The key ideas

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

Jonathan Haidt, 2006

Why do we know what's right and still act otherwise? Psychologist Jonathan Haidt takes ideas that sages of the East and the West have repeated for centuries and tests them with experiments. The book shows how to come to terms with your own “elephant”, why winning brings joy for only a short while, and where happiness really comes from.

Who it is for

For anyone who has read a lot about happiness and still doesn't understand why it keeps slipping away. And for anyone curious which pieces of advice from ancient sages have stood up to scientific testing.

Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait.

Ten ancient ideas put to the scientific test

Imagine how much wisdom passes you by in a week: a quote on a calendar, a piece of advice on a tea bag tag, the words of the Buddha in a message from a friend. There is so much of it that you skim it and scroll on.

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt decided not to scroll on but to stop. He read dozens of ancient texts, picked ten ideas that recur across different cultures, and tested each one against what psychology knows today.

The main one is the happiness hypothesis. The Buddha and the philosophers of Greece and Rome taught that happiness comes from within and can't be had by bending the world to your wishes. Haidt shows where they were right, where they were wrong, and why the hypothesis will have to be rewritten twice.

Ahead are an elephant with a small rider on its back, a coin that lands in the tosser's favor a bit too often, and a man who decided to sing an aria in the worst year of his life. Let's begin with a ride along a cliff edge.

The horse that knew the way better than its rider

In 1991 Haidt went horseback riding without a guide for the first time. In the Great Smoky Mountains his horse walked along a trail a meter from a cliff. At a sharp left turn, the horse headed straight for the edge. Haidt was afraid of bumping into the horse next to him and froze, and within five seconds both horses calmly turned on their own: they knew the trail, while he was used to cars, which don't turn by themselves.

He often noticed the same kind of helplessness in himself: it is easy to skip dessert on the menu, but hard to resist dessert on the table. Hence the book's central image: consciousness is a rider on the back of an elephant. The rider holds the reins as long as the elephant has no desires of its own. When the elephant really wants something, the rider is no match for it. The elephant is emotions, intuition and habits.

The elephant isn't stupid. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio described people in whom an injury had knocked out the part of the brain linked to emotions. Their logic survived, but simple decisions became impossible: without the feeling of “like it or not”, all the options seemed the same.

It is hard to beat the elephant by willpower alone: will gets tired, like a muscle. It is smarter to get the temptation out of sight, and if you can't, to think about what is unpleasant about it.

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About the author

Jonathan Haidt is an American social psychologist who studies morality and the moral emotions. For many years he taught at the University of Virginia.

All books by this author: Jonathan Haidt

Terms from the book

  • Damasio
  • Rider
  • Elephant
  • Beck
  • Cognitive therapy
  • Batson
  • Hawking
  • Lyubomirsky
  • Seligman
  • Harlow
  • Companionate love
  • Greg
  • Post-traumatic growth
  • Pennebaker
  • Franklin
  • Wrzesniewski
  • Great Smoky Mountains: A national park in the mountains of the US state of North Carolina.
  • Cortical lottery: The author's phrase, not a scientific term: the inborn good or bad luck in how strongly your brain is tuned to notice the good.
  • Confucius: An ancient Chinese thinker. His sayings are collected in the book known as the “Analects”.
  • Cialdini: Robert Cialdini, an American social psychologist and author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”. He studied the tricks salespeople use to get people to say yes.
  • Hare Krishnas: Followers of the Hare Krishna religious movement. According to Haidt, they perfected the trick of giving a gift before making a request.
  • Moral hypocrisy: Batson's term: the desire to look moral without paying the price of real morality.
  • Adaptation principle: The author's name for a feature of the mind: we judge our situation by comparing it with what we are used to, so both good luck and misfortune fade over time.
  • Progress principle: The author's name for a pattern: pleasure comes more from moving toward a goal than from reaching it.
  • Happiness formula: The positive psychologists' formula: your level of happiness is made up of your inborn set point, the conditions of your life and your voluntary activities.
  • Passionate love: As defined by the psychologists Ellen Berscheid and Elaine Walster, whom the author cites: a stormy state in which tenderness and desire are mixed with elation, anxiety and jealousy.
  • Peterson: Christopher Peterson, an American psychologist at the University of Michigan. Together with Seligman he drew up a classification of character strengths.
  • Transcendence: In Peterson and Seligman's classification: the ability to feel connected to something larger than yourself, such as beauty, nature or a higher meaning.
  • Katherine: Haidt's student at the University of Virginia. The author uses her passion for horseback riding as an example of vital engagement.
  • Vital engagement: A concept from the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura: a bond with an activity that has both enthusiasm and personal meaning.

All terms

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