Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College Social Class Affect His/her Happiness? Hello I need help to write 2 pages reflection (and 1 page script if you prefer

Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College Social Class Affect His/her Happiness? Hello I need help to write 2 pages reflection (and 1 page script if you prefer it tather than recording) based on an interview with a happy person. Write the reflection based on the reading of Nettle, chapter 3 on Love and work answering the following question.1. Dose one’s social class affect his/her happiness? You’ll start from step 3, please find attached the detailed requirements. Assignment 1 focuses on the tormenting question of happiness in the book Happiness: The Science
Behind Your Smile written by Daniel Nettle.
1. Identify and formulate a question which deals with happiness and its pursuit. (Dose one’s
social class affect his/her happiness? )
2. Identify the appropriate passages from Nettle which address this specific question you are
asking. (Chapter 3, Love and work)
3. Interview someone (a happy person?) for two to three minutes (no more than five minutes) on
the above question of happiness, recording the interview with audio (or write a separate script
of the conversation). And yes, you may interview yourself.
4. Write a two page reflection on the interview (12pt, normal margins), showing how your
interviewee might enter into conversation with Nettle and his research. You may write it in
traditional essay form or transcript/conversation form or letter from Mr. Nettle to interviewee
form.
Happiness
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Happiness
the science behind your smile
Daniel Nettle
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and in certain other countries
Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York
© Daniel Nettle 2005
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
Database right Oxford University Press (maker)
First published 2005
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,
or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics rights organizations. Enquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 0–19–280558–4
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc
Contents
Introduction
1
1 Comfort and joy
7
2 Bread and circuses
45
3 Love and work
65
4 Worriers and enthusiasts
91
5 Wanting and liking
115
6 Panaceas and placebos
141
7 A design for living
161
Further reading
185
Notes
187
References
198
Index
213
v
List of figures
1.1 Faces displaying basic emotions, used by Paul Ekman in his
research.
© Paul Ekman 1976–2004.
1.2 Three different senses of the term ‘happiness’.
2.1 Grumpy old men.
Clockwise: © The Times/Camera Press, London; © Ann
Ronan Picture Library/HIP/TopFoto.co.uk; © Bettmann/
Corbis; © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis; © TopFoto.co.
uk; courtesy of Trinity College Library, Cambridge.
2.2 Distribution of responses to the question of how life has
turned out.
2.3 Scale of where participants think they will be in ten years’
time.
3.1 Life satisfaction in contemporary Britain by social class, as
defined by occupation.
3.2 Life satisfaction in contemporary Britain by marital status at
age 42.
4.1 Average happiness rating of British adults on a 5 point scale,
by neuroticism personality score.
4.2 Average happiness rating of British adults on a 5 point scale,
by extroversion score.
5.1 Electric pleasure: a rat self-administering brain stimulation
reward.
vi
Happiness is an ideal not of reason but of imagination
immanuel kant, grundlegung zur
metaphysik der sitten
Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment
to enjoyment
boswell’s life of johnson
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Introduction
‘We hold these truths to be self-evident,’ wrote Thomas
Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, ‘that all men are created equal, that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. Of these three, it is the third that
seems most able to imbue our lives with purpose. Without its guiding light, there would be no way of knowing
what to do with life and liberty, or so it would seem.
Jefferson’s rights one and two wake the horse up and
open the stable door, but only number three—the pursuit of happiness—is going to make it go anywhere.
The idea that happiness is central to the point of the
human experience goes back to the ancients. The
Greek philosopher Aristippus argued in the fourth
century bc that the goal of life is to maximize the totality of one’s pleasures. If this is true, which is more
debatable than it might seem, then happiness becomes
the overarching explanatory concept in all of psychology, and surely the most urgent of personal questions
for any human being to solve. More than this, happiness
also moves to the centre of political and economic
1
introduction
decisions. If maximizing happiness is the point of individual lives, then the point of systems of government
and economy should be to maximize collective or
aggregate happiness. This position is a pure form of the
doctrine of Utilitarianism, which was made famous by
moral philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), but
foreshadowed in the thought of Francis Hutcheson
who claimed, ‘That action is best, which procures the
greatest happiness for the greatest numbers’.
This form of utilitarianism has an enduring appeal.
The government of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan
recently announced that the goal of public policy there
would be to increase not the Gross National Product,
but the Gross National Happiness. The Bhutanese are
obviously on to something. Happy people live longer
than unhappy people and are less vulnerable to disease. And there are enduring differences in happiness
between nations, between the rich and the poor, and
between the married and the single. However enlightened it may seem, though, the Bhutanese strategy
immediately raises questions. Can people’s happiness
actually be changed by public action? Come to think of
it, can it be changed by any means at all? If so, how? And
how should we assess the Gross National Happiness?
The early Utilitarians had recognized that implementing their programme required a device for meas2
introduction
uring happiness—a hedonimeter. No such device exists,
of course. We can ask people how happy they feel. This
turns out to be a surprisingly revealing exercise, as we
shall see. However, happiness has multiple senses. Its
function in the sentence, ‘I was happy to see Bob’, may
be rather different from that in the sentence, ‘I was
happy with the foreign policy of the government’. So
before we could use judgements of happiness as a
touchstone for public life, we would need to undertake
a great deal of empirical work on people’s thoughts and
feelings about happiness, and how the feeling of happiness relates to the quality of life. This is work that
psychologists have begun over the last few decades, and
its illuminating results will be reviewed in this book.
In Chapter 1, we examine the concept of happiness
and attempt to tease apart its various senses. Some
varieties of happiness may be more measurable than
others, and some, perhaps not the same ones, more
worth pursuing. Chapter 2 examines the question of
whether people are basically happy or basically
unhappy, and why. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to the question of why some people seem to be happier than
others: are people happy because good things happen
to them, or do good things happen to them because
they are happy? We shall see evidence that people’s
enduring levels of happiness come at least as much
3
introduction
from themselves and the way they think as they do from
the objective facts of their circumstances. Chapter 5
turns to the brain systems underlying emotions and
moods. The feeling of well-being emerges from the
interplay of neural circuits that are the products of millions of years of evolution. In men as in mice, positive
and negative emotions rely on separate, dedicated
neural circuits, which respond to status, to threats, and
to rewards in the environment. The systems controlling
pleasure are not identical to those controlling desire.
This is an important lesson; the psychology of aspiration is not that of satisfaction. We do not always want
what we like or like what we want.
Chapter 6 considers the problem of how to be happier, from the kinds of remedies on offer to the ways in
which they can work. Finally, Chapter 7 attempts to
synthesize briefly what we know about the often paradoxical psychology of happiness, and consider why we
might be set up the way that we are. We are designed
not for happiness or unhappiness, but to strive for the
goals that evolution has built into us. Happiness is a
handmaiden to evolution’s purposes here, functioning
not so much as an actual reward but as an imaginary
goal that gives us direction and purpose. That goal may
never get any nearer, but it may not need to. Jefferson’s
fundamental right, after all, was not happiness itself,
4
introduction
but the pursuit of happiness. Nothing, not even a Utopia, can necessarily make the pursuit of happiness a
successful one that ends in capture. The best society can
merely allow every individual to flourish in the pursuit.
And, looked at in the right way, this may be enough.
The book concludes with a discussion of the prospects
for future happiness. We, in the developed world at
least, are wealthier, healthier, and freer than ever
before. To expect large gains in happiness to follow suit
may be unrealistic, for reasons which will become clear.
There is even evidence that certain types of unhappiness are on the rise, and we will consider why this
may be.
The problem with the concept of happiness is trying
to make it do enough without making it do too much. If
we define it narrowly as a certain type of feeling or
physiological state, then we can, in principle, measure it
objectively, but it is too trivial a thing to be the foundation of all public life and private decisions. On the other
hand, if we define it broadly as something like ‘the
elements of the good life’, then it is so broad as to beg
the question, and certainly too broad to be measured in
national statistics. Yet we intuitively feel that there is
something called happiness, something unitary but not
trivial, concrete enough to strive for yet broad enough
to be worth striving for. The pursuit of this familiar,
5
introduction
obscure, paradoxical object of desire is the theme of
this book. The concept of happiness is a bit like a mirage to social scientists—it shimmers on the horizon as
an appealing object of study, but often has a tendency
to slip away when it is most closely approached. In this
mirage-like quality, as we shall see, it is much like
happiness itself.
6
1
Comfort and joy
t first glance, happiness seems a little like love: if
you have to ask whether you are in it or not, you
are probably not. Few of us much care to define
it, but by heaven, we know it when we see it. The subjective, fuzzy, vague feel of the concept meant that happiness was neglected in psychology for many decades. For
example, the 1985 Penguin dictionary of psychology moves
unfalteringly from haploid to haptic without any signs of
regret (hedonic tone gets three lines a few pages later).
Surely, psychologists must have thought, happiness is a
kind of homespun, folk category of thing that may have
a certain use in bar-room gossip, but has no place in
scholarly research articles. Actually, I will argue quite
the opposite; however hard we try to fill our scholarly
discourse with more palatable sounding alternatives
(utility, hedonic tone, subjective well-being, positive
emotionality), we are actually talking about some aspect
of what gets agonized over in ordinary conversation. We
A
7
comfort and joy
do ourselves a disservice if we try to obfuscate this in
neologisms. That doesn’t mean that some conceptual
tidying-up is out of place, though, as we shall see.
Early psychologists, like the reliably marvellous
William James (1842–1910), brother of the novelist
Henry James, had no doubt in their minds that psychology should be studied scientifically. However, they
were also quite happy to take as the point of departure
for the new science, everyday, folk psychological
notions from their own lives, like love, happiness, faith,
and so on. They are often misrepresented on this point
as somehow knowing no better. The science of animal
behaviour was in its infancy, so could not furnish a
theoretical vocabulary to be borrowed for human
psychology, and neuroscience scarcely existed. So they
were before their time, stuck in some capacious armchair having to think about what people thought and
felt until someone invented something better.
As soon as psychology could find ways of ditching
armchair and bar-room notions, it did so. In the midtwentieth century, psychologists were much more at
home discussing rates of eye-blinking than love or joy.
In time, eye-blinking evolved into more sophisticated
behavioural measures like tiny differences in reaction
times to given stimuli, but no one was much interested
in connecting these up to big, messy, everyday notions
8
comfort and joy
like happiness. Indeed, the folk psychology of ordinary
conversation, which trades in beliefs, desires, and feelings, was thought of by professionals as simply bad psychology, which stood to psychological truth roughly as
painting someone blue and doing a dance around them
at sunrise stands to antibiotics.
The truth, though, is that William James’ desire to
start from the notions of people’s everyday thinking
about psychology actually had a positive reason behind
it. James seems to have understood that doing psychology is really like doing anthropology, and any
anthropologist worth his malaria tablets begins by finding out what the people he is studying think it is that
they do. It doesn’t mean that they will turn out to
be right, but how they think about their lives is an
important part of the phenomenon under study.
Thus I would argue that if people spend a lot of their
time thinking about the notion of happiness, then that
is a pretty good reason for studying it. This is true
whether or not they ever achieve it, and whether or not
it can be given a water-tight definition. The ideas of
happiness and its pursuit are part of the natural history
of human beings, and so deserve their share of scientific
attention.
Psychology has moved in this direction in an interesting way over the last few decades, and is probably closer
9
comfort and joy
to William James’ concerns now than it was for most of
the intervening years. In particular, the ways that people
report what they think and feel about behaviour are
now worthy objects of study. This is especially true with
respect to the emotions and moods, and to happiness,
as we shall see.
There are several reasons for the change. The work of
Paul Ekman, starting in the 1960s, has been particularly
important for research in the emotions. Before
Ekman, emotions seemed precisely the kind of vague,
subjective folk notions that psychologists avoided like
the plague. Ekman, however, decided to start with some
anthropology (in so doing, interestingly, he was reviving the neglected work of that near contemporary of
William James, Charles Darwin). He took photographs
of (American) actors displaying various emotions. He
then asked participants to identify which emotion the
expression went with. Unsurprisingly, American participants were pretty good at recognizing the emotions.
However, Ekman also took these photographs and
showed them to members of the Dani ethnic group in
remote Papua New Guinea. By and large they agreed
with the Americans about which face goes with which
emotion.
These results have been replicated in many cultures.
Ekman’s work allowed the identification of a set of basic
10
comfort and joy
Fig. 1.1 Faces displaying basic emotions, used by Paul Ekman in
his research. The emotions are anger, fear, surprise, joy, disgust,
and sadness.
11
comfort and joy
emotions—fear, sadness, disgust, anger, surprise, and
joy—which are universally recognized. As well as agreeing which expression goes with which feeling, people
across cultures agree which feeling goes with which
situation. A snake in the picnic hamper, that’s fear; the
death by natural causes of a loved one, that’s sadness;
the contamination of the food you are eating by faeces,
that’s disgust; and the unexpected arrival of someone
you love and miss terribly, that’s joy. These emotions
may be hard to define, but people from diverse cultures
know them when they see them, and since they look like
they come as standard features on your basic model
Homo sapiens, we ought to find out how they work and
what they are for. Interestingly, Ekman’s work means
that in the field of emotion research, the same notions
that turn up in ordinary conversation also turn up in
academic psychology papers.
Another important development has been the birth
of evolutionary psychology. This influential perspective,
which is very much in vogue at present, tries to explain
features of the way our minds work with reference to
the evolutionary challenges those minds were designed
to solve. At some level evolutionary psychology has to
be true. Every single one of our ancestors managed to
stay alive until reproductive age, find a mate, and rear a
child to adulthood. Most people throughout most of
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comfort and joy
human history have not managed this, so our progenitors must have either had innately, or been able to
learn, pretty smart ways of coping with the challenge.
Of course, how much about the detail of how the
mind works can be predicted from these truths is still
something to be worked out.
The important thing about evolutionary psychology,
though, is not that it says evolution has shaped everything we now do—it hasn’t directly shaped mobile
telephony or abstract expressionism—but that evolution has shaped the enduring ways we have for thinking
about things. To take an example from leading evolutionary psychology theorists Leda Cosmides and John
Tooby, again and again over evolutionary time, we faced
the problem of a large carnivore running at speed
towards us. Such a moment is really not the time to run
through all possible subtleties of carnivore biology, the
aesthetics of the big cat, or the relative merits of various
responses to the situation. We want a ready-to-roll way of
thinking—a software package that will start itself automatically when the cue comes—that has communication lines to key players like the heart and the legs
already set up. None of our ancestors got eaten, so it is a
fair bet that they were all running the best version of
this particular programme. The programme—fear—
might lead us to do things in modern life that are really
13
comfort and joy
stupid—for example, hiding under our seats whilst
watching the film of Jurassic park—but having it has
been advantageous over evolutionary time. The ways
people become afraid today reflect the design features
of the fear programme. (For example, people today
are more afraid of Mad Cow epidemics and spiders
than they are of elec…
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