The Happiness Hypothesis : : Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

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Too much wisdom -- The divided self -- Changing your mind -- Reciprocity with a vengeance -- The faults of others -- The pursuit of happiness -- Love and attachments -- The uses of adversity -- The felicity of virtue -- Divinity with or without God -- Happiness comes from between.

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Appealed to my inner psych major. submitted by eknapp on February 13, 2015, 3:22pm Non-fiction is not my usual milieu, but this was a gift from a family member so here I am.

The author explores the nature of happiness, its properties and sources, with the end-goal of teaching the reader HOW to be happy. He searches for commonalities across ancient writings (Buddha, Confucius, the Bible, Torah, Aristotle, etc) to support his ideas, though in truth these felt superfluous to me. Haidt mostly relies on psychology and philosophy to back his assertions.

The Happiness Hypothesis's big recurring metaphor is that the mind is a rider on an elephant. The rider represents reason and makes conscious decisions. The elephant is instinct, approach-retreat reflexes, and automatic responses to stimuli. The rider has limited control over what the elephant does, which explains why it's so hard to do things we know we should do (eg exercise portion control). Pitting the rider against the elephant in a contest of wills is doomed to eventual failure. To develop good happy-making habits, one must train the elephant over time.


Some interesting concepts:

--Negativity bias--We're wired to assign greater value to loss than equivalent gain.

--The cortical lottery--We're born with a baseline level of happiness.

--The adaptation principle--Events may temporarily raise or lower one's baseline happiness (winning the lottery, losing a limb) but people eventually return to their baseline level.

--Reciprocity--We're built to reward those who are good to us and punish those that harm us, which incentivizes cooperative, mutually beneficial behavior. Sales techniques are designed to exploit this instinct.

--Motivated reasoning--If we can find evidence that supports the conclusion we want, we tend at that point to stop thinking critically.

--External factors--A few external factors that are shown to systematically affect happiness are noise (especially variable or intermittent), commute (shorter commutes increase happiness even when this means having a smaller home), lack of control (even the illusion of control increases happiness), shame (eg, body image), and especially relationships (strength and number).

--Conspicuous consumption--Evolutionarily advantageous (attracts more/better mates) but it demonstrably reduces happiness.

--The two types of love--As defined by the author. Passionate and companionate. The latter correlates to greater long-term happiness.


At this point the book kind of lost me, as it veered into an examination of divinity, transcendence, religion and purity and virtues that vary from culture to culture. Squishy, ill-defined, and often undesirable stuff. I found the earlier psychology studies and experiments to be more interesting and relevant.

The Happiness Hypothesis, boiled down: strong, numerous relationships create happiness; acknowledging one's own flaws and hypocrisies leads to growth and improved relationships; meditation can help; and dispense with conspicuous consumption.