There’s Something About Mary: A Selection from Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis (2006)

“Most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little. Try to imagine yourself changing places with either Bob or Mary. Bob is thirty-five years old, single, white, attractive, and athletic. He earns $100,000 a year and lives in sunny Southern California. He is highly intellectual, and he spends his free time reading and going to museums. Mary and her husband live in snowy Buffalo, New York, where they earn a combined income of $40,000. Mary is sixty-five years old, black, overweight, and plain in appearance. She is highly sociable, and she spends her free time mostly in activities related to her church. She is on dialysis for kidney problems. Bob seems to have it all, and few readers of this book would prefer Mary’s life to his. Yet if you had to bet on it, you should bet that Mary is happier than Bob.

What Mary has that Bob lacks are strong connections. A good marriage is one of the life-factors most strongly and consistently associated with happiness. Part of this apparent benefit comes from ‘reverse correlation’: Happiness causes marriage. Happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness setpoint, both because they are more appealing as dating partners and because they are easier to live with as spouses. But much of the apparent benefit is a real and lasting benefit of dependable companionship, which is a basic need; we never fully adapt either to it or to its absence. Mary also has religion, and religious people are happier, on average, than nonreligious people. This effect arises from the social ties that come with participation in a religious community, as well as from feeling connected to something beyond the self.

What Bob has going for him is a string of objective advantages in power, status, freedom, health, and sunshine—all of which are subject to the adaptation principle. White Americans are freed from many of the hassles and indignities that affect black Americans, yet, on average, they are only very slightly happier. Men have more freedom and power than women, yet they are not on average any happier. (Women experience more depression, but also more intense joy). The young have so much more to look forward to than the elderly, yet ratings of life satisfaction actually rise slightly with age, up to age sixty-five, and, in some studies, well beyond. People are often surprised to hear that the old are happier than the young because the old have so many more health problems, yet people adapt to most chronic health problems such as Mary’s (although ailments that grow progressively worse do reduce well-being, and a recent study finds that adaptation to disability is not, on average, complete). People who live in cold climates expect people who live in California to be happier, but they are wrong. People believe that attractive people are happier than unattractive people, but they, too, are wrong.

The one thing Bob does have going for him is wealth, but here the story is complicated. The most widely reported conclusion, from surveys done by psychologist Ed Diener, is that within any given country, at the lowest end of the income scale money does buy happiness: People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than those who don’t. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller. The rich are happier on average than the middle class, but only by a little, and part of this relationship is reverse correlation: Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also because their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures. Wealth itself has only a small direct effect on happiness because it so effectively speeds up the hedonic treadmill. For example, as the level of wealth has doubled or tripled in the last fifty years in many industrialized nations, the levels of happiness and satisfaction with life that people report have not changed, and depression has actually become more common. Vast increases in gross domestic product led to improvements in the comforts of life—a larger home, more cars, televisions, and restaurant meals, better health and longer life—but these improvements became the normal conditions of life; all were adapted to and taken for granted, so they did not make people feel any happier or more satisfied. . . .

A person’s average or typical level of happiness is that person’s ‘affective style.’ (‘Affect’ refers to the felt or experienced part of emotion.) Your affective style reflects the everyday balance of power between your approach system and your withdrawal system, and this balance can be read right from your forehead. It has long been known from studies of brainwaves that most people show an asymmetry: more activity either in the right frontal cortex or in the left frontal cortex. In the late 1980s, Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin discovered that these asymmetries correlated with a person’s general tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions. People showing more of a certain kind of brainwave coming through the left side of the forehead reported feeling more happiness in their daily lives and less fear, anxiety, and shame than people exhibiting higher activity on the right side. Later research showed that these cortical ‘lefties’ are less subject to depression and recover more quickly from negative experiences. The difference between cortical righties and lefties can be seen even in infants: Ten-month-old babies showing more activity on the right side are more likely to cry when separated briefly from their mothers. And this difference in infancy appears to reflect an aspect of personality that is stable, for most people, all the way through adulthood. Babies who show a lot more activity on the right side of the forehead become toddlers who are more anxious about novel situations; as teenagers, they are more likely to be fearful about dating and social activities; and, finally, as adults, they are more likely to need psychotherapy to loosen up. Having lost out in the cortical lottery, they will struggle all their lives to weaken the grip of an overactive withdrawal system. Once when a friend of mine with a negative affective style was bemoaning her life situation, someone suggested that a move to a different city would suit her well. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I can be unhappy anywhere.’ She might as well have quoted John Milton’s paraphrase of Aurelius: ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’”—Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (2006)