Abstract
Suppose you want to live a happy life. Who should you turn to for advice? We normally think that we know best about our own happiness. But recent work in psychology and neuroscience suggests that we are often mistaken about our own natures, and that sometimes scientists know us better than we know ourselves. Does this mean that to live a happy life we should ask scientists for advice rather than relying on our introspection? In what follows, we highlight ways in which the science of happiness could help us live happy lives, but we also argue that, in other ways, our navel gazing will remain indispensable.
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Notes
In what follows we draw on Dan Haybron’s discussion of the range of different views about happiness [2].
We are grateful to two reviewers for pressing us to support this claim, and to one of them for suggesting this way of supporting it.
For a longer list, visit https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html
Additionally, McConnell et al. counterbalanced the stimuli and reversed the label on the response buttons to avoid potential confounds. For a more complete, detailed articulation of the methods of this experiment, please see [1]:629–630.
The subjects used a slide-bar to make these ratings ranging from “very unhappy” (left) to “very happy” (right). These ratings were converted to ratings on a numerical scale (1–100) for further analysis. See ([7]:12,256–12,257) for a more detailed articulation of the methods in this experiment.
For more information on the Inflow application, please visit http://www.inflow.mobi/. Related applications include Expereal (http://expereal.com/) and My Mood Tracker (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mymoodtracker/id362285162?mt=8).
Whether users of Inflow or similar smartphone apps actually benefit by living happier lives is a separate question for which we have no answer. Our aim is only to demonstrate that scientific models are being repackaged as tools designed for use by the public with the purpose of helping people gain happiness-relevant insights about themselves.
Although we focus on affective dimensions and notions of happiness in this section, we say “contribute to happiness” to again signify that we remain neutral with respect to what notion(s) of happiness ought to be endorsed. Admittedly, though, we cannot help but think that having positive affect rather than negative affect will in general increase our happiness, either by contributing a valuable component to the objective list of items that make for a happy life, or by helping us to make decisions that will lead to a happier life.
This fascination with analyzing and modeling happiness has led to satirical treatment of the topic. The Onion published an article with the headline “Average Time Spent Being Happy Drops to 13 Seconds per Day.” The fictitious researchers in the article reported: “…the average American experiences a 0.8- s window of happiness upon awakening, before remembering that they are conscious beings in a relentlessly bleak and numbing world... Other periods of happiness include 1.9 s after a good meal; 0.6 s upon receiving a paycheck; 1.1 s following completion of a scientific study; and the 2.5 s approaching orgasm, just before the guilt sets in.” [11]
We use the language of “gradually gaining insight” to signify that there are limitations to what information can be gleaned from neuroimaging studies. In this paper, we focus on a very narrow discussion of the potential utility and limitations of neuroimaging data with respect to assisting us with living happy lives. For a broader discussion of the limitations of neuroimaging, see [14, 15].
“When it comes to my promoting happiness as an end that is also a duty, this must therefore be the happiness of other human beings, whose (permitted) end I thus make my own end as well. It is for them to decide what they count as belonging to their happiness; but it is open for me to refuse them many things that they think will make them happy but I do not, as long as they have no right to demand them from me as what is theirs” ([16]:519) (our emphasis).
“But neither one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it. He is the person most interested in his own well-being: the interest which any other person, except in cases of strong personal attachment, can have in it, is trifling, compared with that which he himself has; the interest which society has in him individually (except as to his conduct to others) is fractional, and altogether indirect: while, with respect to his own feelings and circumstances, the most ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else.” ([17]:Chapter 4) (our emphasis).
Methodologically, it is more common in fMRI studies to aggregate data obtained from many subjects, rather than to study only one subject intensively. Exceptions to this rule, like Russell Poldrack’s study of functional connectivity within one subject’s (his own) brain over many different tasks [19], voice similar views to our own about why it might be useful to conduct such intensive single-subject studies.
This is an ambitious estimate that assumes that the research subject will always be available to provide a response. It is plausible (and quite likely) that the subject will be engaged in other activities when prompted with the happiness question and will not be able to provide a response.
Here, white matter tracts refer to axons, which are the primary carriers or relayers of information in the nervous system. The cortical juncture that connects the two hemispheres is called the corpus callosum.
For instance, see this Daily Mail story in which a German girl’s right hemisphere failed to develop in the womb. Dr. Lars Muckli, lead researcher of a neuroimaging study on the girl’s brain, stated “The brain has amazing plasticity but we were quite astonished to see just how well the single hemisphere of the brain in this girl has adapted to compensate for the missing half... Despite lacking one hemisphere, the girl has normal psychological function and is perfectly capable of living a normal and fulfilling life. She is witty, charming and intelligent” [20].
For a discussion of multiple realizability and neuroscience research, see [21].
We would like to acknowledge that there is some room for freedom when we say that the scientist should “update her model accordingly.” In developing her model, the scientist could choose to exclude data points that are more than three standard deviations away from the mean. Although, given what we have said about mental states being multiply realizable, this opens the possibility that the scientist would end up excluding something important — perhaps a new way that happiness is realized in your brain.
For the thinking that underpins this metaphor, see Elizabeth Schier [23] who offers a conceptually and empirically rich explanation of why some knowledge may indeed only be amenable to being acquired via some sense apparati but not through others nor by reading scientific descriptions, and why this does not challenge materialism.
By ‘diffuse’, Haybron seems to be referring to psychological states or dispositions that lack intensity and are not tied to any particular object(s). He writes that strong emotions and intense pains “seem to be so hard to miss. Most obviously, they are intense. But more interestingly, they are relatively focused states, having a more or less specific object or (phenomenological) location... Such affects are thus comparatively easy to attend to... But if you are feeling uneasy in general, about nothing in particular, to what do you attend?” ([24]:398).
Haybron provides the example of a groom on his wedding day, who is supposed to feel like he is filled with joy but may actually feel otherwise (likely experiencing a rough-and-tumble of various emotions).
Haybron provides four additional lines of evidence supporting the view that we can be ignorant about present affect. For the sake of space and time, we cannot provide a detailed articulation of all his arguments here. See ([24]:397–408).
The underlying worry here – that they do not want to be duped into enjoying a cheap wine – is not unlike what Robert Nozick gets at with his “experience machine” thought experiment ([25]:42-45).
This is one way in which scientists might gain insight into what types of things “do it for Sally.” While this type of scientific intervention in the love department may seem farfetched, it turns out that scientists have been recruited to play the role of matchmaker. In NBC’s Science of Love (aired June 2007), scientists performed a barrage of experiments to find the perfect match for former NFL Football Player, Adam Johnson. For a preview of the episode, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcdx7Gxu7yw.
In this case, we might add that she might have good reason to be disgusted.
For a discussion of the complex relationship between facts and norms that hints at why we feel that this is a much larger topic than what can adequately be discussed here given the constraints of space, please see Nicole A Vincent’s discussion of how similar scientific considerations bear on a similar debate in the legal domain [26].
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Stephanie M. Hare & Nicole A Vincent contributed equally to this work.
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Hare, S.M., Vincent, N.A. Happiness, Cerebroscopes and Incorrigibility: Prospects for Neuroeudaimonia. Neuroethics 9, 69–84 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-016-9254-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-016-9254-y