The Happiness Hypothesis

By Jonathan Haidt

Putting Ancient Wisdom and Philosophy to the Test of Modern Science.

“What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind. “

Buddah

The Divided Self

In the last third of the century, Social Scientists created “information processing theories” to explain everything from prejudice to Friendship. Economist’s created “rational choice” models to explain why people act in certain ways. Academia united under the idea that humans were rational beings.

“But then why do people keep doing such stupid things? Why do they fail to control themselves and continue to do what they know is not good for them?”

The Roman Poet Ovid describes how Medea is torn between her love for Jason and her duty to her father. She laments: “I am dragged along by a strong new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.”

Throughout History the idea of the divided self has appeared. Plato describes how the soul is a chariot and the rational mind holds the reins. Plato’s chariot controls two horses with one regal horse of the right guided by verbal commands and the other crooked horse who will barely respond if at all. The noble horse represents the positive passions (love of honor) while the wild horse represents the bad (lusts).

Platonic education aims to allow the mind true control over both horses to steer the chariot in the right direction.

Freud argued that the mind is divided into:

1. Ego- The ego develops in order to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world (like a referee). It is the decision-making component of personality. The ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.

2. Superego-The superego incorporates the values and morals of society which are learned from one’s parents and others. It is similar to a conscience, which can punish the ego through causing feelings of guilt.

3. ID- The id is the primitive and instinctive component of personality. It consists of all the inherited (i.e., biological) components of personality, including the sex (life) instinct — Eros (which contains the libido), and aggressive (death) instinct — Thanatos. It operates on the pleasure principle (Freud, 1920) which is the idea that every wishful impulse should be satisfied immediately, regardless of the consequences.

The writer personally describes how he is on the back of an elephant. By pulling one way or another he is able to turn the elephant but if the elephant really wants to go in a certain direction he is powerless.

Controlled vs Automatic Processes

In the 1990s, Psychologists began to study the idea that there are two processing systems at work, the automatic and the controlled.

Suppose that you volunteer for an experiment in which you are asked to unscramble a set of five words to make sentences with four of them i.e. “they her bother see usually” > “they usually see her” | “they usually bother her”. A few minutes later when you have finished you go to find the researcher, as instructed, but find her talking to someone else and not giving you eye contact. If you were asked to unscramble words which were related to rudeness you would be more likely to interrupt the researcher.

“According to John Bargh, the pioneer in this research, these experiments show that most mental processes happen automatically, without the need for conscious attention or control.”

Anicius Boethius

Anicius was born to a distinguished Roman family in 480 CE, four years after Rome fell to the Goths. Anicius had a eminent career and rise to become the consul of Rome (the highest elected office) in 510. In 523, at the peak of his fame has was accused of treason towards King Theodoric for remaining loyal to Rome. Stripped of his wealth and rank, he was sent to a remote prison and executed in 524.

While in Prison, he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. He writes how at first he was anything but Philosophical, weeping and cursing the injustice. The one night, the majestic apparition of Lady Philosophy visits him and proceeds to chide him for his philosophical behavior. She begins by asking him to think about his relationship with the goddess of Fortune with Fortune being fickle, coming and going as she pleases. Boethius enjoyed Fortune as his mistress for a long time but cannot demand that she stays chained to him. Change is normal and is the right of Lady Fortune. Boethius was fortunate; now he is not. That is no cause for anger. Rather, he should be grateful that he enjoyed fortune for so long, and he should be calm now that she has left him.

“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it” — Lady Philosophy

Hereditary Happiness

Happiness is one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality. Twin studies generally show that from 50–80% of all variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences.

A person’s average level of happiness is that person’s “affective style”. You can change your affective style in three main ways:

1. Meditation — Suppose that you read about a pill that you could take once a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. Suppose further that the pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good, would you take it? This pill exists its called meditation.
2. Cognitive Therapy — Depressed people are convinced in their hearts of three related beliefs, known as Becks “cognitive triad” of depression. These are “I’m no good”, “My world is bleak” and “My future in hopeless”. Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further. Beck’s discovery is that you can break the cycle by changing the thoughts.
3. Prozac — Prozac was the firs member of a class of drugs known as selected serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs. Prozac gets into the synapses but it is selective in affecting only synapses that use serotonin as their neurotransmitters. Once in the synapses, Prozac inhibits the reuptake process- the normal process in which a neuron that has just released serotonin into the synapse then sucks it back up into itself,to be released again at the next neural pulse. The net result is that a brain on Prozac has more serotonin in certain synapses, so those neurons fire more ofen.

The Ultimatum Game

The Ultimatum game was developed by economists to study the tension between fairness and greed. The experimenter gives one of the two players twenty one-dollar bills (the two candidates never meet with all choices being made in separate rooms). The experimenter asks the player to divide the money between herself and the other candidate. The other candidate is then asked to take it or leave it. The catch is that if she doesn’t accept the money both candidates do not get anything. If people were rational then the money candidate would offer 1 dollar and the other candidate would always accept with 1 dollar being better than 0 dollars. However, in real life nobody offers one dollar and around half of all people offer ten dollars. While most people would not accept three dollars being willing to take a loss themselves to punish the other person.

Dan Batson’s Coin

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 devised a clever way to make people choose.

He brought students into his lab one at a time to take part in what they thought was a study on how unequal rewards affect teamwork. One member of the 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 make the decision in any way you like and by the way here is a coin. What happened?

About half of the people used the coin (we know this as the coin was originally sealed in a plastic bag). Of those who did not flip the coin, 90% chose the position task for themselves. For those who did flip the coin, the laws of probability were suspended and 90% of them chose the positive tasks for themselves. Batson’s subjects who flipped the coin reported that they had made the decision in an ethical way. The only way to make people play the game fairly is to put a mirror in the room and stress the importance of fairness in the instructions.