The Happiness Hypothesis
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| Author | Jonathan Haidt |
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| Genre | Psychology |
| Publisher | Basic Books |
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Publication date
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2006 |
| Pages | 320 |
| ISBN | |
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom is a 2006 psychology book by Jonathan Haidt written for a general audience. In it, Haidt poses several "Great Ideas" on happiness espoused by thinkers of the past - Plato, Buddha, Jesus and others - and examines them in the light of contemporary psychological research, extracting from them any lessons that still apply to our modern lives. Central to the book are the concepts of virtue, happiness, fulfillment, and meaning.
Haidt looks at a number of ways of dividing the self that have existed since ancient times:
Haidt focuses on this last division, between the conscious/reasoned processes and automatic/implicit processes. His metaphor is a rider on the back of an elephant in which the conscious mind is the rider and the unconscious mind is the elephant. The rider is unable to control the elephant by force: this explains many puzzles about our mental life, particularly why we have such trouble with weakness of will. Learning how to train the elephant is the secret of self-improvement.
The automatic emotional reactions of the "elephant" (affective priming) guide us throughout our lives. People even tend to choose mates, and professions, whose names resemble their own. Though there is a bias towards negativity, some people are optimists and others pessimists. Haidt discusses three ways of changing those automatic reactions: meditation, cognitive therapy, and SSRI medications such as Prozac.
Many species have a social life, but among mammals, only humans in particular are ultra-social – able to live in very large cooperative groups. The Golden Rule, supplemented with gossip, is the secret of our success. Calling on Robert Cialdini's "six weapons of influence", Haidt describes ways in which understanding the deep workings of reciprocity can help to solve problems in our social lives and guard against the many ways that we can be manipulated.
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