50 Psychology Classics (52 page)

If you are a maximizer,
The Paradox of Choice
could be a life-changing book. If you have put yourself into agonies over “if only,” it could make you see that how satisfied you are with life depends not on the actual quality of
your experiences, but whether or not you perceive a gap between how things are and how they might be.

Schwartz includes a couple of seven-question surveys so you can determine whether you are a maximizer or a satisficer. He admits that he is a satisficer, and it shows in his writing.
The Paradox of Choice
is clearly not the result of years of toil to get every line and phrase just right so that it would be the “best possible book” about choice and decision making—yet it succeeds because Schwartz has spent decades thinking about these issues and the impact they can have on our happiness.

Schwartz received a BA from New York University in 1968, and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. In line with his own theory about limiting the number of choices in life, Schwartz has taught and researched at the one university for the last 35 years. In 1971 he became an Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, and is currently its psychology department's Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action. He also married young and has stayed married
.

Schwartz has published many journal articles in the fields of learning, motivation, values, and decision making. Other books include
The Battle For Human Nature: Science, Morality and Modern Life
(1986),
The Cost of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life
(2001), and
Psychology of Learning and Memory
(5th edn, 2001), with E. Wasserman and S. Robbins
.

“This was an epiphany for me. In terms of my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch. I had spent fifty years enduring mostly wet weather in my soul, and the last ten years as a walking nimbus cloud in a household radiant with sunshine. Any good fortune I had was probably not due to being grumpy, but in spite of it. In that moment, I resolved to change.”

“[Very] happy people differ markedly from both average and unhappy people in that they all lead a rich and fulfilling social life. The very happy people spend the least time alone and the most time socializing, and they are rated highest on good relationships by themselves and also by their friends.”

In a nutshell

Happiness has little to do with pleasure, and much to do with developing personal strengths and character.

In a similar vein
David D. Burns
Feeling Good
(p 58)
Mihaly Csiksentmihalyi
Creativity
(p 68)
Daniel Gilbert
Stumbling on Happiness
(p 120)
Daniel Goleman
Working with Emotional Intelligence
(p 130)
Barry Schwartz
The Paradox of Choice
(p 248)

For every 100 scientific journal articles on sadness, there is only one for happiness. The science of psychology has always been about what is wrong with people, Martin Seligman notes, and in the last 50 years it has become pretty successful at diagnosing and treating mental illness. But this focus has meant that much less attention has been given to finding out what makes people happy or fulfilled.

For the first 30 years of his working life, Seligman himself worked in the field of abnormal psychology, but his work on feelings of helplessness and pessimism led him to research optimism and positive emotion, and how their presence could be increased in our life. This work caused him to rethink the larger purpose of psychology, and he is now known as the founder of the “positive psychology” movement. While his 1991 book
Learned Optimism
is an acknowledged classic,
Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment
has also had a significant impact as a sort of manifesto for positive psychology, and has much to teach us about leading a good and meaningful life.

Collating hundreds of research findings, Seligman makes the following points about some of the factors conventionally thought to bring happiness.

Purchasing power in the last 50 years has more than doubled in rich nations like the United States, Japan, and France, but overall life satisfaction has not changed at all. Very poor people have a lower level of happiness, but once a certain basic income and purchasing power has been reached (“barely comfortable”), beyond this point there are no increases in happiness on a par with extra wealth. Seligman notes: “How important money is to you, more than money itself, influences your happiness.” Materialistic people are not happy.

In a huge survey looking at 35,000 Americans over the last 30 years, the National Opinion Research Center found that 40 percent of married people said that they were “very happy.” Only 24 percent of divorced, separated, and widowed people were “very happy.” This statistic has been borne out in other surveys. Marriage seems to increase happiness levels independent of income or
age, and that is true for both men and women. In one of Seligman's own studies, he found that nearly all very happy people are in a romantic relationship.

Nearly all those who consider themselves very happy lead a “rich and fulfilling social life.” They spend the least time alone among their peers. People who spend a lot of time alone generally report a much lower level of happiness.

Women experience twice as much depression as men, and tend to have more negative emotions. However, they also experience many more positive emotions than men. That is, women are both sadder and happier than men.

Religious people are consistently shown to be happier and more satisfied with life than the nonreligious, have lower rates of depression, and are more resilient to setbacks and tragedy. One study found that the more fundamentalist the adherents of a religion are, the more optimistic they are. Orthodox Jews are more hopeful for the future, for instance, than Reform Jews. The sermons in Evangelical Christian churches are rosier than those heard in regular Protestant congregations. This strong “hope for the future,” as Seligman terms it, makes people feel really good about themselves and the world.

Illness does not affect life satisfaction or happiness nearly as much as we would think. Good health on its own is taken for granted, and only severe or multiple illnesses actually lower people's normal level of positive feeling.

Climate has no effect on happiness levels. Seligman remarks: “People suffering through a Nebraska winter believe people in California are happier, but they are wrong; we adapt to good weather completely and very quickly.”

Finally, intelligence and a high education level have no appreciable effect on happiness. Neither does race, although some groups, such as black Americans and Hispanics, record lower levels of depression.

All the above factors have traditionally been seen as the chief factors causing happiness, but the research indicates that together they account for only 8–15 percent of your happiness. Considering that the factors relate to very basic things about who you are and your circumstances in life, this is not a high
figure. As Seligman suggests, it is great news for people who believe that their circumstances preclude them from being happy.

Instead of the above factors, Seligman's view is that genuine happiness and life satisfaction arise through the slow development of something you may last have heard your grandparents speak of: “character.” Character is made up of universal virtues that are found across every culture and in the literature of every age. It includes wisdom and knowledge, courage, love and humanity, justice, temperance, and spirituality, among other things. We achieve these virtues by cultivating and nurturing personal strengths, such as originality, valor, integrity, loyalty, kindness, and fairness.

The idea of character has long fallen out of favor because it is thought to be old-fashioned and unscientific. But Seligman says that character traits or personal strengths are both measurable and acquirable, which makes them suitable for psychological study.

There is a difference between talents, which we are born with and which we are therefore automatically good at, and strengths, which we
choose
to develop. We are more inspired, Seligman notes, by someone who overcomes a great obstacle to achieve something than by someone who does so because of simple natural ability. If will and determination are applied to our talent, we have pride in our accomplishments in the same way that we feel proud if we are complimented on our honesty. Talents alone say something about our genes, but virtues and developed talents (making the most of personal strengths) say something about
us
.

Through the refinement of our “signature strengths” (Seligman provides a questionnaire to identify them) we gain satisfaction in life, and happiness that is genuine. It is a mistake to spend our life trying to correct our weaknesses, Seligman says. Rather, the most success in life and real gratification—authentic happiness—come from developing your strengths.

For most of the history of psychology, the answer to the above question has been a resounding “yes,” from Freud to the “inner child” self-help movement. But the actual research findings point another way. For example, someone under the age of 11 whose mother dies has a slightly higher risk of depression later in life, but the risk is only slight, only if they are female, and even then it shows up in only about half the studies. And parental divorce has only a marginally disruptive effect on late childhood and adolescence, and this wanes in later life.

Adult depression, anxiety, addictions, bad marriage, anger—none of these can be blamed on what happened to us as a child. Seligman's message is a strong one: We are wasting our life if we think our childhood has delivered
present misery or if it has made us passive about the future. What matters is the development of personal strengths that do not depend on the quality of our childhood or current circumstances.

To some extent, the answer is no. A lot of research suggests that people have set ranges of happiness or unhappiness that are genetically inherited, just like people tend to revert, despite dieting, to a certain body weight. It has been shown that even after a big lottery win, a year later the winner will return to the level of sadness or happiness that was their natural lot before the windfall. Seligman is blunt in his assertion that our level of happiness cannot be lastingly increased, however what
is
possible is to live in the upper reaches of our natural range.

The idea of “emotional hydraulics” says we need to ventilate negative emotions, otherwise their repression will cause mental problems. In the West people think that it is healthy to express anger, and unhealthy to bottle it up. But Seligman writes that the reverse is correct. When we dwell on something that has been done to us and how we are going to express it, the feeling gets even worse. Studies of “Type A” (intense, driven) people have shown that it is
expressing
hostility, rather than feeling it, that is the link to having a heart attack. Blood pressure actually goes down when people decide to bottle up their anger or express friendliness. The Eastern way of “Feel the anger, but don't express it” is a key to happiness.

In contrast, the more gratitude you experience for people or things in your life, the better you feel. Seligman's students had a “Gratitude Night” in which they invited someone along they wanted to thank for what they'd done for them, in front of everyone. The people involved were generally on a high for days or weeks afterwards.

Our brain is built so that we can't make ourselves forget things just because we want to. But what we can do is forgive, which “removes and even transforms the sting.” Not forgiving doesn't really punish the perpetrator, whereas forgiving can transform ourselves and bring back our life satisfaction.

We now live in a world offering endless shortcuts to happiness. We don't have to make much effort to get a positive feeling. But strangely, the easy availability of pleasures tends to leave a yawning hole in many people's lives because it demands zero growth of them as people. A life of pleasures makes us a spectator, not an engager with life. We master nothing and do not use our creativity.

A real life is one where we seek out and respond to constant challenges. Seligman believes that we need a psychology of “rising to the occasion,” or what he calls the “Harry Truman effect.” When Truman took over from Franklin Delano Roosevelt after FDR died in office, against everyone's expectations he turned out to be one of the great American presidents. The position revealed his character and allowed his long-honed personal strengths to be utilized.

Whether or not we are happy every moment is largely irrelevant. Like Truman, what matters is whether or not we choose to develop what is within us—happiness does not “come along” but involves choices.

One of the best features of
Authentic Happiness
are the tests you can take to determine your levels of optimism, your signature strengths, and so on. Some readers won't like the vignettes of Seligman's personal life that are dropped in throughout the book, such as how he won the presidency of the American Psychological Association, but these do spice the book up and are often amusing. Amazingly, Seligman admits to having spent the first 50 years of his life as a grumpy person, but the mountain of evidence about happiness pushed him into thinking that he should apply it to himself!