'Happiness' research has reached a juncture where it would be
useful to explicate an integrative theoretical model of happiness that can
capture and articulate our current understanding of happiness. To date, the
happiness literature, at least in psychology and economics, has been
principally driven by empirics. This is laudable for its commitment to
scientific method and understandable given that historically, rooted as it was
in theology, mysticism and philosophy, happiness research was decidedly
unempirical. However, after 30 odd years of data driven inquiry we are now at a
point where conceptual confusion regarding the definition and content of
‘happiness’ is making it hard for us to make sense of the stylised facts that
we have uncovered. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the ongoing
interchangeable use of terms like happiness, life satisfaction, flourishing,
well-being, eudemonia, self-actualisation and the good life despite general
agreement that these actually refer to different things. Another example is the
controversy around whether economic development brings happiness, which is at
least arguably an artefact of the confusion, not least of all in measurement,
between affective or emotional happiness and evaluative life satisfaction. The danger of
such theoretical inconsistencies is that they make it hard for empiricists to
conceptualise exactly what they are measuring. In good science we need to test hypotheses, but we need those hypotheses
to be clear, otherwise we don’t actually know what we’re testing, and our tests
will provide potentially misleading results (Popper 1934).
The purpose of this paper is to provide a preliminary
sketch of the integrative model of happiness alluded to above.
The paper is set out as follows. First, the appropriate
dependent variable will be discussed and the choice of ‘happiness’ justified.
This will occur largely by way of a process of elimination. Most contenders for
the role of dependent variable, such as subjective wellbeing, psychological
wellbeing, happiness, meaning, flourishing, agency and eudemonia will be
declined because they find their best use referring to a specific element or
source of utility. Some of these elements will be discussed in this section
while others will be given proper treatment in the discussion of independent
variables.
The paper will then outline the right-hand side of the
utility function. Herein there are three clusters of variables—agency,
subjective well-being (SWB) and psychological well-being (PWB). The first
category draws almost entirely on research from economics, while the second is
almost entirely a product of research in psychology, specifically hedonic
psychology. The final category, psychological well-being, draws on psychology,
especially the therapeutic branches of the discipline, but also on philosophy
and theology. Each cluster will be treated in turn. Variables that might belong
to each cluster will be discussed and justified with reference to the relevant
literature. Through this process, the conceptual and analytical similarities
and differences between the facets of utility that economics, psychology and
philosophy investigate will hopefully become clear.
Speaking very simplistically, the ‘agency’ cluster is first
about the absence of deprivation and then about the enhancement of the
individual’s capabilities. It takes in the fulfilment of physical needs and the
possession of agency in a political sense. The SWB cluster handles transitory
shocks, both positive and negative, like missing the bus, winning the lottery
and the event of getting married. Upwards and downward movements in happiness
are an inevitable aspects of life. These movements are important but they are
distinct from long-run, baseline life evaluation. A model of ‘happiness’, which
encompasses both, must treat each separately. This is accomplished mostly by
the inclusion of PWB as a separate cluster. PWB concerns itself with such
concepts as goals and human striving, religious experience, self-actualisation
and the affirmation of values. A regular theme of this cluster is ‘meaning’,
which has very little relevance to subjective wellbeing and affect but is of
enormous importance for life satisfaction.
Having established the model through the discussion of the
three clusters, the paper will move on to a discussion of an additional issue
that is of relevance to the model but doesn’t come into the three
clusters—preferences. The parameters of the model will differ depending on the
preferences of the person in question. For example, a materialist will have a
stronger utility payoff to income growth and a weaker income-elasticity for
utility than a Buddhist hermit. It is thus critical that preferences are taken
into account when thinking about the model.
Why
is happiness the most appropriate dependent variable?
In the history of ideas pertaining to happiness an enormous
number of words have been used to describe similar phenomena. Among them are happiness,
utility, meaning, human flourishing, the good life, wellbeing and Eudemonia.
Why should we prefer happiness to any of the others as the dependent variable
for our model? We will answer this question by first working backwards, using a
process of elimination to reject some of the above as potential dependent
variables. We will then justify utility separately. It will become clear that
some phrases are inappropriate for what we are trying to do or more efficacious
as independent variables, and utility possesses certain particularly attractive
features.
Subjective
well-being
Let us begin with the principle object of research in
hedonic psychology, namely subjective well-being (SWB). The main reason we
should avoid using SWB as the dependent variable is because it is an overly
specific term. Notably, SWB has difficulty managing aspects of PWB and is
somewhat insensitive to changes in baseline agency. Importantly, this
specificity makes SWB a very important and useful independent because it
identifies a neatly bounded collection of phenomena, namely those concerning
affect and characterised by homeostasis, and it is thus more useful as a
right-hand side variable than as the dependent variable.
In Wellbeing: the
foundations of hedonic psychology, published in 1999, the usage of SWB
leant towards describing stability of emotional affect. Since that seminal
text, SWB has come to encompass more, including mood, emotional well-being and
life satisfaction (Sheldon & Lucas 2014)
Mood corresponds to very short term affective states. These
are found to be homeostatically protected (Cummins 2010). That is to say that
individuals knocked away from their mood set-point by events like an unpleasant
argument quickly adapt back to their set-point, which is typically characterised
by moderate background levels of positive affect (Luhmann et al 2012).
The phrase ‘emotional well-being’ covers this positive
affect as a ‘state’ analysis and
extensions dealing with positive affect as a trait (Eid & Kutscher 2014).
The principle sense in which this manifests is that some people are glass
half-full or half-empty types and have different set points (Gonzalez Gutiérrez
et al 2005). Certain characteristics that emerge from genes or environment can
affect this trait, as can certain behaviours, such as gratitude (Emmons 2012), savouring
(Lyumborsky 2013) and renunciation (Ricard 2003).
Gratitude refers to a collection of practices that all
involve the individual taking stock of their situation and focusing on the good
or positive things, often using gratitude journals. The idea is to orient the
mind towards sources of positive affect and reduce the cognitive space afforded
to sources of negative affect. Numerous studies have found gratitude to have
small but statistically significant positive effects on overall affect.
However, some exceptions have been reported when people who are clinically
depressed are encouraged to practice gratitude. Here the ‘think positive’
advice can backfire as some patients find they have nothing positive to reflect
on.
Savouring is a similar to gratitude in that the objective
is to orient the conscious mind towards sources of positive affect and away
from sources of negative affect. Indeed, some authors, like Bryant and Veroff
(2007), consider gratitude to be a component of savouring. Savouring involves
mindfulness and ‘conscious attention to the experience of pleasure’. Some
examples of savouring activities include marvelling, luxuriating and basking
(Lyubomirsky 2007).
Renunciation is the practice of consciously redefining
harmful, unhealthy or otherwise negative desires as inconsequential. It is the
formal term for ‘letting go’. The term is used frequently in discussions of
Buddhism, where systematic renunciation of material desires is a fundamental
part of religious practice. Like gratitude and savouring, renunciation serves
to eliminate sources of negative affect from the conscious life of the
practitioner. Buddhist teachings argue that all desire is harmful, but
renunciation can take less intense forms by targeting desires that are
outlandish, cannot be met or are self-destructive.
Life satisfaction refers to longer term evaluations that
are robust to short term variations in affect (Kahneman and Deaton 2010). For
example, someone who values their life highly because they have a satisfying
job and pleasant home life is unlikely to change that evaluation because they
miss the bus, though this may put them in a foul mood for the rest of the
morning. A useful construct for understanding the difference between affective
state and life satisfaction is the distinction made by Carol Graham between
experienced utility and evaluated utility (Graham 2011). In terms of modelling,
there is some evidence that while emotional well-being is a stationary
auto-regressive process, life satisfaction may instead follow a structural
break pattern (Sheldon and Lucas 2014 pg. 3). This would mean while affective
state would always hover around a mean, the level of that mean could jump up or
down as a result of major life incidents like achieving long term goals or
having a terrible accident. These issues will be discussed in greater detail later.
Subjective well-being is an expansive term and we may
therefore be inclined to use it as our dependent variable. The inclusion of
life satisfaction in particular allows SWB to take in both short and longer
term evaluations, making it very useful. Yet we should be cautious, because
life satisfaction arguably refers to a different domain of evaluations to the
kind of existential evaluations that
the PWB literature is interested in. If there is a substantial difference then
it is becomes clear that PWB and SWB are components of some third, more
overarching concept.
Life satisfaction research to date has largely amounted to
producing a checklist of stylised facts regarding what produces life
satisfaction, and some techniques for cultivating satisfaction regardless of
circumstances. Money, health, marriage and religiosity are all found to
increase life satisfaction on average, and mindfulness, gratefulness and
renunciation can all help us to be satisfied with what we have (Argyle 1999,
Abbe et al 2003). Yet we can conceive of an individual who should tick all the
boxes SWB research has come up with to date for affective well-being and life
satisfaction and yet still be unhappy. For example, someone might be relatively
wealthy, married, handsome, practice religion and even attest to a high degree
of life satisfaction during mindfulness exercises, yet still be unhappy because
they don’t find their prestigious job meaningful, because they have outgrown
their popular partner, and because they are increasingly uncomfortable with the
internal inconsistencies of their religion. For this person to say that are
dissatisfied with their life while millions globally struggle to eat would be
self-indulgent, but we can still understand that they are suffering from a
dissatisfying existential anxiety.
On a simpler and more general level, it seems
straightforward enough to conceive of someone who admits they ‘cannot complain’
and says ‘I have a good life’, yet still feels restless. Many college students
would fit this mould. They have a life full of leisure and hedonic stimulation;
they are full of potential and all indicators point to a bright future. They
may very well be satisfied with life. Yet they will worry about questions like
‘who am I?’, ‘what is right?’, ‘what should I do?’ and, famously, ‘what is the
meaning of life?’
The existential
satisfaction and meaning that emerges
from having answers to these questions is arguably distinct from the security
and contentedness that emerges from ticking off the stylised facts of life
satisfaction (Ryff 1989). If we want to engage with how people evaluate this
‘existential life satisfaction’ aspect of their utility it may be necessary to
clearly delineate it from what we may term ‘hedonic life satisfaction’. Indeed,
for the rest of this paper I will advocate for giving ‘life satisfaction’ a
very limited definition as long term hedonic or affective evaluation. This can
be contained within an independent variable called SWB that focuses on hedonic,
emotional or affective dimensions of utility, including adaptation. These are
the dimensions of happiness that the subjective well-being research stream
excels at understanding. Deeper evaluations of satisfaction with one’s
existence and one’s ‘being’ will be housed instead in the PWB cluster.
The literature of PWB is concerned with such things as
mental illness, spirituality, ethics, zest, identity and purpose. It is an old,
deep and rich body of research coming primarily from philosophy, theology and
psychoanalysis that can explain the mechanisms underlying the stylised facts of
hedonic life satisfaction. An example or two may help to illustrate this point.
As mentioned earlier, SWB research has identified that married people report
sustained higher levels of life satisfaction on average compared to unmarried
people (Lucas et al 2003). This result emerges from large sample statistical
analyses of longitudinal panel data sets. However, a paper by Guven and Chapman
(2014) found that people in unsatisfying marriages were actually substantially
less happy than the unmarried. What then is it about marriage that makes us
happy or unhappy? Another robust finding of the SWB literature is that
religious people are happier and more satisfied. Yet Ferriss (2002) found that
this effect was largely localised to people who genuinely had faith. Those who
attended church out of habit or compulsion often saw their life satisfaction
reduced by participation in religion. Here again we see complexity in the
theoretical dimensions of the stylised facts of life satisfaction. To get
answers we must go deeper into issues of religiosity, spirituality and values.
This is where research into psychological well-being comes in.
While the SWB literature is to an extent under theorised,
the PWB literature suffers in many cases from the opposite problem—limited
empirical verification. Both issues emerge from the questions the research
streams ask. SWB research is relatively young and is understandably occupied
with sketching the major boundaries and stylised facts of its topic of
interest. Broad questions are appropriate here and we have the straightforward
empirical tools to answer such questions, such as ‘does religion make people
happy, on average?’ The PWB literature predates the very notion of empirics and
is often interested in questions that can’t be directly answered empirically,
such as ‘how can I justify my values without a cosmic moral order?’ There are
enormous gains to be made for research into happiness from combining these two
research perspectives on happiness. In a sense, the SWB literature is coming
from above and drilling down, starting with basic observations that can be
verified and gradually detailing them. The PWB literature is working up from
the bedrock by using philosophy and qualitative analysis to break down complex
questions into smaller pieces that might be amenable to empirical analysis.
What’s critical is that both streams have important insights and we should not
be quick to dismiss either of them for lack of depth or lack of strong
verification.
Returning to the issue of what our dependent variable
should be, it seems clear that if we can differentiate SWB and PWB as
components of happiness then they can only be parts of a more overarching
concept. They are thus appropriate as independent variables that predict some
other dependent variable. We will return to their role and content as
independent variables later.
Flourishing
In the work of Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, the term
flourishing corresponds quite closely to the existential evaluation outlined
above. They describe it as being happy ‘for the right reasons’ (Deiner and
Biswas-Deiner 2008), and explicitly separate it out from life satisfaction in
the following formula:
The term is quite linguistically suitable for this purpose
as it connotes something beyond pleasantness that captures personal growth,
purpose, environmental mastery and autonomy. As such, we reserve it for this
purpose as a component of PWB. This is for the reasons already outlined. First,
it is useful to demarcate SWB as dealing with questions of hedonism and affect.
Second, because theories of flourishing have a richer history in the PWB
literature. Indeed, the terms mentioned above—personal growth, purpose,
environmental mastery and autonomy—are all components of Ryff’s theory of PWB
(Ryff 2014). Regardless of whether we think flourishing is more suitable as a
component of SWB or PWB, it isn’t suitable as a dependent variable.
Eudemonia
Our next candidate is eudemonia, a term Aristotle was very
fond of that is sometimes colloquially translated as ‘the good life’ or more
directly as ‘happiness’ (Graham 2011). The main reason we should eschew
eudemonia as our dependent variable is that the term refers as much to a method
by which to attain happiness as it does to the state itself (Norton 1976).
Moreover, eudemonia is a useful term for analysing one component of
psychological well-being, namely whether the individual is living
authentically, and we should reserve it for that purpose (Ryff & Singer
2008).
Eudemonia and happiness is not the same thing. As Ryff
& Singer (2008) point out, to define them in such equivalence is to confuse
hedonia and eudemonia, which runs contrary to Aristotle’s distinction
satisfaction of right and wrong desires. In his analysis in the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle is at
pains to distinguish Eudemonia from satisfying appetites, moneymaking,
political power, amusement and relaxation. Given that all these things play a
substantial role in SWB we are already at the point where we should avoid
eudemonia as our dependent variable, but let’s go a bit further. Aristotle
describes eudemonia as a state of happiness that we arrive at through the process of living in accordance with
integrity and fulfilling our potential:
If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is
reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this
will be the best thing in us...to achieve the best that is within us.
Expanding on the notion of eudemonia as a process or way of
living, Norton describes eudemonia as an ethical doctrine (Norton 1976). Its
directive is for each person to comport themselves to their daimon, which is a kind of fundamental
identity. In living with such integrity the individual will realise their
potential, achieve psychic harmony and experience life as full of purpose. In
his words, eudemonia translates to ‘meaningful living conditioned upon
self-truth and self-responsibility’. Ryff notes that this combines two epitaphs
of Hellenic philosophy: ‘know thyself’ and ‘become what you are’. These two
notions are picked up and substantially extended first by Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche in the late 19th century and then by the French Existentialists in
the mid-20th century. They develop these admonishments into a functional,
atheist ontology of value and philosophy of the good life. We will return to
their ideas later when analysing the content of PWB.
Happiness
and utility
We turn now to the final two possibilities: happiness and
utility. Happiness is the term de jour in psychological parlance and captures
the public imagination. Utility is the operative concept in rational choice
theory and, by extension, economics, and occupies an historical place in public
policy discussions of how to engineer society to maximise welfare. It is
unclear which one to prefer. One way to potentially distinguish between the two
is offered by Graham (2011, pg. 42). She, following Jan Ott, defines happiness
as lived well-being and utility as expected well-being. This maintains some of
the research-agenda distinction between psychology and economics. It is also
useful for analysing happiness responses under uncertainty. This is important
as happiness research has thrown up several cases where it seems that people
don’t know what makes them happy. Three prominent examples are migration (Schkade
and Kahneman 1998), materialism (Kasser 2002) and the fact that ‘I just don’t
know what to do with my life’ is a ubiquitous feature of our cultural output.
These points made, it remains unclear which term is more
appropriate as a dependent variable. Arguably, it depends on what question you
are asking. If you are interested in exploring decision making, then utility is
more canonical. If you are interested in what determines people’s life
evaluations, happiness is the traditional choice. The right hand side variables
may well remain the same in both cases, but their parameter estimates will be
different.
In this paper, happiness is chosen for the following
reasons. First, this paper is interested in what people are referring to when
they answer survey questions like “taking all things together, on a scale of
1-10, how happy are you with your life?” This clearly refers to experienced or
lived welfare, rather than expectation. This paper aspires to provide a
foundation for statistical investigation of happiness wherein answers to this
survey question are likely to function as the dependent variable. Hence
happiness is more appropriate than utility.
Second, the model presented herein is not strictly
appropriate for decision theory, which is where utility is most prominently
utilised. The main reason for this is that PWB includes elements, like psychic
coherence, that imply multiple utility functions in the sense of neoclassical
economics. This is opens up many complexities within choice theory that are
outside the scope of this paper. The most straightforward way to proceed is thus
to focus on a happiness function rather than a utility function, and to focus
on experienced welfare rather than expected welfare. This has the added benefit
of bypassing the problem that people often do not know what makes them happy.
This is very important for decision theory but not so important for a theory of
experienced welfare.
We have arrived at happiness as the most appropriate
dependent variable for describing what it is that we are getting at. A
by-product of this discussion has been a sketch of a range of other
notions—SWB, PWB, flourishing and eudemonia—that can be reasonably regarded as
explanatory variables that determine utility. We will now turn to the right
hand side of the equation for a more in depth discussion of these and other
explanatory variables that should be included in a grand model of utility.
Independent
variables
It would be useful to discuss the functional form of
happiness and the correct model specification in a mathematical sense. However,
as this is a brief paper, this will be left for future elaboration. For the
time being, we will simply present a simplified model without parameters and
the like. We will then discuss each component in detail.
Happiness = f(SWB, PWB)
SWB can be further disaggregated into:
SWB = f(positive affect, negative affect, hedonic life satisfaction)
And PWB can be further disaggregated into:
PWB = f(growth, esteem, purpose, environmental mastery, relatedness)
The individual tries to maximise their happiness subject to
a constraint imposed by their agency, which is disaggregated into:
Agency = f(absolute income, relative income, health, education, power, status)
Agency
Agency refers to what an individual is able to do and be
(Nussbaum 2000). In this sense it refers to capacity rather than actuality.
This is unsurprising given that this cluster draws heavily on the literature of
capabilities in development economics (Sen 1999). The focus is on objective
parameters rather than subjective experience. The agency variable does not
include willpower and the like, which is instead captured by way of fixed effects.
As well as the overlap with development economics, this variable also draws on
the theoretical frameworks provided by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the four
capitals framework of ecological economics; these will be discussed in
turn.
In neoclassical development economics is there is a strong
emphasis on the growth of output, synonymously referred to as income, as the
channel to higher levels of utility (Thirlwall 2006). This is arguably a
natural consequence of the neoclassical utility function, where utility can be
mathematically backed out one-for-one from the expenditure function (Nicholson
& Snyder 2012). Ergo, if expenditures increase, utility will increase;
therefore we simply need to increase income. For many decades, this analytical
framework provided the foundation for using GDP growth as the primary measure
of development. Here development means not so much human progress as human
progress towards higher levels of utility.
Sen’s influential book ‘Development as Freedom’ represented
a partial break from this way of thinking about development. Sen was concerned
with people’s capabilities: the extent to which they could effect change in
their life. Income certainly plays a substantial role in enhancing people’s
capabilities, but there are a range of other factors they may not change
regardless of income growth. For example, in societies where women are
culturally marginalised, income growth for a woman may have almost no effect on
her capabilities because her pay check is co-opted by her household and
extended family. Related to capabilities is the concept of opportunities. An
individual can have a relatively large income thanks to goat herding or small
scale mining yet still experience life as under-developed because they live in
a very remote area that lacks infrastructure, including schools, hospitals and
roads to market.
These observations led to the creation of the human
development index (HDI), utilised to this day by the United Nations. The HDI
takes in income but also life expectancy as a measure of health and years of
schooling as a measure of educational access. The human development index is a
rough and ready measure of human capital, which is essentially the skills and
fitness that an individual can put to productive use. Human capital is a
substantial component of total factor productivity, which is a residual term in
neoclassical growth models that captures the effectiveness of labour and
capital inputs into production.
While the HDI was certainly a step forward, Sen emphasised
that the social conditions surrounding access to education and health were
critical for understanding how to improve human development outcomes. In the
early years of the HDI there was an assumption that simply building schools and
medical facilities would lead to improvement in the HDI index (Nussbaum 1999).
While this was partially correct, it became quickly apparent that some
individuals were excluded from new services. Women are again the most common
example. In cultures where women’s traditional role was in the home, it didn’t
make much sense for families to spend resources educating their daughters. The
formal skills learnt in school would not be much use in the home. Other
cultural factors have been identified in the years since, including customs
around unescorted women (Burde and Linden 2013). Race, class and caste are
other prominent barriers to access that emerged in this period. Sen would
discuss these issues in terms of advantages,
which is similar to the contemporary notion of privilege. It was not enough
to simply have services present in your area, you also needed to have the
advantage of being able to access them.
Sen’s analysis of advantages underlines that power is
critical for development. This is the root of his argument for measuring
development in terms of expansions in freedom, or perhaps more appropriately,
agency. The individual must have the freedom to choose their own way in life,
and the agency to be able to affirm that choice. Education, health and income
are critical to this, but so is political power and social status. Power here refers
to traditional hard power, such as voice in the political process (most
frequently through voting), institutional rights and legal protections. Social
status encompasses the colloquial definition of prestige, but also the issues
around diffuse power, such as being free from discrimination and stigma,
including having a position of equal strength in the household, and possessing
equality of opportunity.
The determinants of utility that emerge from Sen’s work in
development economics are thus income, health, education, power and status.
These variables combine to form the overarching concept of agency. They also
form the core of the millennium development goals.
A recent extension to this work that overlaps well with the
updated sustainable development goals
is the four capitals framework. This framework is utilised extensively by
ecological economists and those interested in wealth and the productive base
rather than income (Arrow et al 2012, Daley and Farley 2010). The four capitals
are built capital, human capital, social capital and environmental capital.
Built capital refers to capital in the neoclassical sense—machines, factories,
cash etc. Human capital takes in the skills and fitness of individuals, notably
their education and health. Environmental capital includes the aesthetic beauty
of the environment, its productive potential in terms of geographical resources
like minerals and fisheries, and ecological services like the water
purification processes of forests (De Groot et al 2002, Farber et al 2002).
Finally, social capital takes in the particular cultural and institutional
features of a particular society as well as the value of the link between
members of that society. Many of these things are very difficult to measure,
but the four capitals framework is at least valuable as a conceptual tool for
discussing overall progress. Importantly, the four capitals comprise the entire
productive base and are thus, at least conceptually, a complete measure of a
society’s wealth. Sustainable development can then be defined as ensuring that
future generations have just as much wealth as the present generation.
In this paper, I have omitted some aspects of the four capitals,
notably environmental capital and many aspects of social capital, from the
agency variable. This is partially to keep things simple, but it is also
because there is limited empirical evidence that these items have significant
impacts on people’s happiness in the
grand scheme of things. Cost benefit analyses and public goods games have
found that people have a willingness to pay for these things, which suggests
that they gain utility from them (Foglia and Jennings 2013). However, large
scale studies attempting to illuminate the major determinants of people’s
happiness have not, to my knowledge, found statistical significant effects of
these items; certainly not effects that cannot be captured by income, which
correlates closely with many indicators of development (Kassenboehmer &
Schmidt 2011). By contrast, they do find strong effects for the components of
the original HDI index and for political power and social status (Frey & Stutzer
2002), so these elements are explicitly included.
Agency is a useful paradigm for objectively evaluating utility growth, which makes it very useful
for governments, but it falls short as a paradigm for subjective evaluation. The four capitals framework is a fairly
comprehensive measure of sustainable progress, and Nussbaum’s capabilities
framework is a useful paradigm for thinking about the socio-economic conditions
necessary for the pursuit of
happiness. However, both of these frameworks focus on giving people the means to obtain utility, but the end of utility requires SWB and PWB as
well. Another way of phrasing this is that agency is a prerequisite for utility
but the individual must utilise their agency to affirm something else in order
to actually achieve the utility.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a useful reference point
here (Maslow 1943). Agency corresponds to the lower order physiological and
safety needs, and to some extent to mid-level love/belonging needs. Without
meeting these needs it is extremely difficult to even begin to try and achieve
the higher order needs of esteem and self-actualisation, which parallel
somewhat the concepts of SWB and PWB. This is empirically evident in studies of
warzones and extreme poverty, situations wherein people report levels of
happiness that are below global averages and far from the levels we observe in
studies of homeostasis (Deaton 2008). Without agency utility is extremely
difficult to achieve, as research in development economics bears out, but
having agency doesn’t necessarily lead to sustained high levels of happiness,
as the waiting rooms of European psychiatric clinics demonstrate.
There are two more aspects of the agency cluster that
require further discussion before we move on: health and income.
The point to be made about health is that issues that come
under ‘mental health’ are split between the agency cluster and the PWB cluster.
It is hard to come up with a criterion upon which to determine where these different
aspects should be housed. However, one demarcation that I find useful is that
mental health issues that are exogenous are covered by health in the agency
cluster while mental illness issues that contain substantial endogenous
components belong in PWB. For example, chemical disorders like bi-polar and
ADHD are housed within agency, where they have a negative effect. Development
of health services reduces the severity of their effect. By contrast, ailments
like existential anxiety (for which one probably would not see a psychiatrist
but might see a counsellor) are housed within PWB. This dichotomy leaves a huge
grey zone which includes things like depression that can have both
physiological (chemical) and/or behavioural causes and may need to be treated
with drugs or talk therapy, or both (Francis 2013). Hopefully the usefulness of
this split will become clearer after the analysis of PWB below, where it will
be revisited.
Income
We now return to the role of income in the agency cluster.
No single item’s contribution to utility has been studied more extensively than
income, and yet its role remains somewhat ambiguous. A historical analysis will
help to make the exact nature of this ambiguity clear. In classical economics,
income had a strong role to play in utility, but it was believed that
individuals experienced diminishing returns to utility from income, as they did
from most things (Bruni and Sugden 2007). This attitude was modified slightly
by the marginalist revolution. In the neoclassical microeconomic theory that
emerged out of that revolution, income and utility have a direct relationship.
Diminishing marginal returns come into play through the goods that income
allows an individual to purchase, rather than directly through income (Weimann
et al 2015).
This is a subtle but important point. It recognises that
money is a unit of exchange—utility is derived from goods, which cost money,
not money itself. Increasing the amount of money an individual has always leads
to more utility, but the returns can be expected to diminish once an individual
has a diverse consumption basket and starts to simply consume more (in terms of
both quality and quantity) of what they already have.
Richard Easterlin’s research in the mid-70s challenged this
paradigm (Easterlin 1974). Examining data on happiness across countries
globally, he made two striking observations. First, there appeared to be rapid
diminishing returns to income for happiness beyond the middle income point. In 2005,
Richard Layard extended this finding and claimed the existence of a kind of satiation
point beyond which income makes no appreciable difference to happiness (Layard
1980). Second, income appeared to explain differences in happiness within
countries but not between them. There were relatively poor nations that had
similar levels of happiness to relatively wealthy nations. This is the
so-called ‘Easterlin Paradox’.
In his original paper on these themes Easterlin proposed
relative status effects as a possible explanation for the phenomena he
observed. He suggested that individual’s cared as much about their position in
the income distribution as they did about their absolute income. Consider a
small holder in rural Indonesia. They might be quite poor by global standards,
but by local standards they are quite wealthy and enjoy a great deal of status.
As a result, their arguably meagre income might actually have a powerful effect
on their happiness. By contrast, a plumber in Western Sydney, who is much wealthier
in absolute terms than the Indonesian small holder, occupies a relatively low
position in the income distribution of their city. They may be dissatisfied
with their income as a result and be unhappy as a consequence.
In an influential paper in 2008, Stevenson and Wolfers
refuted Easterlin’s findings and argued that the Paradox was an artefact of bad
data (Stevenson and Wolfers 2008). They looked at the same data that Easterlin
had used—the World Values Survey—updated with more years, as well as the world’s
major longitudinal household surveys. Their conclusion was that there is a
consistent, positive, log-linear relationship between income and happiness that
holds both within countries and between them.
Stevenson and Wolfers argue that the Easterlin paradox
emerged out of a tendency in the early years of the World Values Survey to use
population samples that were not nationally representative. In particular, in
many poor countries, middle and upper class households were disproportionately
represented in sampling. With better data and the use of the log scale the
paradox disappears. They further argue against a satiation point because the
line of best fit through the data shows no signs of curvature at any income
level. They acknowledge, however, that on the log scale this linear fit
represents diminishing marginal returns to income as movements up the curve
require a fixed percentage increase
rather than a fixed absolute increase in wealth, which means that as
individuals get richer they need more and more money to achieve the same
incremental gain in happiness. In practical terms, this means that there are
diminishing returns to happiness from income, as neoclassical microeconomics
predicted. Moreover, it means that from a public policy point of view, once
individuals have reached middle income status, it might be socially more
cost-effective to look for ways to increase their happiness other than income
growth.
While Stevenson and Wolfers find a consistent functional
form for the relationship between absolute income and happiness, it would be
incorrect to dismiss the importance of relative income. There is an enormous
body of literature that attests to the relevance of status anxiety reference
groups for individuals’ life evaluations. This literature spans multiple
disciplines. Philosophical works include Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and Bourdieu’s Distinction (1984). In psychology there
is the work of Knabe and Ratzel (2009) on the unemployed and the experimental
study of Charness and Grosskopf (2001). There is also the evolutionary
perspective of Weimann et al (2015), who propose that competition was
fundamental to our survival and that we have consequently selected for genes
that encourage comparisons and use relative status to motivate us.
The discipline most exercised by relative income effects is
economics. Here there is an abundance of research on the topic. Among the most
recent and perhaps the best is empirical work on migrant populations in China
during its recent decades of immense and rapid growth. These studies typically
find a tension between the positive happiness effect of the higher wages migrants achieve in towns and the
expanding reference groups they are exposed to there, which make them feel
poorer (Clark & Senik 2014). Similar findings are presented by Ferrer-I-Cabonell
in a study of German panel data (2005). The three main findings therein are
that relative income is about as important as own income for individual
happiness, that the relatively poor care more about relative income than the
relatively rich, and that individuals are happier the richer they are relative
to their social set. Another study worth highlighting here is Frijters and
Mujcic (2012). They study the choices of a large (N=1068) sample of Australian
university students over hypothetical income distributions. Their principle
finding is that “income rank matters independently of absolute
income…rank-sensitive individuals require as much as a 200 per cent increase in
income to be compensated for going from the top to the bottom of the income
distribution”.
The exact relationship between relative income, absolute
income and happiness remains ambiguous and may never be properly amenable to measurement.
For the time being, it suffices to acknowledge that both absolute and relative
income matter for happiness.
Agency
as a constraint
The happiness literature has demonstrated a strong
correlation between the capabilities captured in the agency variable and
happiness. One might wonder then why happiness is not some function of agency.
Why do we treat agency as a constraint?
We proceed in this manner because intuition suggests that
the relationship between agency and happiness is very much a correlation and
not a causal relationship. Microeconomic theory, for example, recognises that
income only leads to utility by way of the goods that it allows the individual
to purchase. The income itself does not provide utility. As the old saying
goes, you cannot eat money. One might immediately counter that money makes a materialist
happy (Keng et al 2000). This is true in some instances (Sirgy et al 2013).
However, such utility derived from values
is captured in the PWB score under ‘purpose’, specifically values-affirmation.
Similarly, people who derive utility from health because of the opportunities
vitality brings, such as hikers, will find that source of utility captured by
purpose or by the environmental mastery variable, which includes the ability to
engage in adventure racing, for example. Similar points can be made for
education and political power. Everyone’s capabilities are expanded by these
items. Some individuals will also directly derive happiness from amassing power
or getting educated. However, this happiness comes from PWB rather than from
the expanded capability itself.
The crucial point is that having a capability is distinct
from acting on it. This is extremely important in the context of happiness
because it is abundantly clear that people often don’t know how to utilise
their capabilities to make themselves happy. And while someone possesses this
ignorance they will remain disaffected regardless of how much we increase their
agency. This is less true for SWB than it is for PWB. SWB responds to short
term ‘cheap’ shocks like narcotics, stimulating or pleasant experiences like
skydiving and holidays and power-trips in a way that PWB doesn’t (Diener et al
2009, Diener et al 2010). There is a thus a close proximity between changes in
agency and actions that give you happiness. If your power increases to a
certain level, for example, you can immediately detain people you don’t like.
An increase in agency has here led to an almost immediate increase in your
happiness. But there is still a step here between having the power and using
the power. Similarly, if we gave huge quantities of education to someone on a
deserted island they would receive little increases in their happiness unless
they valued knowledge for its own sake.
So the agency variable is about capabilities and these act
as a constraint on the individual’s ability to achieve happiness. This explains
why we tend to see increases in happiness on
average as we move from less to more developed nations, but also see people
who sharply defy this trend, such as Sen’s happy peasant and Carol Graham’s
frustrated millionaire. The quantity of agency a person possesses is given
objectively by their income, health, education, political power and social
status, and subjectively by their ability, willpower and personality. As these
subjective factors are largely time invariant and frequently hard to observe,
they are treated through fixed effects rather than by way of inclusion in the
agency cluster. Within the constraint of their agency, the individual tries to
maximise their utility by increase their SWB or PWB. We turn now to these
variables.
Subjective
Well-being
The concept of SWB emerged predominantly from research in
psychology and the main thrust has come from the school of hedonic psychology,
led initially by Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener and Norbert Schwarz (1999). Its
point of departure is that pleasure, pain; happiness and unhappiness are
important motivators of human behaviour and should be studied in that regard.
More recently, this literature has been joined by work emerging from positive
psychology regarding the characteristics and habits of happy people, and by
work examining the phenomenon of flow (Abbe et al 2003, Csikszentmihalyi 1992).
Positive psychology was the brainchild of Abraham Maslow in the 1940s and
departed from the position that psychology was overly fixated on pathology and
had neglected the science of positive or super-healthy psychological
functioning. Flow is a term used to describe the state individuals achieve when
engaged in activities that are highly challenging but in which they also
possess the appropriate level of skill. These activities and the frequent
achievement of flow have been found to lead to high levels of positive affect.
For the most part, SWB research is concerned with affect,
mood and the emotion of happiness.
Hedonic psychology explicitly started with an emphasis on this aspect of
happiness rather than longer term evaluations, and this remains the
discipline’s strength, so we will stick to that demarcation herein. There is a
distinction in philosophy between this kind of happiness and the kind of
flourishing that emerges from PWB. Indeed, Matthew Ricard, a French Buddhist
monk and sometimes scholar of happiness, has quipped about how French
philosophers say to him “don’t talk to us about happiness; we like our ups and
downs” (Ricard 2004). This paper makes this distinction explicit by separating
out PWB into its own variable. One reason why this is important is that PWB
might have negative implications for SWB, at least over the short term. For
example, some goals, such as getting a paper published, might involve a great deal
of suffering while reading frustrating articles, stumbling through equations
beyond your ken, having to re-write whole sections and getting rejected by
reviewers. This suffering has negative effects on affect and thus on subjective
well-being. However, once the paper is actually published the goal-realisation
element of PWB will kick in and this might also result in an episode of the
emotion of happiness. Similarly, while some behavioural remedies to combat
negative mood might result in a stabilisation of affect, if they are unable to
address underlying causes of the negative mood in the psychological structures
of the patient, that negative mood may well reappear. While ‘flourishing’ might
be able to accommodate some of these issues, separating the two elements out
allows for a deeper analysis and a clearer model.
So at least for the purposes of this paper, SWB is strictly
about mood, emotion, affect and hedonism and not about flourishing or
psychological hygiene. Note that there are an enormous number of exogenous
things that can affect our emotional state, from getting a flat tire to being
awarded a fellowship, so for the most part we don’t try to engage with SWB on
the level of inputs herein. Instead, we simply talk about positive and negative
affect as abstractions.
Perhaps the most significant findings of the SWB research
are the facts of adaptation and happiness set points. Adaptation refers to the
way we get used to things, both positive and negative. Our set point is our
baseline level of affect, which is determined by genetics, environment, and
arguably by some kinds of training we can undertake (Lykken & Tellegen
1996; Roysamb et al 2014; Ruini & Fava 2014). We adapt back to our set
point over time. Generally speaking, the more severe a shock to our affect, the
longer it takes to adapt back to the set-point. At present, there are only a
very few items, such as the death of a spouse, shortlisted as having the
potential to permanently increase or lower an individual’s set point (Heady et
al 2014). This may be because these shocks have strong and difficult to treat
impacts on PWB as well as SWB (Diener 2014). Most shocks to SWB can be adapted
to. Exogenous shocks to mood, the most short-term dimension of SWB, have been
found to be not at all robust to adaptation (Armenta et al 2014). Indeed, Tomyn
and Cummins (2011) describe mood as being homeostatically protected, meaning
that the biochemical processes of the brain act to stabilise mood.
From a modelling point of view, genetic and early life
determination of set points suggests a need for individual time invariant fixed
effects, to be discussed later, while adaptation to a set point lends itself to
an auto-regressive moving average (ARMA) format. A basic version of the latter
is as follows:
Where t refers to time denominated in whatever interval the
researcher cares about, and e is an exogenous shock.
Auto-regressive refers to the fact that the value of the
dependent variable (SWB in this case) is a function of its value in the
previous period. Adaptation is clearly an auto-regressive process. An
individual who was ecstatically happy in the previous period will be slightly
less happy in the present period due to adaptation. How long it takes them to
return back to the set-point depends on the distance of the deviation from the
set point, and the strength of the adaptation mechanism, which is captured by
the a1 parameter. Adaptation as theorised necessitates that 0 < a1
<1. This means that shocks to SWB decay over time as only a portion of their
effect is carried over into the next period. By contrast, if |a1|
were > 1 then SWB would explode over time as a result of a shock.
Depending on the interval of time under study, it might be
more realistic to allow the value of SWB from multiple previous periods to have
an effect on the value of SWB in the previous period. For example, in a study
at the level of daily intervals the shock of it being the weekend might last
for more than one period. Similarly, we might like to the effect of the shocks
themselves to be able to persist for several periods. An example might be good
weather. We can extend the model to capture this persistence:
***
This is a standard n-period ARMA representation. The AR
(auto-regressive) terms are those referring to values of SWB in previous periods,
while the MA (moving average) terms refer to the values of the exogenous shock
in previous periods. We can simplify this to:
Recall that the ai capture the speed of
adaptation to shocks. These terms are between 0 and 1, but the closer to 0 the
faster the individual will adapt because less of an effect will carry over
between periods. There is a substantial body of research developing techniques
to manage the speed of adaptation in order to prolong periods of positive
affect and shorten periods of negative affect (Armenta et al 2014). Among the
most prominent techniques in this realm are gratitude, mindfulness,
renunciation and savouring. Gratitude, renunciation and savouring have already
been discussed. Mindfulness has sometimes been perverted into the slogan ‘live
in the now’, but is actually much deeper. A brief explanation is that mindfulness
involves being hyper self-aware, including of your psychological processing as
it is happening (Dorjee 2014). This allows you to respond consciously to
changes in your affective state, including by renouncing negative influences.
One issue that complicates the simple ARMA framework for
affect is that negative affect and positive affect have been found to operate
simultaneously rather than on a single scale. That is to say that you can be
both happy and sad at the same time. For example, you might be suffering from a
bout of sciatica that is irritating you while you are at a delightful dinner
with friends. In practical terms, what this means is that we need separate ARMA
models for each of negative affect and positive affect:
*****
The problem with this simple two-equation model is that
one’s positive affect has no effect on one’s negative affect. This is not
consistent with the literature, which has found that while positive and
negative affect are separate phenomena, they do have cross-effects. We can
start to account for this by including cross effects in the model. We start
with a simple AR(1) process, which means that only the previous period and
contemporaneous effects are relevant. The discussion can be generalised to the
n-period case but that would add little of use to our discussion so we will
skip it here.
Positive affect is here influenced by negative affect in
the present period and in the previous period, and vice versa. Each is also influenced
by its value in the previous period. On all variables there is a speed of
adjustment parameter that captures how fast the person in question is adapting
to each type of affect. The literature to date suggests that certain people may
adapt faster or slower to positive or negative affect. For example, those who
practice the Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model (Armenta et al 2014) may have
relatively large parameters for positive affect but relatively small parameters
for negative affect. For example, their values for b12, a12
and a22 may be around 0.1 while their values for a11, b21
and a21 could be around 0.9. This would imply that their positive
emotions dampen their negative emotions and that a substantial portion of their
positive affect is carried over across periods, whereas their negative emotions
have little effect on their positive ones and tend to fade quickly. Alternatively,
someone with a genetic predisposition towards neuroticism and a learned
tendency to dwell on the negative may have their values reversed.
Life
satisfaction
Recall that hedonic life satisfaction (as distinct from
flourishing) is a component of SWB that stands outside the affect scales. Life
satisfaction is typically measured using either the Cantrill’s ladder of life
question (Bjornskov et al 2013). This reads as follows:
Please imagine a ladder with
steps numbered from zero at the bottom to ten at the top. Suppose we say that
the top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom
of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
If the top step is 10 and the
bottom step is 0, on which step of the ladder do you feel you personally stand
at the present time?
This question is much more explicitly about long term
evaluations than other life satisfaction questions, such as that employed by
the World Values Survey, which uses the following:
All things considered, how
satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days? Using this card on
which 1 means you are “completely dissatisfied” and 10 means you are
“completely satisfied” where would you put your satisfaction with life as a
whole?
For quite some time, researchers made little distinction
between affect and life satisfaction. This was partially because it was hard to
separate the two through survey instruments, and partially because studies of
arguably long term influences of hedonia showed similar adaptation dynamics as
studies of short term phenomena. For example, Kahneman and Schkade (1998)
showed that people in California had the same life satisfaction (using the
World Values Survey question) as those living in other US states. However,
those living outside the West Coast thought they would be happier living there.
Kahneman and Schkade demonstrated that this could largely be explained by a
focussing illusion pertaining to the pleasant climate in California. Once
people actually moved to California they would quickly adapt to the weather and
drop back down to their previous happiness levels.
Another explanation for this phenomenon is rescaling. It
seems undeniable that happiness and life satisfaction survey instruments impose
a structure on the underlying data that may not be there. We ask for answers to
be placed on a scale of 1-10, but it is theoretically possible that happiness,
or life satisfaction at least, exist on a continuum with no upper limit. If
this is the case then we are imposing strong restrictions on the data that may
lead to some very misleading interpretations.
Consider the following example. The New Zealand government
allocates migration visas to Tongans on the basis of a lottery. This makes for
an excellent mechanism by which to study the impact of migration on happiness
because you have a kind of randomised control trial. Moreover, Tonga is an
island paradise and the only citizens eligible for a New Zealand visa are
highly educated, upper class members of Tongan society. Migration is thus close
to a pure income effect. Everything else can only get worse. Stillman et al
(2015) track the outcomes of these migrants. Prior to the visa lottery,
potential candidates are interviewed and asked about their life satisfaction.
They report an average of 8/10. 2 years after the lottery both successful
applicants who migrated to New Zealand and unsuccessful applicants who stayed
in Tonga are interviewed again. They both report being 8/10, despite the New
Zealanders now having higher real incomes on average. This would suggest
adaption, relative income effects, or some other phenomenon. It does not seem
to support the suggestion that the migrants are happier despite their initial
belief that they would be. However, when the Tongans are asked how happy they
were 2 years prior, they say they were 8/10, which they were. The New
Zealanders on the other, say they were 6/10.
This suggests that perhaps the imposed scale is making it
hard for the migrants to articulate their feelings. It seems perfectly
reasonable to suggest that when in Tonga they were quite satisfied with their
lives but could seem some room for improvement, hence the 8/10. Post migration
their happiness has increased but their scales have also expanded and now they
see new room for improvement, hence they are still 8/10 but this 8 is actually
higher than the 8 they reported previously, as is the 10 on the horizon.
Indeed, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to suppose that their current 8 is
actually their old 10 and their new 10 is their old 12, which they couldn’t
even conceive of previously due to uncertainty and inexperience.
This issue of rescaling was well captured by a discussion
between Martin Ravallion of the World Bank and Richard Easterlin in Happiness and Economic Growth (Clark and
Senik eds. 2014). Easterlin had presented research showing that the happiness
of the average Chinese citizen had not improved over the period from the end of
the 80s until the end of the first decade of the 21st century (2009,
2014). This claim was backed up by scatter plots of average happiness in the
nation over that period. Easterlin explained this result as a byproduct of
unemployment effects emerging out of the end of guaranteed (but compulsory)
employment under the pure communist system. He further suggested that:
“The present results demonstrate the value of subjective
well-being measures such as happiness or life satisfaction as a guide to
policy. Output measures lead one to focus on firms and their productivity,
while happiness measures lead directly to the lives and personal concerns of
individuals and bring out possible costs in terms of human suffering that are
missed by GDP.” (pg. 20)
Ravallion countered this with an argument about rescaling
and structural breaks:
“Economic development is a process of structural change,
which changes people’s reference groups and scales. It changes how you think of
the world where you live when you move from a village, where the reference
group is very narrow, to a city with a very vast set of people at different
levels of living. In that process, the scale of subjective well-being that we
use is surely going to change.” (pg. 246)
The results discussed in Easterlin’s chapter would seem to
imply that people were happier in China in the immediate aftermath of the
events of June 1989 (the incidents of Tiananmen Square, which were mirrored
nation-wide) than during the extensive market liberalisation of the subsequent
Zemin & Rongji years, or even the reactionary years of sustained high
growth but relatively limited structural change under Jintao & Jiaobao
(Overholt 2015). Observers of China’s history, literature and popular culture
may well consider such a proposition unlikely.
Such sanity checks are little more than anecdotes that we
try to temper with data. In this case, the data suggests that the sanity check
is incorrect. But when the data disagree so fundamentally with our intuitions,
we should at least consider alternative explanations. One such explanation is
readily available in the notion that over time people change their scales for
what sad or 10/10 mean in terms of their happiness, and there is some evidence
for this in the Stillman et al study of migration.
Identifying such rescaling or structural breaks is very
difficult precisely because the scale used to ask happiness questions obviates
against people’s ability to communicate scale adjustment. Longitudinal studies
are unlikely to help because a year on year survey will allow for a lot of time
between structural breaks and the moment of survey. The problem is compounded
by the tendency for affective state to bias responses to life satisfaction questions
(Bertrand & Mullainathan 2001).
Some studies have managed to find evidence that hedonic life
satisfaction and affect are meaningfully different. For example, Kahneman and
Deaton (2010), using a variety of survey questions, found that income growth had
lasting impacts on life satisfaction but only transitory effects on affect. One
explanation for this might be that income growth represents not just an
increase in opportunities for affecting enhancing activities but also relates
to career advancement and other structural breaks in PWB. It is very hard to
separate out these effects with survey instruments. Even if the researcher is
able to devise some sort of 5 question packet covering off on all aspects of
SWB, agency and PWB, as Ryff (2014) suggests, the ordering of the questions is
likely to be important. If the researcher tries to overcome this problem by
explaining the purpose of each question to the respondent there is an argument
that they are leading the witness.
This discussion can be boiled down to two conflicting
graphical representations of happiness dynamics (Sheldon and Lucas 2014). The
first is the standard representation of adaptation to a set-point that
dominates research on affect:
Figure 1
The mean of the data is 7, which is the set point. The
score of the person under scrutiny fluctuates between 1 and 10 or whatever
scale they are being asked to answer on, but their responses seem to fluctuate
around some equilibrium point. The other representation is the following:
Figure 2
What we see here is a tendency for affect to vary around a set point but for life satisfaction (or
happiness more generally) to jump as a result of structural breaks. The time
scale is in months, adding up to 50 years. Imagine scales of 1-10 around the
jagged sections of the graphic. That is to say, this graphic captures both the
structural breaks in scales and the adaptation to affective set point dynamic
that dominates everyday experiences. A narrative that could be described this
graph is as follows. Throughout university the individual generally feels good
about life but is a bit listless. They get some direction and determine to
embark on a particular life track. Upon graduation they are offered a job on
this track, which sees their life satisfaction jump. Several years pass and
then they are promoted, leading to another structural break. After another
decade they are promoted to a management position, marry and have their first
child. Once again their life satisfaction jumps. Throughout these many years
they miss the bus a bunch of time, eat nice meals, face setbacks, enjoy
unexpected pleasures and otherwise experience a range of shocks that cause
their affect to bounce around. They adapt to these shocks, but not to the
structural breaks. Then, around the age of retirement, they are diagnosed with
cancer and one of their children dies in a car accident. Their life
satisfaction plummets, but recovers somewhat when they are cured of cancer.
As already mentioned, empirically determining which of
these graphs more accurately depicts the underlying true structure of happiness
is very difficult. That said, it ought to be an immediate priority of happiness
research because if structural breaks are the correct paradigm then a large
portion of the happiness literature is invalid. Notably, under this paradigm,
someone who is 5/10 on a happiness scale might actually be happier than someone
who is 9/10 if that person is sitting on a structurally higher level.
Psychological
well-being
We turn now to psychological well-being, a cluster that
sheds light on the determinants and dynamics of the structural breaks outlined
above. This section draws primarily on the work in psychology of Ryan and Deci
on Self-Determination Theory and Ryff on components of psychological
well-being. A fundamental postulate of these authors is that psychological
health and by extension, general ‘well-being’ is a function of more than
affect. They articulate this as a difference between hedonia and eudemonia (Deci
& Ryan 2008). Indeed, an individual may be experiencing strong negative
affect and yet be psychologically healthy (Ryan & Deci 2001). In certain
cases this may even affirm their health. For example, if someone had recently
lost a spouse they would only be psychologically healthy if they grieved and
experienced negative affect. As such, it is important that we define well-being
more broadly than simply affect and emotion, or even life satisfaction, to
encompass existential evaluations and psychic hygiene.
Self-determination theory departs from two main ideas: the
distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and human psychological
needs for autonomy, relatedness and competency (Deci & Ryan 2000).
Intrinsically motivated activities are those an individual engages in for the
sake of the activity itself, likely because it provides them with autonomy,
relatedness and or competence. Hobbies are a classic example. By contrast,
extrinsically motivated activities are those the individual engages in for some
contingent reason. The most often used example is materialistically motivated
activities. Individuals might partake of some activities they don’t find much
enjoyment in, such as bond trading, in order to make money to buy material
objects that they value. In this case the activity—bond trading—is motivated by
something external to the activity itself, namely material goods. Another
common example is social pressure. Individual’s may be motivated to engage in
activities to avoid punishment, censure or to win the approval of their family
or peers.
There are gradations between intrinsic and extrinsically
motivated activities (Ryan & Deci 2000). The least autonomous form of
extrinsic motivation is external regulation. These are behaviours “performed to
satisfy an external demand or obtain an externally imposed reward contingency”.
Actions coming under this heading have an external locus of causality. Actions
performed under duress are the classic example here.
Moving slightly closer to intrinsic motivation is
introjected regulation. This is where the individual feels pressure to avoid
guilt or anxiety or attain ego-enhancement or pride. Ryan and Deci note that
introjected regulation revolves around ‘regulation by contingent self-esteem’.
The idea here is that ‘the person acts in order to enhance or maintain
self-esteem’. Regulation in this case is internal, but such introjected
behaviours are not fully part of the self.
The next step towards intrinsic motivation is called
‘identification’. This is where you identify the importance of a certain kind
of behaviour and try to integrate it into your sense of self. Someone who
dislikes math but trudges through it because they think it is important is an
example.
Only slightly outside intrinsic motivation is extrinsically
motivated actions characterised by integrated regulation. Ryan and Deci
describe this as follows:
Integration occurs when identified regulations have been
fully assimilated to the self. This occurs through self-examination and
bringing new regulations into congruence with one’s other values and needs. The
more one internalises the reasons for an action and assimilates them to the
self, the more one’s extrinsically motivated actions become self-determined.
Integrated actions are autonomous and unconflicted, but
differ from purely intrinsically motivated actions because the action is still
done for its instrumental value rather than for its own sake. Intrinsically motivated actions are purely
self-determined.
Intrinsically and extrinsically motivated activities
motivated activities and their relationship to well-being have been extensively
investigated empirically (Kasser & Ryan 2004, Guillen-Royo & Kasser
2014, Sheldon et al 2004, Kasser et al 2013). Whether an action, regardless of
motivation, is valued by the individual makes it more like that the individual
will succeed in that action or endeavour (Niemiec et al 2009). However, while
success in intrinsically motivated actions has been found to contribute
substantially to psychological health and produce positive affect as a
by-product, research suggests that success in extrinsically motivated
endeavours only relates to the later. Moreover, there is some evidence that
attainment of extrinsic aspirations is positively correlated with indicators of
ill-being. What seems critical is whether the action fulfils the individual’s
basic needs for autonomy, relatedness and competence.
In self-determination theory (SDT), psychological needs are
posited as ‘innate psychological nutriments that are essential for ongoing
psychological growth, integrity and well-being’ (Deci and Ryan 2000).
Furthermore, SDT posits that desires and motivations are linked to or catalysed
by needs as an element of our psychological design. This is where SDT links
back to Aristotle’s notion of living to discover one’s Daimon, or true inner
self. When this process is ‘thwarted’, to use modern psychological parlance,
neurosis creeps in. Deci and Ryan delineate 3 separate psychological
needs—competence, autonomy and relatedness.
The notion of competence borrows heavily from White (1959)
and refers to a deeply structured motivation to have an effect on the
environment and to attain valued outcomes within it. This relates substantially
to Ryff notion of ‘environmental mastery’, discussed below. Relatedness refers
to the need to be intimate with others, especially with regards to love and
care. Finally, autonomy refers to volition, which is the desire to
‘self-organise experience and behaviour and to have activity be concordant with
one’s integrated sense of self’ (Deci and Ryan 2000). According to SDT, psychological
well-being lies in satisfying these three innate psychological needs, which is done
by engaging in intrinsically motivated activities, which nourish all three
needs.
SDT has some substantial similarities and notable
differences with Ryff’s definition of psychological wellbeing. This construct
is made up of 6 separate items: self-acceptance, positive relations with
others, personal growth, purpose in life, environmental mastery and autonomy.
Autonomy, environmental mastery and positive relations with others are similar
to Deci and Ryan’s notions of autonomy, competence and relatedness. ‘Positive
relations’ is about love empathy and affection. Environmental mastery is about
the individual’s ability to ‘choose or create environments suitable to his/her
psychic conditions’. And autonomy refers to evaluating oneself by personal
standards. This nicely parallels intrinsic motivation.
The additional criteria of self-acceptance, personal growth
and purpose in life are defined as follows. Self-acceptance includes
self-esteem—thinking well of oneself—but goes further to incorporate
self-regard. This is an awareness of personal strengths and weaknesses and an
ongoing process of self-evaluation wherein disliked traits qualities are
overcome and discarded while desired ones are enhanced and deepened. Personal
growth is largely concerned with realising one’s inherent potential and
actualising ones daimon. Purpose in life is about having existential
motivation. Numerous philosophers, including Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre and
De Beauvoir, as well as early psychoanalysts, notably Frankl, have identified
the human need for a reason to live, especially since the ‘Death of God’ in the
late 19th century left something of a vacuum where the monotheistic cosmic
order had previously been.
Aside from having 3 extra criteria, the principle
difference between Ryff’s model of PWB and SDT’s 3 innate needs model is that
where SDT theorizes that the three needs are factors that foster wellbeing,
Ryff’s 6 items define well-being. In a sense then, SDT theory points to a
process while Ryff’s metric describes an end goal. In terms of practice then,
if we want to measure people’s progress in terms of PWB the Ryff metric is
appropriate. However, if we want to understand how people arrive at high scores
on PWB and how we might intervene to improve their PWB we are better off
engaging with SDT.
SDT theory and PWB parallel a great deal of philosophical
work in the existential tradition. Indeed, Ryff explicitly draws on a lot of
this material to formulate her metric. Issues that overlap include values,
purpose, the harmonisation of internal conflicts, the coalescence of a sense of
self, autonomy, authenticity and personal growth. This paper will now turn to a
discussion of these overlaps their potential for adding texture to PWB,
especially with regards to the process by which PWB is achieved. This
discussion will take in the notion of preferences and values, something which
has seen limited examination in the happiness literature outside of SDT. The
essay will then close with a summary discussion of the implications of the
model presented herein for how we think about happiness and the ongoing
research agenda.
Existential
Philosophy
There is an area of psychology called terror management
theory. The central postulate of this research stream is that humans are unique
among animals in their consciousness of the inevitability of death. A great
deal of psychological effort is expended by humans to build defences against
the debilitating terror this brings about.
Terror management theory is quite a good scientific
backdrop to existential philosophy, which is replete with statements like ‘the
purpose of life is to build death’, and this famous one from Albert Camus:
There is but one truly serious
philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not
worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All
the rest -- whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has
nine or twelve categories -- comes afterward. These are games; one must first
answer.
ALBERT
CAMUS, An Absurd Reasoning
Existential philosophy emerged as a natural consequence of
the first big strides of science through the enlightenment and industrial
revolution. The expanding understanding of humanity organically provoked a
questioning of previously observed divine truths, especially regarding the
cosmic order (Sartre 1943). The Kantian assumption that the just will prosper,
though it may only be in the next life, was replaced with an uneasy doubt about
the transcendentalism of values, especially moral ones. This uneasiness erupts
in Nietzsche’s thought, especially his pronouncement that ‘God is Dead’, but
was present earlier, notably in the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’s early
mentor, Schopenhauer (Nietzsche 1883, Kierkegaard 1843, Kierkegaard 1849,
Schopenhauer 1818). Kierkegaard was a staunch Christian (protestant) whose work
is perhaps the most philosophically rigorous assessment of the faith-based
approach to the human condition. He affirmed faith as the only possible answer
to despair—the feeling that perhaps life really is hollow and without purpose.
Faith is precisely the unshakeable belief in the opposite—that meaning and
morality are written into the firmament and enforced by the very force of
creation. Faith is a very direct way to approach terror-management.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche took different approaches.
Schopenhauer theorised that all existential suffering is the product of
desire—the desire for more stuff, the desire for meaning, the desire for
purpose, the desire for comfort etc. The solution was to destroy your desire,
or more specifically, annihilate the will, because it is the will that desires.
This could be achieved by ascetic practice, including meditation.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy has been described as secular Buddhism and
unsurprisingly overlaps substantially with the Buddhist practice of
renunciation.
Nietzsche rejects faith. Indeed, he rejects the possibility
of values being a part of the firmament—“there are altogether no moral facts”. While
he acknowledges that “man needs a reason”, he sees this absence of a cosmic
order, of objective reasons, as
profoundly liberating. The human spirit is free to articulate its own values
and carry their light out into the galaxy. Nietzsche describes the faith-based
view of values as ‘slave morality’. Such a moral order requires Individuals to
sublimate their will to external standards. He contrasts this with ‘noble’
morality, which posits its own ‘good’ and enforces its authority upon the
individual through their own integrity. ‘Nobility’, he says, ‘is the right to
make promises’. The Noble individual is able to overcome nausea—the feeling of
meaninglessness—by acting to remake the world so that it accords more closely
with their own values. Nietzsche’s approach to terror management is to build
resilience. He encourages the individual to accept that life is full of horror,
despair and nausea but also full of vitality, zest and affirmation. Indeed,
that it is this very mixture of misery and triumph that makes life sublime:
My formula for greatness is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not in the future,
not in the past, not for all eternity. Not only to endure what is necessary,
still less to conceal it…but to love it.
The solution to despair is to loves one’s fate and to dash
oneself against life’s rocks so that you can enjoy the surf:
…for the ideal of the most high-spirited, most lively, and
most world-affirming human being, who has not only learned to comes to terms
with and accept what was and is but wants to have what was and is come back for all eternity, calling out insatiably da capo [from the beginning], not only
to himself but to the entire play and spectacle, and not only to a spectacle
but basically to the man who needs this particular spectacle and who makes the
spectacle necessary, because over and over again he needs himself—he makes
himself necessary.
The notion of ‘becoming one’s own necessity’ is a critical
component of Nietzsche’s solution to nausea. He articulates the view that each
individual has a ‘self’ that needs individuation. The affirmation of the will
makes manifest this self and brings the conscious individual into coincidence
with their innate self. This is the mechanism by which Nietzsche instructs his
readers to ‘become who you are’. The parallels to Aristotle’s notion of a
Daimon and the good life as being one wherein the individual lives in
accordance with and in affirmation of that Daimon are obvious.
Nietzsche’s thought is extended in the work of the French
existentialists, notably Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (De Beauvoir
1947, Sartre and De Beauvoir 1946). They start by elaborating on the human
condition and the nature of the ‘self’. They have two key thoughts here:
‘existence precedes essence’ and ‘man is condemned to be free’. The first
relates to the fact that consciousness makes humanity unique in its need to
define its self, its identity. We exist as an entity because that entity
develops personality and being. Consider this example: gold is defined by the
numbers of atoms that make it up. ‘Human’ is similarly defined by a collection
of biological traits. But Usain Bolt the individual is defined by being the
fastest man in history. Critically, Usain Bolt is human before he is Usain
Bolt. It takes individuation to achieve being.
That man is condemned to be free is also a function of
consciousness. However, this is also a metaphysical statement about reality.
Consciousness makes us aware of ourselves as endowed with volition—we make
choices. If we assume that the universe is devoid of objective values, notably
objective moral rules written into the firmament, there is nothing compelling
us to make choices one way or another, but we must nonetheless choose
continuously throughout life. There is no escaping this fundamental,
ontological freedom, hence why we are ‘condemned’ to it. To try to abrogate this
responsibility for our choices by recourse to duress, social pressure,
flippancy or seriousness (such as that of the religious individual) is to act
in ‘bad faith’.
Existence precedes essence and being condemned to freedom
combine to form the postulate that man is defined by his choices. At each
moment an individual is aware of their past and the open possibility of their
future and they make a choice. That choice then becomes a part of their past
and comes to define them in the here and now when we talk of who they are. Man
is thus ‘nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his
life is…nothing else but what he makes of himself’.
Importantly, in the next moment there is immediately
another choice that must be made, and so on and so forth until death. Thus an
individual’s ‘being’, which is to say their essence, is never fixed, and might
collapse in the next moment if some core value upon which it rests is
challenged. The realisation of this is one of the core elements in Kierkegaard’s
original conception of despair.
The existentialists provide a ‘way out’ from this problem
and the problem of nausea through the idea of the coincidence of being. The
existentialists argue that man wants ‘a disclosure of being’. This to say that
people want to see their sense of themselves manifest in reality. They want
proof that they are who they believe themselves to be, notably in terms of the
values they hold. A disclosure of being occurs when an individual ‘coincides’
with themselves. This is where an individual harmonises who they are (there
actual self), who they want to be (their ideal self) and who they ought to be
(their ought-self) to define an identity and affirms that desired identity in
their actions (Tory Higgins 1987). For example, someone who wants to be fit
might train and then run a marathon. At the conclusion of the marathon the
individual is revealed to themselves as precisely the person they want to be
and believe themselves to be. This provides the disclosure of the self, of
being, for a moment, and brings about the feeling of meaningful activity.
As the many values an individual holds, big and small, are
refined and harmonised and find their expression in a range of activities and
principles incidents of the disclosure of being will give way to a more general
process that I call the coalescence of
being. The individual will be left with a large, dense and nuanced core of
identity. This will still fluctuate during interplay with the environment,
especially through stimulation by new ideas, experiences and people, but will
nonetheless ground the individual’s psyche in a sense of their own being.
Critically, while the potential for fundamental challenges to identity remains
throughout life, as the individual’s sense of self and their reasons for
holding their values crystallises through the coalescence process they find it
easier to make decisions, they know more instinctively what their autonomous,
authentic attitude and response to stimuli is and they can affirm themselves
more easily, forcefully and coherently. This is how the individual comes to ‘be
their own necessity’ in the language of Nietzsche and the Greeks (Norton
1976).
The processes outlined above have substantial parallels
with modern psych theory and provide useful texture to SDT and Ryff’s theories
of PWB. The notion of harmonising who you are and who you want to be encapsulates
Ryff’s notion of self-acceptance, and disclosure of being is the mechanism by
which we arrive at personal growth and purpose. Existentialist philosophy also
provides the system by which these processes can be entrenched in mental
processes. Notably, the only route to the disclosure of being, which is the
only route to sustained happiness and meaning in existential philosophy, is
through integrity. The individual must act continuously in accordance with
their believed sense of self in order to disclose and coalesce it. Abandoning
one’s principles means abandoning one’s self. As De Beauvoir notes:
I cannot genuinely desire an end today without desiring it
through my whole existence, insofar as it is the future of this present moment
and insofar as it is the surpassed past of days to come. To will is to engage
myself to persevere in my will.
There is thus an implicit connection in existentialist
theory between self-interest and ethical conduct. Without integrity, we will
never be happy. Nowhere else in ethical theory does such a connection exist.
External theories of ethics like utilitarianism require the individual to
submit their will to ethical standards outside of themselves. In existentialism
the will is the standard. What’s required is a harmonisation of principles.
The harmonisation of principles is taken up by
self-discrepancy theory (Tory Higgins 1987). This body of psychological
literature posits that people are distressed by discrepancies in their sense of
self, notably between their actual self and their ideal and ought selves. They
may also be distressed by discrepancies viz. the way they appear in the eyes of
significant others, like intimate partners and parents. Different types of
pathology, including depression or anxiety, develop depending on the kind of
discrepancy. One interesting cross-over between existential theory and self-discrepancy
theory pertains to the ‘ought’ self. As already discussed, traditional morals
theories, including theological and philosophical moral theories, inevitably
establish morals as objectively salient rather than born of the individual.
This makes it extremely difficult for the individual to achieve coherence
between their ‘actual’ and ‘ought’ self if they possess any inclination towards
selfish behaviour. Existential theory, on the other hand, proposes something
more like an internalisation of ethical principles through a process like that
described by SDT (moving from introjection to integration). Here the external
moral standard is brought to the individual rather than the individual
comporting themselves to the moral standard. When internalisation is intrinsically
motivated, such as in the case of a student who internalises ‘earning to give’
because of a pre-existing value for efficiency and charity, the individual
finds it fulfilling and affirming to behave ethically rather than
self-abrogating. Again, we see the idea of ‘being one’s own necessity’ play
out. The ethic is freely chosen and thereby self-reinforcing.
Existentialism provides some useful extensions to the three
human needs of SDT, while SDT provides some important formalisation of the processes
by which the coalescence of being takes place. Autonomy and intrinsic
motivation/aspiration is obviously critical for the authenticity of values and
thus for the disclosure of being. The notion of internalisation is also
fundamental to the process of the coalescence of being, where values are
absorbed by and aligned with someone’s actual self. To quote self-determination
theory at length:
Our concept of self, because of its organismic basis,
begins with intrinsic activity and the organismic integration process—that is,
with the innate tendencies of human being to engage in interesting activities
and to elaborate and refine their inner representation of themselves and their
world. The activity and integrative tendency move the organism toward a more
unified set of cognitive, affective, and behavioural processes and
structures...the inherent tendency for activity, the integrative process, and
the fundamental needs are all aspects of one’s nascent self, and gradually the self is elaborated and refined through
the integrative process. As such, behaviours that are motivated by regulations
that have not been fully integrated into the self are not considered self-determined. As already noted, introjected regulation represents a prime
instance of behaviour that is motivated by processes internal to the person but
relatively external to the self
However, existentialism suggests that autonomy, competence
and relatedness are not the fundamental psychology need at play. Indeed, if
this was the case then people would not resort to religion and external moral
codes because these are fundamentally extrinsic. Rather, the need that
underlies autonomy is the need for meaning, purpose and being. This is what
defines ‘interesting activities’ as SDT theorists discuss them. The coalescence
of being, that is, the ‘integrative process’ mentioned above, is what satisfies
these needs, and autonomous, intrinsically driven behaviour is the vehicle of
this coalescence. SDT thus neatly connects two element of existential theory.
It is worth mentioning that the coalescence of being and
SDT both differ from what might be termed pure eudemonist theory, which finds
its most advanced articulation in the work of David Norton (1987). Eudemonist
theory is substantially fatalist. It argues that we are born with a true self
that we must discover and realise in our lives to attain happiness in the
eudemonic sense of living well (and virtuously). The parameters of this true
self are handed down to us in the same way that our biological parameters are
handed down to us through height, appearance, IQ and personality type.
Critically, pure eudemonism circumscribes the relevance of the social
environment to the healthy development of the individual. The individual is not
to compromise on their true self.
This is something of the complete opposite of the
faith-based approach to despair, and it is not coincidence that Norton takes
huge inspiration from Nietzsche. The will is not only set free but is taken to
be the authority on what the individual must do to become happy. The will is
the self. There is only ego and no super-ego. In Freud’s terminology the
super-ego was the locus of morality and could engage with the will at the least
of rationality.
This is where the coalescence of being idea diverges from
pure eudemonism. Coalescence breaks from theological approaches in setting the
will free, but posits the need to harmonise the ego and super-ego or the will
and the conscious or rational self. In Nietzsche’s language this is a
harmonisation of the Dionysian and Apollonian in man. The rational mind, which
might balk at some of the excesses of the will, is a substantial component of
the psychic self, and its perspective counts. Where theology advocates the
triumph the rational (Apollonian) mind in its quest to crush the sinful will
(as in Plato), eudemonism advocates the triumph of the instinctive will
(Dionysian) over the artificial concerns of the rational mind. The coalescence
of being and SDT both advocate for a middle road where these different components
of the self are brought into harmony.
Collectivism
The coalescence of being thus offers a much greater role
for the environment (natural but especially social) as a source of stimuli than
pure eudemonism does. In the former approach, the individual interacts with the
environment and internalises values it finds that there that it considers
agreeable. In the latter, the environment is something for the individual to
dominate rather than master. The only interplay is a kind of conquest, where
the individual rides to battle on behalf of their values. There is no give and
take.
In the work of the French existentialists there is a
discussion of how the individual exists in a world full of other individuals
affirming their values and wherein they often affirm their values in concert
with others. Arp, a scholar of De Beauvoir, describes it thus (Arp 2001):
The human world depends on the existence of other human
beings. The meanings with which it is saturated do not originate in me alone.
They are inter-subjectively constituted…the existence of other subjects is the
condition of the existence of the human world.
Values are frequently co-determined, socially contested and
collectively realised. Even if we depart from the eudemonistic perspective that
the individual is born endowed with an orientation towards a certain value, the
manner in which they are able to manifest that in the world will depend
substantially on contemporary environmental factors. For example, if someone is
given to scholarly pursuit, whether this manifests as shamanism, monasticism or
academic writing will be determine substantially by their environment in terms
of the human epoch in which they are born. Similarly, someone inclined to
combat may find themselves a soldier or a football player depending on the
conditions of their upbringing. Similar outcomes can be hypothesised for mental
inclinations. A nascent orientation towards political theory is likely to end
in quite different identities depending on whether the individual grows up in a
liberal-democratic or social-democratic household and society. A penchant for
environmental causes will end in distinct expertise and objectives depending on
whether the individual lives in Laos, where dam-building tends to dominate
environmental discourses, or Australia, where mines and whaling are much more
salient.
This is the simplest level on which the environment influences an
individual’s being.
The example of an environmental activist points the way to
the next level influence, namely at the level of collective action. Many values
require collective action to realise. Indeed, collection action is frequently
unavoidable. Consider the academically inclined. The acquisition of knowledge
is aided by the presence of colleagues, libraries, facilities and technology
like STATA and databases. The contours of the social environment and the
opportunities for engaging in collective aspirations and values will inevitably
have a substantial influence over the coalescence of being process. As part of
this collective action, the embryonic values an individual holds will find
articulation and nuance through discussions (and arguments) with other members
of the collective and interaction with the goals of the group.
Finally, there is the political level. The affirmation of
values will almost invariably require some degree of contestation. As De
Beauvoir notes:
To will that there be being is also to will that there be
men by and for whom the world is endowed with human signification. One can
reveal the world only on a basis revealed by other men. No project can be
defined except by its interference with other projects
This is especially true in the context of values that are
accepted as subjective. The authority of such values is the individual over
themselves and the degree to which the reasons that underpin the values are
compelling to others. Affirming your values means seeing them realised in the
world. This will typically involve bringing others around to your point of
view. In the past, such value contests were largely matters of raw power and
physical force. Dogmatic belief was helpful in justifying such confrontations,
but equally, such confrontations are inevitable when you can’t convince someone
of your point of view due to your paucity of reasonable arguments. Even
Kierkegaard, after all, accepts that monotheism is ‘faith in the absurd’. The
advances of reason in recent centuries and the development of institutions to channel
it means that in modern liberal democracies there is a much greater role for
rationally convincing others of your view than there has ever been in the past.
Doctrines like the coalescence of being that are grounded in fallibilism and
the subjectivity of values can flourish in such times. Moreover, they reinforce
the value of the institutions that underpin these societies and that make the
coalescence of being possible. We have moved from one self-reinforcing cycle to
another.
The contestation of values and the collective action this
involves is of critical importance to the coalescence of being through its role
in nuancing and affirming values. Without exposure to more eloquent and
sophisticated representations of our values we cannot articulate them, and it
is often difficult to affirm them without help from others. This is the role of
relatedness in the coalescence of being and self-determination. Existential theory suggests that people
decide who they want to relate in part because of the values those people
possess. Others here are a source of sophistication for one’s own values and an
asset in the collective action required to affirm many values. We internalise
the values of these others because they align with existing but less refined
values that we already hold. These less refined values are why we approached
the others in the first place. Likewise, we avoid some people precisely because
we define our identities in opposition to their values.
All this fits quite nicely with existing empirical evidence
from SDT, which suggest that autonomy and collectivism are not incompatible. Many
Western ideas of well-being and happiness, particular those that are founded on
notions of individuation, are roundly criticised for employed an
individual-specific framework. It is argued that these paradigms do not fit
humans in other societies, notably the collectivist cultures of Asia. There is
an abundance of evidence that individuals in these cultures case substantially
for the good of the group over and above their own individual well-being (Rego
and Cunha 2007).
Existentialism has little to say on this matter. SDT’s retort
is that autonomy and relatedness can go together:
To be autonomous does not mean to be detached from or
independent of others…autonomy involves being volitional, acting from one’s
integrated sense of self, and endorsing one’s actions. It does not entail being
separate from, not relying upon, or being independent of others
The basic idea is that someone can value the collective,
but that for well-being to result they must do so autonomously (or
‘authentically’ in philosophical language). Self-determination will only occur
where actions are intrinsically motivated, and this requires autonomy. If the
individual is ‘controlled’ by the group then autonomy is circumscribed, but
where the individual internalises the values of the group there is no conflict
between their individuation and collective values. The psychological processes
are individual, the values are not. There is nothing about collectivism that
affects psychic processes, only values.
Two empirical studies underline these points. Iyengar and
Lepper (1999) studied the aspirations, motivations and achievements of American
and Japanese university students. They found that in both groups, having goals imposed by others led to the lowest
levels of intrinsic motivation and well-being. Among the American students,
decisions made personally resulted in the highest levels of intrinsic
motivation, while those made because of trusted insiders ranked second. Among
the Japanese, these positions were reversed. The key thing then is not
collectivism or individualism, but whether the individual is controlled or
self-determined. People can feel more autonomous when endorsing and enacting
the values of people with whom they identify but they will only achieve
autonomy if it is they who choose the values. If they are forced to follow
collective values under duress or manipulation then ill-being will eventuate.
This analysis is supported by the findings of Devine et al.
Their study tracks households throughout Bangladesh. Both qualitative and
quantitative survey techniques reveal that even in this highly collectivist
society, and even amongst members who are discourage or limited in their
autonomy, such as women, issues of autonomy remain salient. Individual
expressed the desire to be consulted, to be financially independent, to have
outside options thanks to a good education and simply ‘to be free’. Importantly
though, many people expressed their autonomy in terms of their relationships,
not just with family members, but also with kin networks more broadly, and within
community-based and development organisations. This is in line with the
theoretical postulate that values might be collective but the processes
underlying psychological well-being depend on autonomy and intrinsic
motivation.
Another aspect of this study that is worth elaborating on
is its coverage of the development of the Shammo organisation. This was a
community body instigated by development and other aid workers to organise
collective action by locals against an oppressive system of land ownership that
locked them into client-patron relationships with local landlords. Prior to the
organisation emerging as a vehicle for collective action the villagers barely
expressed a value for a more just distribution of local resources. Over time
however, Shammo provided a source of sophisticated values that the locals
internalised and eventually came to identify with. The organisation also served
as an increasingly powerful platform for collective political action and
allowed the villagers to contest their values against those of the local
land-owners. They were ultimately successful in this endeavour. Shammo is
obviously a story of power and institutions, but in the background is a neat
narrative that captures the earlier analysis of the role of the collective,
relatedness and internalisation in helping people define and affirm their
values to achieve well-being.
Religion
and spirituality
In large cross sectional studies of the determinants of
happiness the religious are consistently found to be happier on average than
those who report having no religion. Two principle reasons have been provided
for this. The first is that organised religion provides community and
relational support, thereby satisfying the innate need for relatedness (Diener
et al 2011). The second is that religion satisfies spiritual strivings. Here
spirituality is defined as the search for meaning (or purpose) in life. Emmons
defines religion as ‘the (more or less) organised search for the spiritual
associated with a covenant of faith community with narratives that enhance the
search for the sacred’ (Emmons 1999 pg. 5). Furthermore, religion addresses
what Tillich calls ‘ultimate concerns’ (1951). He describes these as follows:
‘Man is ultimately concerned about his being and meaning.
“To be or not to be”, in this sense is a matter of ultimate, unconditional
total and infinite concern. Man is infinitely concerned about the infinity to
which he belongs, from which he is separated, and for which he is longing…man
is ultimately concerned about that which determines his ultimate destiny beyond
all preliminary necessities and accidents.’ (Systematic Theology I, pg. 14)
We are here back at the basic issue in atheist ethics,
namely that in the absence of a God and/or cosmic order values seem to lose all
seriousness. Ultimate concerns are about finding the transcendental values
written into the firmament, the meaning of the cosmos and doing what is
objectively ‘good’. Other kinds of spirituality, such as the quest after one’s
own personal meaning as articulated by Nietzsche, lack this grand schema. To
summarise, people want spirituality and religion provides a transcendental
spiritual (in the sense that it transcends the individual).
It is worth elaborating on how religion achieves this for a
moment, and for this we turn to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is perhaps one of the
most arcane writers in the history of philosophy, which is no small
achievement. For example, the following is his preliminary articulation of the
problem of and solution to despair:
Such a derived, established relation is the human self, a
relation which relates to itself, and in relating itself relates to something
else. That is why there can be two forms of authentic despair. If the human
self were self-established, there would only be a question of one form: not
wanting to be itself, wanting to be rid of itself. There could be no question
of wanting in despair to be oneself. For this latter formula is the expression
of the relation’s (the self’s) total
dependence, the expression of the fact that the self cannot by itself arrive at
or remain in equilibrium and rest, but only, in relating to itself, by relating
to that which has established the whole relation. (The Sickness unto Death, pg.
7)
Because of this manner, an exposition of Kierkegaard’s work
replete with textual references is outside the scope of this paper. What
Kierkegaard is tortuously analysing here is the dialectical process of the self
we discussed earlier, namely that the coalescence of being involves harmonies
various aspects of the self, in particular the actual, ideal and ought self. In
Kierkegaard’s work, especially The
Sickness Unto Death and Fear and
Trembling, he argues that this can only be achieved in a strong way by
faith. The reason for this is what we discussed earlier—that without objective
values ethics, meanings and purposes lack seriousness:
It recognises no power over itself; therefore in the final
instance it lacks seriousness and can only conjure forth an appearance of
seriousness, even when it bestows upon its experiments its greatest possible
attention
…
‘No derived self, by taking notice of itself, can make
itself more than it already is; it remains itself from first to last, in its
self-duplication it still becomes neither more nor less than the self.’
…
‘In the whole dialectic in which it acts there is nothing
firm, at no moment does what the self amounts to stand firm, that is eternally
firm. The negative form of the self exerts the loosening as much as the binding
power; it can, at any moment, start quite arbitrarily all over again and,
however far an idea is pursued in practice, the entire action is contained with
a hypothesis.’
…
‘The self is its own master, absolutely (as one says) its
own master; and exactly this is the despair, but also what it regards as its
pleasure and joy. But it is easy on closer examination to see that this
absolute ruler is a king without a country, that really he rules over nothing;
his position, his kingdom, his sovereignty, are subject to the dialectic that
rebellion is legitimate at any moment.’
…
‘Just when it seems on the point of having the building
finished, at a whim it can dissolve the whole thing into nothing.’
The sickness unto death pp. 83-85
Not only can the
individual seemingly chop and change their values and thus their ‘self’
flippantly but their actions also amount to nothing more than futile entropy:
they will crumble to dust in the end. In the work of the existentialists a half
century later these matters are at least partially resolved, but Kierkegaard
sees no solution in atheism, and instead emphasises the faith-based approach.
This approach operates by assuming that there are objective
values and then maintaining faith in this assumption. Once the external
standard is erected the individual simple bludgeon’s their will into submission
with this standard. All individual action is guided by the tenets of the
external standard and all autonomy is autonomously given over to its direction.
The individual is freed from the dialectical psychological processes that mean
that can never be because they essentially take on the identity of the external
standard, which is absolute, infinite and timeless.
Kierkegaard describes this as ‘faith in the absurd’ because
objective values require an omnipotent God to ensure that the just will
prosper, and such a God can never be empirically verified:
God in heaven, I thank you for not requiring a person to
comprehend Christianity, for if it were required, then I would be of all men
the most miserable. The more I seek to comprehend it, the more I discover
merely the possibility of offence. Therefore, I thank you for requiring only
faith and I pray you will continue to increase it. (Sickness unto Death pg.
162)
Kierkegaard is consequently at pains to emphasise that
attempts to rationally establish religious belief are pointless if not actually
counterproductive:
Would it not be best all the same to stop with faith, and
is it not disturbing that everyone wants to go further? When people nowadays—as
is in fact variously announced—will not stop with love, where is it they are
going? To worldly wisdom, to petty calculation, to paltriness and misery, to
all that can put man’s divine origin in doubt? Would it not be better to remain
standing at faith, and for the one who stands there to take care not to fall?
For the movement of faith must be made continuously on the strength of the
absurd, though in such a way, be it noted, that one does not lose finitude but
gains it all of a piece. (Fear and Trembling pg. 40–41)
In Kierkegaard we thus find an articulation of how religion
achieves a spirituality of ultimate concerns rather than a mere spirituality.
The work of the existentialists provides the mechanisms by which subjective
ethics can be rendered serious, but the individual nonetheless remains
responsible for themselves. Religion goes further than this by giving the individual
a transcendental place in the meaning of the universe. A lot of people need
that, which is partially why atheism remains somewhat moribund despite the
enormous strides of science in recent centuries (Emmons 1999).
In the existentialist or SDT framework, religious values
are simply a distinct cluster of values that are affirmed by individuals in
their lives. Their authority lies in the individual, and to believe otherwise,
to believe, for example, that their authority actually lies with God or the cosmos,
is simply bad faith. Man cannot avoid choosing, regardless of whether he
chooses himself or the divine.
Returning to the regression analysis, some of the
philosophy outlined above is supported by the data. Numerous studies have
identified that going through the motions of religion, especially when such
behaviour is extrinsically motivated, is not enough for attaining the positive
outcomes associated with it (Swinyard et al 2000). Church attendance, for
example, does not necessarily predict positive well-being outcomes in an
individual. Rather, it is predominantly those people who genuinely have (deep) faith
who experience happiness from their religious activities (Ferriss 2002).
Preferences
This above discussion of religion and faith leads neatly into
the final major consideration of this paper, which is the role of preferences
in determining happiness. The example of the effects of religion on the
faithful and extrinsically motivated, positive and negative respectively,
indicates that whether an activity, goal or state of being provides someone
satisfaction depends fundamentally on whether they have a preference for it, or
in other words, whether they value it authentically. Existentialism argues that
the coalescence of being, and thereby happiness, comes from determining one’s
authentic preferences and then affirming them in life. SDT argues that
psychological well-being is a matter of engaging in intrinsically motivated
activities that satisfy intrinsic aspirations and the fundamental need for autonomy.
Both of these frameworks emphasise that happiness comes from living in
accordance with oneself. Now of course everyone is quite different. That means
that coinciding with yourself is going to be a matter of different things to
each person. Bowling and Windsor demonstrated this in an empirical study in
2000. They found that self-rated achievement in self-nominated areas of
importance explained twice as much of the variation in quality of life scores
among respondents that objective indicators like health and socio-demographic
variables.
What this means in practical terms if that we should keep
preferences front and centre when designing or estimating happiness models. A
model of happiness that ignores preferences and simply takes the average effect
across a very large population is liable to obfuscate the underlying
psychological mechanisms that lead to happiness. If the state were to take the
inferences drawn from these studies seriously it might find itself coercively
forcing everyone to have families, which would be very unpleasant for people
who just want to succeed in their careers and for whom a family is a liability.
Any model of happiness must include some means of accounting for preferences.
One difficulty here is that research cited earlier suggests
that some preferences are basically dumb or ‘bad’ preferences, notably those
that are fundamentally extrinsic, like fame and wealth (see especially Kasser
2002).
It is worth noting the differences between what is
discussed here and neoclassical microeconomics. In that body of work, the
individual’s preferences are taken as exogenous and given. These preferences
are inferred from the individual’s behaviour under the assumption that people
act to maximise their preferences. The possibility of dumb or incorrect
preferences is excluded because economics is interested in decision making.
Whether the preferences of an individual are healthy and whether acting on them
will actually bring utility is irrelevant for a decision theory, because only the expected utility counts. In happiness studies however, experienced
utility is what is under investigation, and here dumb preferences must be
countenanced. From research into materialistic preferences, for example, it
seems clear that at least some people hold preferences that are unsuitable to
them and the realisation of which does not bring them well-being. There is also
a great deal of uncertainty around how much happiness someone will gain from
realising their preferences. People frequently make decisions around such
things as career choices and migration with only suspicions about the
implications for their happiness.
Summary
Good scientific method requires that we develop refined
theories with good internal consistency and subject those theories to precise
tests. In happiness studies we have strayed somewhat from this premise. We have
allowed conceptual confusion to undermine the refinement of our theory, which
has made it unclear what exactly we are testing. We have also tended to take
the stories told by data at face value, even though these results are often
counter-intuitive and other interpretations that are not counter-intuitive but
perhaps less obvious are available. One step we can take towards rectifying
this drift in our methodological integrity is to integrate what we know or at
least think we know about happiness and develop a refined theory that we think
is logically correct, agrees with our intuitions and is not invalidated by the
data. The present paper has attempted to construct a preliminary specification
of this model.
Happiness, by which is meant experienced welfare as opposed
to expected welfare, is a function of subjective well-being and psychological
well-being. Subjective well-being refers to hedonia while psychological
well-being is more oriented towards eudemonia. SWB covers one’s emotional or
affective happiness and longer term hedonistic evaluations of life
satisfaction, such as the pleasantness of life. PWB is concerned with long
term, narrative, existential evaluations of life. Its key components are
purpose (the clinical term for spirituality), self-assessment, personal growth,
environmental mastery (or competence), relatedness and autonomy. As SWB mostly
covers off short term moods while PWB is concerned with long term evaluations,
it is hypothesised that a graph of happiness will look like figure 2 while a
graph of just SWB will look very similar to figure 1.
Individuals attempt to maximise this happiness function
subject to the constraint imposed by their agency. Agency concerns an
individual’s capabilities and covers income, health, education, political power
and social status. It is essentially comprised of the objective indicators of
happiness traditional utilised in development economics. It could also include
things like willpower and personality type, but in modelling these would be
covered by fixed effects on a per-person basis. The individual has some control
over these factors, but they are also substantially determined by external
factors, notably the state apparatus and cultural norms.
The processes by which individual’s maximise their
happiness remain ambiguous, but we have some knowledge of them. On the
subjective well-being front, individual approach positive affect and avoid
negative affect. They can practice savouring and gratitude to prevent
adaptation to positive affect and practice renunciation and distraction to
avoid dwelling on the causes of negative affect and thus adapt to it faster.
For psychological well-being the individual must ‘know themselves’ and then
‘become who they are’. Self-knowledge will make it easier to define intrinsic
aspirations and identify intrinsically motivated behaviours which will in turn
satisfy needs for autonomy, competence, personal growth, purpose and
self-assessment. It will also make it easier to internalise values that are
compatible with an individual’s actual self, which will speed the process of
the coalescence of being. This process will ensure the seriousness of values,
which will meet spiritual needs.
There are many obvious areas where future research would be
valuable. Two that are singled out here are the following. First, it seems urgent
to investigate the extent to which conventional happiness scales impede the
ability of respondents to communicate changes in their happiness. There are two
main issues here. First, to what degree do respondents provide answered based
on SWB and PWB when replying to these questions. And second, to what extent to
their scales change over time. If there is no rescaling, which seems
intuitively unlikely, then these scales are powerful and quite straightforward
empirical instruments. If rescaling is common and strong, then the validity and
usefulness of these scales is substantially circumscribed. The second urgent
research project is to identity whether the conceptual differentiations made in
this paper between SWB and PWB and more finely between short term emotional
states and various longer term evaluations correspond to respondent’s own
thinking about their lives and to what extent this affects our ability to
measure happiness accurately. If the long term goal of happiness studies is to
have public policy take happiness maximisation seriously as a criterion for
development, then resolving these conceptual and empirical issues will be
critically important.
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