Happiness

Jonathan Haidt
Photo by Tom Cogill

In 1771, Robert Skipwith made the mistake of asking his future brother-in-law, Thomas Jefferson, to suggest a few books for a library he was creating. Jefferson, who had a lifelong passion for books, approached the question with his typical thoroughness. He drew up a catalogue of 148 titles in 379 volumes costing several times the modest sum Skipwith had set aside for the project. Jefferson also included a cover letter in which he justified including works of fiction in his list. He wrote, “When any original act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also.”

The fundamental truth of this observation caught the attention of Jonathan Haidt when he first encountered it shortly after arriving at the University. Haidt, now an associate professor of psychology, studies moral emotions—such feelings as disgust, shame, and awe—and Jefferson’s remark led him to investigate the psychological effect of uplifting experiences, an emotion he termed “elevation.”

Haidt’s interest in elevation coincided with the emergence of a new academic field, positive psychology, which studies how people find meaning and happiness in life. Haidt’s examination of what prompts elevation and the resulting physical and motivational effects won him psychology’s largest monetary award, the John Templeton Positive Psychology Prize, in 2001.

Haidt wrote his latest book, The Happiness Hypothesis, to convey to popular audiences the ways they could apply the tenets of positive psychology to find more satisfaction in their own lives. Haidt is an encyclopedic reader who often uses quotations from classic texts—the plays of Shakespeare, the sayings of the Buddha, and the Analects of Confucius, for instance—to convey psychological concepts to students in his classes. He decided to use a similar technique to write The Happiness Hypothesis. “This book is about the origins of positive psychology in ancient wisdom,” he says. At the same time, it is firmly grounded in contemporary research, which often casts the pronouncements of these sages in a new light—and occasionally contradicts them.

For Haidt, happiness ultimately lies in balance and relatedness or, as he puts it, “from between”—between the different parts of your mind, between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. “Wisdom might come from between too,” he suggests. Haidt applies this concept to groups of people as well as individuals. He asks, “Might not wisdom emerge from communities and institutions that bind members to the right people, in the right way, to jointly pursue the right goals?”