The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness

By Frank Trippett

mc^2 may well = E in the known physical universe. Nothing quite that pat can be said about the cosmos of the human temperament. In the play of emotion, logic is seldom evident, and the laws of gravity and thermodynamics never. What goes up in the psyche sometimes does not come down; the boiling points of individuals and collectives alike are impossible to fix. In light of this, it is no wonder that science long shied away from studying, or attempting to explain, that most subtle and elusive of all human moods: happiness. Instead, it happily left the field to philosophers, preachers, poets--and the swarms of author-therapists who yearly vie for bestsellerdom with new formulas for attaining this desired estate.

Lately, however, science has begun to nose around in that shifty terrain it so long neglected. Tenuous scientific probes of the happiness phenomenon, as an aspect of mental health, were organized as long ago as the 1960s. Perhaps because happiness itself was all but out of style in the days of Viet Nam, urban riots and the burgeoning dope culture, the trend never took off. Only now is it becoming clear that our gladness is likely to be subjected to the same methodical research and analysis that has been lavished for generations on our madness. The signs that happyology is aborning as a discipline have come in sequences of earnest surveys, widespread drizzles of articles and now a spate of hardback tomes.

An archetype of the current genre is Happy People, by Columbia Psychology Professor Jonathan Freedman. It promises to reveal "what happiness is, who has it and why." Freedman analyzes the results of both popular surveys and casual interviews and also attempts, he says, "to present what we, as social scientists, know about happiness." Soon to be published is Optimism: The Biology of Hope, by Rutgers University Anthropologist Lionel Tiger; it explores the possible biological origins of the human sanguineness that underlies feelings of wellbeing, whatever they are called. New York Psychoanalyst Willard Gaylin has just weighed in with a study called Feelings: Our Vital Signs, which scrutinizes and tries to delineate all the familiar varieties of human feeling. Gaylin thus probes the character of a state that he calls not "happiness" but "feeling good."

A proliferation of less ambitious studies and surveys, some of them amounting to market research, has occurred in the past few years. The University of Michigan Institute for Social Research conducted a nationwide study of income and education as determinants of happiness. The advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn carried out a similar but broader survey to find out whether their clients' potential consumers "were happier ... than other segments of the population." Scientific studies of worker "contentment" have been going on for years, to be sure, but are not quite the same as the new wave of investigations into the larger character of wellbeing. It may be too soon to say where these new excursions will lead, but it is not too early to inquire.

First off, analytical scrutiny of happiness should not be confused with preaching about it. Books hustling formulas and drills that are supposed to produce happiness circulate these days in numbers that are too great to count, let alone mention. These products of the booming feel-good industry invariably try to evoke happiness, but they seldom describe or analyze it. That, of course, is the fascination of the scientific challenge. The feelgood trade's blizzard of lighter-than-air tracts proves nothing whatever about happiness except that a lot of people are willing to pay for help in pursuing it.

The new happyologists are doing a bit better than that, though their young science is now approximately where navigation was before the invention of the compass. In some ways, as Humorist Russell Baker recently observed, the happyologists resemble sociologists in their dedication to proving what everybody has known all along. Baker groaned at the supposedly big discovery that an unhappy childhood does not necessarily lead to an unhappy adulthood. Who could fail to echo his groan when it is reported, as though it were news, that money, beyond some uncertain minimum, does not buy happiness? A horselaugh might even be the appropriate response when Psychoanalyst Gaylin declares: "It is... good to 'feel good.' "

The one thing common to most of the research is the conspicuous wariness of the investigators. The utterly elusive ingredients of the mood they are examining force them to turn away from the phenomenon itself. They prefer to tabulate its incidence and parameters. So, even though they maintain their scientific detachment and method in analyzing data, to collect it they have had no convenient choice but to adopt the time-tested techniques of public opinion polling. Subjects are asked merely to declare their degree of happiness, not define it. Even Pollster Louis Harris turns up as an unlikely temporary happyologist, reporting for this month's Playboy that while 49% of American men rank sexual satisfaction as "very important" to happiness, 84% give that same crucial weight to family life.

Not all the early discoveries are that breathtaking, although many of them come in similar statistical form. Findings may vary from survey to survey, but seldom astonishingly. Some results that fail to amaze can still be heartening. Most studies so far confirm that happiness does not depend on any single factor. That is, neither geographical location nor financial status nor age is a determinant of happiness. The happy are slightly more likely to be married, but unhappiness is anything but epidemic among the single. Neither the young, the middle-aged nor the old have any special claim on happiness.

People who like their jobs (and up to 82% claim to) tend to be happier in general. An attitude of optimism (held by some 70%) often coincides with happiness, but quite a few of the 6% who are convinced pessimists are also happy. Good health is a big factor in happiness to some, yet poor health does not turn out to be incompatible with happiness. Not even "satisfaction" is indispensable to happiness. Says University of Michigan Psychologist Stephen Withey in Subjective Elements of Well-Being, a collection of papers presented in 1972: "Young people tend to report more happiness than satisfaction, while older people tend to say that they are more satisfied than they are happy."

The incongruous and even adverse situations that seem to support happiness may only confirm the insight ventured by turn-of-the-century Psychologist William James. "Life and its negation," wrote James, "are beaten up inextricably together. The two are equally essential facts of existence and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction." One broad contradiction that emerges from the happiness surveys is that, in spite of all the reports of the emptiness of modern life, relatively few people consider themselves very unhappy. On the contrary, an overwhelming majority of Americans (60% in one survey, 70% in another, 86% in a third) consider themselves reasonably happy. Only the heartless could be harsh toward the science that bears such tidings.

Still, happyology has defaulted so far on the really big question: Why are people happy or why not? And more fundamental, what is happiness? The young science is far from the practical goal of providing guidance on how to attain happiness. "Alas," says Freedman, "the overwhelming finding of all the research is that there is no easy solution, no foolproof strategy for finding it."

Lionel Tiger's forthcoming book offers some slightly more definite advice--or at least postulation. Although he is not studying happiness as such, the anthropologist argues that humankind does not have to go looking far for its basic source of wellbeing: it is built right into the human body. Says he: "Our benign sense of the future could have been bred into us and other complex animals out of the need to survive." Tiger speculates that man pushes ever onward, inextinguishably optimistic in the face of adversity, because of his biochemistry. The key to mankind's optimism, he argues, lies in those lately discovered substances called endorphins. These are the morphine-like chemical agents that the body itself produces, sending them into special sites of the brain and spinal cord to reduce pain. In this, says Tiger, "we may be on the way to finding a specific source for notions of personal wellbeing. Endorphins may not serve principally to reduce pain. Their major function may be to anesthetize the organism against responding too directly and forcefully to negative cognitive stimuli in the environment. They permit the animal to obscure the understanding that its situation is dire."

If that is so, people who anesthetize themselves with booze or pot may be trying to achieve unnaturally what endorphins do naturally. Still, since individual body chemistries vary, the endorphin theory might account for the fact that some people are habitually happier than others: some might just have a bigger supply of this natural analgesic. It may even suggest, moreover, one concrete way in which human beings might assure their sense of happiness; yet this way--the ingestion of synthetic endorphins--is unnervingly like the drug-popping route to happiness envisioned in Brave New World. In all this, alas, nothing much is added to the question that has always nagged the brave old world: Just what is happiness?

Given time, the happyologists could conceivably come up with a useful, or at least a discerning, answer. Perhaps the question is so fundamental that, like love and wisdom, it will al ways elude human definition. For the moment, surely, it can be answered decisively, for better or worse, only by each in dividual. In short, the considerable resources, even good intentions, of science have so far disclosed little about happiness that was not available in the words of Seneca "Unblest is he who thinks himself unblest") in ancient times or those of Abe Lincoln ("Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be") in a more recent epoch. Happiness, in short, awaits its Newton, its Galileo.

Frank Trippett

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