The Happiness Hypothesis

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom is a 2006 book by the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (born 1963), written for a general readership. In it, Haidt takes a number of "great ideas" about happiness put forward by thinkers of the past, such as Plato, the Buddha and Jesus, and examines them in the light of contemporary psychological research, drawing out the lessons that still apply to modern life. The book's central concepts are virtue, happiness, fulfilment and meaning.

The work is organised into eleven chapters, preceded by an introduction in which the author sets out to reduce the vast body of wisdom available today to ten great ideas, one per chapter. The early chapters address the divided self: Haidt draws on classic dichotomies (mind and body, the two brain hemispheres, old and new brain, the controlled and the automatic) and settles on the last, developing his best-known metaphor of a rider on an elephant. The rider, representing conscious reasoning, cannot control the elephant, which stands for automatic processes, by force; this explains much of our difficulty with willpower, and training the elephant is, in the author's view, the key to self-improvement. From there the book covers reciprocity and the Golden Rule, our tendency to see others' faults more readily than our own, the pursuit of happiness, the different kinds of love, the uses and limits of adversity, virtue understood as excellence, the sacred and the spiritual dimension of life, and finally the meaning of life and the need for balance between different traditions.

The book received favourable reviews. Daniel Nettle, writing in Nature, accepted its central premise, the striking similarity between the ancients' advice on how to live and the conclusions of modern psychology, and the book was praised for its clarity and accessibility. Its greatest influence lies in popularising positive psychology and in its way of combining philosophical and religious traditions with empirical research.