States in bad shape = religiosity

A recent Gallup poll has shown an impressive positive correlation between how religious the inhabitants are and how bad they are of. In other words, this means that if you have a nation that is in a poor state, then your people are likely to turn to religion for guidance, or meaning or whatever you would like to call it. There is of course another possibility namely that first a people become religious, and then the state starts to tear apart. I personally don't believe in the latter possibility, rather, as I have argued here, I think that religion is where people who have lost meaning try to find their answers.

This gallup poll should also be seen as an important piece of information in the debate on whether religion makes people happier. There are indeed a few studies that have looked at this, and they tend to show that people who have religion, everything else being equal, are happier than people who are not religous. 

This gallup poll shows, however, that on a global scale, religious people are not happier than non-religious people (assuming that the average citizen in Bangladesh or Congo kinshasa are not as happy as the average American or Swede). 

Positive psychology and the hedonic treadmill

How happy are you on a scale from 1-10, with 5 being the average individual? If you are like most people you think that you are happier than most people (7-8 is the average answer you get). But what factors affect your life satisfaction?

This post has been inspired by yet another fantastic professor that everyone with an internet connection can (and should), listen to. His name is Paul Bloom and his course in introductory psychology can be found at Yale's open courses site. In the last lecture of this series Bloom discusses "The Good life: Happiness". The first 15min or so is about therapy and whether it really works, an interesting topic on its own, however, it is with happiness that I will be concerned here.

A few years ago (summer 2004) I went to summer school in Cambridge UK. I attended a wealth of different lectures on everything from astronomy and climate change to genetics and ladybird sexuality. One of the most memorable lectures was one held by Nick Baylis which was on the just born branch of psychology called "positive psychology". The general outline of the lecture was something like the following. Since psychology was born in the 19^th century it has merely been focused on the sick and abnormal. How do we deal with crazy and depressed individuals? Now does that seem a bit skewed to you? Should we also not study happy people and see how they differ. What makes them happy? Or is happiness simply not being abnormal or insane (not to far from the truth perhaps…)? What Nick said was basically that we should investigate happy people to see if there are any lessons to be drawn from them, and that I think seems to make an awful lot of sense.

Since this lecture which positive psychology has become a very hyped subject and vast sums of money are being pumped into this field of research with highly variable gains. Some experiments which I will share here are however, highly interesting and also hilarious. In what is perhaps my favorite experiment, random people at work were asked to go to the photocopier and make some copies of whatever. For half of the participants a dime had been planted on the photocopier, as if someone had forgotten it. Now we all know what a great feeling it is to find money on the street but I think that what happens next will surprise you. After having done the photocopies the participants were approached and asked something like the following: "how happy would you say you are with your whole life". What happens? The group that found the dime on the photocopier reported significantly better life satisfaction!!! Conclusion: when we estimate how happy we are we are extremely susceptible to factors in out immediate environment. In a similar experiment participants were asked when the weather was sunny or rainy, and like in the previous experiment, bad weather caused people to say that they were just not particularly happy with their entire life!!!

In fact, the picture that has emerged from research in positive psychology is that our life satisfaction goes up and down. We have some sort of average happiness which we basically stick to, whatever happens, throughout or lives. The nice thing about this is that whatever happens in your life you are not likely to become less satisfied with your life. Even people who have been paralyzed neck down tend to recover, after about a year, in terms of overall life satisfaction.

The more depressing conclusion from this research is that there is nothing you can do to increase your overall life satisfaction. This is where the term "hedonic treadmill" comes from. You can fulfill all your dreams and fantasies, jump from an airplane, win the nobel prize, become a karate champion, become a Mormon and have sex with ten partners simultaneously, buy your dream house, visit exotic places, etc, etc. Whatever you do, your life satisfaction will stay the same. Of course all of the above may give you temporary happiness and some people suggest that this is how to proceed in life, always do new things that make you happy and don't stick to one because the happiness will disappear. The fact of the matter is that we are able to adapt to even the most luxurious lifestyle.

So is there really nothing that will make you happier? There is actually one interesting exception that I want to end with. Individuals who have undergone plastic surgery report that they have greater life satisfaction after the surgery, and amazingly the gain remains. In other words plastic surgeons have done what no-one else in history have ever managed to do, make people happier (I don't know if this statistical conclusion is true for the woman in the picture who want's to become a cat)…

The God Delusion, Chapter 10 – A much needed gap?

Is a belief in God beneficial? Do we need God in our lives? Richard Dawkins discusses this issue in chapter 10 of the God Delusion. The first point he makes is that, whether or not a belief in God is beneficial in terms of psychological health or whatever, says nothing about the existence of God. There are studies indicating that religious people, on average are happier and healthier than atheists. The difference was not big but it was significant. However, it would be very erroneous to conclude that just because religion is correlated with happiness, God must exist… Dawkins writes:

"Religion's power to console doesn't make it true. Even if we make a huge concession; even if it were conclusively demonstrated that belief in God's existence is completely essential to human psychological and emotional well-being; even if all atheists were despairing neurotics driven to suicide by relentless cosmic angst - none of this would contribute the tiniest jot or tittle of evidence that religious belief is true. It might be evidence in favour of the desirability of convincing yourself that God exists, even if he doesn't."

Personally I do think that the world would be a better place if people would have an evidence based world view. Politicians today often get stuck when religious arguments are brought to the table. Should Jerusalem be in the possession of the Israeli, or the Palestinian's? How do you argue with Bush when he claims that the Iraq invasion was a mission given to him by God? There is just not so much you can say in response to such an argument. To be fair, this was not his primary argument for going to war, but my point stands nevertheless.

I do not believe in God, yet I consider myself happy and I enjoy my life. When I face misfortunes I do not pray to God to help me, rather I try to come up with a concrete and effective solution to whatever it is I am facing. I realize of course that I have been born in a wealthy part of the world and that my miseries are nothing compared to the miseries that the average human being must face, yet even for them I think that it would be better not to rely on God to console and fix things. An additional bonus that you get as an atheist, at least to the extent that atheists do not believe in reincarnation, is that you value your time here on earth more. I do not believe that I will be reborn when I die, therefore I want to make the best of the time that I have here on this planet. For this reason I am also unlikely to end up as a suicide bomber. Only a very religious person would sacrifice something as valuable as his or her own life in order to kill other innocent people.

In short, there are plenty of reasons to be grateful for our time here on earth. One does not need God to have some substance in life. My life is filled with substance, and I think that for most people, even for religious people, the principal sources of happiness lie outside of the realm of religion. I end with these words from the God Delusion which illustrates my point well.

"But could it be that God clutters up a gap that we'd be better off filling with something else? Science, perhaps? Art? Human friendship? Humanism? Love of this life in the real world, giving no credence to other lives beyond the grave? A love of nature, or what the great entomologist E. O. Wilson has called Biophilia"

The evolution of happiness

Our genes, containing the recipe for making us, do not care about our feeling. All they care about is replicating themselves. Whether their host is the most depressed anxious, suicidal person out there doesn't matter to the genes as long as they get into the next generation, preferably in great numbers. In a sense we are merely the means to obtaining a goal: replication of our genes.

So why do we have emotions? Why are we not just insensitive robots that do not break down because of something silly such as your dog dying, or too much stress at work? The reason is of course that emotions are adaptive in many important ways, and people who lack emotions evidently do not succeed very well in our society. Fear makes us avoid many dangers; pleasure makes us come back to the things that induced it. Guilt and shames tells us we have not been fair and that we should try to fix it, and so on. In other words, we are not born to be happy. Of course we are not born to be sad either; rather we are born with a spectrum of emotions, all of which are probably important in some ways.

What I want to argue here is that, by learning more about evolution, our ancestry, and which situations are likely to produce different emotions we will be able to form our lives as well as our society in such a way that happiness occurs more often, and sadness not so often. David Buss (see picture) from the University of Texas, have written an interesting article on this topic in which he lists the lessons that research in evolutionary psychology have taught us. For example, Buss argues that our anonymous metropolis society is bound to cause distress and anxiety due to a lack of belonging. You can easily live your entire adult life without really getting to know someone today. Our genes, because they are used to a society containing no more than a hundred or so individuals (read about ancestral environment), may feel distressed in the big cities today. Buss advices us to try to get closer to our extended kin, and to make use of today's technology in order to keep in touch with family as well as friends.

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two evolutionary theorists from University of California, Santa Barbara (where I used to go to school), have done some interesting research about the meaning of deep friendships. David Buss writes about this research in his article as well. Without going into any details, it can be said that deep friendships are good for all kinds of reasons (e.g. live longer, less stress, happier etc). Talking about your problems is simply good for you (there is no ambiguity in the research on this point), so go get good friends!

Other examples of advice that Buss gives us in his article include, (1) Educating people about evolved psychological sex differences (I believe that sex differences, without proper understanding, can destroy any relationship), (2) Managing our competitive mechanisms, and (3) Fulfilling your desires and dreams (go do that thing that you have always dreamt about!).

Another thing that makes us happy is democracy. If you ask people whether they are "happy" and "satisfied with life as a whole", and then correlate that with the degree of freedom in the country, you will find a very nice positive correlation (see diagram). In other words, countries with democracy, free elections, and elective rule have happier citizens, than dictatorships. So here is a lesson for the society as a whole, don't vote for dictators, and keep fighting for freedom of speech…

Some people say that a belief in evolution by natural selection will corrupt a person into immorality. In contrast, I think that evolution is one of the keys to create a society in which people are happy, or as my former teacher put it:

"Go save the world, but do it using what you know about human nature"