BOOK REVIEW. Do not trust your own wants if you want to be happy!

Transcription

1 Journal of Happiness Studies (2006) 7: Ó Springer 2006 DOI /s Do not trust your own wants if you want to be happy! Review of Happiness; the science behind your smile by Daniel Nettle Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, ISBN: , 216 pages. INTRODUCTION Daniel Nettle is Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Newcastle in England. His publications include Vanishing Voices (with Suzanne Romaine), Linguistic Diversity and Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature. He takes a broadly evolutionary perspective in all his work and runs the website THREE KINDS OF HAPPINESS Nettle defines three kinds or levels of happiness. The most immediate and direct type involves positive emotions like joy and pleasure at specific moments. Such emotions are brought on by the attainment of desired states and there is no cognition involved. Happiness at the second level is more than that; it is satisfaction with life as a whole after some reflection on the balance sheet of pleasures and pains. This is a hybrid of emotions and judgements. The cognitive processes involved can be rather complex since comparisons are made of actual experiences and achievements with all kinds of standards and expectations: a shaving man cutting himself once will be happy afterwards if he usually cuts himself twice. Happiness at the third level is the flourishing of people by fulfilling some ideal about the good life. The happiness or eudemonia of Aristotle is a famous example. This type is rather different from the first two since it does not require any positive emotions like pleasure or joy. The fulfilling

2 518 of some physical ideal by a very unpleasant Spartan or anorexic way of life can still create this type of happiness. This type will be difficult to measure since measurement requires comparison of reality with some dominant ideal. And whose ideal is it? If it is the subject s own ideal then this happiness is a psychological reality and then it will have some impact on the judgements at level two happiness. But if this ideal is promoted by psychologists, philosophers and politicians, then such an ideal is a moralizing ideology. Because of these complications, and considering the fact that people perceive happiness as a state involving positive feelings, Nettle makes happiness at the first two levels the focus of his book. He admits that this choice implies that there are other important human goods, which are not reducible to happiness at those levels. WHY WE ARE HAPPY Several important philosophers, like Schopenhauer and Sartre, have been very pessimistic about happiness but in Nettle s vision their pessimism has been falsified by empirical evidence. Most people in affluent nations appear to be very happy at level two. But why? Impression management could produce positive answers to happiness-questions. Creating a happy impression on other people has important advantages in terms of status and relations. This explains that people report higher levels of happiness in face-to-face interviews than in postal surveys, in particular if the interviewer in the face-to-face interviews is of the opposite sex. An additional argument for strategic optimism is that optimism motivates us to do the best we can in order to achieve the best possible results, not just in sports but also in other domains of life. Thus the finding that most people are happy is in part a reflection of an unrealistic psychology with which we address the world. Another interesting finding is that even very happy people expect to be happier in the future. Whatever the circumstances, there is always a gap between our present happiness and a conceivable super-happiness. This permanent gap explains the popularity of

3 519 Utopias, stories about societies where people are supposedly completely happy, like Coming of age in Samoa by Margaret Mead. Our happiness-system appears to be constantly scanning the horizon on the lookout for improvements in terms of environment and behaviour. Evolution has not set us up for the attainment of happiness but merely for its pursuit. Such a function obviously makes sense in terms of survival; even if everything is perfect people keep exploring their environment in order to identify interesting resources and possibilities. Just in case. FUNCTION OF PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS In Nettle s functional vision we are programmed to want things that contribute to the successful dispersion of our genes, like power and a high social status. This evolutionary functionality makes us overestimate the importance of such conditions; in Randolph Ness s phrase: natural selection does not give a fig about our happiness, it just wants us alive and making babies, miserable if need be. Overestimation of such conditions is stronger if we are able to compare our own conditions with the conditions of other people. This is the case with positional goods like income and material wealth (Frank, 1999). This social comparison, leading to all kinds of wants, is an unfortunate legacy of evolution, since empirical evidence shows that the actual impact on happiness of such conditions is limited. What we want is not always what we like in due course. The dynamic behind this difference is our underestimated adaptation to change. This adaptation has been described by authors like Easterlin (2003), Headey and Wearing (1992), and Brickman and Campbell (1971). Even the impact of changes in marital status is, according to Nettle, probably rather limited. Other conditions have a more permanent impact. Even after considerable adaptation exposure to chronic noise and health problems have a permanent negative impact. Permanent positive effects can be attained by more individual autonomy, social embededness and the quality of the environment. All in all, we have implicit theories about happiness and these theories are often incorrect. These incorrect theories lead us to decisions that do not maximize our happiness.

4 520 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WANTING AND LIKING Two recent discoveries in brain-research are very interesting in this respect. The first is that rats can be forced to eat without any pleasure and even disliking the food. The second is that rats can be starved to death in the presence of good food that they really like. Manipulating the dopamine-supply for specific parts of the brain can do such things. This proves that mechanisms that control the wanting of things are not identical to those that control the liking of them. The two are distinct; you can crave for something very much but take little or no pleasure in it once you have it. This conclusion is supported by experiments with drug addicts who keep working for injections with low concentrations of drug, even if they rated these concentrations as worthless. Such studies suggest that there could be disconnections between wanting and liking, and this would account for the observation that we often work hard in life for things that turn out not to increase pleasure or happiness, like power, social status, material wealth and a high income. ASYMMETRY OF POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE FEELINGS; HOW TO IMPROVE HAPPINESS Evolution has made our emergency-systems very important; our ancestors faced real dangers like predators or being ostracized from their social group. Such dangers have virtually disappeared but we still have our emergency-systems. As a consequence there is in Nettle s vision an unpleasant asymmetry between negative and positive emotions. Negative emotions are more urgent and imperialistic; they capture our consciousness easier than positive ones. If we are upset that something has gone wrong it is easy to feel that everything we ever do will go wrong. If we lie awake at night full of anxiety about some situation we make ourselves anxious about other situations too. Positive emotions are weaker and disappear easier. Nettle believes nevertheless that there are three kinds of deliberate manipulation to improve our happiness. The first is reducing the impact of negative emotions by cognitive-behavioural

5 521 therapy. In this therapy therapist and client work together to identify patterns of negative thinking and expose their irrationality. This does not stop negative emotions coming up but it stops them spiralling into self-fulfilling prophecies of stress and alienation. The second deliberate manipulation is increasing positive emotion by pleasant activity training: determine, which activities make you happy and do them more often! This sounds rather obvious but it requires the capacity to unmask activities that do not bring happiness. The third deliberate manipulation is changing the subject: do not concentrate on personal happiness as a goal but look for additional goals in different domains of life and put them in context. This will create alternative roads to positive emotions and it will limit the emotional impact of failures in specific domains. Meditation and writing about experiences can also help to see negative emotions for what they are: bothersome but transitory and not an integral part of our personality. COMMENTS This book, with its charming title, is very interesting. It contains many important research findings and up-to-date insights in happiness. It is also well written with a good sense of humour. Nettle s argument, that we will never be completely happy since we are programmed for the pursuit of happiness, is plausible. A related and likewise plausible argument is that we have incorrect theories about happiness and make disputable decisions as a consequence. Such arguments underline the importance of empirical happiness research as a compensation for this weakness and to improve our decisions. At one point we can make a critical remark. Nettle could be right that social comparison and the high priority for positional goods are an unfortunate inheritance of evolution. There is, however, an alternative explanation. Perhaps there is not enough freedom in modern societies for alternative lifestyles. First of all people are permanently stimulated to compare their material wealth by overloads of commercial advertising. This

6 522 has a negative impact on their psychological freedom to choose. A second problem, but now in terms of objective freedom, is the fact that people in modern societies need a lot of money if they want to escape the rat race, for instance by making a choice for a quiet job, part-time work or early retirement. In some countries people are supported by tax-facilities to make such choices, but even in such countries part-time work and early retirement are usually only affordable for relatively rich people. Perhaps we should try to reorganize a few things first, before we blame our evolution as the one and only suspect! REFERENCES Brickman, P. and D.T. Campbell: 1971, Hedonic relativism and planning the good society, in M.H. Appley (ed.), Adaptation Level Theory (Academic Press, New York), pp Easterlin, R.A.: 2003, ÔExplaining happinessõ, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100, pp Frank, R.H.: 1999, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (The Free Press, New York). Headey, B. and A. Wearing: 1992, Understanding Happiness; A Theory of Subjective Well-Being (Longman Cheshire Ptv. Limited, Melbourne). JAN OTT Erasmus University Rotterdam Stevinstraat 225, 2587, Den Haag, EH The Netherlands jan.ott@planet.nl

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