The Happiness Hypothesis (Shrink Rap Radio interview)
http://talentdevelop.com/articlelive/articles/709/1/The-Happiness-Hypothesis--Shrink-Rap-Radio-interview/Page1.html
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt, PhD is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. His research examines the emotional basis of morality and the ways that morality varies across cultures, including the cultures of liberals and conservatives. He has been active in the positive psychology movement since 1999, and in 2001 he was awarded the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology. He is the author of the book The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
By Jonathan Haidt
Published on 07/14/2008
“When you are surrounded by facts, and quotes and things like that,
your eye can run over an idea, you can think about it consciously; but
it won’t really become wisdom until you have, I think, a much more
intuitive and emotional experience to it. Until you see connections
and feel it’s importance."
Dr. David Van Nuys, aka “Dr. Dave” interviews Dr. Jonathan Haidt
(transcribed from www.ShrinkRapRadio.com by Jo Kelly)
Excerpt: “When you are surrounded by facts, and quotes and things like that, your eye can run over an idea, you can think about it consciously; but it won’t really become wisdom until you have, I think, a much more intuitive and emotional experience to it. Until you see connections and feel it’s importance.
"Just as we get inflation when you pump too much money into the money supply, you get a kind of an inflation which leads to ultimate cheapening of ideas when you pump too many ideas into every minute of your life. We are just surrounded by good ideas now.
"You think about ancient times, when people had to treck up to a mountain to get wisdom from a guru; all you have to do is look down at the bottom of your friends’ emails these days, you’ll find plenty of wisdom right there. But there’s so much of it, that we don’t have emotional experiences to it.”
Introduction: That was the voice of my guest, Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D.
Dr. Jonathan Haidt is a social and cultural psychologist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did post- doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India. He has been on the faculty of the University of Virginia since 1995. His research focuses on morality – its emotional foundations, cultural variations, and developmental course.
Dr. Haidt is the 2001 winner of the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology, and a 2004 winner of the Virginia “Outstanding Faculty Award,” conferred by Governor Mark Warner. He is the author of the 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and his website is http://www.happinesshypothesis.com/
He was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at Princeton University in 2006-2007.
Dr. Dave: Dr. Jonathan Haidt, welcome to Shrink Rap Radio.
Dr. Haidt: Thank you Dave.
Dr. Dave: I’m really glad to have you here.Because of my long involvement with humanistic psychology I’ve been very intrigued by developments in the positive psychology movement. I’ve been kind of a viewer from the sidelines, and I’ve interviewed several other people who are prominent in the movement. So how did you come to be involved with positive psychology?
Dr. Haidt: I got involved at the very beginning, just by a confluence of interests. My research has always been about morality, that’s really what I do; and I look at the moral emotions. And I was studying especially the emotion of disgust: I’m kind of known as “the big fish in the small, stinking pond of disgust research”.
Dr. Dave: Oh my goodness; you’re the “disgusting psychologist” (laughing).
Dr. Haidt: I am; I’m a student of Paul Rozin and the University of Pennsylvania. And my aspect of it – I was so interested in why disgust was used so much as a moral emotion. Why the Bible, and the Koran, and most religions seem to moralise the body so much, and care so much about menstruation, and food, and how you handle corpses, and all those sorts of things.
And they are all pointed to disgust as a moral emotion. So that’s what I did for a number of years, but then soon after I moved to the University of Virginia in 1995 I began thinking about the opposite of disgust. If disgust seemed to be functioning as a kind of a guardian of the lower boundary between humans and animals – alerting us to the presence of the monstrous – is there a corresponding emotion at the upper end?
Is there some emotion alerting us to the presence of divinity, or angels, or super human virtue? And just from reflecting on it, it seemed to me – well yes, there certainly is.
When I hear stories about moral beauty I feel something. So I started studying it systematically, and interviewing people, and doing experiments.
This was about 1997, 1998; and just then Martin Seligman was putting out the call for young researchers who were interested in issues related to the positive side of human nature. I answered the call, and joined about seventeen other young researchers at one of the first conferences at Akumal, Mexico in, I think 1998 or 1999. And that was it – I’ve been involved since then. ///cut///
Dr. Dave: Well the main title of your book is The Happiness Hypothesis, which suggests that there is some sort of underlying hypothesis or idea to be tested. So what’s the hypothesis here in your wonderful book?
Dr. Haidt: Well first, let me say that whatever a title suggests, the main thing it suggests is that a few people at the publisher talked together in a hallway and picked a title and forced it upon the author.
Dr. Dave: Ahh.
Dr. Haidt: In this case I couldn’t come up with a better one, but I’ll tell you my original title was “Twelve Great Truths – Insights into Mind and Heart from Ancient Cultures and Modern Psychology”. Then as I began to run out of time in writing the book, it became “Ten Great Truths” etc.
So the book isn’t really about happiness primarily; it’s really about the greatest ideas of all time, at least ideas about how the mind works. So I reviewed the ideas that I was just finding all over the place about psychology from the ancients; and there is a chapter on each of the ten main ideas, and each chapter reviews what we now know, that we can say is this idea true or not?
And they are all true in some way, although some have some interesting exceptions.
The publisher’s basic book just decided to call it something with happiness; I resisted that, but I couldn’t really come up with a better title. By the time I really finished the book I actually kind of accepted their title, because it turns out there is sort of a happiness hypothesis here.
The most obvious hypothesis is that people are happy when they get what they want; but that one we all know is wrong, and it’s easy to demonstrate that empirically, that people are happy for hours maybe but rarely for days from a success.
The second hypothesis which is much more sophisticated, and more widespread is that happiness comes from within. Stop striving, you can never attain everything you want, therefore work on yourself; only by working on yourself can you find happiness. This one you find certainly in the wisdom of the East, you find it in the Stoics, and there is a lot to be said for it.
But what really excited me, and what I didn’t know before I started writing the book, was that there is a further happiness hypothesis. One which I think is a little different, and I think kind of exciting.
It’s one that people don’t seem to have guessed; it’s not quite as obvious. It’s that happiness comes not from within, but from between. That is happiness comes from getting the right kind of engagement: between yourself and others; yourself and your work; and yourself and something larger than yourself.
We have to stop thinking about the world as being composed of these separate little atoms, and then each atom has to somehow work on itself. And rather see happiness or wellbeing flourishing as something that emerges when a system is properly configured, and all the parts are deeply engaged and enmeshed.
That’s the happiness hypothesis.
Dr. Dave: OK. The sub-title, if that’s due to the publishers, well that captures I think the core of what you were trying to get at in your original title; and the sub-title is, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
Dr. Haidt: That’s right; that’s what the book is really about.
Dr. Dave: I really loved that aspect of it, because it’s really a tour de force in terms of integrating ancient wisdom traditions with some of the most recent findings in the whole world of psychology; and especially social psychology, and positive psychology.
In fact you set out on a reading expedition in the world’s major traditions, which was quite an astounding range you covered. Tell us a little bit about that.
Dr. Haidt: Well I was a philosophy major in college, and I was a philosophy major because I had a kind of an existential depression when I was in high school. Not a serious clinical depression, but just a sort of a depression at thinking through whether or not there was a god; and deciding that pretty well seemed clear to me there wasn’t, and then what are the implications of that – is there any meaning in life?
So I thought, well I know, I’ll major in philosophy and see if I can find the meaning in life. So I majored in philosophy, and I read philosophical works, East and West, and didn’t find much – especially in modern philosophy – but I liked Buddhism very much.
Then I forgot about all of this stuff as I studied morality; but many years later when I began teaching Psych 101 at UVA, I just found myself thinking of ways to illustrate psychological points. So here I was lecturing on say emotions, and the importance of appraisals; or lecturing on the balance between various psychological systems and showing the importance of balance.
I found myself just wanting to use other quotations: quotations from literary sources, from ancient religious works, to illustrate these principles. And I just started doing that in my lectures.
Then in the following years I started numbering them, and saying these are major themes of the course.
Major theme number 1- The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. And as I got up to about seven or eight of these, I started thinking: hey, I wonder how many of these there are?
And I decided – well maybe I could write a book on this. I could just do a little more systematic survey, and write down every idea I found in all these ancient texts, and then organise them into clusters, and then write chapters. And that’s how the book came about.
For rest of interview transcript and audio podcast:
Shrink Rap Radio #142, March 14, 2008.
(transcribed from www.ShrinkRapRadio.com by Jo Kelly)
Excerpt: “When you are surrounded by facts, and quotes and things like that, your eye can run over an idea, you can think about it consciously; but it won’t really become wisdom until you have, I think, a much more intuitive and emotional experience to it. Until you see connections and feel it’s importance.
"Just as we get inflation when you pump too much money into the money supply, you get a kind of an inflation which leads to ultimate cheapening of ideas when you pump too many ideas into every minute of your life. We are just surrounded by good ideas now.
"You think about ancient times, when people had to treck up to a mountain to get wisdom from a guru; all you have to do is look down at the bottom of your friends’ emails these days, you’ll find plenty of wisdom right there. But there’s so much of it, that we don’t have emotional experiences to it.”
Introduction: That was the voice of my guest, Jonathan Haidt, Ph.D.
Dr. Jonathan Haidt is a social and cultural psychologist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did post- doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India. He has been on the faculty of the University of Virginia since 1995. His research focuses on morality – its emotional foundations, cultural variations, and developmental course.
Dr. Haidt is the 2001 winner of the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology, and a 2004 winner of the Virginia “Outstanding Faculty Award,” conferred by Governor Mark Warner. He is the author of the 2006 book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and his website is http://www.happinesshypothesis.com/
He was the Laurance S. Rockefeller Distinguished Visiting Professor at Princeton University in 2006-2007.
Dr. Dave: Dr. Jonathan Haidt, welcome to Shrink Rap Radio.
Dr. Haidt: Thank you Dave.
Dr. Dave: I’m really glad to have you here.Because of my long involvement with humanistic psychology I’ve been very intrigued by developments in the positive psychology movement. I’ve been kind of a viewer from the sidelines, and I’ve interviewed several other people who are prominent in the movement. So how did you come to be involved with positive psychology?
Dr. Haidt: I got involved at the very beginning, just by a confluence of interests. My research has always been about morality, that’s really what I do; and I look at the moral emotions. And I was studying especially the emotion of disgust: I’m kind of known as “the big fish in the small, stinking pond of disgust research”.
Dr. Dave: Oh my goodness; you’re the “disgusting psychologist” (laughing).
Dr. Haidt: I am; I’m a student of Paul Rozin and the University of Pennsylvania. And my aspect of it – I was so interested in why disgust was used so much as a moral emotion. Why the Bible, and the Koran, and most religions seem to moralise the body so much, and care so much about menstruation, and food, and how you handle corpses, and all those sorts of things.
And they are all pointed to disgust as a moral emotion. So that’s what I did for a number of years, but then soon after I moved to the University of Virginia in 1995 I began thinking about the opposite of disgust. If disgust seemed to be functioning as a kind of a guardian of the lower boundary between humans and animals – alerting us to the presence of the monstrous – is there a corresponding emotion at the upper end?
Is there some emotion alerting us to the presence of divinity, or angels, or super human virtue? And just from reflecting on it, it seemed to me – well yes, there certainly is.
When I hear stories about moral beauty I feel something. So I started studying it systematically, and interviewing people, and doing experiments.
This was about 1997, 1998; and just then Martin Seligman was putting out the call for young researchers who were interested in issues related to the positive side of human nature. I answered the call, and joined about seventeen other young researchers at one of the first conferences at Akumal, Mexico in, I think 1998 or 1999. And that was it – I’ve been involved since then. ///cut///
Dr. Dave: Well the main title of your book is The Happiness Hypothesis, which suggests that there is some sort of underlying hypothesis or idea to be tested. So what’s the hypothesis here in your wonderful book?
Dr. Haidt: Well first, let me say that whatever a title suggests, the main thing it suggests is that a few people at the publisher talked together in a hallway and picked a title and forced it upon the author.
Dr. Dave: Ahh.
Dr. Haidt: In this case I couldn’t come up with a better one, but I’ll tell you my original title was “Twelve Great Truths – Insights into Mind and Heart from Ancient Cultures and Modern Psychology”. Then as I began to run out of time in writing the book, it became “Ten Great Truths” etc.
So the book isn’t really about happiness primarily; it’s really about the greatest ideas of all time, at least ideas about how the mind works. So I reviewed the ideas that I was just finding all over the place about psychology from the ancients; and there is a chapter on each of the ten main ideas, and each chapter reviews what we now know, that we can say is this idea true or not?
And they are all true in some way, although some have some interesting exceptions.
The publisher’s basic book just decided to call it something with happiness; I resisted that, but I couldn’t really come up with a better title. By the time I really finished the book I actually kind of accepted their title, because it turns out there is sort of a happiness hypothesis here.
The most obvious hypothesis is that people are happy when they get what they want; but that one we all know is wrong, and it’s easy to demonstrate that empirically, that people are happy for hours maybe but rarely for days from a success.
The second hypothesis which is much more sophisticated, and more widespread is that happiness comes from within. Stop striving, you can never attain everything you want, therefore work on yourself; only by working on yourself can you find happiness. This one you find certainly in the wisdom of the East, you find it in the Stoics, and there is a lot to be said for it.
But what really excited me, and what I didn’t know before I started writing the book, was that there is a further happiness hypothesis. One which I think is a little different, and I think kind of exciting.
It’s one that people don’t seem to have guessed; it’s not quite as obvious. It’s that happiness comes not from within, but from between. That is happiness comes from getting the right kind of engagement: between yourself and others; yourself and your work; and yourself and something larger than yourself.
We have to stop thinking about the world as being composed of these separate little atoms, and then each atom has to somehow work on itself. And rather see happiness or wellbeing flourishing as something that emerges when a system is properly configured, and all the parts are deeply engaged and enmeshed.
That’s the happiness hypothesis.
Dr. Dave: OK. The sub-title, if that’s due to the publishers, well that captures I think the core of what you were trying to get at in your original title; and the sub-title is, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
Dr. Haidt: That’s right; that’s what the book is really about.
Dr. Dave: I really loved that aspect of it, because it’s really a tour de force in terms of integrating ancient wisdom traditions with some of the most recent findings in the whole world of psychology; and especially social psychology, and positive psychology.
In fact you set out on a reading expedition in the world’s major traditions, which was quite an astounding range you covered. Tell us a little bit about that.
Dr. Haidt: Well I was a philosophy major in college, and I was a philosophy major because I had a kind of an existential depression when I was in high school. Not a serious clinical depression, but just a sort of a depression at thinking through whether or not there was a god; and deciding that pretty well seemed clear to me there wasn’t, and then what are the implications of that – is there any meaning in life?
So I thought, well I know, I’ll major in philosophy and see if I can find the meaning in life. So I majored in philosophy, and I read philosophical works, East and West, and didn’t find much – especially in modern philosophy – but I liked Buddhism very much.
Then I forgot about all of this stuff as I studied morality; but many years later when I began teaching Psych 101 at UVA, I just found myself thinking of ways to illustrate psychological points. So here I was lecturing on say emotions, and the importance of appraisals; or lecturing on the balance between various psychological systems and showing the importance of balance.
I found myself just wanting to use other quotations: quotations from literary sources, from ancient religious works, to illustrate these principles. And I just started doing that in my lectures.
Then in the following years I started numbering them, and saying these are major themes of the course.
Major theme number 1- The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. And as I got up to about seven or eight of these, I started thinking: hey, I wonder how many of these there are?
And I decided – well maybe I could write a book on this. I could just do a little more systematic survey, and write down every idea I found in all these ancient texts, and then organise them into clusters, and then write chapters. And that’s how the book came about.
For rest of interview transcript and audio podcast:
Shrink Rap Radio #142, March 14, 2008.