Pain, Pleasure In A Petri-Dish

So can there be any hope for the condition of human happiness? It’s certainly not guaranteed by being fat, worried and brainy. And it’s hard to measure, quantify or, for that matter, even qualify. Yet in recent years two fields have made dramatic progress towards developing a science of happiness.

One is psychology. For decades, it preferred to look at people’s dysfunctional behaviour though history has documented the importance of happiness for much longer; Aristotle famously said that men and women seek happiness more than anything else, 23 centuries ago. But it has been only 15 years since psychologists like Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania began looking at people’s personal strengths and how what he calls "positive psychology" could help develop a science of happiness.

Some of the results are startling, because they challenge conventional wisdom. For instance, Seligman’s work is built around the rather empowering premise that we can indeed control how happy we are. Other psychologists look at how we might attain particular states. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago has worked on the "flow states" of great contentment, familiar to musicians, artists or sportsmen who often enter a zone of utter absorption in their craft.

And a study of separately reared identical twins (it’s the best way to tell inherited and learned traits apart) by University of Minnesota professors Daniel Lykken and Auke Tellegen shows that we have individual happiness levels almost entirely explained by genetic characteristics that can be inherited. These levels, or happiness "set points", are specific to us and tend to be very stable through our lives.

This has two important implications. One is that these points set a limit to how happy you can be, assuming, vide Seligman, that this is indeed under your control. In other words, you can’t be as happy as the next guy.

The other is that major events like marriage, sacking, great success, divorce or the death of someone you love doesn’t permanently change your ability to be happy. As long as no other factors are at play, the impact normally lasts between six months and a year before you return to your set point.

One factor that can skew this is clinical depression, which features extremely low subjective well-being. A report by psychiatrist Samir Parikh quotes global estimates that 5-12 per cent of men and 10-25 per cent of women suffer depression. At current growth rates, it could become the world’s second most prevalent disease by 2010. Contrary to old wives’ tales, one doesn’t just "snap out of" depression. Nor do sex, status or wealth help. Instead, a growing variety of anti-depressant drugs seem to help some victims return to their "normal" happiness set points.

Indian research on happiness beyond analysis of the factors involved has been somewhat limited, though S. Bhogle and I.J. Prakash’s 1995 questionnaire in the Journal of Personality and Clinical Studies is well-known. It identifies 12 determinants of psychological well-being, including one’s meaning in life, sense of personal control, self-esteem, absence of tension and social support.

This last is one of the strongest happiness drivers. A University of Chicago study shows that people who can form intimate relationships (defined as having five or more close non-family friends) are 50 per cent more likely to describe themselves as happy than those who find it hard to have such close relationships.

Organised religion’s appeal also makes psychological sense in the context of intimacy. It emphasises congregation, ritual, forgiveness, commitment and meditation, all of which help develop intimate relationships. It’s easy to see why this is quite compelling. But does it make you happy? Neither psychology nor the other field that has made great progress in understanding how happiness works seems to have the final word on that.That other field is economics. For years it contorted itself to explain life, the universe and more in terms of rational profit-maximising behaviour. That left entirely unexplained our many emotionally-driven decisions, whether for love, happiness or despair.

No longer, fortunately. Economists are incorporating such intangible values into their analyses. Here too, the result is the demolition of once-cherished assumptions. For instance, absolute achievement (earning money towards a goal like a flat in Koramangala, say) was considered an individual’s economic driver.

More recent economics accepts that the achievement might need to be measured against some chosen exogenous standard (a 900 sq ft space within the one-hour commute that is assumed acceptable for middle-class India).

But today, the influence of psychology on economics shows that people do determine what they will compare themselves with. Such endogenous standards ("I want a bigger house than my sister and that awful husband of hers") are inherently competitive. And keeping up with the Joneses is better avoided if you want to be happy, agrees the research. One Swedish survey goes further and identifies areas where such relative concerns matter (like cars) and others where they don’t (such as car safety, where absolute levels matter).

It’s unrealistic to avoid all competition, but it’s clear that simply avoiding some forms can lead to happiness. Research also shows that we are unhappy because we make economically unsound—and avoidable—decisions. For instance, economic theory says people choose the pain of commuting when they are compensated for it through better jobs or nicer homes. Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer of the University of Zurich, co-authors of Happiness and Economics (Princeton University Press), a key work on the subject, found that people with longer commuting times systematically reported lower subjective well-being. Which more or less suggests that the life of anyone who doesn’t live in South Bombay is a cruel joke, alas.

Some economic research on happiness may imply fairly revolutionary conclusions. Though, as Frey and Stuzer say, money does matter, like any material aid to happiness, it has rapidly diminishing marginal utility. More of virtually any product or service keeps yielding less and less incremental happiness. Consider what this does to the implicit thesis of advertising, which is that using the promoted product will make you happier.There’s also a much larger challenge. Capitalism claims to be the surest path to life, liberty and the pursuit of individual happiness. But is it? It offers a clear route to material gain, but once that gain has met basic needs for food and physical security, it influences happiness very little: those diminishing returns again. And standard socio-economic indicators of progress don’t track human happiness well. Yet any government will cite precisely those indicators to argue its case for power.

So, are we unhappily shooting ourselves in the foot with our choice of economic and political models? It would not be the first time.