Happiness & Public Policy

Randolph M. Nesse, “Natural Selection and the Elusiveness of Hapiness“, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 2004, p. 1333-1347. [pdf]

ABSTRACT. The quest for happiness has expanded from a focus on relieving suffering to also considering how to promote happiness. However, both approaches have yet to be conducted in an evolutionary framework based on the situations that shaped the capacities for happiness and sadness. Because of this, the emphasis has almost all been on the disadvantages of negative states and the benefits of positive states, to the nearly total neglect of ‘diagonal psychology’, which also considers the dangers of unwarranted positive states and the benefits of negative emotions in certain situations. The situations that arise in goal pursuit contain adaptive challenges that have shaped domain-general positive and negative emotions that were partially differentiated by natural selection to cope with the more specific situations that arise in the pursuit of different kinds of goals. In cultures where large social groups give rise to specialized and competitive social roles, depression may be common because regulation systems are pushed far beyond the bounds for which they were designed. Research on the evolutionary origins of the capacities for positive and negative emotions is urgently needed to provide a foundation for sensible decisions about the use of new mood-manipulating technologies.

This is the best paper I know of on happiness and evolution. I found Nesse more subtle and insightful than Buss in “The Evolution of Happiness” [pdf]. Both, I think, lay too much stress on environmental mismatch, and neither are sufficiently careful about what “happiness,” as opposed to positive affect and goal-conducive motivational states, really is. My mitigated connectionist/Hayekian tendencies lead me to worry less about mismatch, and lead me to worry more about the possibility that happiness, as we think of it in the west, is a culturally learned blend of basic affective states packaged together with certain objective life conditions (i.e., not a natural psychological kind.) But I think Nesse provides a very promising account of what positive emotions are for, in terms of adaptive function.

I found Nesse’s discussion of the “maladaptivity” of manic behavior especially interesting. Which leads Nesse to observe:

One of the main questions facing happiness research is whether most people would be better off if they experienced more positive affect, and if that proves to be the case, how it can be accounted for given that mood regulation mechanisms were shaped by natural selection. Much happiness research starts with the folk psychology notion that happiness is good for you and proceeds to demonstrate correlations between positive affect and a variety of other indicators of well-being including friendships, achievement, health and longevity.

Nesse goes on to point out that a few (of the far too few) longitudinal studies have shown that more positive affect is generally associated with other positive changes for individuals. But this poses a puzzle:

If positive affect is strongly heritable [as it appears to be] and improves function [as the longitudinal studies seem to indicate], and presumably reproduction, then why did natural selection not long ago shape a higher average level of positive affect? More directly, why are there so many very successful people with many friends and resources who remain in states of chronically low mood?

I think the answer is likely to be that what Nesse has in mind as “improved function” isn’t actually improved biologically proper function, but is rather improved function relative to an internal human normative standard, and so doesn’t reliably cash out in terms of inclusive fitness. Anyway, a very rich paper well worth reading.