Happiness Hypothesis

Understand your disposition as both an elephant and a rider.

Our default state of happiness is largely in our genes – upwards of 50% of our general disposition. We make snap decisions about the world (the elephant) and only afterward rationalize those instincts (the rider). We can learn and train ourselves to reduce and adapt to these patterns, but only to lessen their impact.

That’s one of the big themes around happiness that appears in Happiness Hypothesis, the 2006 positive psychology book from Jonathan Haidt. Though 15 years old, it’s part of a library of positive psychology books that I’ve been making my way through. It still offers a good foundation, and so I recommend it. (I also recommend the Happiness Equation, and this essay)

“Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire or achieve directly,” Haidt writes, pulling from extensive research. “You have to get the conditions right and then wait“

Those right conditions for happiness are love, the right goals for flow and engagement. Happiness doesn’t only come from within, then, and certainly not only from without but from between. He even shares his Happiness formula: H Happiness = S (Set Point, genes or temperature range) + C (conditions of life that can’t change as easily) + V (voluntary activities we do)

Below find my extensive notes for my research purposes in the future.

Here are my notes:

• Shakespeare in Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”
• Ben Franklin. “If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.”
• Author explains Freud’s Ego, superego and ID with a simile, like a horse and buggy: ego is the driver; Id is the difficult horse and superego is the driver’s father lecturing from the carriage. For Freud, psychoanalysis was to strengthen the ego
• In 2000, a 40-year-old man turned to pedophila after a large tumor put pressure on his impulse control. Who was in control?
• Dan Wegner’s controlled processes: “Don’t think of a white bear!” teaches that we have both automatic and controlled processed. One automatic process we have is programed to check in for our reward center . Saying “don’t think of XYZ” creates a loop in which our automatic system keeps checking.
• Our brain is like a rider and an elephant. We train to be better riders. We can make up reasons we think a painting is pretty but we really don’t know
• In moral arguments, the elephant gives an automatic instinct and then our rider makes up reasons to defend us after the fact.
• “The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it.” That is a quote from Marcus Aurelius, and in 1944 Dale Carnegie wrote the last eight words “are “eight words that can transform your life.”
• Boethius: “No man can ever be secure until he has been forsaken by fortune“
• Marcus Aurelius said “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it”
• Boethius wrote “The Consolation of Philosophy” after being stripped, jailed (and eventually executed) to become an early Christian martyr
• Affective priming: preexisting beliefs influence our instinctual response to something new
• Clinical psychologists joke that all patients come either for “tightening or loosening”
• Bret Pelham: what our name sounds like really does influence where we live, what our career is and who we marry. For example, people named Dennis really are more likely to become dentist
• Ben Franklin “ we are not so sensible of the greatest health as of the least sickness”
• Your behavior is governed by both approach system and a withdrawal system
• The amgdala can intercept information for the thalamus to note fear (sudden shocks) but no similar for joy. (We’ll jump at a scary sound but won’t instinctually love)
• Twin studies show that 50-80% of variance in average happiness comes from genes not life experience. This is our affective style.
• Cortical left or right activity predicts happiness levels as young as age 10 months p;d
• John Milton: Heaven a hell, hell a heaven
• Aaron Beck from Penn was trained in Freudian philosophy (underpinned by “the child is father of the man” concept coined by Wordsworth) but Beck departed to find cognitive therapy
• The cognitive triad of depression: “I’m no good “my world is bleak “and “my future is hopeless” (Beck)
• With these tendencies people will often follow three traps called “personalization “, overgeneralization and magnification ( it’s my fault, I always do this and it’s all ruined now)
• Marcel Proust wrote that “the only true voyage… Would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes”
• Prozac is an effective shortcut to cognitive therapy (but we don’t like these implications!)
• Peter Kramer “ cosmetic psychopharmacology“
• Flight evolved three times: insects, dinosaurs (birds today) and mammals (bats)
• Ultra-sociality evolved four times: Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps); termites; naked mole rats and humans
• Kin altruism (your siblings and kids have half your genes; Nephews and nieces one quarter ; cousins one-eighth)
• Other animals have versions of extended family tribe (ie queen bees and sterile ants), humans use faux kinship (call your neighbor an uncle)
• Ultimate game with $20 bills
• Human brains are so big that in a mammalian sense we are born prematurely
• Dunbar’s natural number of 100-150 argues mammalian brains grow larger the more complex social groups, language evolved as replacement for physical grooming. Language evolved to create gossip
• Gossip and information is a non zero sum game
• Holly Hom research on gossip: 1 in 10 pieces of gossip is about good deeds rather than misdeeds
• Robert Cialdani sales tips: reciprocity and concession
• Deanna Kuhn: we present pseudo evidence for our gut feelings
• Motivated reasoning: we work harder to discredit what conflicts with our beliefs than that we agree with
• Unconscious overclaiming: The average married couple estimates their housework at 120%
• Epley and Dunning: we learn more about the world to correctly predict others behaviors but not ours
• Naive realism: everyone misunderstands the world except us
• Clifford Geertz: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”
• Either god is not all good or not all powerful’ answered in three ways: Dualism Manichaeism; Monism Evil is illusion and Christian mix
• Epicetetus: “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen”
• Richard Davidson:, pre-goal and post-goal attainment positive effect. The first can last throughout and offers the most joy but the latter is short lived. (ie. Dreaming about and planning a hiking trip is the first and the end of the hike is the latter)
• “The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than the relief of taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike” 84
• This is Progress principle, or as Shakespeare put it: “ things won are done, joy’s soul lies in the doing”
• The human body is sensitive to changes, not absolute levels. A year after winning the lottery and becoming paralyzed, most of us return to near baseline levels
• Our genes impact us and we return to a steady state so we are on a “hedonic treadmill”
• Happy people get and stay married, it is “reverse correlation” (it’s not explicitly that marriage makes you happier but happier people marry and stay married because they’re more attractive to each other
• As the country got richer, we haven’t gotten happier. Happiness is mostly within
• Big 1990s happiness research findings: happiness has strong relation to genes and weak relation to environment
• Martin Siegelmam positive psychology taught us that it’s as if we start with a temperate range of negative-positive but there are external factors that can bring us to different parts of our range
• Happiness formula: H Happiness = S (Set Point, genes or temperature range) + C (conditions of life that can’t change as easily) + V (voluntary activities we do)
• Conditions that affect us: noise, commute (we get used to a bigger house but not a worse commute), lack of control, shame (breast enlargement surgery actually does help happiness), and relationships (this trumps all others; “you never adapt to interpersonal conflict”)
• Wealth, prestige and beauty are classic pursuits that do not produce happiness (beyond a basic level that avoids shame)
• The other cofounder of positive psychology Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “cheeks sent me high”) found the “flow state” is another simpler happiness we like even more than physical /bodily pleasure.
• Siegelman calls these pleasures (food/sex) and gratifications (losing self consciousness and lead to flow)
• The key to finding your gratifications is to know your own strengths: Find your strengths at authentichappiness.org
• Robert Frank: “Those who say money can’t buy happiness don’t know where to shop.” (I am reminded of this study, as tweeted here, which challenges this one I wrote about)
• Van Boven and Gilovich showed experiences with people worth more than possessions to impress people
• “The elephant cares about prestige not happiness“
• Barry Schwartz “paradox of choice”: Satisfiers benefit from choice but maximizes do mot
• Buddhas stoicism and no attachment made sense in a chaotic earlier world but in rich countries we do have more control. Now as Robert Solomon has argued philosophy of non-attachment is an affront To human nature
• Ainsworth: secure, avoidant and resistant model for children that Hazan/Shaver mapped to romantic love
• Adult relationships build on two systems: attachment system (child to mother) and care-giving system (mother to child). Mating system is separate and involved distinctive brain areas and hormones
• Why do human males enter long-term relationships with female unlike any other male mammal group? One theory goes that in order to produce ever larger human brains, human females evolved to produce and give birth to babies whose brains would spend many additional years developing than other mammals, and so required more intensive caregiving, which required hunting, protection and support from males. Genes would benefit if they contributed (122) Then evolution combined the parental attachment system to the mating system
• 12th century French troubadours may have invented “true” love but of 166 human cultures reviewed, 88% had a form of romantic love (and the rest were not understood enough from their fossil record to be sure) No known human culture lacked romantic love, the mix of adult and male to children relations
• Berscheid and Walster: passionate and compassionate love. Passionate doesn’t turn to compassionate, they are different (see phone screenshot for timeline on Aug 20, 2022); Rush into things too fast or bail when it first gets hard and you could miss out
• Many social relationships will extend your life more than quitting smoking
• What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger: Nietsche
• As Paul said in his letter to the Romans 5:3–4 “suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character and character produces hope”
• Adversity helps in three ways so long as it doesn’t cause PTSD: we learn our own abilities, we strengthen relationships and we change our priorities
• Psychologist Dan McAdams says there are three levels of personality.
  • The first and deepest or lowest is the “basic traits, which refers to the big five of neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness conscientiousness.
  • The second level of personality is the characteristic adaptations, including values beliefs coping mechanisms and goals and life stages like parenthood.
  • The third level of personality is the “life story. if the basic traits are the elephant of our metaphor than the life story is the rider. The life story is not the workmen Astorian but more like historical fiction built on references to real events (143) Adversity helps strengthen the last category
• Robert Emmons argues that characteristic adaptations can be sorted in four categories: work and achievement, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality and generativity or leaving a legacy.
• Ken Sheldon and Tim Kassar show that the people who are mentally healthy and happy have a higher degree of “vertical coherence“ among their goals, meaning long-term goals and more immediate goals fit together so that the advancing of one benefits the other (145)
• Pennebaker shows writing / speaking about trauma helps because we develop a story about our experiences
• Memory bump comes aged 15-25 for formative years, far fewer early memories
• Glen Elder says adversity is best from teens to twenties. Older gets harder
• Marcel Proust wrote “we do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for selves, after a journey to the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom at the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world”
• Sternberg’s “tacit knowledge” is knowing “how” rather than knowing “that,” and it comes from experience
• Adversity then is maximally beneficial when it happened in the right time (young adulthood) to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to the challenge and to find the benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to cause PTSD)
• Instruction of Amenemope is a 3,000-year-old Egyptian book of advice that influenced the Christian bible; like many old books it relies on role models and pithy maxims
• Franklin’s autobiography and Buddha 8-fold path both show a sophisticated understanding of the need to use habit to train both rider and elephant. That’s why you can just give advice but need to experience it. Rider can hear, elephant must learn
• Kant (his deontologist tribe must follow universal rules): “categorical imperative” then questioned by Bentham (consequentialists): maximize total benefit, or utility. Kant can’t kill 1 person to save 100, but Bentham can. Kant influenced law that respected individual rights and Bentham’s maximum Joy
• Author argues those two above brought Western thought away from what person to be and more focused on what actions to take, or “moral quandaries,” from character ethics to moral reasoning. Author argues this weakens morality and limits its scope. This is a more narrow view of virtue (16)4
• “Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them the reason well it’s like trying to make a dog happy by wagging his tail. It gets causality backwards” 165
• Positive psychology’s DSM answer started with list of virtues across most cultures: courage; humanity; justice; temperance and transcendence, or the ability to connect to something larger
• One argument: focus on your strengths more than weaknesses (ie in resolutions)
• Virtue should be considered our excellences we cultivate
• Jean Piaget showed “immanent justice” in children (follow immediately from bad behavior)
• Kin altruism and reciprocal altruism.
• Does altruism pay for the altruist?
• Alice Isen dropped dimes in Philadelphia pay phones to show happy people are nicer
• Durkheim anomie: “normlessness” is the breakdown and blurring of societal norms which regulate individual conduct (like social web!!)
• Diversity got its modern usage after 1978 UC Regrnts v Bakke
• Two kinds of diversity: demographic and moral. Everyone wants demographic diversity but author argues no one wants moral diversity. If we think it’s a moral issue we want our side to be right (ie abortion), If you want diversity of opinion it’s “a matter of taste” not moral, author writes . Author argues conservatives may be right to tell an American story (e Pluribus unum) because happiness research shows we want that (178)
• Disgust is a biological adaption that is co-opted by cultures to promote our norms
• Richard Shweder’s “big three” of autonomy, community and divinity: The ethic of autonomy, the ethics of community and the ethic of divinity
• Emerson wrote “He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity”
• Author argues that in addition to the “ two dimensions “ of closeness (kin or stranger) and hierarchy, there is a third dimension of divinity that non religious folks struggle to describe but still feel
• Micrea Eliasde, in the book The Sacred and Profane, argues the modern West is the first culture in human history that stripped away the difference between the sacred and the profane
• Author argues even atheists keep holy places and things: books and locations of importance that have a reverence
• Author researches what he calls “elevation,” a feeling something like opposite of disgust when seeing good deeds
• Elevation opens to bonding (not action like new good deeds)
• Kant: The two causes of genuine awe are “the starry sky above and the moral law within”
• Walter Pahnke psychedelics and Good Friday service
• Abraham Maslow collected “peak experiences “in his small book Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences
• Maslow did not believe religions were literally true but he did think religions were translating real experiences. He thought it should be part of reform education system: “education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society”
• Lorraine Dustin and Kathryn Park, who are historians of science, argue that in the late 16 century European citizen scientists viewed wonder as childish and started our division of labor between rigid facts and science and wondered in the humanities
• Liberals tend to focus on ethic of autonomy while conservatives use all three especially the ethics of the divinity and the ethics of community
• “I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.“ Ecclesiastes 1:14
• When we ask the holy question “what is the meaning of life” we really are asking “tell me something enlightening about life” which has two important sb questions: “what is the purpose of life” and “how do I find purpose within life?” (218)
• The right conditions of happiness: love, the right goals for flow and engagement
• Tolstoy wrote “one can live magnificently in this world if that one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and love ones work”
• Harvard’s Robert White: people strive to “make things happen” what he called the “effectance motive”
• Marx hated that the industrial revolution had separated craftsman and the goods they produced.
• In 1964 the sociologists Melvin Kohn and Carmi Schooler found the most satisfied workers are those with “occupational self direction”
• Difference in job, career or calling
• The author argues that happiness doesn’t only come from within and certainly not from without but from between
• Howard Gardner and William Damon interviewed geneticists and journalists in the 1990: and found a healthy industry is one with alignment between doing good (high quality) and doing well (well paid)
• Genetics is “coherent”
• Physical, psychological and sociocultural : coherence is when we have them together
• Darwin argued we co-evolved as groups so morality helped form tribes. Free rider problem solved with “selfish altruism “ thru kin altruism and reciprocal altruism so evolutionary theorists didn’t think we evolved with groups . But David Sloan Wilson argues we evolve both genetically and culturally , competing both within as individually and competition between groups
• It takes 20 generations of selective breeding to create differences in appearance and behavior, like Indian caste system creating not just occupation but race differences
• Religion: Maybe created developed for social cohesion (before nation states)
• William McNeil In “Keeping Together in Time” builds on his military drill marching
• “Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait“