The Happiness Hypothesis

"Right. And I started with the easy ones. One very accessible one, but by a guy who is very serious, is a book called The Happiness Hypothesis . It’s by Jonathan Haidt, who is a psychologist at the University of Virginia. Haidt uses the metaphor of a boy and an elephant. He says our minds are structured like a boy riding an elephant, and the boy is the conscious reasoning part, the cortex-based brain. And it can see very far, and make certain steering decisions. But most of the work is done by the elephant, which is the unconscious part of the brain. His work is to try to explain what the elephant is doing. In his research, he focuses especially on moral judgments. So he tells his students the story of a brother and a sister who are off on a trip somewhere. They decide one night they’re going to have sex with each other. They do it, they find it pleasant, and decide they’ll never do it again. But they are glad they did it. And he asks: ‘Is that wrong?’ And most people say it is. But they can’t really explain why they feel that way. He says that feeling of disgust that we experience is a moral feeling that flows unconsciously, it’s not based on conscious reasoning. And he argues that most of our moral decisions are that kind of an instant reaction. It’s like aesthetics: when we see a scene we know instantly if it’s beautiful or not. We know instantly if something feels moral to us or not. I think I would say, and he would say and most scientists would say, that it’s the result of two flows of information. One is the genetic, and in every culture under the sun, incest is regarded as wrong. There is no human culture that really tolerates incest. There’s that sort of knowledge. So we do have some moral knowledge that just comes to us genetically: a sense of fairness, a sense of reciprocity. All humans have these, except psychopaths. So some of that is genetic. But then it’s underlined by cultural things; that’s the second flow of information. And those cultural things may be learned consciously, but are also stored in the elephant."

"I think Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis . There’s a pretty clear connection. Haidt is a very interesting thinker. There’s a wonderful TED talk by him. Do you know his work at all? When I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, I remember moral philosophy consisted of dry analysis of moral concepts, the status of moral judgements and a lot of Oxbridge-style linguistic analysis. Haidt – who started off as a philosopher and is now a psychologist – shows just how interesting moral philosophy can be, if you broaden its scope a little bit. He’s done some really interesting work analysing different elements of people’s moral thinking in different parts of the world. For instance, he shows how liberals tend to emphasise rights and justice and conservatives tend to emphasise loyalty, obedience to authority and purity. He uses that analysis to explain why, in the culture wars in the US, liberals and conservatives are often talking past one another. For liberals, gay marriage is simply a rights issue. It’s a no-brainer. Of course people should have the right to marry who they want. For conservatives, who are thinking along a different moral axis, homosexuality is sinful, it’s impure, it goes against tradition. One of Haidt’s big contributions is to show just how much more there is to say about morality than we’ve been thinking. He shows a lot of creativity there. Haidt starts out with the traditional philosophy we’ve been talking about. He uses a lot of Eastern as well as Western philosophy. He looks at some of the major insights and chunks of wisdom within these traditions, but then he relates them to contemporary psychological research, and he assesses them in relation to that. He’s willing to criticise them and say, “Well the Buddha and the Stoics and Socrates, they showed a lot of insight here, but we can build on that, and using contemporary psychology we can actually offer a more well-founded guide to how to live a meaningful life, how to be happy and how to be fulfilled.” One of his best chapters is chapter six, where he talks about love. He contrasts passionate love with companionate love. Passionate love is Romeo and Juliet, what we all think of as romantic love. He says that a lot of people want and expect that they fall in love in the paradigmatic romantic way, and that this passionate, romantic high will last for a lifetime. Sometimes people will even make claims like that for their marriage: “I love you just as much and just the same as when we first met.” He says that that’s nonsense. What happens in the case of passionate love is that your brain is flooded with certain kinds of chemicals, and you can’t sustain that for a long time. It’s not even biologically possible. It’s like a drug you get accustomed to, so to expect it to be sustained is a big mistake because you’ll be disappointed. What takes over, though, is companionate love, which takes a very long time to grow. He has a lovely little graph, where passionate love falls off a cliff after a short while, but companionate love grows steadily. It seems to me that this is clearly true to people’s experiences. It makes good use of contemporary psychology and it relates a bit to Stoicism. It’s a matter of being realistic in your expectations about things, and not becoming dissatisfied because things are failing to accord with some impossible ideal. Yes, he says quite early on that antidepressants like Prozac are a solution for some forms of depression, and he criticises people who suggest there is something morally suspect or inferior about them. He says: “No, these drugs can really make a very positive difference to some people.” I thought he was refreshingly blunt and straightforward about that. He actually has a formula for happiness that goes something like genetics + conditions + choices. This is his formula for a realistic approach to trying to achieve the good life. There’s something out of your control, which is your genetic heritage. We’d be foolish to deny that this has something to do with who we are. Psychological research of identical twins shows there’s quite a lot in us which is fixed by genetics. But conditions and choices are things that are more under our control. He talks about how the conditions that you live under affect your happiness – quite small things, sometimes. For instance, he says noise – the incessant noise of living in a city – actually grates on people, and has an adverse effect on their overall sense of wellbeing. He also recommends against long, stressful commutes. Haidt says it’s worth talking about things. He does see a value in talking about adversity. But I do think the books suggest that perhaps you don’t always need to call in experts to provide the key to dealing with life’s problems. To some extent we come equipped with the resources to fend for ourselves, to work things through. And other resources are readily available. Some of these resources can be philosophical: The philosophies that the Stoics offer, that Nietzsche offers, and the insights that Haidt offers. I’m not saying, “Oh, no one ever needs to go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist.” I wouldn’t say that at all. But you’re right that these books are all about having to think about our lives, our basic values, our priorities, and the direction we’re heading in. Also, the ways in which the minutiae of life can affect things. Maybe that is something we tend to overlook. For instance, Haidt points out, I think in this book, that in a relationship it’s a very good thing if you say positive things to each other a few times a day. You could make each other cups of tea, or thank each other for favours rendered. Small things like that actually make a difference. I’m all in favour of what he’s doing, as long as you don’t give up on philosophy or despise philosophy, or say it’s got nothing more to offer. Because philosophy – which is general reflection and clarification of thinking – can open up ideas precisely for people like Haidt to study on a more scientific basis. Philosophy does have a reputation for being difficult and for being abstruse, but one development that’s healthy is that there are a lot of people who are trying to write philosophy in a way that is more accessible without dumbing it down – Alain de Botton, for instance, and Julian Baggini, as well as some of the people who have contributed to The Stone columns in the New York Times . Yes, it can be an informal channel of communication that can prevent misunderstandings."