mating, is one way that we travel along the divine Z-axis.
Hindu teaching even mandates that recitation or study of the holy scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita should never be done during eating or elimination, ensuring that the spark of divinity within each individual is always separate from the baser functions of our biology.
These notions go far beyond mere tools of hygiene or social control (as a non-believer might be tempted to think). They speak to something much more profound and universal. To fail to treat one’s body as a temple is to degrade and diminish the godliness within oneself. This leads to bad karma and reincarnation as a baser animal in the next life.
Even in the west, where (as we explored in Chapter 7) our ethics are more based on individual autonomy—do what you want as long as you don’t harm others—this...
PDF Summary Chapter 9: The Purpose of Life
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One need not be engaged in white-collar or highly paid work to enjoy occupational self-direction. Blue-collar and manual workers can enjoy this same feeling of self-worth if they believe what they do is critical to the achievement of a larger mission. In one NYU study, the janitors who cleaned the bed pans reported some of the highest levels of satisfaction of anyone working in the hospital surveyed by the research team. These janitors believed they were making a visible and meaningful contribution to the creation of a safe and healthy environment for patients.
The key is to find work that engages your strengths, which will initiate a cycle of more positive thinking. You’ll start to connect the dots between your work and the achievement of larger goals. Without these intrinsic rewards, you’ll just be doing a job on a purely translational basis, seeing your work only in isolation and connecting it to no larger purpose.
Religion and the Birth of Altruism
Our happiness is intimately connected to our experiences with others. We do not operate in isolation. We all have physical brains; that physical brain creates the mind, the set of mental patterns and structures that...