Is pleasure the measure of happiness? Does happiness make life meaningful? How does it factor in economic and political life? 

The boom of contemporary research on happiness has been driven by psychologists, though historically philosophy has long examined the subject. What happens when philosophy and psychology enter into conversation?

While happiness may be found through a walk in the woods with a friend, happiness research also illuminates social and public issues ranging from social media to authoritarianism. In this episode of Meeting Street, psychologist Joachim Krueger and philosopher Bernard Reginster explore with host Amanda Anderson the factors that contribute to or impact happiness and the ways in which happiness and meaningfulness can diverge. They talk about the benefits of conducting and teaching happiness research together and discuss how collaboration could shed light on related topics like social status.

Transcript

From the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, this is Meeting Street. I’m Amanda Anderson, the show’s host and director of the institute. In today’s episode, I’m joined by two scholars — one, a social psychologist, and the other, a philosopher — who have several times partnered to teach a course here at Brown on the philosophy and psychology of happiness. The most recent iteration of the course was offered under the aegis of a collaborative humanities initiative that promotes research-based, team-taught courses on important cultural topics. The aim is to see what happens when a humanities perspective is brought into conversation with a disciplinary perspective outside of the humanities.

One striking fact about the boom in happiness research over the past couple of decades is that it has largely been driven by the field of psychology, a social science, even though historically philosophy, a core humanities discipline, has had much to say about the topic. So I’m very excited to speak with my two guests today. Let me now introduce them.

Joachim Krueger is professor of cognitive and behavioral sciences. He studies topics in social judgment and decision-making, such as self-perception, strategic interpersonal behavior, and inter-group relations. He has published widely on these research topics and also has a vibrant blog hosted by Psychology Today. His more occasional writings on happiness have been collected in the book The Quest for Happiness in 31 Essays, published in 2016.

Bernard Reginster is a professor in the philosophy department. His research areas include ethics and moral psychology in 19th-century European philosophy and psychoanalytic theory. He is the author of "The Affirmation of Life," published in 2006, and "The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality," published in 2021. Bernard is also the founder and director of the Program for Ethical Inquiry at Brown. Joachim and Bernard, welcome to Meeting Street.

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

It’s great to be here, Amanda. Thank you for having us.

So, as I mentioned in the intro, the past few decades have seen a large increase in research on happiness, much of it within psychology, although ideas from the history of philosophy certainly exert an influence on happiness studies. Your course explores the question of happiness by means of an encounter between the two disciplines. Why do you think an approach that juxtaposes the two disciplinary frameworks of psychology and philosophy is important or useful? Joachim, as the psychologist, perhaps you could begin.

Yeah, thank you. It’s an encounter all right, both for the instructors and for the students. And it’s fun. And it’s also educational because disciplines have different modes of thinking and different paradigms and differences in how they do their scholarship, and we bring that into the same room in our course. So we can tell the students, we can share with the students what we’ve learned about the differences in our theoretical pre-commitments, conceptualization of the issues, and the methods that we use in our efforts to find answers to the questions that we care about.

Bernard, how would you answer the same question?

Well, I mean, I agree with what Joachim just said about the confrontation of different methods, different approaches, right? And I can give a specific example if you’d like. So one of the things that philosophers do is that they emphasize the importance of conceptual analysis. So they try to understand what the concept of happiness really is, what it covers, what it doesn’t cover, and so on and so forth.

But from the point of view of a psychologist — and I learned that of course by talking to Joachim about this — is that what philosophers first called conceptual analysis looks very much like armchair psychology, and perhaps we would be better served by a rigorous empirical investigation of what’s really going on in the minds of people who describe themselves as happy.

Well, as it turns out, on reflection, both of these approaches are equally indispensable. On the one hand, the empirical investigation of a topic like happiness is only going to be as good as the initial conceptualization that frames the hypothesis that guides the inquiry. If you ask the wrong questions, obviously the answers you get are not going to be very helpful. But on the other hand, if the empirical hypothesis your initial conceptualization supplied [is] not confirmed by the empirical inquiries, then your initial conceptualization probably missed something and you need to revise it.

The other thing that I want to say is that, precisely because, as you noted in your introduction, the study of happiness has been mostly done by empirical psychologists, it makes it incumbent on philosophers to find out what psychologists have to say and see whether the empirical investigations might in some way force us to revise our concept of happiness. One of the things that’s been very striking to me is the way in which the psychological study of happiness has made it necessary for philosophers to become very careful in the way in which they, so to speak, map out the conceptual territory.

So when psychologists study happiness, obviously they will by trade define it as a state of mind of one sort or another. So the main views here are that happiness is a preponderance of positive over negative affect, or happiness is a sense of satisfaction with your life, things of that nature. But in any event, they define it as a state of mind.

Now in philosophy, happiness has been used virtually as synonymous for the good life in the sense of the life that’s good for the person living it. As philosophers tend to talk about it, it’s been synonymous with wellbeing. But it’s a real question, when you think about it, whether all that matters to your life going well for you is that you be in a certain state of mind. OK. And so philosophers had already started to talk about this kind of issue, but the prevalence of psychological research has really put it front and center. Is being in a certain state of mind all that really matters to your life going well for you?

Yes, let me press on this a little bit by asking Joachim what precisely are the different conceptions of happiness at play in happiness research? And what do you think some of the major contributions of happiness studies and positive psychology have been? I mean, Bernard has been stressing state of mind, or what we might call self-report, but one thing I would be really curious to hear is how happiness is conceived, apart from the question of whether or not the subject is saying that they feel happiness.

Right, yeah. So what we tell our students, we give them some distinctions that are heuristic and useful, but they’re not categorically true, but they’re helpful for us to think about the issues. And one distinction is between the normative and the descriptive, and we say that by and large philosophers tend to gravitate to normative questions, and normative has a feeling of “Now we have a fix on how things should be or what happiness really is.”

And psychologists tend to shy away from that because then you get to judge people. So if we have a normative standard, we can judge people — or ourselves: “Am I as happy as I should be, or am I thinking about happiness in the correct way?” And so we lay it out for the students that psychologists are empirically working on a descriptive game and philosophers on a normative game, but there is overlap and we need to talk to one another. But it’s not categorically 100% true because there are, of course, many psychological enterprises that are normative.

So for example, when we study judgment and decision-making or choice, we use normative models. So it’s not entirely descriptive and that’s the end of the story. And likewise in the study of happiness and subjective wellbeing, once we’ve discovered, or we have empirical and theoretical grounds, that certain things are better for us and our wellbeing, then we have one foot in the normative territory: “Should you be doing this? Shouldn’t you be exposing yourself more to nature and give pro-socially and hang out more with your friends, because we know it will be good for you?” So the descriptive and the normative are continually in a dance with one another, and we hope we make progress by dancing the dance and understanding where we’re headed.

Is part of what is at stake here between the normative and, let’s just say, the state of mind orientation competing temporal perspectives, where happiness can be the report of a state of mind in a kind of punctual sense, but the good life can only be known over the course of longer spans of time, or even perhaps the course of a life? I mean, I guess I would pose that question to Bernard.

When psychologists talk about happiness, they talk about a state of mind, but they tend to talk about a long-term state of mind. So a moment of pleasure does not happiness make, right? On one of the models there’s got to be a preponderance of pleasure over pain, presumably over a certain period of time. I mean, it doesn’t have to cover your entire life, but it has to cover a protracted period of it.

The other point I would make in connection to the previous discussion is that it may very well be that there is something that psychologists call happiness and that is in fact good for you. The question, and I guess it has something to do with the normative question, is that, while it’s very likely to be good for you, is that the only way in which your life can go well for you? Or is this what you should be aiming at? Or are there other things that you might, and perhaps should, aim at if you want to have a life that’s really going well for you?

Right. I mean, I think it comes down to value commitments, right? I mean, what are one’s primary value commitments? And certain forms of believing one’s life to be meaningful and important might not foreground feelings of pleasure and happiness. Joachim, did you want to speak to that?

Yeah, I haven’t really answered your question on the state of mind, and that’s the orientation that psychologists take. And again, by and large, that’s true, but not entirely. So it’s not entirely true that this is all — as psychologists — what we think of as states of mind. And some are fleeting, some are longer lasting, but at the end of the day, we want to integrate them and have a whole of how happy the life has been. It’s actually the case that in psychology there’s a long tradition of also talking about deeper psychological constructs that are not states of mind, but whatever it is that gives rise to the state of mind. And that, of course, we know from the study of attitudes.

So you may have a strong ecological attitude — wanting to be green and wanting to do the necessary things — and from time to time, at the right conditions, things will pop into consciousness. But we assume, from what we see in people’s behavior and what they tell us and how they seem to be feeling, that there’s a latent state that gives rise to it, and this latent state or entity we can’t really see. It’s a hypothetical construct that we use to explain what we do see. So in that sense, we have much more common ground with the philosophers who are particularly interested in the deep, the ontology, what is happiness aside from the phenomena that we get to experience and witness in everyday life.

Yeah, yeah. So to give you an example, I mean, one of the things that we discuss in the course is the question of whether the state of mind that is supposed to [be] considered happiness is an experiential state, a conscious experience, or something that underlies conscious experience, that’s still a condition of the mind — something like emotional health, for example — that is manifest in experience, but is not simply reducible to it.

That’s very helpful. Joachim, what do you think made you particularly open to working with a humanities scholar on this particular topic?

It has a lot to do with how Bernard, my friend and colleague, approached me to collaborate on this. So he kicked in the door, but the door was half open anyway, because I’ve always felt in my scholarly work that interdisciplinary thinking and interdisciplinary contacts are vital for — actually for my own happiness. When thinking is fun, you look for inspiration, and one way to get inspired in scholarship is to look beyond the confines of your little silo or discipline. So I’ve always read widely. I’ve never taken a philosophy course in my life, but I’m self-educated — and then to see the opportunity to work with a liked and loved and respected colleague, and to bring that attitude of excitement and inspiration to the students, how could I have said no?

Bernard, what aspects of your own research or intellectual commitments or academic history drew you to this collaboration?

Well, first of all, I have one of my undergraduate degrees in psychology, so I already have a separate interest in it. I was also very struck by the increasing interaction between philosophy, my discipline, and the social sciences and how that interaction proved to be very fruitful. And then, I discovered, and that was a bit unexpected, that in fact Joachim is a kind of a closet philosopher himself. So even though he never took a philosophy [course] in his life, he clearly has a bent towards it. So that really helped, but the interaction between the two disciplines can be amazingly fruitful, which is why philosophers engage in it.

So psychologists, for example, expose correlations, and sometimes those correlations can be quite eye-opening and striking and they merit consideration. If you want a couple of examples, one of the striking correlations is between positive affect, or happiness in that sense, and pro-social giving, when you spend more of your money on other people than on yourself, which goes against, of course, you know, what people tend to believe. And also more recently, the correlation established by some psychologists between the attraction towards authoritarianism and a sense of meaningfulness in life. So those, when they are well documented — these correlations cannot be dismissed, and they cry out for exploration.

Bernard, let me follow that up by asking you, why do you think positive psychology and happiness research emerged when it did and has enjoyed such success? Do you have any thoughts about that from a cultural, or historical, or disciplinary perspective?

Well, the emergence of that trend in the field of social psychology is something that I will let Joachim address, but I can say a few words about why it’s been so influential and successful. Certainly one reason for this is the fact that, at least in the 20th century and at least in the English-speaking world, the study of happiness was in some disrepute in my own discipline. So it was not really examined very much, and as a result there was a vacuum. And I think that the studies of happiness by social psychologists basically took over in this way. Increasingly then the psychological study of happiness has replaced philosophy, but also non-scientific self-help, as the go-to place where people who seek practical guidance will go in their quest for happiness.

Joachim, how would you account for the rise of the field?

Well, the term “positive psychology” was coined deliberately about 20 years ago by the president of the American Psychological Association at the time [Martin Seligman]. That was 1999, and that was kind of a heyday. Culturally and economically, the United States was the only superpower, everybody was happy already, but we can be even happier, and how do we go about it?

And the claim was that the discipline of psychology had ignored happiness, not necessarily about being negative psychology, clinical, but just having this blind spot on: “Can we be happier? And if we can, doesn’t psychology have an obligation to help us find out how?” But we live in quite a different world now [from] 20 years ago. Climate change is now climate crisis, the infrastructure is crumbling in this country, the democratic institution is under duress, and I can tell that our young students can feel that. That’s a different crowd of students than we had 20 years ago.

And I’m not ready to conclude that happiness can be studied only under the best of times — but also under the worst of times, or when times are more challenging, and that’s where we are now. And now, perhaps even more so we have an obligation to do our best to find our way forward.

You might think there is a tendency or risk that the study of happiness becomes overly individualized: Here is this person, and this person wants to be happy, and that’s the end of that. But the happiness of people, individual people, is embedded in a social context. And that’s another one of the major lessons we have for our students, that we are social creatures, and we are not islands or unto ourselves, but our happiness is something that we see and try to optimize within a social context in which we live.

This connects to my very next question which is to ask the two of you to both talk a little bit about what role larger economic and social factors play in individual happiness. For instance, there are reports about how income inequality or social media negatively affect happiness, but happiness research, as you’re just saying, Joachim, often stresses more immediate factors such as close relations with others or the cultivation of certain practices of affirmation or compassion. So how do larger structural conditions affect happiness or interact with these individual or small-scale practices? Joachim?

That’s a very delicate thing because we can, of course, study the larger context, and we do, so there’s another interdisciplinary frontier with sociology, political science, and economics. So we try to think and understand things globally, but we have to act locally because that’s all we can do. So we tell our students about the research that we see on the correlations between wealth and income inequality, and inequality and life satisfaction.

The data are pretty clear now: If you have extreme inequality in wealth and income, it leaves a footprint on average happiness. What is probably the most provocative findings within this literature is that these extreme discrepancies are not even good for those who have the most money, and that will probably be the hardest to see for them, that it’s not actually in their higher-order interest to maximize even more, to soak up even more, of a nation’s or global wealth within a few hands.

But hey, what can we do about that? Not that much. So that might require another course or another type of scholarship to go there, but what we can do is put that on the radar screen for ourselves and for our students.

Bernard, would you like to add anything?

Well, I might say that that’s true: We can’t do much about macro-economical conditions. But we did have a segment on happiness and social media, the use of social media, especially in young people, which was truly frightening. There’s a correlation between the number of times you spent on social media and suicidal tendencies. So that was problematic. But I would say that, you know, even though we cannot intervene necessarily, we can clarify what the issues are.

And another interesting example, I think, is the fact that some countries — I mean, it started in the country of Bhutan, but now the British government does it and other countries as well — started to sort of switch to a way of assessing the success and therefore the viability of a particular type of social organization, not in economic measures such as the gross domestic product for example, but in terms of something that is being called global national happiness.

I have to mention, again, something that I just found out recently about this, is that when it comes to the viability of the type of social organization under which we operate, some interesting research that just came out [is] showing that there’s actually a strong negative correlation between happiness, or positive affect, and the inclination towards authoritarianism.

So the people who are inclined towards authoritarianism tend to be very unhappy, but at the same time, there is also some research that shows that the inclination towards authoritarianism is not strongly correlated with low economic standing. So, of course, that might suggest that then we have political reason to care for the global national happiness as much as for the GDP since the very survival of our democratic political system seems to depend upon it.

But it turns out that things are even more complicated than this, because the same research that I mentioned a moment ago also shows a positive correlation between the inclination towards authoritarianism and meaningfulness. And that might suggest that the deep political problem is not that we don’t care enough about happiness. The deep political problem might be that we don’t care enough about meaningfulness, and that the survival of our republic depends upon that. So these are the kinds of concern, we can’t do anything about them, but at least we can expose them, bring them to the right.

That’s fascinating. You’ve both talked about how your two approaches complement one another and are both necessary for the study of happiness. But let me also ask you, were there substantive disagreements between the two of you in your approach to the topic of happiness, and have there been cases in which those disagreements were productive for the course or for the collaboration? Bernard?

One disagreement that we have had for some time now is about hedonism, which is the view that happiness consists of a preponderance of pleasure over pain. Joachim has been inclined towards it. I have been more skeptical. But the interesting thing is that once you start looking closely, you realize that the disagreement might be more apparent than real. So two examples: One is that when Joachim talks about happiness, of course what he has in mind is happiness in the fairly restricted psychological sense, and it may well be that happiness in that sense consists of pleasure. But when I talk about happiness, I talk about a broader concept of wellbeing, and there, there are reasons to think that maybe when pleasure may be part of it, it’s not the whole of it.

But another issue is that sometimes it looks as though a disagreement over hedonism is a disagreement about the importance of pleasure in happiness, and in fact, we don’t disagree about that. I mean, it would be insane of me to disagree that pleasure is an important, common, maybe even necessary part of happiness. The question really is, you know, what this means — the fact that pleasure and happiness are strongly correlated, what it means about our understanding of happiness. And there, there might be room for disagreement, right? I mean, so I tend to believe that happiness doesn’t consist of pleasure, but that pleasure is an indication of a state, which is a state of happiness, or that being happy tends to produce more pleasure than being unhappy, for example, and maybe Joachim disagrees with that.

Yeah [chuckles]. It’s an unfolding story. We’ve tried the course now four times, and when I listened to my colleague, Bernard, I noticed all the critiques on hedonism, and so I found myself resisting that: “Come on, we can’t throw the baby out of the bath water. There’s something to be said for pleasure. Would you really? I mean, more pleasure is good, right? More pleasure, less pain, yes, sign me up.” And the question is rather, is that all that people want?

And so I find myself — yes, pleasure, and more pleasure, less pain, that fits my definition of happiness. But of course, when we ask, “What do people want and need?” this conception of happiness doesn’t exhaust it. And I’m reminded of my favorite book review that I ever read. It was published in 1940, it was one paragraph, and it was George Orwell’s review of an English translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. And Orwell didn’t really go into critiquing the book, which could have gone on for pages.

He made one point, and the point was that Hitler understood that the Enlightenment idea of happiness is not the only thing that drives people. That as a dictator, as a tyrant, as a populist, you can actually exploit other needs that people have and their willingness to actually accept pain or suffering. And that is a very deep lesson, and that’s an ongoing question in our course: happiness — yes, pleasure, less pain, but what else is going on? And so some of our disagreements about how we frame [the course] was the domain that we look at. Do we include meaning, let’s say, into our definition of subjective wellbeing or not? And that’s arguable.

Joachim, are there things that you feel that you learned from the students, particularly through the group projects or the collaborative dimensions of the course?

Yes, I did, at two levels. So the last time we taught the course, we introduced group work. We had over 200 students and we had over 30 groups of eight, and they were told to generate a hypothesis and a tractable empirical problem, and collect data, analyze them, and write a report. And they did, and I was just amazed how well that went. There was not a single group out of the 32 groups that imploded or collapsed.

And what I learned was a) the students can do it and most of them like it, and [b)] their reports were very good, addressing a lot of problems of our current time — there were many projects addressed to COVID-related issues and social media related issues. I learned, we learned, that the students got into it and they were not defensive or resistant, and that they embraced this opportunity to study, to themselves do some study and grow with that, and that was delightful.

I mean, it’s interesting. You did teach the course during what many people would describe as a distinctly unhappy time, which is to say during the second spring of COVID-19, and that’s striking that it informed some of the group projects. And I know you talked earlier in the interview about how the cultural context for happiness studies is very different from the moment historically in which it emerged. I’m just wondering, Bernard, do you have thoughts on teaching the course and thinking about the topic of happiness during the pandemic? Do you feel that that affected the course in significant ways?

I only have a few anecdotes from some individual students I’ve spoken with, so I don’t have any sort of a general sense of how the students fared. Part of the issue for us, I think, is that because we were teaching the course as the pandemic was happening, we didn’t have the distance that’s necessary to be able to assess the impact of such a massive event on the happiness of people.

I mean, we know now that obviously it wasn’t good in many respects, but we don’t know yet, for example, whether the changes that it will bring, for example, in the way in which people conceive of the place of work in their lives, will in fact be beneficial. They could well be, or maybe simply the fact that people recognize that getting along, you know, having social interaction with people, is actually quite important to your happiness and that the self-imposed isolation of COVID made that very clear to them. So there could still be beneficial effects, but we have to wait and see.

Those are very interesting reflections. It is fascinating to think about how important it’s going to be to allow some time to pass before we can really assess the last couple of years. So as a last question, I’d like to ask you: This has been such a fruitful collaboration for the two of you, I can tell. I mean, even when you talk about disagreement within the conversation itself, during this interview, there was a dynamism and a kind of a rethinking in relation to the other person’s position. Is there another topic that you think might profit from collaboration between a psychologist and a philosopher? Joachim?

Yeah, I’d love to answer that, but I can’t resist going back to the previous question really quickly. And that is, times change, cultures change, and our challenges change, but also some things are timeless. And students have never asked me point blank, "Professor, what’s the secret to happiness?" — I’m still waiting for somebody to ask me that because I have an answer, and I told them anyway, and I’m going to tell you now.

There is no “the secret,” but there are a number of little secrets. And one is — if I have one sentence to give one piece of advice is — it’s this: Go take a walk in the woods with a friend. Because you get three for one: The walk is good because the body likes to move. You get physiological benefits. We do know that people feel better when exposed and within nature as opposed to a human-made environment. And somebody you love, or like. That’s pro-sociality.

As to other topics, there are many. Now Bernard and I are both interested in social life, the social world and how people navigate it, and one particularly intriguing concept on which we both have our perspectives is social status — which is something most people want, it’s very difficult to get, it’s easy to lose, and it has a dialectical challenge because, as you gain status, you go above others in your group, so you have a reduction of that kind of affinity or closeness when everybody’s equal. Yet most of us want to be better in some ways. So, that’s a balance we have to find, and I think that’s a topic where we can both take a look using psychological and philosophical concepts and methods.

Bernard, do you have thoughts about that question?