Jonathan Haidt on Happiness

Tell me why you started with the sayings of the Buddha.

The Dhammapada is one of the greatest psychological works ever written, and certainly one of the greatest before 1900. It is masterful in its understanding of the nature of consciousness, and in particular the way we are always striving and never satisfied. You can turn to it – and people have turned to it throughout the ages – at times of trouble, at times of disappointment, at times of loss, and it takes you out of yourself. It shows you that your problems, your feelings, are just timeless manifestations of the human condition. It also gives specific recommendations for how to deal with those problems, which is to let go, to accept, and to work on yourself. So I think this is a kind of tonic that we ambitious Westerners often need to hear.

Is there a specific saying that you particularly like?

There are two big ideas that I found especially useful when I wrote The Happiness Hypothesis. One is an idea common to most great intellectual traditions. The quote is: ‘All that we are arises with our thoughts, with our thoughts we make the world.’ It’s not unique to Buddha, but it is one of the earliest statements of that idea, that we need to focus on changing our thoughts, rather than making the world conform to our wishes.

The other big idea is that the mind is like a rider on an elephant. Buddha uses this metaphor: ‘My own mind used to wander wherever pleasure or desire or lust led it, but now I have it tamed, I guide it, as the keeper guides the wild elephant.’ That’s the most important idea in The Happiness Hypothesis – I just adapted the metaphor slightly. What modern psychology shows us is that our minds are like a small rider on the back of an elephant: the rider doesn’t have that much control even though he thinks that he does.

And once you accept that you are much closer to understanding happiness?

Exactly, because it helps explain why you can’t just resolve to be happy. You can’t just resolve to quit drinking, you can’t resolve to stop and smell the flowers – because the rider does the resolving but it’s the elephant that does the behaving. Once you understand the limitations of your psychology and how hard it is to change yourself, you become much more tolerant of others, because you realise how difficult it is to change anyone…

Let’s go on to the book about ambition.

Gilbert Brim is possibly the wisest person I’ve ever met face to face. I interviewed him for a report I did for the MacArthur Foundation in 1994. He was running a research network on midlife, on the psychology of people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, and he had written this wonderful book called Ambition – How We Manage Success and Failure Throughout our Lives. In it, he brought together research as well as his own insights that he had collected in his own 75 or so years. It fits very well with Buddha because Brim recognises that our basic psychology is one of striving. When we get what we hoped for, we don’t celebrate for more than a minute – or a day at most. Right away we ratchet up our expectations, and move on to the next goal. Which is why we’re never really satisfied. The book is about how to be a Westerner who is going to strive, who is going to get great pleasure from work. It’s about how to violate the advice of the Buddha, while still respecting the psychology that the Buddha told us about. Brim has this phrase that I’ve never forgotten: he advises us to live life ‘at the level of just manageable difficulty’. So, if you live life at 50 per cent of your capacity, you’ll be bored and disengaged; if you live it at 100 per cent of your capacity, you’re going to be burned out, but if you live at about 85 per cent on average, with some fluctuations, that’s about the best you can do.

So he’s disagreeing with Buddha?

Let’s say that if the Buddha had been born in the Midwest of the US he would have written Brim’s book. Brim has a Midwesterner’s work ethic, and Americans moralise work quite a lot…so Brim says don’t drop out of the game, play it, but play it so you don’t get trapped, play it wisely, so that you get to enjoy the fruits of your labour.

You wanted to talk about Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, and Sonja Lyubomirsky’s The How of Happiness, next.

These are two of the recent books on positive psychology by two of the top researchers. They are very different books and they appeal to very different readers. The Gilbert book is just so much fun to read. He’s one of the funniest people, certainly in psychology – he’s just endlessly witty, and reading it is like strapping yourself into a roller coaster. He’s describing very good research that he’s done along with my colleague here at the University of Virginia, Tim Wilson. It’s a single big idea that is very, very important, which is that we make a lot of errors in our expectations of what will make us happy, and therefore we make a lot of errors in our choices.

What’s a common mistake that people make?

One of the things Gilbert looks at is consumer behaviour – for example, he was involved in a study where they asked people if they would want to be able to return a product or not.