The Happiness Hypothesis by Haidt Jonathan

Author:Haidt, Jonathan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-44816-668-8
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2015-06-18T04:00:00+00:00

MUST WE SUFFER?

The adversity hypothesis has a weak and a strong version. In the weak version, adversity can lead to growth, strength, joy, and self-improvement, by the three mechanisms of posttraumatic growth described above. The weak version is well-supported by research, but it has few clear implications for how we should live our lives. The strong version of the hypothesis is more unsettling: It states that people must endure adversity to grow, and that the highest levels of growth and development are only open to those who have faced and overcome great adversity. If the strong version of the hypothesis is valid, it has profound implications for how we should live our lives and structure our societies. It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats. It means that we might be dangerously overprotecting our children, offering them lives of bland safety and too much counseling while depriving them of the “critical incidents”12 that would help them to grow strong and to develop the most intense friendships. It means that heroic societies, which fear dishonor more than death, or societies that struggle together through war, might produce better human beings than can a world of peace and prosperity in which people’s expectations rise so high that they sue each other for “emotional damages.”

But is the strong version valid? People often say that they have been profoundly changed by adversity, yet researchers have so far collected little evidence of adversity-induced personality change beyond such reports. People’s scores on personality tests are fairly stable over the course of a few years, even for people who report that they have changed a great deal in the interim.13 In one of the few studies that tried to verify reports of growth by asking the subjects’ friends about them, the friends noticed much less change than the subjects had reported.14

These studies might, however, have been looking for change in the wrong place. Psychologists often approach personality by measuring basic traits such as the “big five”: neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness (warmth/niceness), and conscientiousness.15 These traits are facts about the elephant, about a person’s automatic reactions to various situations. They are fairly similar between identical twins reared apart, indicating that they are influenced in part by genes, although they are also influenced by changes in the conditions of one’s life or the roles one plays, such as becoming a parent.16 But psychologist Dan McAdams has suggested that personality really has three levels,17 and too much attention has been paid to the lowest level, the basic traits. A second level of personality, “characteristic adaptations,” includes personal goals, defense and coping mechanisms, values, beliefs, and life-stage concerns (such as those of parenthood or retirement) that people develop to succeed in their particular roles and niches. These adaptations are influenced by basic traits: A person high on neuroticism will have many more defense mechanisms; an extrovert will rely more heavily on social relationships. But in this middle level, the person’s basic traits are made to mesh with facts about the person’s environment and stage of life.

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