The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt Flashcards
(276 cards)
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Wisdom is now so cheap and abundant that it floods over us from calendar pages, tea bags, bottle caps,.
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Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. ”1.
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Helping people find happiness and meaning is precisely the goal of the new field of positive psychology,2.
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The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does.
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Shakespeare’s, about how “thinking makes it so. ” (Or, as Buddha4 said, “Our life is the creation of our mind. ”) But we can improve this ancient idea today by explaining why most people’s minds have a bias toward seeing threats and engaging in useless worry.
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Reciprocity is the most important tool for getting along with people,.
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One is that happiness comes from getting what you want, but we all know (and research confirms) that such happiness is short-lived. A more promising hypothesis is that happiness comes from within and cannot be obtained by making the world conform to your desires.
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Changing your mind is usually a more effective response to frustration than is changing the world.
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For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. —ST. PAUL, GALATIANS 5:171.
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If Passion drives, let Reason hold the Reins. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.
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Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know. 3.
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Buddha, for example, compared the mind to a wild elephant: In days gone by this mind of mine used to stray wherever selfish desire or lust or pleasure would lead it. Today this mind does not stray and is under the harmony of control, even as a wild elephant is controlled by the trainer. 4.
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Sigmund Freud offered us a related model 2,300 years later. 6 Freud said that the mind is divided into three parts: the ego (the conscious, rational self); the superego (the conscience, a sometimes too rigid commitment to the rules of society); and the id (the desire for pleasure, lots of it, sooner rather than later).
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The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) 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.
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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.
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The last third of the century: Social psychologists created “information processing” theories to explain everything from prejudice to friendship. Economists created “rational choice” models to explain why people do what they do. The social sciences were uniting under the idea that people are rational agents who set goals and pursue them intelligently by using the information and resources at their disposal.
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I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong. 7.
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I was a rider on the back of an elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.
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Trying to improve the workings of the head brain can directly interfere with those of the gut brain.
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Ancient Indian theories in which the abdomen contains the three lower chakras—energy centers corresponding to the colon/anus, sexual organs, and gut.
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The corpus callosum is the largest single bundle of nerves in the entire body, so it must be doing something important. Indeed it is: It allows the two halves of the brain to communicate and coordinate their activity.
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The brain divides its processing of the world into its two hemispheres—left and right. 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 sends out commands to move the limbs on the right side of the body.
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The left hemisphere is specialized for language processing and analytical tasks. In visual tasks, it is better at noticing details. The right hemisphere is better at processing patterns in space, including that all-important pattern, the face. (This is the origin of popular and oversimplified ideas about artists being “right-brained” and scientists being “left-brained”).
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These dramatic splits of the mind are caused by rare splits of the brain. Normal people are not split-brained. Yet the split-brain studies were important in psychology because they showed in such an eerie way that the mind is a confederation of modules capable of working independently and even, sometimes, at cross-purposes.
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Gazzaniga’s “interpreter module” is, essentially, the rider.
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Perhaps the frontal cortex is the seat of reason: It is Plato’s charioteer; it is St. Paul’s Spirit. And it has taken over control, though not perfectly, from the more primitive limbic system—Plato’s bad horse, St. Paul’s flesh.
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The limbic system underlies many of our basic animal instincts. 14.
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When people suffer damage to the frontal cortex, they sometimes show an increase in sexual and aggressive behavior because the frontal cortex plays an important role in suppressing or inhibiting behavioral impulses.
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A brain scan found that an enormous tumor in his frontal cortex was squeezing everything else, preventing the frontal cortex from doing its job of inhibiting inappropriate behavior and thinking about consequences.
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In fact, the frontal cortex enabled a great expansion of emotionality in humans. The lower third of the prefrontal cortex is called the orbitofrontal cortex because it is the part of the brain just above the eyes (orbit is the Latin term for the eye socket). This region of the cortex has grown especially large in humans and other primates and is one of the most consistently active areas of the brain during emotional reactions. 16.
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The orbitofrontal cortex therefore appears to be a better candidate for the id, or for St. Paul’s flesh, than for the superego or the Spirit.
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When they look out at the world and think, “What should I do now?” they see dozens of choices but lack immediate internal feelings of like or dislike. They must examine the pros and cons of every choice with their reasoning, but in the absence of feeling they see little reason to pick one or the other.
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Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains works so well that our reasoning can work at all.
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Reason and emotion must both work together to create intelligent behavior, but emotion (a major part of the elephant) does most of the work. When the neocortex came along, it made the rider possible, but it made the elephant much smarter, too.
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There are really two processing systems at work in the mind at all times: controlled processes and automatic processes.
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If half the sentences you unscrambled contained words related to rudeness (such as bother, brazen, aggressively), you will probably interrupt the experimenter within a minute or two to say, “Hey, I’m finished. What should I do now?” But if you unscrambled sentences in which the rude words were swapped with words related to politeness (“they her respect see usually”), the odds are you’ll just sit there meekly and wait until the experimenter acknowledges you—ten minutes from now.
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Some part of the mind does see the words, and it sets in motion behaviors that psychologists can measure.
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Controlled processing is limited—we can think consciously 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.
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Controlled processing requires language. You can have bits and pieces of thought through images, but to plan something complex, to weigh the pros and cons of different paths, or to analyze the causes of past successes and failures, you need words.
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Nobody knows how long ago human beings developed language, but most estimates range from around 2 million years ago, when hominid brains became much bigger, to as recently as 40,000 years ago, the time of cave paintings and other artifacts that reveal unmistakably modern human minds. 23.
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Automatic processes, on the other hand, have been through thousands of product cycles and are nearly perfect.
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Evolution never looks ahead. It can’t plan the best way to travel from point A to point B. Instead, small changes to existing forms arise (by genetic mutation), and spread within a population to the extent that they help organisms respond more effectively to current conditions.
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The rider evolved to serve to the elephant.
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It is no accident that we find the carnal pleasures so rewarding. Our brains, like rat brains, are wired so that food and sex give us little bursts of dopamine,.
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The automatic system has its finger on the dopamine release button. The controlled system, in contrast, is better seen as an advisor. It’s a rider placed on the elephant’s back to help the elephant make better choices.
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The rider can see farther into the future, and the rider can learn valuable information by talking to other riders or by reading maps, but the rider cannot order the elephant around against its will.
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Scottish philosopher David Hume was closer to the truth than was Plato when he said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. ”26.
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In sum, the rider is an advisor or servant; not a king, president, or charioteer with a firm grip on the reins.
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The elephant and the rider each have their own intelligence, and when they work together well they enable the unique brilliance of human beings. But they don’t always work together well.
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Mischel discovers that the number of seconds you waited to ring the bell in 1970 predicts not only what your parents say about you as a teenager but also the likelihood that you were admitted to a top university. Children who were able to overcome stimulus control and delay gratification for a few extra minutes in 1970 were better able to resist temptation as teenagers, to focus on their studies, and to control themselves when things didn’t go the way they wanted. 27.
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A large part of it was strategy—the ways that children used their limited mental control to shift attention. In later studies, Mischel discovered that the successful children were those who looked away from the temptation or were able to think about other enjoyable activities. 28 These thinking skills are an aspect of emotional intelligence—an ability to understand and regulate one’s own feelings and desires. 29.
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An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills.
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It’s hard for the controlled system to beat the automatic system by willpower alone; like a tired muscle,30 the former soon wears down and caves in, but the latter runs automatically, effortlessly, and endlessly.
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Buddhism, for example, in an effort to break people’s carnal attachment to their own (and others’) flesh, developed methods of meditating on decaying corpses. 31 By choosing to stare at something that revolts the automatic system, the rider can begin to change what the elephant will want in the future.
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The imp works hard to suggest the most inappropriate things I could possibly say.
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The moment one stops trying to suppress a thought, the thought comes flooding in and becomes even harder to banish. In other words, Wegner creates minor obsessions in his lab by instructing people not to obsess. Wegner explains this effect as an “ironic process” of mental control. 32.
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When controlled processing tries to influence thought (“Don’t think about a white bear!”), it sets up an explicit goal. And whenever one pursues a goal, a part of the mind automatically monitors progress,.
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But because controlled processes tire quickly, eventually the inexhaustible automatic processes run unopposed, conjuring up herds of white bears. Thus, the attempt to remove an unpleasant thought can guarantee it a place on your frequent-play list of mental ruminations.
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Automatic processes generate thousands of thoughts and images every day, often through random association. The ones that get stuck are the ones that particularly shock us, the ones we try to suppress or deny. The reason we suppress them is not that we know, deep down, that they’re true (although some may be), but that they are scary or shameful. Yet once we have tried and failed to suppress them, they can become the sorts of obsessive thoughts that make us believe in.
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If you listen closely to moral arguments, you can sometimes hear something surprising: that it is really the elephant holding the reins, guiding the rider. It is the elephant who decides what is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Gut feelings, intuitions, and snap judgments happen constantly and automatically.
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The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it. —MARCUS AURELIUS1.
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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. —BUDDHA2.
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Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.
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Dale Carnegie, writing in 1944, called the last eight words of the Aurelius quote “eight words that can transform your life. ”3.
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Often a moment comes when a person consumed by years of resentment, pain, and anger realizes that her father (for example) didn’t directly hurt her when he abandoned the family; all he did was move out of the house. His action was morally wrong, but the pain came from her reactions to the event, and if she can change those reactions, she can leave behind twenty years of pain and perhaps even get to know her father.
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“Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it. ”7.
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Epiphanies can be life-altering,8 but most fade in days or weeks. The rider can’t just decide to change and then order the elephant to go along with the program. Lasting change can come only by retraining the elephant, and that’s hard to do.
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When pop psychology programs are successful in helping people, which they sometimes are, they succeed not because of the initial moment of insight but because they find ways to alter people’s behavior over the following months. They keep people involved with the program long enough to retrain the elephant.
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The most important words in the elephant’s language are “like” and “dislike,” or “approach” and “withdraw. ”.
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Your negative evaluation of boredom has been facilitated, or “primed,” by your tiny flash of negativity toward fear. If, however, the word following fear is garden, you would take longer to say that garden is good, because of the time it takes for your like-o-meter to shift from bad to good. 9 The discovery of affective priming.
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Researchers have found that Americans of all ages, classes, and political affiliations react with a flash of negativity to black faces or to other images and words associated with African-American culture. 10.
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(You can test your own elephant at: www. Projectimplicit. Com. ) Even many African Americans show this implicit prejudice,.
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Brett Pelham,11 who has discovered that one’s like-o-meter is triggered by one’s own name.
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Whenever you see or hear a word that resembles your name, a little flash of pleasure biases you toward thinking the thing is good.
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People named Dennis or Denise are slightly more likely than people with other names to become dentists. Men named Lawrence and women named Laurie are more likely to become lawyers.
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People are slightly more likely to marry people whose names sound like their own, even if the similarity is just sharing a first initial.
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The unsettling implication of Pelham’s work is that the three biggest decisions most of us make—what to do with our lives, where to live, and whom to marry—can all be influenced (even if only slightly) by something as trivial as the sound of a name.
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Clinical psychologists sometimes say that two kinds of people seek therapy: those who need tightening, and those who need loosening.
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For most people, the elephant sees too many things as bad and not enough as good.
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The cost of missing the sign of a nearby predator, however, can be catastrophic. Game over, end of the line for those genes.
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Bad is stronger than good. Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures. This principle, called “negativity bias,”13.
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It takes at least five good or constructive actions to make up for the damage done by one critical or destructive act. 14.
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Design principle of animal life: Opposing systems push against each other to reach a balance point, but the balance point is adjustable.
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The sympathetic system prepares your body for “fight or flight” and the parasympathetic system calms you down.
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One reason the withdrawal system is so quick and compelling is that it gets first crack at all incoming information. All neural impulses from the eyes and ears go first to the thalamus, a kind of central switching station in the brain. From the thalamus, neural impulses are sent out to special sensory processing areas in the cortex; and from those areas, information is relayed to the frontal cortex, where it is integrated with other higher mental processes and your ongoing stream of consciousness.
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But because neural impulses move only at about thirty meters per second, this fairly long path, including decision time, could easily take a second or two. It’s easy to see why a neural shortcut would be advantageous, and the amygdala is that shortcut.
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Bad is stronger and faster than good. The elephant reacts before the rider even sees the snake on the path.
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The amygdala: Not only does it reach down to the brainstem to trigger a response to danger but it reaches up to the frontal cortex to change your thinking. It shifts the entire brain over to a withdrawal orientation.
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Genes make at least some contribution to nearly every trait.
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Genes are not blueprints specifying the structure of a person; they are better thought of as recipes for producing a person over many years. 26.
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Happiness is one of the most highly heritable aspects of personality. Twin studies generally show that from 50 percent to 80 percent of all the variance among people in their average levels of happiness can be explained by differences in their genes rather than in their life experiences. 28.
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A person’s average or typical level of happiness is that person’s “affective style. ” (“Affect” refers to the felt or experienced part of emotion. ) Your affective style reflects the everyday balance of power between your approach system and your withdrawal system,.
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You can change your affective style too—but again, you can’t do it by sheer force of will. You have to do something that will change your repertoire of available thoughts. Here are three of the best methods for doing so: meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac. All three are effective because they work on the elephant.
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The goal of meditation is to change automatic thought processes, thereby taming the elephant.
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Disrespect hurts more on average than respect feels good.
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For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing.
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Buddha said: “When a man knows the solitude of silence, and feels the joy of quietness, he is then free from fear and sin. ”35.
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He mapped out the distorted thought processes characteristic of depressed people and trained his patients to catch and challenge these thoughts.
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Cognitive therapy,36 one of the most effective treatments available for depression, anxiety, and many other problems.
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We often use reasoning not to find the truth but to invent arguments to support our deep and intuitive beliefs (residing in the elephant).
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Depressed people are convinced in their hearts of three related beliefs, known as Beck’s “cognitive triad” of depression. These are: “I’m no good,” “My world is bleak,” and “My future is hopeless. ”.
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Depressed people are caught in a feedback loop in which distorted thoughts cause negative feelings, which then distort thinking further.
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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.
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Cognitive therapy works because it teaches the rider how to train the elephant rather than how to defeat it directly in an argument.
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You can’t win a tug of war with an angry or fearful elephant, but you can—by gradual shaping of the sort the behaviorists talked about—change your automatic thoughts and, in the process, your affective style.
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Many therapists combine cognitive therapy with techniques borrowed directly from behaviorism to create what is now called “cognitive behavioral therapy. ”.
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If you have frequent automatic negative thoughts about yourself, your world, or your future, and if these thoughts contribute to chronic feelings of anxiety or despair, then you might find a good fit with cognitive behavioral therapy. 40.
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Prozac was the first member of a class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.
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Prozac gets into the synapses (the gaps between neurons), but it is selective in affecting only synapses that use serotonin as their neurotransmitter. 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 often.
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Prozac turns out to be just about as effective as cognitive therapy—sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less—but it’s so much easier than therapy.
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Kramer coined the term “cosmetic psychopharmacology,” for Prozac seemed to promise that psychiatrists could shape and perfect minds just as plastic surgeons shape and perfect bodies.
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Which of these two phrases rings truest to you: “Be all that you can be” or “This above all, to thine own self be true. ”.
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Horror fascinates me, particularly when there is no victim.
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My research indicates that a small set of innate moral intuitions guide and constrain the world’s many moralities,.
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Something is indeed lost when psychiatrists no longer listen to their patients as people, but rather as a car mechanic would listen to an engine, looking only for clues about which knob to adjust next.
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Once you know why change is so hard, you can drop the brute force method and take a more psychologically sophisticated approach to self-improvement.
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Zigong asked: “Is there any single word that could guide one’s entire life?” The master said: “Should it not be reciprocity? What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others. ” —ANALECTS OF CONFUCIUS1.
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That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; this, in a few words, is the entire Torah; all the rest is but an elaboration of this one, central point. —RABBI HILLEL, 1ST CENT. BCE2.
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Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life.
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Animals that live in large peaceful societies seem to violate the laws of evolution (such as competition and survival of the fittest), but only until you learn a bit more about evolution. Ultrasociality4—living in large cooperative societies in which hundreds or thousands of individuals reap the benefits of an extensive division of labor—evolved independently at least four times in the animal kingdom: among hymenoptera (ants, bees, and wasps); termites; naked mole rats; and humans.
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For all the nonhuman ultrasocial species, that feature was the genetics of kin altruism.
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The only way to “win” at the game of evolution is to leave surviving copies of your genes. Yet not just your children carry copies of your genes. Your siblings are just as closely related to you (50 percent shared genes) as your children; your nephews and nieces share a quarter of your genes, and your cousins one eighth. In a strictly Darwinian calculation, whatever cost you would… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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Shared genes equals shared… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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Kin altruism explains only how groups of a few dozen, or perhaps a hundred, animals can work together. Out of a flock of thousands, only a small percentage would be close enough to be worth taking risks for. The rest would be competitors, in the Darwinian sense. Here’s where the ancestors of bees, termites, and mole rats took the common mechanism of kin altruism, which makes many species sociable, and parlayed it6 into the foundation of their uncommon ultrasociality: They are all siblings. Those species each evolved a reproduction system in which a single queen produces all the children, and nearly all the children are… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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If everyone around you is your sibling, and if the survival of your genes depends on the survival of your queen, selfishness becomes genetic suicide. These ultrasocial species display levels of cooperation and… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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Some ants, for example, spend their lives hanging from the top of a tunnel, offering their abdomens for use as food… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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The ultrasocial animals evolved into a state of ultrakinship, which led… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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We humans also try to extend the reach of kin altruism by using fictitious kinship names for nonrelatives, as when children are encouraged to call their parents’ friends Uncle Bob and Aunt Sarah. Indeed, the mafia is known as “the family,” and the very idea of a godfather… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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The human mind finds kinship deeply appealing, and kin altruism surely underlies the… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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What would you do if you received a Christmas card from a complete stranger? This actually happened in a study in which a psychologist sent Christmas cards to people at random. … Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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Influence,9 Robert… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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People have a mindless, automatic reciprocity reflex. Like other animals, we will perform certain behaviors when the world presents… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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Cialdini sees human reciprocity as a similar ethological reflex: a person receives a favor from an acquaintance and wants to repay the favor. The person will even repay an empty favor from a stranger,… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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Play tit for tat. Do to others what they do unto you. Specifically, the tit-for-tat strategy is to be nice on the first round of interaction; but after that, do to your partner whatever… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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Tit for tat takes us way beyond kin altruism. It opens the possibility of forming cooperative relationships with strangers. Most interactions among animals (other than close kin) are zero-sum games: One animal’s gain is the other’s loss. But life is full of situations in which cooperation would expand the pie… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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Vampire bats, for example, will regurgitate blood from a successful night of bloodsucking into the mouth of an unsuccessful and genetically unrelated peer. Such behavior seems to violate the spirit of Darwinian competition, except that the bats keep track of who has helped… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
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Vengeance and gratitude are moral sentiments that amplify and enforce tit for tat. Vengeful and grateful feelings appear to have evolved precisely because they are such useful tools for helping individuals create cooperative relationships, thereby reaping the gains from non-zero-sum games. 13.
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A species equipped with vengeance and gratitude responses can support larger and more cooperative social groups because the payoff to cheaters is reduced by the costs they bear in making enemies. 14 Conversely, the benefits of generosity are increased because one gains friends.
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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, and eye for eye.
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But the economists were wrong about you both. In real life, nobody offers one dollar, and around half of all people offer ten dollars. But what would you do if your partner offered you seven dollars? Or five? Or three? Most people would accept the seven dollars, but not the three. Most people are willing to pay a few dollars, but not seven, to punish the selfish partner.
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What parts of the brain were more active when people were given unfair offers. One of the three areas that differed most (when comparing responses to unfair vs. Fair offers) was the frontal insula, an area of the cortex on the frontal underside of the brain. The frontal insula is known to be active during most negative or unpleasant emotional states, particularly anger and disgust. Another area was the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, just behind the sides of the forehead, known to be active during reasoning and calculation.
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Gratitude and vengefulness are big steps on the road that led to human ultrasociality,.
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An individual who had gratitude without vengefulness would be an easy mark for exploitation, and a vengeful and ungrateful individual would quickly alienate all potential cooperative partners.
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Gossip is another key piece in the puzzle of how humans became ultrasocial. It might also be the reason we have such large heads.
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Human brains grow so large that human beings must be born prematurely18.
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Maps brain size onto social group size. Robin Dunbar19 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.
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All over the animal kingdom, brains grow to manage larger and larger groups. Social animals are smart animals.
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100 to 150 is the “natural” group size within which people can know just about everyone directly, by name and face, and know how each person is related to everybody else.
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Dunbar suggests that language evolved as a replacement for physical grooming. 20 Language allows small groups of people to bond quickly and to learn from each other about the bonds of others. Dunbar notes that people do in fact use language primarily to talk about other people—to.
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In our ultrasocial species, success is largely a matter of playing the social game well. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. In short, Dunbar proposes that language evolved because it enabled gossip.
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Dunbar’s point: We are motivated to pass on information to our friends;.
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Your friend’s reciprocity reflex kicks in and she feels a slight pressure to return the favor.
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Gossip elicits gossip, and it enables us to keep track of everyone’s reputation without having to witness their good and bad deeds personally. Gossip creates a non-zero-sum game because it costs us nothing to give each other information, yet we both benefit by receiving information.
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Gossip is overwhelmingly critical, and it is primarily about the moral and social violations of others.
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People do occasionally tell stories about the good deeds of others, but such stories are only one tenth as common as stories about transgressions.
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When people pass along high-quality (“juicy”) gossip, they feel more powerful, they have a better shared sense of what is right and what’s wrong, and they feel more closely connected to their gossip partners.
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A second study revealed that most people hold negative views of gossip and gossipers, even though almost everyone gossips.
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In a gossipy world, we don’t just feel vengeance and gratitude toward those who hurt or help us; we feel pale but still instructive flashes of contempt and anger toward people whom we might not even know.
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Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance. 22.
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Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the value of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.
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As long as everyone plays tit-for-tat augmented by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully. (It rarely does, however, because of our self-serving biases and massive hypocrisy.
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Reciprocity is like a magic wand that can clear your way through the jungle of social life.
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Robert Cialdini spent years studying the dark arts of social influence:.
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Cialdini describes six principles that salespeople use against us, but the most basic of all is reciprocity.
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If you get something for nothing, part of you may be pleased, but part of you (part of the elephant—automatic processes) moves your hand to your wallet to give something back.
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Students were first asked whether they would volunteer to work for two hours a week for two years with juvenile delinquents. All said no, but when the experimenter then asked about the day trip to the zoo, 50 percent said yes. 26 Concession leads to concession.
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In financial bargaining, too, people who stake out an extreme first position and then move toward the middle end up doing better than those who state a more reasonable first position and then hold fast. 27 And the extreme offer followed by concession doesn’t just get you a better price, it gets you a happier partner (or victim): She is more likely to honor the agreement because she feels that she had more influence on the outcome. The very process of give and take creates a feeling of partnership, even in the person being taken.
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Reciprocity is an all-purpose relationship tonic. Used properly, it strengthens, lengthens, and rejuvenates social ties. It works so well in part because the elephant is a natural mimic.
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When we interact with someone we like, we have a slight tendency to copy their every move, automatically and unconsciously. 28.
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But it’s not just that we mimic those we like; we like those who mimic us. People who are subtly mimicked are then more helpful and agreeable toward their mimicker, and even toward others. 29 Waitresses who mimic their customers get larger tips. 30.
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A theme of the rest of this book is that humans are partially hive creatures, like bees, yet in the modern world we spend nearly all our time outside of the hive. Reciprocity, like love, reconnects us with others.
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Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?. . . You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye. —MATTHEW 7:3-5.
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There is a special pleasure in the irony of a moralist brought down for the very moral failings he has condemned.
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The first two set the pattern, and the third violates it. With hypocrisy, the hypocrite’s preaching is the setup, the hypocritical action is the punch line.
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Stories about the moral failings of others are among the most common kinds of gossip,3.
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In these games, which are intended to be simple models of the game of life, no strategy ever beats tit for tat. 4 In the long run and across a variety of environments, it pays to cooperate while remaining vigilant to the danger of being cheated.
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In real life, however, you don’t react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management.
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If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?.
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Human beings evolved to play the game of life in a Machiavellian way. 6 The Machiavellian version of tit for tat, for example, is to do all you can to cultivate the reputation of a trustworthy yet vigilant partner, whatever the reality may be.
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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.
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People who think they are particularly moral are in fact more likely to “do the right thing” and flip the coin, but when the coin flip comes out against them, they find a way to ignore it and follow their own self-interest. Batson called this tendency to value the appearance of morality over the reality “moral hypocrisy. ”.
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When people were forced to think about fairness and could see themselves cheating, they stopped doing it. As Jesus and Buddha said in the opening epigraphs of this chapter, it is easy to spot a cheater when our eyes are looking outward, but hard when looking inward.
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Though you see the seven defects of others, we do not see our own ten defects. (Japanese proverb)8.
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Most people think they are good people and that their actions are motivated by good reasons.
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As Robert Wright put it in his masterful book The Moral Animal, “Human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse. ”10.
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Curing hypocrisy is much harder because part of the problem is that we don’t believe there’s a problem.
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People are skilled at finding reasons to support their gut feelings: The rider acts like a lawyer whom the elephant has hired to represent it in the court of public opinion.
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Our inner lawyer works in the same way, but, somehow, we actually believe the stories he makes up.
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Studies of everyday reasoning show that the elephant is not an inquisitive client.
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People who are told that they have performed poorly on a test of social intelligence think extra hard to find reasons to discount the test; people who are asked to read a study showing that one of their habits—such as drinking coffee—is unhealthy think extra hard to find flaws in the study, flaws that people who don’t drink coffee don’t notice. Over and over again, studies show that people set out on a cognitive mission to bring back reasons to support their preferred belief or action.
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Franklin concluded: “So convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do. ”.
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I don’t want to blame everything on the lawyer. The lawyer is, after all, the rider—your conscious, reasoning self; and he is taking orders from the elephant—your automatic and unconscious self. The two are in cahoots to win at the game of life by playing Machiavellian tit for tat, and both are in denial about it.
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The consistent finding 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.
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When Americans and Europeans are asked to rate themselves on virtues, skills, or other desirable traits (including intelligence, driving ability, sexual skills, and ethics), a large majority say they are above average. 15 (This effect is weaker in East Asian countries, and may not exist in Japan. )16.
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We judge others by their behavior, but we think we have special information about ourselves—we know what we are “really like” inside, so we can easily find ways to explain away our selfish acts and cling to the illusion that we are better than others.
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In a study of 1 million American high school students, 70 percent thought they were above average on leadership ability, but only 2 percent thought they were below average.
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(College professors are less wise than high school students in this respect—94 percent of us think we do above-average work. )19.
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But when there is little room for ambiguity—how tall are you? how good are you at juggling?—people tend to be much more modest.
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As with other kinds of social comparison, ambiguity allows us to set up the comparison in ways that favor ourselves, and then to seek evidence that shows we are excellent co-operators.
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When husbands and wives estimate the percentage of housework each does, their estimates total more than 120 percent. 21.
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When MBA students in a work group make estimates of their contributions to the team, the estimates total 139 percent. 22.
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When subjects read the essay about self-serving biases and were then asked to write an essay about weaknesses in their own case, their previous righteousness was shaken. Subjects in this study were just as fair-minded as those who learned their identities at the last minute.
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People were quite happy to learn about the various forms of self-serving bias and then apply their newfound knowledge to predict others’ responses. But their self-ratings were unaffected. Even when you grab people by the lapels, shake them, and say, “Listen to me! Most people have an inflated view of themselves. Be realistic!” they refuse,.
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“naive realism”: Each of us thinks we see the world directly, as it really is. We further believe that the facts as we see them are there for all to see, therefore others should agree with us. If they don’t agree, it follows either that they have not yet been exposed to the relevant facts or else that they are blinded by their interests and ideologies.
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To the naive realist, that everyone is influenced by ideology and self-interest. Except for me. I see things as they are.
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Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.
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With peace and harmony ascendant, Americans seemed to be searching for substitute villains.
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Most of them share three properties: They are invisible (you can’t identify the evil one from appearance alone); their evil spreads by contagion, making it vital to protect impressionable young people from infection (for example from communist ideas, homosexual teachers, or stereotypes on television); and the villains can be defeated only if we all pull together as a team.
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“Our life is the creation of our mind,” as Buddha said,.
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When taking the perpetrator’s perspective, he found that people who do things we see as evil, from spousal abuse all the way to genocide, rarely think they are doing anything wrong. They almost always see themselves as responding to attacks and provocations in ways that are justified. They often think that they themselves are victims.
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“the myth of pure evil. ” Of this myth’s many parts, the most important are that evildoers are pure in their evil motives (they have no motives for their actions beyond sadism and greed); victims are pure in their victimhood (they did nothing to bring about their victimization); and evil comes from outside and is associated with a group or force that attacks our group. Furthermore, anyone who questions the application of the myth, who dares muddy the waters of moral certainty, is in league with evil.
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Baumeister found that violence and cruelty have four main causes. The first two are obvious attributes of evil: greed/ambition (violence for direct personal gain, as in robbery) and sadism (pleasure in hurting people). But greed/ambition explains only a small portion of violence, and sadism explains almost none.
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The two biggest causes of evil are two that we think are good, and that we try to encourage in our children: high self-esteem and moral idealism.
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Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism—the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end.
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Clifford Geertz wrote that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun. ”32.
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The great lesson that comes out of ancient India is that life as we experience it is a game called “samsara. ” It is a game in which each person plays out his “dharma,” his role or part in a giant play.
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If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease. 34.
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Judgmentalism is indeed a disease of the mind: it leads to anger, torment, and conflict. But it is also the mind’s normal condition—the elephant is always evaluating, always saying “Like it” or “Don’t like it. ”.
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Once anger comes into play, people find it extremely difficult to empathize with and understand another perspective.
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Debiasing occurred only when subjects were forced to look at themselves. ).
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When you first catch sight of a fault in yourself, you’ll likely hear frantic arguments from your inner lawyer excusing you and blaming others, but try not to listen.
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Was really upset by X. But I guess I shouldn’t have done P, so I can see why you felt Q. ” Reciprocity amplified by self-serving biases drove you apart back when you were matching insults or hostile gestures, but you can turn the process around and use reciprocity to end a conflict and save a relationship. The human mind may have been shaped.
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When pleasure or pain comes to them, the wise feel above pleasure and pain. —BUDDHA1.
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Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. —EPICTETUS2.
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Buddhism and Stoicism teach that striving for external goods, or to make the world conform to your wishes, is always a striving after wind. Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.
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Battling the disappointment of success. The pleasure of getting what you want is often fleeting.
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Here’s the trick with reinforcement: It works best when it comes seconds—not minutes or hours—after the behavior.
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The elephant works the same way: It feels pleasure whenever it takes a step in the right direction. The elephant learns whenever pleasure (or pain) follows immediately after behavior, but it has trouble connecting success on Friday with actions it took on Monday.
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“pre-goal attainment positive affect,” which is the pleasurable feeling you get as you make progress toward a goal. The second is called “post-goal attainment positive affect,” which Davidson says arises once you have achieved something you want. 3.
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You experience this latter feeling as contentment, as a short-lived feeling of release when the left prefrontal cortex reduces its activity after a goal has been achieved. In other words, when it comes to goal pursuit, it really is the journey that counts, not the destination. Set for yourself any goal you want. Most of the pleasure will be had along the way, with every step that takes you closer.
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Success is often no more thrilling than the relief of taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike.
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“the progress principle”: 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. ”4.
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Of course, it’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d 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,” 5 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. 6.
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The human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels.
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Forming lottery winner support groups to deal with their new difficulties. 7.
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“My expectations were reduced to zero when I was twenty-one. Everything since then has been a bonus. ”8.
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This is the adaptation principle at work: 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. 9 Adaptation is, in part, just a property of neurons: Nerve cells respond vigorously to new stimuli, but gradually they “habituate,” firing less to stimuli that they have become used to.
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Human beings, however, take adaptation to cognitive extremes.
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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. After a string of successes we aim higher; after a massive setback, such as a broken neck, we aim lower. Instead of following Buddhist and Stoic advice to surrender attachments and let events happen, we surround ourselves with goals, hopes, and expectations, and then feel pleasure and pain in relation to our progress. 10.
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It doesn’t much matter what happens to you. Good fortune or bad, you will always return to your happiness setpoint—your brain’s default level of happiness—which was determined largely by your genes.
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The Stoic philosophers of Ancient Greece, such as Epictetus, taught their followers to focus only on what they could fully control, which meant primarily their own thoughts and reactions.
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The second biggest finding in happiness research, after the strong influence of genes upon a person’s average level of happiness, is that most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little.
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A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness. 14 Part of this apparent benefit comes from “reverse correlation”: Happiness causes marriage.
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Religious people are happier, on average, than nonreligious people. 17 This effect arises from the social ties that come with participation in a religious community, as well as from feeling connected to something beyond the self.
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White Americans are freed from many of the hassles and indignities that affect black Americans, yet, on average, they are only very slightly happier. 18 Men have more freedom and power than women, yet they are not on average any happier. (Women experience more depression, but also more intense joy). 19.
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Ed Diener,26 is that within any given country, at the lowest end of the income scale money does buy happiness: People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than those who don’t. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller. The rich are happier on average than the middle class, but only by a little, and part of this relationship is reverse correlation: Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also because their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures. 27.
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Wealth itself has only a small direct effect on happiness because it so effectively speeds up the hedonic treadmill.
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One of the most consistent lessons the ancient sages teach is to let go, stop striving, and choose a new path. Turn inwards, or toward God, but for God’s sake stop trying to make the world conform to your will.
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Maybe the only way to find happiness therefore is to change one’s own internal setting (for example, through meditation, Prozac, or cognitive therapy) instead of changing one’s environment?.
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Yes, genes explain far more about us than anyone had realized, but the genes themselves often turn out to be sensitive to environmental conditions. 32 And yes, each person has a characteristic level of happiness, but it now looks as though it’s not so much a set point as a potential range or probability distribution. Whether you operate on the high or the low side of your potential range is determined by many factors that Buddha and Epictetus would have considered externals.
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Martin Seligman founded positive psychology in the late 1990s,.
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Two fundamentally different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake. 33.
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Voluntary activities, therefore, offer much greater promise for increasing happiness while avoiding adaptation effects.
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“happiness formula:” H=S+C+V.
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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. 34.
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Research shows that people who must adapt to new and chronic sources of noise (such as when a new highway is built) never fully adapt, and even studies that find some adaptation still find evidence of impairment on cognitive tasks. Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress. 35.
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Although people quickly adapt to having more space,36 they don’t fully adapt to the longer commute, particularly if it involves driving in heavy traffic. 37 Even after years of commuting, those whose commutes are traffic-filled still arrive at work with higher levels of stress hormones. (Driving under ideal conditions is, however, often enjoyable and relaxing. )38.
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None of these subjects pressed the button, yet the belief that they had some form of control made the noise less distressing to them.
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On the floor with increased control, residents were happier, more active, and more alert (as rated by the nurses, not just by the residents), and these benefits were still visible eighteen months later. Most amazingly, at the eighteen-month follow-up, residents of the floor given control had better health and half as many deaths (15 percent versus 30 percent). 40.
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Overall, attractive people are not happier than unattractive ones. Yet, surprisingly, some improvements in a person’s appearance do lead to lasting increases in happiness. 42.
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Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people. 44.
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Conflicts in relationships—having an annoying office mate or room-mate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse—is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict;45 it damages every day, even days when you don’t see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.
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People who report the greatest interest in attaining money, fame, or beauty are consistently found to be less happy, and even less healthy, than those who pursue less materialistic goals. 47.
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Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “cheeks sent me high”),.
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People report the highest levels of happiness, on average. People really enjoy eating, especially in the company of others, and they hate to be interrupted by telephone calls (and perhaps Csikszentmihalyi’s beeps) during meals, or (worst of all) during sex.
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To continue eating or having sex beyond a certain level of satisfaction can lead to disgust. 49.
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The keys to flow: There’s a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle).
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In the flow experience, elephant and rider are in perfect harmony. The elephant (automatic processes) is doing most of the work, running smoothly through the forest, while the rider (conscious thought) is completely absorbed in looking out for problems and opportunities, helping wherever he can.
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Pleasures are “delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components,”50 such as may be derived from food, sex, backrubs, and cool breezes. Gratifications are activities that engage you fully, draw on your strengths, and allow you to lose self-consciousness. Gratifications can lead to flow.
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Because the elephant has a tendency to overindulge, the rider needs to encourage it to get up and move on to another activity.
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They derive a great deal more pleasure from their food by eating slowly and paying more attention to the food as they eat it. 51 Because they savor, they ultimately eat less.
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The wise man “chooses not the greatest quantity of food but the most tasty. ”52.
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When we enter a state of flow, hard work becomes effortless.
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You can find out your strengths by taking an online test at www. Authentichappiness. Org.
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People experienced longer-lasting improvements in mood from the kindness and gratitude activities than from those in which they indulged themselves.
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Even though people were most nervous about doing the kindness and gratitude activities, which required them to violate social norms and risk embarrassment, once they actually did the activities they felt better for the rest of the day.
The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt
