Jonathan Haidt, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” Basic Books, 2006, 243 pp.
I know I am reading a good novel when I can hardly wait to see what happens next—I may not even go to bed on time as I continue reading late into the night, maybe all night. On the other hand, a good non-fiction book is one that you want to read slowly, it inspires pausing and thinking. The Happiness Hypothesis is such a book. I have read other such books by this same author: The Righteous Mind (C2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (C2018). So, when I discovered this earlier book by this same author I just had to read it. This book gets my Education tag (a high honor, the third book by this same author to receive this designation).
The Happiness Hypothesis is an analysis of how you can find happiness in our modern society, backed by scientific research, real-life examples, and even a formula. Haidt establishes a metaphor, the elephant and the rider, which then serves throughout the rest of the book to explain happiness in different contexts. He says our brain is divided into two main parts. Your limbic system is in charge of your basic instincts, the need for sleep, food, and sex. The neocortex is a newer, later developed part of the brain, responsible for your rational thinking. It’s what keeps your limbic system in check and makes sure you don’t run around naked on the street, overeat, or sleep in when you’re supposed to go to work.
Haidt describes the limbic brain as a wild elephant, with your neocortex being the rider, trying to control the elephant. Unhappiness comes from the rider and the elephant disagreeing. Although 50% to 80% of your baseline level of happiness is determined in your genes, by changing your thoughts you can still train the elephant. Changing your thoughts is best done through cognitive therapy, drugs like Prozac, or meditation.
My Notes:
Pg. 2f: Plato used a metaphor in which the self is a chariot, and the calm, rational part of the mind holds the reins. Plato’s charioteer had to control two horses. One horse is a lover of honor with modesty and self-control; the other is wild and deaf as a post and just barely yields to horsewhip and goad combined.
When teaching Freud to his students, Haidt instructs his students to think of the mind as a horse and buggy in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver’s father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing the driver on what he is doing wrong. For Freud, the goal of psychoanalysis was to escape this pitiful state by strengthening the ego, thus giving it more control over the id and more independence from the superego.
Pg. 4ff: To understand most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Our minds are divided in four ways. The fourth is the most important, for it corresponds most closely to the rider and the elephant, but the first three also contribute to our experiences of temptation, weakness, and internal conflict.
Mind vs. Body: Haidt uses Montaigne’s description of the uncontrollable behavior of the penis as an example as well as our facial expressions, hair standing on end, the working of our intestines, etc.
Left vs Right: the human brain has two separate hemispheres joined by a large bundle of nerves, the corpus callosum which allows the two halves of the brain to communicate and coordinate their activity. The left hemisphere takes in information from the right half of the world (that is, it receives nerve transmissions from the right arm and leg, the right ear, and the left half of each retina, which receives light from the right half of the visual field) and send out commands to move the limbs on the right side of the body, etc.
New vs. Old: Over time as more complex bodies and behavior evolved, the brain kept building out the front, away from the spinal column. The front portion of the neocortex is available to make new associations and to engage in thinking, planning, and decision making—mental processes that can free an organism from responding only to an immediate situation.
Controlled vs. Automatic: In the 1990s psychologists began to realize that there are really two processing systems at work in the mind at all times: controlled processes (the rider) and automatic processes (the elephant). Controlled processing is limited—we can think continuously about one thing at a time only—but automatic processes run in parallel and can handle many tasks at once. If the mind performs hundreds of operations each second, all but one of them must be handled automatically.
Pg. 15: By 3 million years ago, the Earth was full of animals with extraordinarily sophisticated automatic abilities. Many of these creatures possessed systems of communication but none of them had developed language. Estimates of when humans developed language range from 3 million years ago when hominid brains became much bigger, to as recently as 40,000 years ago, the time of cave paintings.
Pg. 26: The most important words in the elephant’s language are ‘like’ and ‘dislike.’ This like-o-meter runs all the time.
Pg. 35: Suppose there was a pill that you could take one a day to reduce anxiety and increase your contentment. The pill has a great variety of side effects, all of them good: increased self-esteem, empathy, and trust, it even improves memory. This pill is called meditation. The goal of meditation is to change automatic thought processes, thereby taming the elephant. The proof of taming is the breaking of attachments.
Pg. 38: Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further. You can break the cycle by changing your thoughts. A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking. Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument. You need a method for taming the elephant, for changing your mind gradually. Meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac are three effective means of doing so. Because each will be effective for some people and not for others, all three should be readily available.
Pg. 45: Confucius said that if there is one word to guide you it is reciprocity: What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others. When sages pick a single word or principle to elevate above all others, the winner is almost always either ‘love’ or ‘reciprocity.’
Pg. 50f: Reciprocity: or “tit for tat” appears to be built into human nature as a set of moral emotions that make us want to return favor for favor, insult for insult, tooth for tooth, an eye for an eye. Gratitude and vengefulness are big steps on the road that led to human ultrasociality, and it’s important to realize that they are two sides of one coin.
Pg. 53: The only theory that explains why animals, in general, have particular brain sizes is the one that maps brain size onto social group size. Robin Dunbar has demonstrated that within a given group of vertebrate species—primates, carnivores, ungulates, birds, reptiles, or fish—the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size. Brains grow to manage larger and larger groups. Humans ought to live in groups of around 150 people.
Pg. 56f: The most basic principle that salespeople use against us is reciprocity. People who want something from us try to give us something first: address labels, Hare Krishna flowers, etc. Reciprocity works just as well for bargaining. A scout asked a customer to buy tickets to an expensive movie, after the customer (as expected) refused the scout proposed he buy two chocolate bars—this worked. It appears an extreme offer followed by an offer with a concession may work. An experimenter asked college students to volunteer for two hours a week for two years with juvenile delinquents. All said no, but when then asked about a day trip to the zoo, 50 percent said yes. Concession leads to concession. Relationships are exquisitely sensitive to balance in their early stages, and a great way to ruin things is either to give too much (you seem a bit desperate) or too little (you seem cold and rejecting).
Pg. 66: Social life is always a game of social comparison. We must compare ourselves to other people, and our actions to their actions, and we must somehow spin those comparisons in our favor (In depression, part of the illness is that spin goes the other way: I’m bad, the world is terrible, and my future is bleak.) You can spin a comparison either by inflating your own claims or by disparaging the claims of others. You might expect that we do both, but the consistent findings of psychological research is that we are fairly accurate in our perceptions of others. It’s our self-perceptions that are distorted because we look at ourselves in a rose-colored mirror (we’re all above average.)
Pg. 84: Adaptation: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing.” Of course, it’s better to win the lottery than breaking your neck but by not as much as you might 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, 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. 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. 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 time we hit one we replace it with another.
When we combine the adaptation principle with the discovery that people’s average level of happiness is highly heritable, 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 set point which was determined largely by your genes. (i.e., as long as you have adequate food, shelter, and clothing).
Pg. 91: 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 conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do.
Conditions (C): conditions of your life include facts that you can’t change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). Conditions are generally consistent over time so you are likely to adapt to them.
Voluntary activities (V): things that you choose to do, such as meditation, exercise, learning a new skill, or taking a vacation. Voluntary activities offer much greater promise for increasing happiness while avoiding adaptation regression to the mean effects.
Pg. 101: The Elephant cares about prestige, not happiness. The Elephant was shaped by natural selection to win at the game of life, and part of its strategy is to impress others, gain their admiration, and rise in relative rank.
Pg. 105: The philosopher Robert Solomon directly challenged the philosophies of nonattachment as an affront to human nature. The life of cerebral reflection and emotional indifference 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. Yes, attachments bring pain, but they also bring our greatest joys.
Pg. 108: Germ theory was first proposed in the 1840s by Ignaz Semmelweis and slowly incorporated into medicine over the next century. In the 1920s, pediatricians came to fear germs above all else. Records showed that most children dropped off at foundling homes died within one year. So they launched a crusade against germs and began to isolate children as much as possible in clean cubicles to prevent them from infecting each other. Nurses retreated behind masks and gloves, and mothers were scolded for violating quarantine. Also, the psychologists and behaviorist at the time concluded that unconditional love—holding, nuzzling, and cuddling for no reason—was seen as the surest way to make children lazy, spoiled, and weak. The leading American behaviorist, John Watson, (in the years before B. F. Skinner), published Psychological Care of Infant and Child. Watson wrote of his dream that one day babies would be raised in baby farms, away from the corrupting influences of parents.
Pg. 109ff: Science has come a long way from the days of John Watson. Harry Harlow and John Bowlby are the heroes and Attachment Theory is the result: theory begins with the idea that two basic goals guide children’s behavior: safety and exploration. When the safety level is adequate the child plays and explores. But as soon as it drops too low the child stops playing and moves toward mom. If you want your children to grow up healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them and love them.
Pg. 120: Adult love relationships are built out of two ancient and interlocking systems: an attachment system that bonds child to mother and a care-giving system that bonds mother to child. These systems are as old as mammals—older perhaps, because birds have them too. The mating system is completely separate from the other two systems and it involves distinctive brain areas and hormones.
Pg. 122: Humans are the only creatures on Earth whose young are utterly helpless for years, and heavily dependent on adult care for more than a decade. In humans the rapid rate of embryonic brain growth continues for about two years after birth, followed by a slower but continuous increase in brain weight for another twenty years.
Pg. 126: There are two kinds of (adult) love: passionate and companionate. They are two separate processes and they have different time courses. Passionate love ignites, it burns, and it can reach its maximum temperature within days. Nobody can think straight when high on passionate love. The rider is as besotted as the elephant. True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other.
Pg. 142f: Psychologists often approach personality by measuring basic traits such as the ‘big five’: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness (warmth/niceness), and conscientiousness. These traits are facts about the elephant, about a person’s automatic reactions in various situations. Psychologist Dan McAdams has suggested that personality really has three levels, and too much attention has been paid to the lowest level, the basic traits outlined above.
A second level of personality, ‘characteristic adaptations,’ includes personal goals, defense and coping mechanisms, values, beliefs, and life-stage concerns (such as those of parenthood or retirement) that people develop to succeed in their particular roles and niches.
The third level of personality is that of the ‘life story.’ Human beings in every culture are fascinated by stories; we create them whenever we can. (See those seven stars up there” They are seven sisters who once…). Although the lowest level of personality is mostly about the elephant, the life story is written primarily by the rider. It is a work of historical fiction that makes plenty of references to real events that might or might not be true to the spirit of what happened.
Pg. 143: Because human beings were shaped by evolutionary processes to pursue success, not happiness, people enthusiastically pursue goals that will help them win prestige in zero-sum competitions. Success in these competitions feels good but gives no lasting pleasure, and it raises the bar for future success.
Pg. 167: Psychology has become obsessed with pathology and the dark side of human nature, blind to all that is good and noble in people. In 1998, Martin Seligman founded positive psychology to combat this fixation on the dark side. He set out to construct a list of the strengths and virtues that might be valid for any human culture. The resulting list of six broad virtues, or families of related virtues, are: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence (the ability to forge connections to something larger than the self). You can diagnose yourself by examining the list below or taking the strengths test at www.authentichappiness.org.
Wisdom:
o Curiosity
o Love of learning
o Judgment
o Ingenuity
o Emotional intelligence
o Perspective
Courage:
o Valor
o Perseverance
o Integrity
Humanity:
o Kindness
o Loving
Justice:
o Citizenship
o Fairness
o Leadership
Temperance:
o Self-Control
o Prudence
o Humility
Transcendence:
o Appreciation of beauty and excellence
o Gratitude
o Hope
o Spirituality
o Forgiveness
o Humor
o Zest
Pg. 183f: In all human cultures, the social world has two clear dimensions: a horizontal dimension of closeness or liking, and a vertical one of hierarchy or status. People naturally make distinctions along the horizontal dimension between close versus distant kin, and between friends versus strangers. There is a third, Z dimension, that involves the sacred, or purity (it does not demand you believe in God). It involves a sense of community, morality, and of awe.
Pg. 194: Emotions known have distinctive facial expressions: joy, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise. The author adds another: elevation.
Pg. 207: It is important to note that the self is not exactly the rider—much of the self is unconscious and automatic—but because the self emerges from conscious verbal thinking and storytelling, it can be constructed only by the rider.
Pg. 232: David Sloan Wilson points out that human beings evolve at two levels simultaneously: genetic and cultural. Cultural elements don’t spread by the slow process of having children; they spread rapidly whenever people adopt a new behavior, technology, or belief. Cultural traits can even spread from tribe to tribe or nation to nation, as when the plow, the printing press, or reality television programs became popular in many places in quick succession.
Pg. 242: Liberals are experts in thinking about issues of victimization, equality, autonomy, and the rights of individuals, particularly those of minorities and nonconformists. Conservatives, on the other hand, are experts in thinking about loyalty to the group, respect for authority and tradition, and sacredness. A society without liberals would be harsh and oppressive to many individuals. A society without conservatives would lose many of the social structures and constraints that are so valuable. Anomie would increase along with freedom. A good place for wisdom is in the minds of your opponents, if you would only listen.
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