Progress Daily

As a society we are no happier now than 50 years ago, yet every group in society is richer, and most are healthier.

Happiness is an objective phenomenon that can be measured. We can ask people how they feel, we can ask their friends or other observers, and we can measure electrical activity in the relevant parts of the brain. All of these measurements give consistent answers.

The average happiness in one country compared with another can be largely explained by six factors (and so can the suicide rate): (1) the proportion of people who say that other people can be trusted, (2) the proportion who belong to social organizations, (3) the divorce rate, (4) the unemployment rate, (5) the quality of government, and (6) religious belief.

People hate loss of any kind. An income loss of $100 hurts about twice as much as an income gain of $100 helps.

People like what is familiar. Crime and mental illness are higher in transient or mixed communities.

People are very adaptable. The number of people who are dissatisfied with their financial position is as high as it was 30 years ago, although people are richer.

It is the change in income rather than the income itself that affects happiness — unless you are very poor.

Increasing income increases happiness less and less as people get richer.

Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, by Richard Layard

Happy lives are marked by positive traits, such as optimism and a sense of personal control; by close relationships; and by participation in faith communities that entail support, meaning, and hope. Forty percent of married people report that they are “very happy,” compared with only twenty-three percent of never-married adults. The percentage of “very happy” Americans ranges from twenty-six percent among those never engaged with a faith community to forty-seven percent for those engaged several times weekly. This comes from almost 43,000 Americans randomly sampled by the National Opinion Research Center over the years since 1972.

“Happier Ever After,” Marianna Krejci-Papa’s interview with psychologist David Myers

Imagine an economy whose government spends 2 percent of its GDP on its military. Then, imagine that the government gets into a war and raises military spending to 7 percent of national income. The government now takes an additional 5 percent of the real output of that economy to wage its war. The government buys tanks, trucks, fuel, clothing, parachutes, bullets, guns, airplanes, and all the other paraphernalia of war. In addition, the government hires laborers away from other uses, or it drafts them. All of the capital and labor that go to produce the “outputs” of war is capital and labor that cannot be used in their previous uses.

World War II did not end the Great Depression in America — that is, if we measure the real amount of goods and services available to people. During WWII the US government spent up 38 percent of gross national product on the war. The assembly lines in Detroit, which churned out 3.6 million cars for civilians in 1941, were retooled for military production. By 1942, auto production had fallen to under 1 million, and for the years 1943 to 1945, auto production was so low that Wikipedia does not even report it. The government also rationed gasoline and railroad seats.

“War Is Good for the Economy – Isn’t It?” by David R. Henderson

We are the inheritors of an emotional system that leads us to be, for the most part, somewhat happy. But this same adaptation prevents us from sustaining high levels of happiness over time.

University of Illinois psychologists Ed and Carol Diener, surveyed representative samples in fortythree nations and found that eighty-six percent of people were above neutral on the happiness scale.

University of Michigan researcher Barbara Frederickson theorizes that happiness serves the evolutionary function of broadening and building our resources. Frederickson points to laboratory studies in which people who are induced into a good mood tend to be more creative, sociable, and helpful. Happy people tend to be healthier, live longer, and stay married for more years than their less happy peers.

In his University of Chicago laboratory, social neuroscientist John Cacioppo has found that, on average, research subjects who are shown emotionally neutral photographs react to the images as if they were positive. According to Cacioppo, the tendency to interpret neutral surroundings as positive is what led people, historically, to explore and interact with what otherwise would be considered hostile environments.

At the University of Minnesota, behavioral geneticist David Lykken and his colleagues repeatedly administered harmless but painful electric shocks and loud blasts of noise to research participants. Although the participants were startled at first, their reactions diminished over the course of the trials, and gradually, adaptation occurred. Lykken found that when one identical twin was able to adapt quickly, the other twin was likely to do the same.

People adjust to a wide range of circumstances: Lottery winners often feel a temporary spike in happiness that diminishes over time, euphoric newlyweds settle into their marriages, prisoners of war held in isolation for years develop effective coping mechanisms, and paraplegics score on the positive range of happiness measures within a year of their spinal cord injuries. People can be slow to bounce back from the death of a spouse or the loss a job, though.

University of Southern California economist Richard Easterlin plotted the growth of the U.S. economy over the last fifty years and compared it with average rates of happiness from the same period. While the gross national product has doubled, tripled, and quintupled over the decades, happiness has remained flat.

Ed Diener and his colleague, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman, looked at those people who scored in the top ten percent on a variety of happiness measures to see what they had in common. A single variable — social relationships — set this group apart from those whose scores registered at the bottom of happiness scales. Few of the least happy people had many close and trusting relationships but nearly every single person in the happiest group was surrounded by good friends and enjoyed healthy familial ties.

Psychologist David Myers at Hope College in Michigan cites survey research that indicates married people are happier than those who are unmarried, separated, or divorced.

In one study, only twenty percent of bone marrow transplant patients who said they received little social support were alive two years later, as opposed to fifty-four percent of those who received strong support.

“The Search for Happiness,” by Robert Biswas-Diener

The economic beliefs of economists and the general public systematically differ. (Blendon et al 1997) According to the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy (1996), people think more like economists: if they are well-educated; if they are male; if their real income rose over the last five years; if they expect their real income to rise over the next five years; or if they have high degrees of job security. However, neither high income nor ideological conservatism have this effect. (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996)

“What Makes People Think Like Economists?” by Bryan Caplan

“Bridging the Gap between the Public’s and Economists’ Views of the Economy” by Robert J. Blendon, et al

One of the most positive findings to emerge from recent studies of warfare is that few men relish lethal combat. In On Killing, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a psychologist, military science expert, and former U.S. Army ranger cites military surveys, which reveal that during the American Civil War and both World Wars, as many as eighty percent of men in combat deliberately avoided firing at the enemy.

After World War II the armed services revamped its training to make soldiers less reluctant to kill. As a result, most American soldiers who saw combat in Vietnam fired at the enemy. But U.S. soldiers in Vietnam paid a heavy price for being transformed into more effective killers; a majority of combat veterans are thought to have suffered some symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including nightmares, flashbacks, panic, depression, and guilt. Mental health experts are already predicting that American soldiers fighting in Iraq will experience similar rates of posttraumatic stress disorder.

History offers many examples of warlike societies that rapidly became peaceful. Vikings were the scourge of Europe during the Middle Ages, but their Scandinavian descendants are among the most peaceful people on Earth. Twentieth-century Japan was extremely belligerent, but since its traumatic defeat in World War II, Japan has embraced pacifism. In fact, humanity as a whole has become much less violent than it used to be. Worldwide, about 100 million men, women, and children died from warrelated causes, including disease and famine, in the last century. The total would have been 2 billion if our rates of violence had been as high as in the average primitive society.

“War or Peace,” by John Horgan

The reason we are like our parents is that we share their genes. By any measures of cognition and personality, when there is no genetic inheritance there is no resemblance. Adopted kids are no more similar in personality and intellectual skills to their adoptive parents who raised them than they are to any two adults taken at random off the street.

Nicotine addiction is heavily influenced by genes; the reason that so many children of smokers smoke is that they have inherited a genetic susceptibility to tobacco from their parents. David C. Rowe, a professor of family studies at the University of Arizona, has analyzed research into this genetic contribution, and he concludes that it accounts entirely for the elevated levels of cigarette use among the children of smokers. With smoking, what parents do seems to be nearly irrelevant.

Socialization research has demonstrated, clearly and irrefutably, that a parent’s behavior toward a child affects how the child behaves in the presence of the parent. But it doesn’t necessarily cross over into the life the child leads outside the home.

“Do Parents Matter?” by Malcolm Gladwell

Surprisingly, the fossil record suggests that there has been a rather steep decline in the size of the human brain during the past 15,000 years, partly but not wholly reflecting a shrinking body that seems to have accompanied the arrival of dense and “civilized” human settlements. This followed several million years of more or less steady increases in brain size. In the Mesolithic (around 50,000 years ago) the human brain averaged 1,458 cc (in females) and 1,567 cc (in males). Today the numbers have fallen to 1,210 cc and 1,248 cc, and even allowing for some reduction in body weight, this seems to be a steep decline. Perhaps there has been some recent taming of the species. If so, how?

Richard Wrangham believes that once human beings became sedentary, living in permanent settlements, they could no longer tolerate antisocial behavior and they began to banish, imprison, or execute especially difficult individuals. In the past in highland New Guinea, more than one in ten of all adult deaths were by the execution of “witches” (mostly men). This might have meant killing the more aggressive and impulsive — and hence more developmentally mature and bigger-brained — people.

Matt Ridley, Nature Via Nurture : Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human

Until recently, dogs were thought to be intellectually inferior to wolves, as a result of domestication.

At Loránd Eötvös University, Hungary, Vilmos Csányi has been studying canine cognition for the past decade and, in the process, has built a body of experimental evidence that suggests dogs have far greater mental capabilities than scientists have previously given them credit for. “We thought it would be very difficult for dogs to imitate humans because chimps have great difficulty with it, despite having much larger brains,” Mr. Csányi says. “But it turns out they love to do it. This is not a little thing because they must pay attention to the person’s actions, remember them, and then apply them to their own body. … No other animal could do this.” Dogs can predict social events, provide and request information, obey rules of conduct, and are able to cooperate and imitate human actions. Research even suggests that dogs can speculate on what we are thinking.

Dogs’ interest in communicating with humans to solve problems appears to be innate, probably an evolutionary byproduct of their domestication, says Mr. Csányi. Evidence for that theory comes from an experimental fur farm in Siberia, where Russian geneticists have spent the last 50 years breeding a population of tame foxes. The process was simple: Humans would approach a fox cage, and the foxes that showed the least panic or aggression were selected for breeding. After only 18 generations, the foxes displayed remarkably doglike behaviors: sitting on a person’s lap and barking for attention – actions rarely seen in wild canines.

“Did domestication make dogs smarter?” by Colin Woodard

Experimental domestication of foxes yields clues to cognitive evolution. Dogs have an unusual ability for reading human communicative gestures (e.g., pointing) in comparison to either nonhuman primates (including chimpanzees) or wolves.

To better understand how dogs evolved their unusual social cognitive ability, the researchers studied an experimental population of foxes that have been bred in Siberia, Russia, over the last 45 years to exhibit, over generations, increasingly friendly behavior toward humans. After dozens of generations, these foxes now behave toward people much as pet dogs do–they even bark and wag their tails at the sight of a human. Critically, these foxes were not specifically selected during breeding for their social intelligence. However, the current study found that although the foxes were not intentionally selected to be more skillful at solving social problems, they are in fact just as skillful as domestic dogs at reading human social cues.

These results suggest that sociocognitive evolution has occurred in the experimental foxes, and possibly domestic primates, as a correlated by-product of selection on systems mediating fear and aggression, and it is likely the observed social cognitive evolution did not require direct selection for improved social cognitive ability.

“Social Cognitive Evolution in Captive Foxes Is a Correlated By-Product of Experimental Domestication“: Brian Hare, Irene Plyusnina, Natalie Ignacio, Olesya Schepina, Anna Stepika, Richard Wrangham and Lyudmila Trut