The New Happiness Studies

In 2011, a seminal figure in the field of happiness studies expressed his unhappiness with the very word “happiness.”

“I actually detest the word ‘happiness,’ which is so overused that it has become almost meaningless,” wrote Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. “It is an unworkable term for science, or for any practical goal such as education, therapy, public policy, or just changing your personal life.”

What constitutes a life well lived? What makes people feel that they’re flourishing? That is the type of broad, vital question the study of happiness and well-being should grapple with. Yet by the time Seligman made his declaration, the field had become a victim of its own success. Positive psychology, a prominent subfield, was especially vulnerable to caricature as a warm and fuzzy, solipsistic self-help arena prone to hype and dumbing down. Psychologists called for more context, more work crossing disciplines and cultures, more data.

A recently concluded three-year, $5.1-million project suggests that all that has begun to happen. “Happiness and Well-Being: Integrating Research Across the Disciplines” — supported by $4.6 million from the John Templeton Foundation and $453,000 from Saint Louis University — bridged the sciences and the humanities and was the largest effort of its kind in the field of well-being, says Daniel M. Haybron, the project leader, who is a professor of philosophy at the Jesuit research university. More than 150 researchers on 21 teams from 20 countries participated in research and workshops or as advisers. They included philosophers, psychologists, economists, sociologists, anthropologists, religious-studies scholars, and theologians. Many of the studies the St. Louis-based project spurred are still underway.

The work offers a glimpse into the new state of happiness studies. Participants have explored well-being and disability; the ethics of policies that use “nudges” to incentivize behavior; optimism and hope among low-income populations; compassion among health professionals; well-being and inequality; how religious values affect happiness; norms and coercion in defining the good life; perceptions of well-being over different life stages; and how depression affects one’s sense of beauty.

A couple of decades ago, Haybron says, he could pretty much keep up with the entire literature of happiness and well-being studies. Now? No way.

More Than ‘Happiology’

The problem with studying happiness is that, like fundamental particles of matter, it is difficult to define. As the social psychologist Carol Tavris wrote in a recent review-essay for The Wall Street Journal: “People usually can describe feelings of sorrow, rage and anxiety in degrees from mild to incapacitating, and they do very well describing the ecstasy of finding love and dancing the tango, but happiness? Is happiness watered-down ecstasy? Is it the absence of unhappiness — a constant homeostatic state that might dip briefly into despond or rise into delight and then right itself back into calm?”

Philosophers in the Western tradition trace such questions back to Aristotle, says Valerie Tiberius, a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a senior adviser on the St. Louis project. But as philosophy became more technical and specialized in the 20th century, she says, it largely abandoned those concerns to psychologists.

In the 1990s, Seligman used his presidency of the American Psychological Association to heighten the profile of positive psychology. Seligman, the psychologists Ed Diener and Daniel Kahneman, and others deepened the field’s empirical grounding, methods of measurement, and application to policy. As with the study of matter, even if researchers can’t isolate happiness, they say, they’re getting better at measuring where it is and what it does.

Diener, in the 1980s, led development of a Satisfaction With Life scale that’s quick for respondents to answer, making it useful for surveys. In 2011, Seligman came up with what he calls the Perma scale to measure five pillars of well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. With such tools, they say, the field is becoming increasingly empirical and focusing on replicable health and education interventions.

If the causes of happiness may sometimes seem evanescent, the fruits of happiness are increasingly clear, says Diener, who outlined some of them at a capstone conference for the St. Louis project that was held in May: better health and longevity, social relationships, citizenship, social activism, resilience, creativity, and work performance. Well-being is not a solo project, scholars are increasingly realizing. Clean air, progressive income tax, green space, and job security are just some features of a happy society, Diener says.

Scholars are also getting a feel for the limits of material wealth. He cites, for instance, research showing that only about one-fifth of Silicon Valley tech employees like their jobs despite excellent salaries and bountiful benefits. Applied mathematicians like the University of Vermont’s Chris Danforth and Peter Dodds have mined social media for insights into regional and individual emotional states and changes.

Crossing Disciplines, and Cultures

As the field’s empirical underpinnings grew stronger, philosophers like Haybron and Tiberius wanted back in, looking for applications and numerical grounding for their theories about what constitutes a fulfilling life. They reached out to their psychologist colleagues, who, in turn, sought from philosophers moral and societal compasses for their findings.

Tiberius hopes that philosophers’ influence will help integrate more wisdom and life perspective into the instruments that psychologists have developed. Each discipline learns by playing in the other’s sandbox, scholars say.

The St. Louis project supported that interdisciplinary approach. For example, an Australian team headed by Felicia A. Huppert, a psychologist at Australian Catholic University, is bringing experts in psychology, organizational behavior, philosophy, social anthropology, religious studies, and nursing to a study of how compassion ripples through a health-care setting. The researchers are testing applications of meditation, positive psychology, and cognitive therapy. While Templeton doesn’t want to make a fetish out of interdisciplinarity for its own sake, John Churchill, director of the foundation’s philosophy and theology programs, says he is glad to see such collaborations blossoming.

One of the obstacles to interdisciplinary endeavors is getting recognition for the work in one’s home discipline. But Lauren Kuykendall, an organizational psychologist at George Mason University, says that while it’s tough getting such papers into top general-psychology journals, more topically specialized ones are becoming increasingly open to it.

Kuykendall, an assistant professor, is one of 11 junior scholars who met with five senior colleagues in 2016 to seed new collaborations. The idea was to get those younger scholars used to working across disciplines early in their careers, Haybron says. That led to a collaboration between Kuykendall and Tiberius, the Minnesota philosopher, on work/life balance. Like many of the scholars in the St. Louis project, they’ve had to patiently question and explain to one another assumptions and jargon alien to the other’s field. But that questioning, each says, has been helpful in breaking out of their disciplinary silos.

Scholars like Peter D. Little, a professor of anthropology at Emory University, see a benefit in doing so. Little has been doing fieldwork on questions of inequality and the causes of poverty in northern Kenya and Ethiopia. He had worked with economists and sociologists, he says, but the project allowed him to team up with an Emory philosopher, Mark Risjord, to better explore moral and subjective elements of welfare.

Little had always been amazed that the rural communities he studied seem relatively moral, kind, respectful, and happy despite their stark material deprivation. As part of the St. Louis project, he “revisited those areas with a whole different set of questions” about life satisfaction and well-being. Improved roads, electricity, and schools seem, from preliminary analysis of the data, to contribute to the communities’ optimism, he says, even amid poverty and drought. Little is curious to learn more about how evangelical Christianity in Kenya and moderate Islam in Ethiopia might play into those outlooks. Such studies are illuminating in themselves, researchers say, but also offer interesting contrasts to countries like the United States, where generally decent standards of living don’t seem to ward off high levels of depression, suicide, substance abuse, and so on.

Religion’s Role

If psychology and philosophy make a dynamic couple, religion can create a volatile triangle. Psychology and philosophy have sometimes been apprehensive about it, but they are also intrigued by the topic. Because the Templeton Foundation places an emphasis on religion in much of its grant making, its involvement in studies of well-being, character, and virtue has triggered wariness among critics.

The physicist Sean Carroll, the philosopher Jason Stanley, the journalists Barbara Ehrenreich and John Horgan, and the evolutionary biologist David Barash are among skeptics of what they see as Templeton’s religious encroachment into science.

Carroll says that he has had “nothing but pleasant interactions with anyone from the Templeton Foundation,” but that he has two major qualms. As a scientist, he wants to avoid association with a foundation seeking to reconcile science and religion when, from his perspective, the two are irreconcilable. Even if Templeton in no way tries to influence the work of its grantees, he says, simply by supporting and highlighting ostensibly scientific work open to religious values, it slants public perceptions and debate.

Some happiness researchers, however, reason that regardless of whether or not they are religious, it is important for their work to take into account spirituality’s effects on well-being. As Ellen T. Charry, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and another senior adviser to the St. Louis project, put it during a presentation during the May capstone conference, “Ignoring the fact that 86 percent of the world’s population still identifies with a religious tradition is out of touch with reality.”

Criticism of Templeton’s agenda dates back decades, says Seligman, who has received major support from the foundation even though he doesn’t study religion. Templeton has always been up front about backing research at the border of religion and science, he says, but it considers the research agenda of positive psychology, with its emphasis on good character and positive institutions, as overlapping with the foundation’s own, like two circles in a Venn diagram. Templeton has never tried to co-opt his research, Seligman says, calling the foundation “the Eagle scout of philanthropy.”

Haybron says he had braced to get flak about Templeton support, but “I actually got almost none, which really surprised me. There was probably skepticism I didn’t hear about, but that’s OK — people weren’t yelling at me.” An atheist, Haybron nonetheless finds religious value traditions a welcome change from sometimes dry, theoretical philosophical constructs. (One of his current book projects is an argument “that society might meet certain philosophical standards of justice but still be a terrible place to live.”)

“I certainly understand the reservations people have,” he says. “There are risks inherent in any one funder having that much influence on the field. On the other hand, nobody else is funding this stuff.”

David Cloutier, an associate professor of moral theology and ethics at Catholic University of America, is collaborating with a psychologist at American University to measure not just external behaviors but also motivation, marrying social cognitive theory and religious values. “I thought it was great that the project quite intentionally tried to include some folks from theology and religious studies,” he says, “and that there was an openness to those perspectives.”

Where Next?

Related Templeton-funded endeavors include interdisciplinary research at Yale Divinity School on what constitutes the good life and a collaboration among the University of Pittsburgh, Rutgers University, and the University of California at Los Angeles on “whether fundamental philosophical concepts are shared across cultures.”

Haybron doesn’t anticipate there ever being some unified theory of happiness, and wouldn’t it be dull if there were? he asks. It’s more like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, he says: “You’ll do better if you talk to each other, but it might not be a bad thing if each of you comes away with a different story to tell.”

As Carol Tavris, the social psychologist, puts it: “The elusive nature of happiness may be the reason our founding fathers promised us its pursuit and not its capture.”

Alexander C. Kafka is a senior editor and oversees Idea Lab. Follow him on Twitter @AlexanderKafka, or email him at alexander.kafka@chronicle.com.