#196 — The Science of Happiness

Thanks for having me on the show.

So this was a long time coming. Many people wanted to hear from you. How do you describe what it is you do academically and intellectually?

Yeah. So I am a professor of psychology here at Yale University. My day job as a psychologist is involved in studying what makes the human mind special, and I do that by studying non human primates and domesticated dogs. But most of my time these days is taken up with a different scientific pursuit in psychology. I became super interested in the scientific basis of happiness and well being.

And you have a podcast titled the Happiness Lab, where you go into these issues in depth. And the course you teach at Yale, am I right in thinking this is the most popular course at the university?

Yeah. So in 2018, I taught a new class on this topic called psychology in the good life and the first time I taught it, it did become Yale's largest class ever, just under like 1200 students enrolled, which was about one out of every four students at Yale. Since then, we put the class online on coursera.org and it's now one of coursera's biggest classes. And just in the last month, we've had over a million learners enroll.

Wow. Well, that's great. Happiness really is a paramount concern for everyone, whether they think about it in those terms or not. Let's just focus on the word for a second because happiness, at least in English, is a somewhat insubstantial concept. And people will often say something like, there's much more to life than happiness. Mere happiness sounds like a somewhat effeat goal or primary value. It seems to grade into something like hedonism or pleasure. And then people would will tend to try to balance that in their talk about the goals to which human life could tend with concepts like meaning and virtue. And then many of us find ourselves using a word like flourishing, which is strangely stilted, although not as stilted as using the greek eudaimonia. And then I tend to talk about well being a lot and you actually just use that term. So how do you think about the concept?

I mean, mostly I just think I wish we had better terms and that everyone agreed on them so I didn't spend a lot of my time kind of fighting about them. I use the term happiness because I think that's what a lot of people think of when they're thinking about concepts like well being and flourishing. I agree that happiness is a much more loaded thing because some people think it's about hedonism and really basic kinds of forms of happiness. But I think people kind of get this concept of happiness. We know it from the Declaration of Independence. Right. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Right.

But scientifically speaking, I think social scientists mean a particular thing when they use the term happiness or well being. And this is the definition that I end up using in the course, which is that you can basically say you're happy if you have a lot of well being in your life and for your life. And what we mean by that is that kind of happiness in your life is the sort of almost hedonistic kind of positive emotion type stuff, right. You're happy in your life if you have lots of positive emotions and laughter and so on, and not many negative emotions, like, relatively speaking, there's not a tremendous amount of sadness and anger, although we can debate about how much of that you want, but that's kind of being happy in your life. But there's another feature, I think, that the social scientists really care about. And that's that you're happy with your life. And so that's basically your answer to the question, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life right now? And so I think there are these interesting moments where those dissociate, right. I have my academic dean here in my residential college, just had a newborn baby. And I think she's very satisfied with her life. But in her life right now, there's a lot of negative emotions of like cleaning dirty diapers and not sleeping and these kinds of things. And I think I see a lot when I go to different talks and things of people who are really happy in their life. They have a lot of hedonistic pleasure, but really, at their core, they're really dissatisfied with their life. And so I think in my view, if you're able to maximize both of those things, that winds up encompassing things like flourishing and meeting and all these kind of lesser concepts, I think if you're happy in your life and with your life, you're doing pretty well, right?

That distinction, happy in your life and happy with your life. To my ear, that is more or less identical to Danny Kahneman's distinction between the experiencing and remembering self. Is there any daylight between these concepts for you, or is that the same division?

I think there's a little dissociation there. I think you can have happiness in your life and with your life in the experience self, right? And so just as an example, right now I'm experiencing lots of positive emotions just from daily things I do and daily activities. But I also have a lot of meaning from this happiness work. And that feels like it right now. I don't have to think back on it. It's not my future self kind of looking back and thinking like, oh, that was the kind of thing I really wanted to enjoy. I can experience that life satisfaction in the moment. And so I think you can actually have both in the experienced self rather than the remembered self.

Although it sounds to me like what you're doing is something I do naturally. And this is a point of disagreement between me and Danny. I really do think the remembering self is simply the experiencing self in one of its modes. It feels like something to have these moments of retrospection. When asked, what story can you tell about your life? How satisfied are you? The fact that in his paradigm, he's able to show that there's a mismatch rather often between who you're talking to when you're asking about a retrospective judgment and who you're talking to when you're asking for a moment to moment accounting of just what it's like to be you still, there really is just a single timeline of life experience. And as you say, the global assessment of one's life. Is what I'm doing today actually meaningful? Is it bringing value to the world? Are the sacrifices that I'm making or the stress I'm under now? Is it aimed at some purpose that I feel inspired by and that others feel inspired by? All of that is that's where this remembering self and the experiencing self, just in my experience, they become indistinguishable. And so I wonder if you're just taking, however inadvertently, my side of the argument against Danny here, that really, if we become very fine grained about what we mean by the experiencing self, it just swallows the remembering self.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're right on this one. And I don't mean I haven't pushed Danny on this directly, but my sense is that we don't have what the timeline is for the remembered self, right? If any form of metaanalysis of it is the remember itself, as soon as you ask me like, hey, how's things going? How satisfied with you? If I ever have to take a global view, it's possible that it's using the mechanisms that I use for the remember itself to some interesting extent, right? I don't think Danny's really specified how far back we have to do the remembering, but it might be that any point where we're kind of going meta and thinking about our own happiness might be partly the remember itself. And I think this actually brings up a bigger issue with a lot of the happiness research, right, is that we want to get at what happiness feels like in the moment, but the only way we can do that is to ask people. And it's very possible that between the experiencing and the asking in any form, we're kind of getting some interesting mismatches there. Like it could be that just having you reflect on your own positive emotions, it's going to change that, right? That might be different than kind of what I was noticing and what I was experiencing and the sum total of that throughout my day, which sucks for happiness researchers, right? Because we have to ask people. Somehow, I wish there was a thermometer where we could get at happiness or well, being accurately without