#thehappinesshypothesis

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File under: #selfcaresaturday | Books that synthesize history and pull its teachings/lessons into our times are ones that I immediately love. Joseph Campbell’s books are amongst my favorites for that very reason. So when @amandamclernon recommended this book, I immediately clicked buy. - 📚. Synopsis - The Happiness Hypothesis is a book about ten Great Ideas. Each chapter is an attempt to savor one idea that has been discovered by several of the world's civilizations -- to question it in light of what we now know from scientific research, and to extract from it the lessons that still apply to our modern lives and illuminate the causes of human flourishing. Award-winning psychologist Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind and The Coddling of the American Mind, shows how a deeper understanding of the world's philosophical wisdom and its enduring maxims -- like "do unto others as you would have others do unto you," or "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" -- can enrich and even transform our lives. - 📚. The audiobook feels like a really good college lecture, and you know these days, I’m missing that setting. - 📚. If you guys don’t follow @amandamclernon, you should. She’s full of social marketing and small business wisdom. Plus, book recs! - 📚. 📚. 📚. #selfcare #positivepsychology #bookstagram #booktuber #lessonsfromhistory #jonathanhaidt #thehappinesshypothesis #bookish #currentread #anxietyrelief #booklr #septembertbr #bookflatlay #businessbooks #booksandcoffee #perseusbooks https://www.instagram.com/p/B11dFz0As3p/?igshid=p6a4773tf6vo

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Quotes From: Jonathan Haidt. “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”[2]

Reprocity

“Reciprocity is a deep instinct; it is the basic currency of social life...

For all the nonhuman ultrasoeial species, that feature was the genetics of kin altruism....

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 u nco m m o n ultrasociality: They are all siblings. T h o s e species each evolved a reproduction system in which a single queen produces all the children, and nearly all the children are either sterile (ants) or else their reproductive abilities are suppressed (bees, mole rats); therefore, a hive, nest, or colony of these animals is one big family...

We h u m a n s also try to extend the reach of kin altruism by using fictitious kinship n a m e s for nonrelatives, as when children are encouraged to call their parents' friends Uncle Bob and Aunt Sarah”

“The human mind finds kinship deeply appealing, and kin altruism surely underlies the cultural ubiquity of nepotism”

“In his insightful book Influence, Robert Cialdinj of Arizona S t a t e University cites this a n d other s t u d i e s as e v i d e n c e that p e o p l e h a v e a mindless, automatic reciprocity reflex. Like other animals, we will p e r f o r m certain behaviors w h e n the world p r e s e n t s us with certain patterns of input...

ethological reflex: a p e r s o n receives a favor from an a c q u a i n t a n c e a n d wants to repay the favor...

“So what is really built into the person is a strategy: Play tit for tat. Do to others wha t they do unto you .”

“Like the Godfather, bats play tit for tat, and so do other social animals, particularly those that live in relatively small, stable groups where individuals can recognize each other as individuals.12”

“Vengeance and gratitude are moral sentiments that amplify and enforce tit' for tat. Vengeful and grateful feelings appear to have evolved precisely b e c a u s e they are such useful tools for helping individuals create cooperative relationships, thereby reaping the gains from non-zero-sum g a m e s . 1 3 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.Conversely, the benefits of generosity are increased because one gains friends.”

“the logarithm of the brain size is almost perfectly proportional to the logarithm of the social group size. In other words, all over the animal kingdom, brains grow to m a n a g e larger and larger groups. Social animals are smart animals”

Gossip 

“Language allows small groups of people to bond quickly and to learn from each other about the bonds of others..

in short, Dunbar proposes that language evolved because it enabled gossip. Individuals who could share social information, using any primitive means of communication, had an advantage over those who could not...

And once people began gossiping, there was a runaway competition to master the arts of social manipulation, relationship aggression, and reputation management, all of which require yet more brain power”

“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...

In a world with no gossip, people would not get away with murder but they would get away with a trail of rude, selfish, and antisocial acts, often oblivious to their own violations. Gossip extends our moral—emotional toolkit. In a gos-sipy world, we don't just feel vengeance and gratitude toward those who hurt or help us; we feel pale but still instructive flashes of c o n t e m p t and anger toward people whom we might not even know. We feel vicarious s h a m e and embarrassment when we hear about people whose s c h e m e s , lusts, and private failings are exposed. G o s s i p is a policeman and a teacher.

Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance...

As long as everyone plays tit-for tat a u g m e n t e d by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully. (It rarely does, however, because of our self-serving biases a n d massive hypocrisy.”

 Reprocity in Intimate Relaitonships

“Relationships are exquisitely sensitive to balance in their early stages, and a great way to ruin things is either to give too m u c h (you seem perhaps a bit desperate) or too little (you seem cold and rejecting). Rather, relationships grow best by balanced give and take, especially of gifts, favors, attention, and self-disclosure...

people often don't realize the degree to which the disclosure of personal information is a gambit in the d a t i n g game. W h e n s o m e o n e tells you about past romantic relationships, there is conversational pressure for you to do the same. If this disclosure card is played too early, you might feel ambivalence—your reciprocity reflex m a k e s you prepare your own matching disclosure but s o m e other part of you resists sharing intimate details with a near-stranger”

“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”

Hypocrisy

“There is a special pleasure in the irony of a moralist brought down for the very moral failings he has condemned. It's the pleasure of a well-told joke. With hypocrisy, the hypocrite's preaching is the setup, the hypocritical action is the punch line”

“Players f a c e a binary choice at each point: They can cooperate or defect. Each player then reacts to what the other player did in the previous round.

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap b e t w e e n action and p e r c e p t i o n is bridged by the art of impression management. 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?”

“Niccolo Machiavelli”

“the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are...

People who reported being most concerned about caring for others and about issues of social responsibility were more likely to open the bag, but they were not more likely to give the other person the positive task. In other words, 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”

“We are well-armed for battle in a Machiavellian world of reputation manipulation, and one of our most important weapons is the delusion that we are non-combatants. How do we get away with it?”

Confirmation Bias

“Studies of "motivated reasoning"13 show that people who are motivated to reach a particular conclusion are even worse reasoners than those in Kuhn's and Perkins's studies, but the mechanism is basically the s a m e : a one-sided search for supporting evidence only...

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. And because we are usually successful in this mission, we end up with the illusion of objectivity. We really believe that our position is rationally and objectively justified...

“the rider—your c o n s c i o u s , reasoning self; a n d he is taking orders from the elephant—your automatic and u n c o n s c i o u s self. T h e two are in c a h o o t s to win at the g a m e of life by playing Machiavellian tit for tat, and both are in denial about it...

To win at this g a m e you m u s t present your best possible self to others.”

Self Comparisons

“W h e n comparing ourselves to others, the general process is this: F r a m e the question (unconsciously, automatically) so that the trait in q u e s t i o n is related to a self-perceived strength, then go out and look for e v i d e n c e that you have the strength...

In fact, evidence shows that people who hold pervasive positive illusions about themselves, their abilities, and their future prospects are mentally healthier, happier, and better liked than people who lack such illusions. But such biases can make people feel that they deserve more than they do, thereby setting the stage for endless disputes with other people who feel equally over-entitled....

Whenever people form cooperative groups, which are usually of mutual benefit, self-serving biases threaten to fill group m e m b e r s with mutual resentment.”

Naive Realism

“Pronin and Ross trace this resistance to a phenomenon they call "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. People acknowledge that their own backgrounds have shaped their views, but such experiences are invariably seen as deepening one's insights; for example, being a doctor gives a person special insight into the problems of the health-care industry. But the background of other people is used to explain their biases and covert motivations;...

It just seems plain as day, to the naive realist, that everyone is influenced by ideology and self-interest”

“If I could nominate one candidate for "biggest obstacle to world p e a c e and social harmony," it would be naive realism because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level: My group is right b e c a u s e we see things as they are. T h o s e who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest. Naive realism gives us a world full of good and evil, and this brings us to the most disturbing implication of the sages' advice about hypocrisy: Good and evil do not exist outside of our beliefs about them.”

“The myth of pure evil is the ultimate self-serving bias, the ultimate form of naive realism. And it is the ultimate cause of most long-running cycles of violence because both sides use it to lock themselves into a Manichaean struggle”

“In another unsettling conclusion, 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. Outside of children's car-toons and horror films, people almost never hurt others for the sheer joy of hurting someone. 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. Having high self-esteem doesn't directly cause violence, but when someone's high esteem is unrealistic or narcissistic, it is easily threatened by reality; in reaction to those threats, people—particularly young men—often lash out violently...

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. Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. But when a moral mission and legal rules are incompatible, we usually care more about the mission. They want the "good guys" freed by any means, and the "bad guys" convicted by any means...

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun”

Leveraging Repocity and Perception

“That is, the world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners. All of these are human creations which, though real in their own way, are not real in the way that rocks and trees are real. T h e s e human creations are like fairies in J. M. Barries Peter Pan: They exist only if you believe in t h e m .”

“Feeling Good, a popular guide to cognitive therapy, David Burns has written a chapter on cognitive therapy for anger...

Burns focuses on the should statements we carry around—ideas about how the world should work, and about how people should treat us...

Violations of these should statements are the major c a u s e s of anger and resentment...

Finding fault with yourself is also the key to overcoming the hypocrisy and judgmentalism that damage so many valuable relationships...

You can take a small piece of the disagreement and say, "I should not have done X, and I can see why you felt Y." Then, by the power of reciprocity, the other person will likely feel a strong urge to say, "Yes, I 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”

“People win at the game of life by achieving high status and a good reputation, cultivating friendships, finding the best mate(s), accumulating resources, and rearing their children to be successful at the same game. People have many goals and therefore many sources of pleasure”

Positive Affect

“two types of positive affect. T h e first he calls "pre-goal attainment positive affect," which is the pleasurable feeling you get as you make progress toward a goal. T h e second is called "post-goal attainment positive affect," which Davidson says arises once you .have achieved something you want. 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”

The Progress Principle

“the progress principle": Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them...

We are bad at "affective forecasting" that is, predicting how we'll feel in the future. We grossly overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions. T h e human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels”

Adaptation Principle

“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...

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”

“In every permanent situation, where there is no expectation of change, the mind of every man, in a longer or shorter time, returns to its natural and usual state of tranquility. In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to that state; in adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it.”

Happiness and Marriage

“Happiness causes marriage. Happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness setpoint, both because they are more appealing as dating partners and because they are easier to live with as spouses. But much of the apparent benefit is a real and lasting benefit of dependable companionship, which is a basic need; we never fully adapt either to it or to its absence...

a string of objective advantages in power, status, freedom, health, and sunshine—all of which are subject to the adaptation principle”

“Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also b e c a u s e their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures”

“One of the most consistent lessons the ancient sages teach is to let go, stop striving, and choose a new path”

Happiness Formula 

“fundamentally different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake”

“Conditions include facts about your life that you can't change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). Conditions are constant over time, at least during a period in your life, and so they are the sorts of things that you are likely to adapt to.

Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are the things that you choose to do, such as meditation, exercise, learning a new skill, or taking a vacation. B e c a u s e s u c h activities must be chosen, and because most of them take effort and attention, they can't just disappear from your awareness the way conditions can.. Voluntary activities, therefore, offer m u c h greater promise for increasing happiness while avoiding adaptation effects”

“happiness formula: H = S + C + V”

“Th e 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.”

“Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress.35 It's.worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life...

subjects who thought they had control were more persistent when working on difficult puzzles, but the subjects who had experienced noise without control gave up more easily.. 

changing an institution's environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness...

freed from such a daily burden may lead to a lasting increase in self-confidence and well-being.”

Relationships Importance

“T h e condition that is usually said to trump all others in importance is the strength and number of a person's relationships. Good relationships make people happy, and happy people enjoy more and better relationships than unhappy people”

“conflicts in relationships is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness. You never adapt to interpersonal conflict; it damages every day, even days when you don't see the other person but ruminate about the conflict nonetheless.”

Flow and Pleasure (fleeting) vs Gratification (fulfilling)

“It is the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one's abilities. T h e 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)...

In the flow experience, elephant and rider are in perfect harmony. T h e 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...

Seligman proposes a fundamental distinction between pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures are "delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components, 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... Pleasures must be spaced to maintain their potency...

the elephant has a tendency to over-indulge, the rider needs to encourage it to get up and move on to another activity. Variety is the spice of life b e c a u s e it is the natural enemy of adaptation. The key to finding your own gratifications is to know your own strengths... and development of a catalog of strengths”

“You can increase your happiness if you use your strengths, particularly in the service of strengthening c o n n e c t i o n s — h e l p i n g friends, e x p r e s s i n g gratitude to benefactors...

Performing a random act of kindness every day could get tedious, but if you know your strengths a n d draw up a list of five activities that engage them, you can surely a d d at least o n e gratification to every day ...

choose your own gratifying activities, do them regularly (but not to the point of tedium), and raise your overall level of h a p p i n e s s”

“Evolution s e e m s to have m a d e us "strategically irrational" at times for our own good”

“another kind of irrationality: the vigor with which people pursue many goals that work against their o w n h a p p i n e s s.

Happiness and Consumerism

“Inconspicuous consumption, on the other hand, refers to goods and activities that are valued for themselves, that are usually consumed more privately, and that are not bought for the purpose of achieving status”

“experiences give more happiness in part b e c a u s e they have greater social value..

The elephant cares about prestige, not happiness, and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious...

The pursuit of luxury g o o d s is a happiness trap; it is a d e a d end that people race toward in the mistaken belief that it will make them h a p p y”

Paradox of Choice

" psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this the "paradox of choice"...

We value choice and put ourselves in situations of choice, even though choice often undercuts our happiness. But Schwartz and his colleagues find that the paradox mostly applies to people they call "maximizers"—those who habitually try to evaluate all the options, seek out more information, and make the best choice (or "maximize their utility," as economists would say)...

Maximizers end up making slightly better decisions than satisficers, on average (all that worry and information-gathering does help), but they are less happy with their decisions, and they are more inclined to depression and anxiety...

T h e point here is that maximizers engage in more social comparison, and are therefore more easily drawn into conspicuous consumption.”

“cybernetics—the study of how mechanical and biological systems can regulate themselves to achieve preset goals while the environment around and inside them changes.”

Attachment Theory and Childhood Development

“Attachment theory begins with the idea that two basic goals guide children's behavior: safety and exploration. A child who stays safe survives; a child who explores and plays develops the skills and intelligence needed for adult life...

If you want your children to grow up to be healthy and independent, you should hold them, hug them, cuddle them, and love them. Give them a secure base and they will explore and then conquer the world on their own...

he observed mothers at home and found that those who were warm and highly responsive to their children were most likely to have children who showed secure attachment in the strange situation. These children had learned that they could count on their mothers, and were therefore the most bold and confident. Mothers who were aloof and unresponsive were more likely to have avoidant children, who had learned not to expect much help and comfort from mom. Mothers whose responses were erratic and unpredictable were more likely to have resistant children, who had learned that their efforts to elicit comfort sometimes paid off, but sometimes not.

My skepticism is bolstered by the fact that studies done after Ainsworth's h o m e study have generally found only small correlations between mothers' responsiveness and the attachment style of their children.18”

No one event is particularly important, but over lime the child builds up what Bowlby called an "internal working m o d e l " of himself, his mother, and their relationship. If the model says that m o m is always there for you, you'll be bolder in your play and explorations. Round after round, predictable and reciprocal interactions build trust and strengthen the relationship

“fake one ancient attachment system, mix with an equal m e a s u r e of caregiving system, throw in a modified mating system and voila, that's romantic love”

Myth of True Love: Passionate vs Companionate Love

“As I see it, the modern myth of true love involves these beliefs: True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever”

30 December 2016

“According to the love researchers Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster, passionate love is a "wildly emotional state in which tender and sexual feelings, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy coexist in a confusion of feelings.

“Berscheid and Walster define c o m p a n i o n a t e love, in contrast, as "the affection we feel for those with w h o m our lives are deeply intertwined.

“C o m p a n i o n a t e love grows slowly over the years as lovers apply their attachment and caregiving systems to each other, and as they begin to rely u p o n , care for, and trust e a c h other”

“If the m e t a p h o r for passionate love is fire, I he m e t a p h o r for c o m p a n i o n a t e love is vines growing, intertwining, a n d gradually binding two people together”

“At that point, tolerance has set in, and when the drug is withdrawn, the brain is unbalanced in the opposite direction: pain, lethargy, and despair follow withdrawal from cocaine or from passionate love.”

“So if passionate love is a drug—literally a drug—it has to wear off eventually. Nobody can stay high forever (although if you find passionate love in a long-distance relationship, it's like taking cocaine once a month; the drug can retain its potency because of your suffering between doses).”

“The Time Course of the Two Kinds of Love (Short Run) ding”

“True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other..

But if we change the time scale from six months to sixty years, as in the next figure, it is passionate love that seems trivial—a flash in the p a n”

“The Time Course of the Two Kinds of Love (Long Run”

“The Laws of Manu, an ancient Hindu treatise on how young Brahmin men should live, was even more negative about women: "It is the very nature of women to corrupt men here on earth.”

Philosophy of Love

“I have never seen anyone who loved virtue as much as sex.

For Plato, when human love resembles animal love, it is degrading. The love of a man for a woman, as it aims at procreation, is therefore a debased kind of love.”

“The essential nature of love as an attachment between two people is rejected; love can be dignified only when it is converted into an appreciation of beauty in general”

“Rather, Christian love has focused on two key words:- caritas and agape. Caritas (the origin of our word "charity") is a kind of intense benevolence and good will; agape is a Greek word that refers to a kind of selfless, spiritual love with no sexuality, no clinging to a particular other person

There are several reasons why real human love might make philosophers uncomfortable. First, passionate love is notorious for making people illogical and irrational, and Western philosophers have long thought that morality is grounded in rationality...

The extensive regulation of sex in many cultures, the attempt to link love to God and then to cut away the sex, is part of an elaborate defense against the gnawing fear of mortality”

Morality and Social ties

“The more weakened the groups to which [a man] belongs, the less he depends on them, the more he consequently depends only on himself and recognizes no other rules of conduct than what are founded on his private interests...

Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders. It's not just that extroverts are naturally happier and healthier; when introverts are forced to be more outgoing, they usually enjoy it and find that it boosts their mood. Even people who think they don't want a lot of social contact still benefit from it.”

Freedom from Social Norms

“An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous b e c a u s e it encourages people to leave h o m e s , jobs, cities, and marriages in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment...

S e n e c a was right: " N o one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility...

We are an ultrasocial s p e c i e s , full of emotions finely tuned for loving, befriending, helping, sharing, and otherwise intertwining our lives with others. Attachments and relationships can bring us pain: As a character in Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit said, "Hell is other people."57 But so is heaven.”

The Adversity Hypothesis: Benefit from Adversity

“although traumas, crises, and tragedies c o m e in a thousand forms, people benefit from them in three primary ways..

rising to a challenge reveals your hidden abilities, and seeing these abilities changes your s e l f - c o n c e p t . N o n e of us knows what we are really capable of enduring...

h e second class of benefit concerns relationships. Adversity is a filter.

“When a person is diagnosed with cancer, or a couple loses a child, some friends and family members rise to the occasion and look for any way they can to express support or to be helpful. Others turn away, perhaps unsure of what to say or unable to overcome their own discomfort with the situation.

But adversity doesn't just separate the fair-weather friends from the true; it strengthens relationships and it opens people's hearts to one another. We often develop love for those we care for, and we usually feel love and gratitude toward those who cared for us in a time of need. ...

Trauma changes priorities and philosophies toward the present ("Live each day to the fullest") and toward other people...

T h e reality that people often wake up to is that life is a gift they have b e e n taking for granted, and that people matter m o r e than money...

The adversity hypothesis has a weak and a strong version. In the weak version, adversity can lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement...

T h e weak version is well-supported by research, but it has few clear implications for how we should live our lives. The strong version of the hypothesis is m o r e unsettling: It states that people must endure adversity to grow, and that the highest levels of growth and development are only open to those who have laced and overcome great adversity. If the strong version of the hypothesis is valid, it has profound implications for how we should live our lives and structure our societies. It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats...

It means that we might be dangerously overprotecting our children, offering them lives of bland safety and too much counseling while depriving them of the "critical incidents" that would h e l p them to grow strong and to develop the most intense friendships. It m e a n s that heroic societies, which fear dishonor more than death, or societies that struggle together through war, might produce better human beings than can a world of peace and prosperity in which people's expectations rise so high that they sue each other for "emotional damages.”

[hornak-reflections]

The Happiness Hypothesis

Written By: Jonathon Haidt

“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.” -Publius Ovidius Naso

Haidt’s writing is based upon the feeling depicted within Ovid’s poem above. Haidt believes that there is a separation of mind and body, and if they do not work together the incoherence will create adversity. Haidt creates an effective metaphor to help understand the relationship of mind and body throughout his book.

The comparison is that the mind and body are like a rider on the back of an elephant.  The rider has the reins in his hand, and he can pull the reins in one way or the other and tell him to turn, stop, or go. He can direct things, but only when the elephant doesn't have desires of his own. When the elephant really wants to do something, the rider is no match for him.

The rider is an advisor or servant- conscious controlled thought. The elephant is everything else- gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, intuitions that comprise much of the autonomic system.

So how do we overcome the problem of desire and reason pulling in different directions?

Haidt believes that it is possible to redirect the body’s desires. He believes that it is possible by meditation, Prozac, or cognitive therapy.

My favorite method of the group was cognitive therapy. “The mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly, and persistently than to equivalent good things.” So in other words, we often distort the bad thoughts.  We have to minimize the negativity. A good exercise to do this is to write down uncensored thoughts every day and then develop alternative or more accurate ways of thinking. Cognitive therapy users will learn to challenge autonomic thoughts and behaviors. Bit by bit, small changes in thought and behavior will grow into a lasting change in outlook and mood; the elephant will be trained.

Haidt talked about many different desires of the elephant, but the one that really stuck out to me was conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is when people seek out luxuries or delights rather than things that would make them lastingly happier. According to research by Robert Frank, the problem with conspicuous consumption is that material possessions easily lose their value. This happens because many other individuals have the power to outdo our material possessions. Robert Frank worded it, “Each person's move up devalues the possessions of others. We are wired to impress because of natural selection.”

On the other hand, there is inconspicuous consumption. Frank says, “Inconspicuous consumption refers to goods in activities that are valued for themselves, that are usually consumed more privately, and that are not bought for the purpose of achieving status.” If we focus on things that do not gain us any prestige, then we will be able to find peace among others and ourselves. Spending good time with a friend or family, learning about something, going on a road trip; experiences and knowledge are things that can always be cherished no matter what.

[analyticalheart]

After his enlightenment, Buddha (the "awakened one") preached that life is suffering, and that the only way to escape this suffering is by breaking the attachments that bind us to pleasure, achievement, reputation, and life

The Happiness Hypothesis - Joathan Haidt 

[randomguywholikesstuff]

Quotes From: Jonathan Haidt. “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”[4]

Perception Hypothesis

“God created the angels from intellect without sensuality, the beasts from sensuality without intellect, and humanity from both intellect and sensuality. So when a person's intellect overcomes his sensuality, he is better than the angels, but when his sensuality overcomes his intellect, he is worse than the beasts

-MUHAMMAD”

“OUR LIFE is THE CREATION of our minds, and we do much of that creating with metaphor. We see new things in terms of things we already understand: Life is a journey, an argument is a war, the mind is a rider on an elephant.

With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are “blind””

“We have all encountered something we failed to understand, yet smugly believed we understood because we couldn't conceive of the dimension to which we were blind. Then one day something happens that makes no sense in our two-dimensional world, and we catch our first glimpse of another dimension

In all human cultures, the social world has two clear dimensions: a horizontal dimension of closeness or liking, and a vertical one of hierarchy or status

Our minds automatically keep track of these two dimensions.”

“O n c e again, disgust turns off desire and motivates concerns about purification, separation, and cleansing. Disgust also gives us a queasy feeling when we see people with skin lesions, deformities, amputations, extreme obesity or thinness, and other violations of the culturally ideal outer envelope of the human body.”

“when people think about morality, their moral concepts cluster into three groups, which he calls the ethic of autonomy, the ethic of community, and the ethic of divinity. W h e n people think and act using the ethic of autonomy, their goal is to protect individuals from harm and grant them the maximum degree of autonomy, which they can use to pursue their own goals. When people use the ethic of community, their goal is to protect the integrity of groups, families, companies, or nations, and they value virtues such as obedience, loyalty, and wise leadership. When people use the ethic of divinity, their goal is to protect from degradation the divinity that exists in each person, and they-value living in a pure and holy way, free from moral pollutants such as lust, greed, and hatred.”

Perception Hypothesis: Secular Reverance

“Eliade says that the modern West is the first culture in h u m a n history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical, efficient, and profane world. This is the world that religious fundamentalists find unbearable and are sometimes willing to use force to fight against.

Eliade noted that even a person c o m m i t t e d to a profane existence has privileged places, qualitatively different from all others—a man's birth-place, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the "holy places" of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.”

Perception Hypothesis: Emotional Responses to Moral Beauty

“When any . . . 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. On the contrary, when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with its deformity, and conceive an abhorrence of vice.

Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions, and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.

Jefferson went on to say that the physical feelings and motivational effects caused by great literature are as powerful as those c a u s e d by real events. He considered the example of a contemporary French play, asking whether the fidelity and generosity of its hero does not dilate [the reader's] breast and elevate his sentiments as much as any similar incident which real history can furnish? Does [the reader] not in fact feel himself a better man while reading them, and privately covenant to copy the fair example?”

“Both parts of Sara's study show that Jefferson got it exactly right. People really do respond emotionally to acts of moral beauty, and these emotional reactions involve warm or pleasant feelings in the chest and conscious desires to help others or become a better person oneself”

“Keltner and I concluded that the emotion of a we happens when two conditions are met: a person perceives something vast (usually physically vast, but s o m e t i m e s conceptually vast, s u c h as a grand theory; or socially vast, s u c h as great f a m e or power); a n d the vast thing cannot be acommodated by the person's existing mental structures. Something enormous can't be processed , a n d when people are stumped , stopped in their cognitive tracks while in the presence of something vast, they feel small , powerless, passive, a n d receptive...

Religions sometimes lose touch with their origins, however; they are sometimes taken over by people who have not had peak experiences—the bureaucrats and company men who want to routinize procedures and guard orthodoxy for orthodoxy's sake. This, Maslow said, is why many young people became disenchanted with organized religion in the mid-twentieth-century, searching instead for peak experiences in psychedelic drugs, Eastern religions, and new forms of Christian worship...

Scientists may tell us in their memoirs about their private sense of wonder, but the everyday world of the scientist is one that rigidly separates facts from values and emotions..

Maslow charged, however, that the humanities had abdicated their responsibility with their retreat to relativism, their skepticism about the possibility of truth, and their preference for novelty and iconoclasm over beauty..

His goal was nothing less than the reformation of education and, therefore, of society: "Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society.”

“But by giving each one of us an inner world, a world full of simulations, social comparisons, and reputational concerns, the self also gave each one of us a personal tormenter. We all now live amid a whirlpool of inner chatter, much of which is negative (threats loom larger than opportunities), and most of which is useless. It is important to note that the self is not exactly the rider—much of the self is unconscious and automatic—but because the self emerges from conscious verbal thinking and storytelling, it can be constructed only by the rider.”

“Leary's analysis shows why the self is a problem for all major religions: The self is the main obstacle to spiritual advancement, in three ways. First, the constant stream of trivial concerns and egocentric thoughts keeps people locked in the material and profane world, unable to perceive sacredness and divinity. This is why Eastern religions rely heavily on meditation, an effective means of quieting the chatter of the self. Second, spiritual transformation is essentially the transformation of the self, weakening it, pruning it back in some sense, killing it—and often the self objects. Give up my possessions and the prestige they bring? No way! Love my enemies, after what they did to me? Forget about it. And third, following a spiritual path is invariably hard work, requiring years of meditation, prayer, self-control, and sometimes self-denial. The self does not like to be denied, and it is adept at finding reasons to bend the rules or cheat. Many religions teach that egoistic attachments to pleasure and reputation are constant temptations to leave the path of virtue.”

Religion Ethics

“core idea of the ethic of autonomy: Individuals are what really matter in life, so the ideal society protects all individuals from harm and respects their autonomy and freedom of choice.

The ethic of autonomy is well suited to helping people with different backgrounds and values get along with each other because it allows each person to pursue the life she chooses, as long as those choices don't interfere with the rights of others.

The core idea of the ethic of divinity is that each person has divinity inside, so the ideal society helps people live in a way consistent with that divinity.

On issue after issue, liberals want to maximize autonomy by removing limits barriers, and restrictions. The religious right, on the other hand, wants to structure personal, social, and political relationships in three dimensions and so create a landscape of purity and pollution where restrictions maintain the separation of the sacred and the profane. For the religious right, hell on earth is a flat land of unlimited freedom where selves roam around with no higher purpose than expressing and developing themselves.

If religious people are right in believing that religion is the source of their greatest happiness, then maybe the rest of us who are looking for happiness and meaning can learn something from them, whether or not we believe in God

It is impossible to analyze "the meaning of life" in the abstract, or in general, or for some mythical and perfectly rational being. Only by knowing the kinds of beings that we actually are, with the complex mental and emotional architecture that we happen to possess, can anyone even begin to ask about what would count as a meaningful life.

Without a target or goal, one is left with the animal default: J u s t let the elephant graze or r o a m where he p l e a s e s . And because elephants live in herds , one ends up doing what everyone else is doing. Yet the human mind has a rider, a n d as the rider begins to think more abstractly in adolescence , there may come a time when he looks around, past the edges of the herd, and asks: Where are we all going? And why?”

Perception Hypothesis: Work Life

“Even before Freud, Leo Tolstoy wrote: " O n e can live magnificently in this world, if one knows how to work and how to love, to work for the person one loves and to love one's work

White called it the "effectance motive," which he defined as the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one's environment...

Effectance is almost as basic a need as food and water, yet it is not a deficit need, like hunger, that is satisfied and then disappears for a few hours. Rather, White said, effectance is a constant presence in our lives:

Dealing with the environment means carrying on a continuing transaction which gradually changes one's relation to the environment. Because there is no consummatory climax, satisfaction has to be seen as lying in a considerable series of transactions, in a trend of behavior rather than a goal that is achieved.”

“occupational self direction." M e n who were closely supervised in jobs of low complexity and much routine showed the highest degree of alienation (feeling powerless, dissatisfied, and separated from the work). Men who had more latitude in deciding how they approached work that was varied and challenging tended to enjoy their work much more. When workers had some occupational self-direction, their work was often satisfying.”

“most people approach their work in one of three ways: as a job, a career, or a calling. If you see your work as a job, you do it only for the money, you look at the clock frequently while dreaming about the weekend ahead, and you probably pursue hobbies, which satisfy your effectance needs more thoroughly than does your work. If you see your work as a career, you have larger goals of advancement, promotion, and prestige. T h e pursuit of these goals often energizes you, and you sometimes lake work home with you because you want to get the job done properly. Yet, at times, you wonder why you work so hard. You might occasionally see your work as a rat race where people are competing for the sake of competing. If you see your work as a calling, however, you find your work intrinsically fulfilling—you are not doing it to achieve something else. You see your work as contributing to the greater good or as playing a role in s o m e larger enterprise the worth of which seems obvious to you. You have frequent experiences of flow during the work day, and you neither look forward to "quitting time" nor feel the desire to shout, "Thank God it's Friday!" You would continue to work, perhaps even without pay, if you suddenly became very wealthy”

“Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.”

“correct version of the happiness hypothesis, as I'll illustrate below, is that happiness i lies from between...

every path is unique, yet most of them led in the same direction: from initial interest and enjoyment, with moments of flow, through a relationship to people, practices, and values that deepened over many years, thereby enabling even longer periods of flow.

“vital engagement," which they define as "a relationship to the world that is characterized both by experiences of flow (enjoyed absorption) and by meaning (subjective significance)..

There is a strong felt connection between self and object; a writer is 'swept away' by a project, a scientist is 'mesmerized by the stars.'The relationship has subjective meaning; work is a 'calling.'

Vital engagement does not reside in the person or in the environment; it exists in the relationship between the two”

“When doing good (doing high-quality work that produces something of use to others) matches up with doing well (achieving wealth and professional advancement), a field is healthy..

Whenever a system can be analyzed at multiple levels, a special kind of coherence occurs when the levels mesh and mutually interlock. We saw this cross-level coherence in the analysis of personality: If your lower-level traits match up with your coping mechanisms, which in turn are consistent with your life story, your personality is well integrated and you can get on with the business of living. When these levels do not cohere, you are likely lo be torn by internal contradictions a n d neurotic conflicts. You might need adversity to knock yourself into alignment. And if you do achieve coherence, the moment when things come together may be one of the most profound of your life...

“finding coherence a c r o s s levels feels like enlightenment, and it is crucial for answering the question of purpose within life..

People are multilevel systems in another way: We are physical objects (bodies and brains) from which minds somehow emerge  ; and from our minds, somehow societies and cultures form. To understand ourselves fully we must study all three levels—physical, psychological, and sociocultural.

People gain a sense of meaning when their lives cohere across the three levels of their existence

Once again, happiness—or a sense of meaningfulness that imparts richness to experience—comes from between.”

Perception Hypothesis: Cultural Coherence

“To the extent that a community has many rituals that cohere across the three levels, people in the community are likely to feel themselves connected to the community and its traditions. If the community also offers guidance on how to live and what is of value, then people are unlikely to wonder about the question of purpose within life. Meaning and purpose simply emerge from the coherence, and people can get on with the business of living. But conflict, paralysis. and anomie are likely when a community fails to provide coherence, or, worse, when its practices contradict people's gut feelings or their shared mythology and ideology...

because elements of culture show variation (people invent new things) and selection (other people do or don't adopt those variations), cultural traits can be analyzed in a Darwinian framework just as well as physical traits (birds' beaks, giraffes' necks). Cultural elements, however, don't spread by the slow process of having children; they spread rapidly whenever people adopt a new behavior, technology, or belief...

The human capacity for culture—a strong tendency to learn from each other, to teach each other, and to build upon what we have learned—is itself a genetic innovation that happened in stages over the last few million years..

Individuals who could best learn from others were more successful than their less "cultured" brethren, and as brains became more cultural, cultures became more elaborate, further increasing the advantage of having a more cultural brain. All human beings today are the products of the co-evolution of a set of genes (which is almost identical across cultures) and a set of cultural elements (which is diverse across cultures, but still constrained by the capacities and predispositions of the human mind).”

“After a thousand years of inbreeding within caste, castes will diverge slightly on a few genetic traits—for example, shades of skin color—which might in turn lead to a growing cultural association of caste with color rather than just with occupation.”

“A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a church, all those who adhere to them.”

“Human nature is a complex mix of preparations for extreme selfishness and extreme altruism. Which side of our nature we express depends on culture and context. W h e n opponents of evolution object that human beings are not mere apes, they are correct. We are also part bee.

G r o u p selection creates interlocking genetic and cultural adaptations that enhance peace, harmony, and cooperation within the group for the express purpose of increasing the group's ability to compete with other groups. Group selection does not end conflict; it just pushes it up to the next level of social organization.”

“conclusion suggests that synchronized movement and chanting might be evolved m e c h a n i s m s for activating the altruistic motivations created in the process of group selection”

Happiness Hypothesis

“What can you do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life?

What is the answer to the question of purpose within life? I believe the answer can be found only by understanding the kind of creature that we are, divided in the many ways we are divided. We were shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige, and we were shaped by group selection to be hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger. We are social creatures who need love and attachments, and we are industrious creatures with needs for effectance, able to enter a state of vital engagement with our work. We are the rider and we are the elephant, and our mental health d e p e n d s on the two working together, e a c h drawing on the others' strengths. I don't believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, 'What is the purpose of life?

The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. S o m e of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality.

Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.”

“All things come into being by conflict of opposites”

“HEHACLITUS , C. 500 BCE”

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.

— WILLIAM BLAKE ,  C . 1790”

“Psychology and religion can benefit by taking each other seriously, or at least by agreeing to learn from each other while overlooking the areas of irreconcilable difference...

The Eastern and Western approaches to life are also said to be opposed: The East stresses acceptance and collectivism; the West encourages striving and individualism. But as we've seen, both perspectives are valuable...

Happiness requires changing yourself and changing your world. It requires pursuing your own goals and fitting in with others. Different people at different times in their lives will benefit from drawing more heavily on one approach or the other.

An important dictum of cultural psychology is that each culture develops expertise in some aspects of human existence, but no culture can be expert in all aspects. T h e same goes for the two ends of the political spectrum. My research confirms the common perception that liberals are experts in thinking about issues of victimization, equality, autonomy, and the rights of individuals, particularly those of minorities and nonconformists.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are experts in thinking about loyalty to the group, respect for authority and tradition, and sacredness

Anomie would increase along with freedom. A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents. You already know the ideas common on your own side. If you can take off the blinders of the myth of pure evil, you might see some good ideas for the first time.

By drawing on wisdom that is balanced—ancient and new, Eastern and Western, even liberal and conservative—we can choose directions in life that will lead to satisfaction, happiness, and a sense of meaning. We can't simply select a destination and then walk there directly—the rider d o e s not have that m u c h authority. But by drawing on humanity's greatest ideas and best science, we can train the elephant, know our possibilities as well as our limits, and live wisely”

[randomguywholikesstuff]

Quotes From: Jonathan Haidt. “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom”[3]

Personality

“basic traits such as the "big five": neuroticism, extroversion, o p e n n e s s to new experiences, agreeableness (warmth/niceness), and conscientiousness”

“characteristic adaptations," includes personal goals, defense and coping mechanisms, values, beliefs, and life-stage concerns (such as those of parent-hood or retirement) that people develop to succeed in their particular roles and niches”

“third level of personality is that of the "life story.”

“We can't stop ourselves from creating what McAdams describes as an "evolving story that integrates a reconstructed past, perceived present, and anticipated future into a coherent and vitalizing life myth...

the life story is written primarily by the rider. You create your story in consciousness as you interpret your own behavior, and as you listen to other people's thoughts about you...

the rider has no access to the real causes of your behavior; it is more like a work of historical fiction that makes plenty of references to real events and connects them by dramatizations and interpretations that might or might not be true to the spirit of what happened.”

“Most of the life goals that people pursue at the level of "characteristic adaptations" can be sorted—as the psychologist Robert Emmons has found—into four categories: work and achievement, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and generativity (leaving a legacy and contributing something to society).”

“People who strive primarily for achievement and wealth are, Emmons finds, less happy, on average, than those whose strivings focus on the other three categories”

Adversity Hypothesis

“Adversity may be necessary for growth because it forces you to stop speeding along the road of life, allowing you to notice the paths that were branching off all along, and to think about where you really want to end up...

You need interesting material to write a good story..

stories are" "fundamentally about the vicissitudes of h u m a n intention organized in time

Some people's life stories show a "contamination" sequence in which emotionally positive events go bad and everything is spoiled.

People who tell such stories are, not surprisingly, more likely to be depressed...

Although adversity that is not overcome can create a story of depressing bleakness, substantial adversity might be necessary for a meaningful story...

Imagine a woman whose basic traits are warm and gregarious but who strives for success in a career that offers few c h a n c e s for close contacts with people, and whose life story is about an artist forced by her parents to pursue a practical career. She is a mess of mi s matched motives and stories, and it may be that only through adversity will she be able to make the radical changes she would need to achieve coherence a m o n g levels..

people who are mentally healthy and happy have a higher degree of "vertical coherence" a m o n g their goals—that is, higher-level (long term) goals and lower-level (immediate) goals all fit together well so that pursuing one's short-term goals advances the pursuit of long-term goals...

“Trauma often shatters belief systems and robs people of their sense of meaning..

When bad things happen to good people, we have a problem. We know consciously that life is unfair, but unconsciously we see the world through the lens of reciprocity..

At an intuitive level, we all believe in karma”

we are so motivated to believe that people get what [they deserve]..

that we often blame the victim of a tragedy, particularly when we can't achieve justice by punishing a perpetrator or compensating the victim...

but, in general, the ability to make sense of tragedy and then find benefit in it is the key that unlocks posttraumatic growth”

Optimism Advantage

“The answer compounds the already great unfairness of life: Optimists are more likely to benefit than pessimists. Optimists are, for the most part, people who won the cortical lottery: They have a high happiness setpoint, they habitually look on the bright side, and they easily find silver linings. Life has a way of making the rich get richer and the happy get happier...

When a crisis strikes, people cope in three primary ways: active coping (taking direct action to fix the problem), reappraisal (doing the work within—getting one's own thoughts right and looking for silver linings), and avoidance coping (working to blunt one's emotional reactions by denying or avoiding the events, or by drinking, drugs, and other distractions)...

People who have a basic-level trait of optimism (McAdams's level 1) tend to develop a coping style (McAdams's level 2) that alternates between active coping and reappraisal. Because optimists expect their efforts to pay off, they go right to work fixing the problem. But if they fail, they expect that things usually work out for the best, and so they can't help but look for possible benefits. When they find them, they write a new chapter in their life story (McAdams's level 3), a story of continual overcoming and growth.

In contrast, people who have a relatively negative affective style (complete with more activity in the front right cortex than the front left) live in a world filled with many more threats and have less confidence that they can deal with them. They develop a coping style that relies more heavily on avoidance and other defense mechanisms. They work harder to manage their pain than to fix their problems, so their problems often get worse...

Drawing the lesson that the world is unjust and uncontrollable, and that things often work out for the worst, they weave this lesson into their life story where it contaminates the narrative.

If you can find a way to m a k e sense of adversity and draw constructive lessons from it, you can benefit, too. ”

Writing about Adversity to gain Reappraisal

“Once Pennebaker had found a correlation between disclosure and health, he took the next step in the scientific process and tried to create health benefits by getting people to disclose their secrets..

“T h e people who showed deep insight into the causes and c o n s e q u e n c e s of the event on their first day of writing got no benefit, either: T h e y had already made sense of things. It was the people who made progress across the four days, who showed increasing insight; they were the ones whose health improved over the next year..

You have to use words, and the words have to help you create a meaningful story. If you can write such a story you can reap the benefits of reappraisal (one of the two healthy coping styles) even years after an event. You can close a chapter of your life that was still open, still affecting your thoughts and preventing you from moving on with the larger narrative...

Anyone, therefore, can benefit from adversity, although a pessimist will have to take s o m e extra steps, s o m e conscious , rider-initiated steps, to guide the elephant gently in the right direction. T h e first step is to do what you can, before adversity strikes, to change your cognitive style. If you are a pessimist, consider meditation, cognitive therapy, or even Prozac..

the second step is to cherish and build your social support network. Having one or two good attachment relationships helps adults as well as children (and rhesus monkeys) to face threats..

Trusted friends who are good listeners can be a great aid to making sense and finding meaning. Third, religious faith and practice can aid growth, both by directly fostering sense making (religions provide stories and interpretive schemes for losses and crises) and by increasing social support (religious people have relationships through their religious communities, and many have a relationship with God ) . A portion of the benefits of religiosity could also be a result of the confession and disclosure of inner turmoil, either to God or to a religious authority that many religions encourage...

at some point in the months afterwards, pull out a piece of paper and start writing...

that you write continuously for fifteen minutes a day, for several days...

Write about what happened, how you feel about it, and why you feel that way. If you hate to write, you can talk into a tape recorder. The crucial thing is to get your thoughts and feelings out without imposing any order on t h e m — b u t in such a way that, after a few days, s o m e order is likely to emerge on its own. Before you conclude your last session, be sure you have d o n e your best to answer these two questions: Why did this happen ? What good might I derive from it?”

Virtue Hypothesis: Knowledge and Wisdom

“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world...

explicit and tacit. Explicit knowledge is all the facts you know and can consciously report, independent of context

T h e rider gathers it up and files it away, ready for use in later reasoning. But wisdom is b a s e d — according to Robert Sternberg, a leading wisdom researcher—on "tacit knowledge." Tacit knowledge is procedural (it's "knowing how" rather than "knowing that"), it is acquired without direct help from others, and it is related to goals that a person values..

Tacit knowledge resides in the elephant..

There is no universal set of best practices for ending a romantic relationship, consoling a friend, or resolving a moral disagreement...

First, wise people are able to balance their own needs, the needs of others, and the needs of people or things beyond the immediate interaction

T h e wise are able to see things from others' points of view, appreciate shades of gray, and then choose or advise a course of action that works out best for everyone in the long run. S e c o n d , wise people are able to balance three responses to situations: adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment), shaping (changing the environment), and selection (choosing to move to a new environment”

“For adversity to be maximally beneficial, it should happen at the right time (young adulthood), to the right people (those with the social and psychological resources to rise to challenges and find benefits), and to the right degree (not so severe as to c a u s e PTSD )”

Virtue Hypothesis: Morality

“He was saying that a good life is one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential, and become what it is in your nature to become...

While my care was employed in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous was not sufficient to prevent our slipping, and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct

The rider must take part in the training, but if moral instruction imparts only explicit knowledge (facts that the rider can state), it will have no effect on the elephant, and therefore little effect on behavior. Moral education must also impart tacit knowledge—skills of social perception and social emotion..

so finely tuned that one automatically feels the right thing in each situation, knows the right thing to do, and then wants to do it. Morality, for the ancients, was a kind of practical wisdom.”

“Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, two of the greatest works of Greek philosophy, are essentially treatises on the virtues and their cultivation

Like Plato, Kant believed that h u m a n beings have a dual nature: part animal a n d part rational. T h e animal part of us follows the laws of nature, just as does a falling rock or a lion killing its prey. There is no morality in nature; there is only causality. But the rational part of us, Kant said, can follow a different kind of law: It can respect rules of conduct, and so people (but not lions) can be judged morally for the degree to which they respect the right rules Kant turned the problem around and said that people should think about whether the rules guiding their own actions could reasonably be proposed as universal laws.

This simple test, which Kant called the "categorical imperative," was extraordinarily powerful...

offered to make ethics a branch of applied logic, thereby giving it the sort of certainty that secular ethics, without recourse to a sacred book, had always found elusive”

“Bentham was the father of utilitarianism, the doctrine that in all deci-sionmaking (legal and personal), our goal should be the maximum total benefit (utility), but who gets the benefit is of little concern...

deontologists" from the Greek deon, obligation) try to elaborate the duties and obligations that ethical people must respect, even when their actions lead to bad outcomes (for example, you must never kill an innocent person, even if doing so will save a hundred lives). Descendants of Bentham (known as "consequentialists" because they evaluate actions only by their consequences) try to work out the rules and policies that will bring about the greatest good, even when doing so will sometimes violate other ethical principles (go ahead and kill the one to save the hundred, they say, unless it will set a bad example that leads to later problems).

They both believe in parsimony: Decisions should be based ultimately on one principle only, be it the categorical imperative or the maximization of utility. They both insist that only the rider can make such decisions because moral decision making requires logical reasoning and sometimes even mathematical calculation. They both distrust intuitions and gut feelings, which they see as obstacles to good reasoning. And they both shun the particular in favor of the abstract. The moral law, like a law of physics, works the same for all people at all times.”

“T h e philosopher E d m u n d Pincoffs has argued that consequentialists and deontologists worked together to convince Westerners in the twentieth century that morality is the study of moral quandaries and dilemmas. Where the Greeks focused on the character of a person and asked what kind of person we should each aim to become, modern ethics focuses on actions, asking when a particular action is right or wrong

This turn from character ethics to quandary ethics has turned moral education away from virtues and toward moral reasoning

Children must be taught how to think about moral problems, especially how to overcome their natural egoism and take into their calculations the needs of others

I believe that this turn from character to quandary was a profound mistake, for two reasons. First, it weakens morality and limits its scope. Where the ancients saw virtue and character at work in everything a person does, our modern conception confines morality to a set of situations that arise for each person only a few times in any given week: tradeoffs between self-interest and the interests of others. In our thin and restricted modern conception, a moral person is one who gives to charity, helps others, plays by the rules, and in general does not put her own self-interest too far ahead of others'. Most of the activities and decisions of life are therefore insulated from moral concern. When morality is reduced to the opposite of self-interest, however, the virtue hypothesis b e c o m e s paradoxical: In modern terms, the virtue hypothesis says that acting against your self-interest is in your self-interest..

thicker, richer notion of virtues as a garden of excellences that a person cultivates to become more effective and appealing to others. Seen in this way, virtue is, obviously, its own reward..

Maclntyre says that the loss of a language of virtue, grounded in a particular tradition, makes it difficult for us to find meaning, coherence, and purpose in life.”

“Although no specific virtue made every list, six broad virtues, or families of related virtues, a p p e a r e d on nearly all lists: wisdom, courage, humanity, j u s t i c e , temperance, and transcendence (the ability to forge connections to something larger than the self)- T h e s e virtues are widely endorsed because they are abstract: There are many ways to be wise, or courageous, or h u m a n e , and it is impossible to find a human culture that rejects all forms of any of these virtues

But the real value of the list of six is that it serves as an organizing framework for more specific strengths of character. Peterson and Seligman define character strengths as specific ways of displaying, practicing, and cultivating the virtues. Several paths lead to each virtue. People, as well as cultures, vary in the degree to which they value each path. This is the real power of the classification: It points to specific means of growth toward widely valued ends without insisting that any one way is mandatory for all people at all times..

twenty-four principle character strengths, each leading to one of the six higher-level virtues”

“But you don't really have to be good at everything. Life offers so many chances to use one tool instead of another, and often you can use a strength to get around a weakness”

“immanent justice"—justice that is inherent in an a c t itself

The belief that God or fate will dole out rewards and punishments for good and bad behavior seems on its face to be a cosmic extension of our childhood belief in immanent justice, which is itself a part of our obsession with reciprocity.

These two processes — kin altruism and reciprocal altruism—do indeed explain nearly all altruism among nonhuman animals, and much of human altruism, too. This answer is unsatisfying, however, because our genes are, to s o m e extent, puppet masters making us want things that are sometimes good for them but bad for us (such as extramarital affairs, or prestige bought at the expense of happiness

anyone who does embrace reciprocal altruism as a justification for altruism (rather than merely a c a u s e of it) would then be free to pick and choose: Be nice to those who can help you, but don't waste time or money on anyone else (for example, never leave a tip in restaurants you will not return to). So to evaluate the idea that altruism pays for the altruist, we need to p u s h the sages and the scientists harder: Does it even pay when there is neither postmortem nor reciprocal payback?”

Virtue Hypothesis: Volunteering and Happiness

“Research on "service learning," in which (mostly) high school students do volunteer work and engage in group reflection on what they are doing as part of a course, provides generally encouraging results: reduced delinquency and behavioral problems, increased civic participation, and increased commitment to positive social values

W h e n a person increased volunteer work, all measures of happiness and well-being increased (on average) afterwards, for as long as the volunteer work was a part of the person's life”

“T h e elderly benefit even more than do other adults, particularly when their volunteer work either involves direct person-to-person helping or is done through a religious organization. T h e benefits of volunteer work for the elderly are so large that they even show up in improved health and longer life

With age, however, one's story begins to take shape, and altruistic activities add depth and virtue to one's character. In old age, when social networks are thinned by the deaths of friends and family, the social benefits of volunteering are strongest (and indeed, it is the most socially isolated elderly who benefit the most from volunteering)”

Virtue Hypothesis: Freedom from Norms

“Anomie is the condition of a society in which there are no clear rules, norms, or standards of value. In an anomie society, people can do as they please; but without any clear standards or respected social institutions to enforce those standards, it is harder for people to find things they want to do. Anomie breeds feelings of rootlessness and anxiety and leads to an increase in amoral and antisocial behavior

Values clarification taught children how to find their own values, and it urged teachers to refrain from imposing values on anyone

Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language—a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.

For many liberals, diversity has become an unquestioned good—like justice, freedom , and happiness, the more diversity, the better...

two main kinds of diversity—demographic and moral

Demographic diversity is about socio-demographic categories such as race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, age, and handicapped status

Calling for demographic diversity is in large measure calling for justice, for the inclusion of previously excluded groups .

Moral diversity, on the other hand, is essentially what Durkheim described as anomie: a lack of consensus on moral norms and values. O n c e you make this distinction, you see that nobody can coherently even want moral diversity.

If you prefer diversity on an issue, the issue is not a moral issue for you; it is a matter of personal taste...

Nonetheless, Franklin may be right that leadership on virtue can never come from the major political actors; it will have to come from a movement of people, such as the people of a town who come together and agree to create moral coherence across the many areas of children's lives.”

[randomguywholikesstuff]

Psychology and religion can benefit by taking each other seriously, or at least by agreeing to learn from each other while overlooking the areas of irreconcilable difference... The Eastern and Western approaches to life are also said to be opposed: The East stresses acceptance and collectivism; the West encourages striving and individualism. But as we've seen, both perspectives are valuable... Happiness requires changing yourself and changing your world. It requires pursuing your own goals and fitting in with others. Different people at different times in their lives will benefit from drawing more heavily on one approach or the other. An important dictum of cultural psychology is that each culture develops expertise in some aspects of human existence, but no culture can be expert in all aspects. T h e same goes for the two ends of the political spectrum. My research confirms the common perception that liberals are experts in thinking about issues of victimization, equality, autonomy, and the rights of individuals, particularly those of minorities and nonconformists. Conservatives, on the other hand, are experts in thinking about loyalty to the group, respect for authority and tradition, and sacredness Anomie would increase along with freedom. A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents. You already know the ideas common on your own side. If you can take off the blinders of the myth of pure evil, you might see some good ideas for the first time. By drawing on wisdom that is balanced—ancient and new, Eastern and Western, even liberal and conservative—we can choose directions in life that will lead to satisfaction, happiness, and a sense of meaning. We can't simply select a destination and then walk there directly—the rider d o e s not have that m u c h authority. But by drawing on humanity's greatest ideas and best science, we can train the elephant, know our possibilities as well as our limits, and live wisely

The Happiness Hypothesis

[randomguywholikesstuff]

What can you do to have a good, happy, fulfilling, and meaningful life? What is the answer to the question of purpose within life? I believe the answer can be found only by understanding the kind of creature that we are, divided in the many ways we are divided. We were shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who struggle for resources, pleasure, and prestige, and we were shaped by group selection to be hive creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger. We are social creatures who need love and attachments, and we are industrious creatures with needs for effectance, able to enter a state of vital engagement with our work. We are the rider and we are the elephant, and our mental health d e p e n d s on the two working together, e a c h drawing on the others' strengths. I don't believe there is an inspiring answer to the question, 'What is the purpose of life? The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. S o m e of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger. It is worth striving to get the right relationships between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself. If you get these relationships right, a sense of purpose and meaning will emerge.

Johnathan Haidt , The Happiness Hypothesis

[randomguywholikesstuff]

OUR LIFE is THE CREATION of our minds, and we do much of that creating with metaphor. We see new things in terms of things we already understand: Life is a journey, an argument is a war, the mind is a rider on an elephant. With the wrong metaphor we are deluded; with no metaphor we are "blind"

The Happiness Hypothesis

[randomguywholikesstuff]

anyone who does embrace reciprocal altruism as a justification for altruism (rather than merely a c a u s e of it) would then be free to pick and choose: Be nice to those who can help you, but don't waste time or money on anyone else (for example, never leave a tip in restaurants you will not return to).