Steven Pinker & Martin Seligman on Human Nature & Happiness

From: Robert Wright
To: Steven Pinker and Martin Seligman
Subject: Human Nature and Happiness
Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 11:06 AM PT 
First of all, thanks to both of you for gracing the pages of Slate. It's 
nice to be in the company of two of America's most eminent psychologists. 
And congratulations on your new books, and all the attention they're 
getting. 

 
To judge by the press coverage, at least, one might guess that there's 
some intellectual tension between the two books. Marty, your book, 
Authentic Happiness, is being described as upbeat and hopeful. And 
certainly its subtitle
So for starters, I'd like to ask you, Steve, whether your book, with its 
emphasis on the role of genes in shaping the mind, indeed paints such a 
grim picture. And, Marty, in reply I hope you'll tell us how your 
prescription for happiness reckons with the sometimes stubborn limits that 
genes place on our potential. 

To get a little more specific: Steve, your book emphasizes the importance 
of genes in two senses, and I think Marty basically agrees with you in 
both cases. But each of these senses would seem to complicate the search 
for happiness. 

First, Steve, you endorse evolutionary psychology, which holds that there 
is a fairly firm and universal human nature. People in America and Bhutan 
may in some ways behave quite differently, but if you peer beneath the 
cultural overlay, you find minds that are basically the same, featuring, 
for example, the same basic set of emotions, deployed in generally 
predictable fashion. And various features of human nature would seem to 
make "lasting fulfillment" elusive. To take a pretty fundamental example: 
Natural selection didn't "design" us to be lastingly fulfilled. An 
eternally happy animal would presumably sit around and bask in bliss, 
rather than do those useful things that anxiety and restlessness provoke 
us to do
Second, Steve, you endorse something that is commonly confused with 
evolutionary psychology but is actually a separate field
Broadly speaking, then, I'm asking both of you to tell us whether the role 
of genes in shaping our everyday experience is legitimately depressing 
news


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From: Steven Pinker
To: Martin Seligman and Robert Wright
Subject: Limits to Pessimism
Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 12:07 PM PT 
Yes, in The Blank Slate I argue that Homo sapiens has much to be modest 
about. We are prone, to varying degrees and in various circumstances, to 
ethnocentrism, violence, adultery, ambition, superstition, and 
self-deception, among other vices. As one reviewer put it, we are not 
stardust, we are not golden, there is no way we're getting back to the 
garden
So, does this mean we should all take poison now and be done with it? Not 
yet. In many ways The Blank Slate is an optimistic book. Limits to 
pessimism can be found at three levels. 

The first consists of philosophical reflections on our condition. Should 
we rue the fact that we belong to such a sorry species
Take the kin-selected limits on altruism, which tempt us to form 
dynasties, hire our relatives, spend money on luxuries for our children 
(orthodontics, summer camp, expensive educations) that we could have used 
to save the lives of unrelated children in the developing world, and 
bequeath our estates to our heirs
Or take romantic love, with all its perfidy and heartbreak. Donald Symons 
has pointed out that if people belonged to a species in which each couple 
was marooned on an island for life, the absence of romantic rivals would 
not select for lifelong bliss; it would select for no consciousness at 
all. There would be no falling in love because there would be no 
alternative mates to select from, and falling in love would be a huge 
waste. Nor would there be pleasure in sex, which would be done for 
reproduction and would provide no more feeling than the release of 
hormones or the production of gametes. The richness and intensity of the 
emotions in our minds are evolutionary testimony to the preciousness and 
fragility of our relationships in life. 

The second level is the one of practical social improvement and hopes for 
moral progress. Here, too, human nature should not be cause for 
lamentation. The human mind is a complex system of many parts. It may have 
temptations toward greed or violence, but it has much else besides. It has 
cognitive faculties that can learn the lessons of history and take a long 
view of the future. It has faculties of combinatorial reasoning that can 
come up with new solutions, just as our combinatorial language faculties 
come up with new sentences. It has a moral sense and a capacity for 
sympathy which, granted, might be applied by default only to our clan, but 
which can also be expanded to include the tribe or species. As Bob Wright 
showed in Nonzero, this expansion can be driven by our capacity to enjoy 
gains in trade, making other people more valuable alive than dead; it can 
also be expanded by cosmopolitan forces (history, journalism, realistic 
fiction) that make it easier to project ourselves into other peoples' 
lives. 

Finally, we get to the level of individual decisions on how we live our 
lives. We all know that identical twins reared apart are highly similar in 
their intelligence, personality, and temperament. That is one of many 
discoveries suggesting that some of the differences among us come from 
differences in our genes. But here is a sobering fact. Identical twins, 
even when they are reared together, are nowhere near being perfectly 
correlated. Up to half of the variation in psychological traits is not 
explained by genes, families, or any of the other usual suspects. I 
believe Marty has some interesting things to say about this.



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From: Martin Seligman
To: Robert Wright and Steven Pinker
Subject: Unconstrained Happiness
Tuesday, October 15, 2002, at 12:24 PM PT 
Steve suggests that human hope lies in the fact that our flaws are 
double-edged: that whatever foisted nepotism upon our species also bound 
us very tightly to our children. Unlike Steve, I think our hope comes more 
from huge differences between the negative motivations and the positive 
ones. Our negative emotions, dysphoria, are firefighters, urgent, 
merciless engines that eliminate irritants. In contrast, happiness 
broadens our psychological repertoire and builds the psychological capital 
that we draw on much later in life.

Because happiness is about positive-sum games, about creating what was 
never there before, obtaining happiness is less genetically constrained 
than is relieving misery. In Authentic Happiness, I distinguish three very 
different kinds of happy lives: the Pleasant Life, the Good Life, and the 
Meaningful Life.

The Pleasant Life is a life of smiles, ebullience, and good cheer. It 
consists in getting as many of the felt pleasures as possible and using 
three sets of skills to amplify them: savoring, mindfulness, and 
variation. Such "positive affectivity" is highly constrained genetically. 
It is roughly 50 percent heritable, with identical twins much more similar 
for it than fraternal twins. Like any heritable characteristic (e.g., body 
weight), the best we can achieve by dint of will and of tuition is to live 
in the best part of our set range of smiley good cheer. Negative 
emotionality is also about 50 percent heritable, however, so the 50 
percent left over is not what differentiates the plasticity of happiness 
from rigidity of dysphoria. Rather, Debbie Reynolds notwithstanding, 
happiness is not just about the Pleasant Life. In fact, Aristotle and 
Thomas Jefferson would have trouble recognizing American hedonism as the 
pursuit of happiness.

Half of humankind, genetically in the lower half of positive affectivity, 
is not smiley and cheerful. They do not look or act like Goldie Hawn, and 
pleasure-centered ideas of happiness consign these 3 billion people to the 
hell of unhappiness. But many of these people are enormously capable of 
the Good Life, what Aristotle called Eudaimonia. The Good Life is a life 
filled with absorption, immersion, and flow. When we engage in inspiring 
conversation or listen to great music, for example, time stops for us. We 
are one with the music. In such a state there is no consciousness, no 
thought, and no feeling. Afterward we may say, "That was fun," but what we 
mean is not that there were felt ecstasies, but that we were swept away.

Having the Good Life consists in my view of two steps. The first is 
simple, the second is difficult. First you need to know what your 
signature strengths are. Do you "own" social intelligence, or kindness, or 
fairness, or spirituality, or love of beauty, or integrity? There is a 
well-validated test for these and Slate's readers can take it free at 
www.authentichappiness.org. Next, and this is the hard part, you need to 
recraft your work, your love, your friendships, your leisure, and your 
parenting to use these signature strengths more frequently than you do 
now. This produces more flow in the activities of daily life. Importantly, 
while there are shortcuts to the pleasures (e.g., drugs, masturbation, TV 
shopping), there are no shortcuts to the Good Life. It can be had only 
through the knowledge and deployment of your signature strengths.

No one has yet discovered genetic constraints on the Good Life. Everyone 
has signature strengths and everyone is capable of recrafting their lives 
to use them more. There may turn out to be some heritability of intensity 
of flow and immersion, but no one has yet found it. So, happiness in the 
sense of the Good Life likely does not have much in the way of the genetic 
chains to drag it down, as does the Pleasant Life.

The third happy life, the Meaningful Life, is likely without any genetic 
constraints at all. The Meaningful Life consists in knowing what your 
signature strengths are and using them in the service of something much 
larger than you are. It is hard to imagine how "unfortunate" and 
double-edged genes could compromise that.

I have been a therapist and when I help patients fight dysphoria, it is an 
uphill battle. The success of therapy is measured by how long change lasts 
before it melts. This Sisyphean struggle likely results from fighting 
genetic dispositions to sadness or anxiety or anger. When I work with 
people to increase the Good Life or the Meaningful Life what I see is 
spontaneous accretion and growth. When an individual learns that she is 
very kind and uses her kindness more and more at work, kindness simply 
increases on its own.

Evolution selected for negative motivation to reliably eliminate threats; 
so urgent and so stereotyped are threats to survival that there is little 
leeway for ornamentation. Evolution also selected for positive emotions; 
these are what broadens and builds, and our best hope lies in their 
legacy: the peacock's tail, the periodic table, and the cathedral.