Happiness 1. Positive Psychology

Happiness
1. positive psychology
There's a lot of psychology that focuses on human misery
and this was the topic of clinical psychology,
something which we talked about last lecture.
So, we have a big book of mental disorders.
The DSM-5, it'll grow to become the DSM-6 and will
chronicle all the problems that we have to deal with as individuals and as psychologists.
But recently, there's been a movement in psychology looking at human thriving.
Trying to explore not the bad side of things but the good side of things,
what psychology can tell us about living a good life.
This is sometimes known as positive psychology.
I want to end the class on this note,
I find this stuff extremely interesting and extremely relevant to daily life.
So much so, I'm going to do something at the beginning of this lecture that I
haven't done before which is going to recommend some readings.
So, there's the Bible of positive psychology by Martin Seligman as one of the founders.
There's a wonderful book by Jonathan Haidt called The Happiness Hypothesis
which connects happiness research that ancient wisdom from philosophers.
There's a book by Daniel Nettle called Happiness
which is I find to be a wonderful short introduction.
Then, there's a wonderful book called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert which
focuses on our abilities and inabilities to predict how happy we'll be in the future.
A lot of the work I'm going to talk about in this set of
lectures is drawn upon these readings.
2. What is happiness
So, to get things going,
I want to ask you a question.
The question is, how happy are you?
How happy is your life?
It's a very vague question but try to answer it in your head.
Put it on a scale from one to ten.
Now, this question has been asked over and over
again across many countries and across thousands,
many thousands of people,
and almost nobody answers ten.
But most people do think that they're substantially happier than the midpoint,
common answers are seven and eight.
So, one study did this across 42 countries,
and they found that none of them had an average happiness under five.
In this one study, the most happier were the Swiss,
the most miserable were the Bulgarians,
and the Americans racked up as pretty happy, on the happy scale.
Now, I'm going to use these numbers for
a lot of the studies we're going to talk about later on,
and it's worthwhile being skeptical as to what these answers can mean.
So, I do think that your answer to the question has some real value.
It predicts all sorts of aspects of your life.
It seems to have real meaning,
but at the same time any single reading isn't
perfectly reliable and could be swayed by small effects.
So, in one study for instance,
they tested people on psychology department,
and half of the people right before they were asked how happy they were found a dime,
the other half didn't.
It turned out when asked how good your whole life is,
the people who found a dime were happier.
In a similar result,
people are more positive about their whole life when you ask them on sunny days.
When it's a rainy day, people are net less positive about her whole life,
unless you remind them of the weather.
Once they know about the whether,
they can use this information to recalibrate and then they're more accurate.
So, what is happiness?
Well, we have an evolutionary answer.
Happiness for an evolutionary psychologist is
a goal-state that animals have evolved to pursue.
When you're happy, that means your needs have been satisfied.
So, for instance, hunger is unpleasant if you're really hungry or you'll be miserable.
But being full is pleasant,
and so you're satiated and you're happy.
Steve Pinker sums this up quite nicely.
He notes, "We are happier when we are healthy, well-fed, comfortable,
safe, prosperous, knowledgeable, respected, non-celibate, and loved.
If you look in your life and you could tick off all of these things,
then my bet is that you are pretty darn happy.
But then, Pinker notes himself that it's not quite that simple.
There's a couple of reasons why,
there's a couple of facts that should
shake your perception that happiness is a simple matter.
One is that people right now,
Americans in the 21st century and I meant many of you from
outside United States who are listening to this and watching this,
you're healthier, better fed, safer,
than just about any other time in history,
but you don't seem to be happier.
So, it's not like people get progressively happier as their status in life increases,
also there are individual differences in happiness.
We'd all be in the same community and we all have our basic needs met,
but some people are very happy and some people aren't happy at all.
To explain these facts and to learn a little bit more about what makes us happy and how
happiness works and how one can cultivate happiness in one's life,
we need to keep in mind three quite surprising facts about happiness.
3. happiness set point

The first interesting fact about happiness is that it doesn't change as
much as you think.
And one way to look at it is, you have a set point.
Just as with regard to possibly weight, temperament, or
intelligence, there is a heritability of happiness.
So there's a genetically determined range of how happy you're likely to be.
And we see this for instance, in that, identical twins raised apart
in very different environments tend to be similarly happy.
Play video starting at ::32 and follow transcript0:32
And this to some extent is common sense, some people are naturally cheerful, and
positive, and joyous.
Others are more reticent, and maybe glum and less happy.
This doesn't mean that a miserable person can't achieve great happiness, or
a very happy person can't become glum.
But just as with other psychological traits, it does mean that to some extent,
there are powerful influences on us even before we're born, happiness is heritable.
Now, an immediate, very sensible response to this is, what about life events?
Certainly, life events will change your happiness one way or another.
And think of it as, what's the worst thing that could happen to you?
Imagine that for a second, and then ask, how much would it change your happiness?
Then ask, what's the best thing that can happen to you?
Play video starting at :1:22 and follow transcript1:22
And ask, how much would it change your happiness?
It turns out that the answer's somewhat surprising.
There have been studies looking at response to different life events
including becoming a paraplegic in an accident.
Winning an enormous sum of money.
[SOUND] For professors, either getting tenure or not getting tenure.
If you get tenure you have job security for life, if you don't get tenure you have
a bit of time, then you have to leave and find a new job.
Or they ask people right before a presidential election,
in the United States, between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama.
How happy they would be if their person won and if their person lost.
And it turns out for all of these,
these events do have some influence on happiness.
But it's not a large influence.
And even the most influential,
most powerful sorts of events like becoming paralyzed, make you miserable.
For six months, for a year, and
then you tend to get back to where you started from.
Not perfectly, but we tend to get used to both positive and negative events.
And there are couple of reasons why.
One is that for
some things we just fail to appreciate that certain things are irrelevant.
So in the heat of an election campaign, when you ask somebody,
how would you feel if your candidate loses?
People might say, honestly, I'd feel miserable,
I'm going to spend the next four years miserable.
But the truth is, in day-to-day life, most of the time, you don't even think
about who's president, it doesn't make any difference for you.
And to a surprising extent,
the things that you might think are incredibly important,
like, I might win a tremendous prize and then think that'll make me very happy.
For 99.99% of my life, the prize doesn't seem to make that much of a difference.
I still have to deal with my family and take out the laundry and
engage in my work.
Day-to-day life is often simply uninfluenced by things at
the time seem very important.
And then the second reason why these events don't matter very much is the logic
of the set point where you have a basic amount of how happy you'll be.
And then when events happen, you adapt to them, and
what this means is you simply get used to them.
So you get used to certain bad things, your life is worse but
you don't always feel it as worse.
There's some surprising exceptions to this, happiness, researchers argue,
you never really get used to a long commute.
If you're miserable commuting to work on day one,
you're going to be miserable a year later.
And you don't adapt well to background noise, if there's loud noises that
are distracting and annoying, you never fully get used to them.
But for the most part, we adapt to bad things and we adapt to good things.
So if I win a prize, if I get a great job,
it's wonderful at the beginning and then you just get used to it.
This is a variant of something we talked about early on in the course, habituation.
There's some exceptions that some form of cosmetic surgery for
instance, actually do make you happier.
Maybe because how you see yourself and how others see you is something which is just
long-lasting and pervasive in a surprising extent.
Now, this is an old insight,
there is a wonderful passage in the Bible in Ecclesiastes.
Where a king had everything, gardens, parks, vineyards, castles,
slaves, concubines.
And then it goes on to say, I hated life, he says, all is vanity and
a chasing after wind, and there is nothing to be gained under the Sun.
Let's zoom in a little bit and ask about bad events, so
how is it we adapt to bad events?
A bad event like losing your job,
losing a great sum of money, a breakup with somebody you love.
All sorts of bad events, everything all the way up to becoming paralyzed.
And there's different answers, so one answer I gave is that these bad events
often don't affect as much of your life as you think they will.
A second answer is, we simply get used to it, and that's adaptation.
But a third answer is defended by Dan Gilbert,
who talks about the psychological immune system.
And the psychological immune system is a psychological mechanism
that makes in a normal, a highly-functioning non-depressed person,
makes you seek out the good side of things.
Gilbert gives many examples of good people who, terrible things have happened.
They've been falsely imprisoned and they look back and say,
that was the best thing in my life.
And this may be irrational but it seems to make us happier.
And it seems to make us be able to better bounce back from bad events.
There's a nice illustration of this in this very short,
I think quite moving TED Talk.
[MUSIC]
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Imagine,
if you will, a gift, I would like you to picture it in your mind,
it's not too big, perhaps the size of a golf ball,
some vision what it looks like, all wrapped up.
Before I show you what's inside,
I will tell you it's going to do incredible things for you.
It will bring all of your family together, you will feel loved and
appreciated like never before, and reconnect to friends and
acquaintances you haven't heard from in years.
Adoration and admiration will overwhelm you,
it will recalibrate what is most important in your life.
It will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith.
You'll have a new understanding and trust in your body.
You'll have unsurpassed vitality and energy.
You'll expand your vocabulary, meet new people, and
you'll have a healthier lifestyle.
And get this, you'll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing.
You'll eat countless gourmet meals, flowers will arrive by the truckload.
People will say to you, you look great, have you had any work done?
>> [LAUGH] >> And
you'll have a lifetime supply of good drugs.
You'll be challenged, inspired, motivated, and humbled.
Your life will have new meaning.
Peace, health, serenity, happiness, nirvana.
The price, $55,000, and
that's an incredible deal.
By now, I know you're dying to know what it is and where you can get one.
Does Amazon carry it?
Does it have the Apple logo on it?
Is there a waiting list?
Not likely.
This gift came to me about five months ago,
it looked more like this when it was all wrapped up, not quite so pretty, and
this, and then this.
It was a rare gem, a brain tumor,
hemangioblastoma, the gift that keeps on giving.
And while I'm okay now, I wouldn't wish this gift for you,
I'm not sure you'd want it, but I wouldn't change my experience.
It profoundly altered in my life in ways I didn't expect,
in all the ways I just shared with you.
So the next time you're faced with something that's unexpected,
unwanted, and uncertain, consider that it just may be a gift.
>> [APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]
>> Now, I think a lot of what psychologists have learned about
happiness, in particular what I've talked about in this section,
corresponds well to ancient wisdom.
And the wisdom is, it's not so much what happens to you
that determines how happy you are, it's how you perceive it.
And so I'll end with two quotes, one is by John Milton, and
he attributes this to Satan and Paradise Lost.
The mind is its own place and
in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
And finally Shakespeare, for there's nothing either good or
bad but thinking makes it so.
4. Happiness is relative
The next set of findings has to do with the influences on happiness.
There is indeed a set point
that restrains the amount of happiness and we're able to bounce
back from negative events and sadly positive events don't influence us as much.
But none of this is to say that we aren't influenced by our world.
We definitely are.
For one thing, your life situation has an absolute effect on your happiness.
So, the simplest illustration of this is,
you go back to those data as to the happiness
of people in different countries and then you look at how rich their country is,
and what you find, and maybe this is common sense,
but the richer the country,
the happier the people are on average.
Similarly, happiness is largely influenced by how
successful you are relative to the people around you.
This is an insight that's nicely expressed by H.L.
Mencken, who wrote, "A wealthy man is one who earns
$100 more than his wife's sister's husband," and what this means is, we think relatively.
We are social creatures.
We are hierarchical creatures,
and we're exquisitely sensitive to where we stand relative to other people.
You can see this as a thought experiment.
Would you rather make $70,000 if everybody else in your office makes 65,000,
or 75,000 and everyone else in your office makes 80,000?
Well, your mileage may vary.
I think a lot of people would simply choose the absolute number more,
which is option B.
But I think to some extent we'd be swayed by option A,
where we're making absolutely less but we're making more relative to other people.
In fact, the happiness literature suggests that one measure,
one way to predict how happy somebody is,
is not merely through their absolute income or absolute status in the world,
but where they stand relative to other people,
and some savvy negotiators know this.
There's stories about Maria Carlos and Stanley Fish and they're both stories of the sort,
they're negotiating and the one demand that they make isn't an absolute amount of money,
it's they just want to make a little bit more
than a person who's making the most money right now before they arrived.
They want to be on the top,
and they know that will make them happy.
Whatever number that is, that's not the point.
We could wrap up a little bit and we can give
some advice to our miserable king we saw earlier.
One thing is he does seem depressed.
So, I think antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy probably would help.
We could work on some of the environmental influences that are making him miserable.
His absolute income is great.
His relative income is great.
The status is fine, maybe he can move the castle to quieter part of the kingdom,
and I guess I can't resist saying this,
and this isn't so much grounded in
specific empirical psychology but also just a broader moral view,
which is, I think we get the most satisfaction,
the most sustained benefit from long-term relationships and projects.
So, I think he should give up on his concubines, find a queen,
join a club and get involved in some charities to help other people.
5. judgement about past events are skewed

The final insight on happiness I want
to give you isn't really an insight on happiness actually.
It's more on pleasure,
on short-term pleasure, but it's so cool.
I just have to talk about it.
This is that our judgments about the pleasure and pain of
past events are skewed in very interesting ways.
This is the work of Danny Kahneman who was a famous psychologist.
He won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work,
including this sort of work.
And here's the experiment I want to run on you, and ask you this question,
what would you like better;
a medical procedure that's very painful for an hour then it stops?
Imagine a dental procedure that's painful or a colonoscopy or anything,
anything painful. That's option one.
Or option two is the same,
exact same medical procedure,
very painful for an hour.
then the same procedure continues for five more minutes and it's mildly painful.
Then it stops. Which would you prefer? A or B?
Now this might seem like the stupidest question in the world of course.
A is better. The only difference between A and B is that B has more pain in it.
So you'd rather have A.
It turns out though,
and Kahneman did this research in all sorts of ways,
including testing people who really were undergoing painful medical procedures,
and they find that B leaves a better memory.
Well, why?
Why would it do that?
The answer is that when we look back on past events and assessed their pleasure and pain,
we tend to do so not by just summing
up the amount of pleasure and pain that they experience,
but instead focusing on peeks and endings.
You remember the extremes,
the biggest moment of pain,
the greatest moment of pleasure,
and you also remember how it ends.
So this leads to an interesting,
I think valuable finding,
that if you had to distribute pain and pleasure across time,
you're much better off putting the pleasure at the end and the pain everywhere else.
So imagine a party that's hugely fun at the beginning but it ends badly.
At the last minute of party you say something embarrassing,
you spill something all over yourself,
you get in an argument with a friend.
As opposed to an awful party, this is B,
that's just boring and unpleasant everything,
but it ends just great.
You know, a sudden kiss with somebody you've always admired,
a very nice compliment, something goes really.
Well, you might think if you carefully calibrated the good and the bad,
that A, would be much much better,
but in the real world that is not quite so.
Endings matter so much that a good ending can override a whole lot of
bad and a bad ending can destroy a whole lot of good.
Endings really do matter.
6. Humility and optimism

And this brings the course to an end.
In this course, we've basically reviewed all of psychology,
some more in-depth than others but you have a feeling for the whole field,
and you're now in a position to answer questions about memory,
depression, language, child development,
how the brain works.
You have some sense of why people are different and have different personalities.
You have some understanding of the social influences on our lives,
what makes us afraid,
what leads to different forms of mental illness.
You even have a little hint on what factors influence our happiness,
and maybe you could use your knowledge to make you a little bit happier, yourself.
Now, the field of psychology is broad and we've just gotten started,
but for some of you,
this will be the last course you ever take in psychology.
So, I want to end this course by focusing on two things.
The first is a bit of humility.
There are some very basic questions about the mind that nobody knows the answer to yet.
We know that the brain is the source of mental life,
but we don't have any real understanding of how a physical object,
a lump of meat, can give rise to conscious experience.
We haven't yet solved what philosophers call, the hard problem.
We know that about half the variation in personality is a result of genes,
and so too for intelligence and happiness,
and many other things,
but we don't really know how to explain where the other half comes from,
what experiences make us what we are.
We know about the social influences that can make
us do certain things, including bad things,
but we don't yet know why some people are immune to these influences,
and act and sometimes do great and heroic things,
regardless of the circumstances that they find themselves in.
So, there's a lot left to do.
But the second theme is more optimistic.
This is the idea that will eventually come to answer these questions,
to solve these problems,
through the methods we've been discussing,
through the series of lectures.
This is the idea that in the end,
the most important and intimate aspects of ourselves,
our beliefs and emotions,
the capacity to make decisions,
our sense of right and wrong,
can be explained through constructing,
and testing scientific hypothesis.
I think there's been some success stories where we really have
learned some surprising and important things about the mind,
and there's no reason to expect this way of proceeding to fail us in the future.
Now, some people may find this a scary prospect.
I know that some people worry that a scientific approach to
the mind takes a specialness away from people,
it diminishes us somehow,
but I don't agree.
I have the opposite reaction actually.
My view is the more you look at the mind and how it
works from a serious scientific point of view,
the more you appreciate its complexity, its uniqueness,
and its beauty. And I'll end with that.

Happiness 1. Positive Psychology

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Happiness

3. happiness set point

5. judgement about past events are skewed

6. Humility and optimism

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