Filling the happiness gap

There is a lot of happiness research. The empirical studies in this field are probably only matched by the number of definitions of “happiness” and the number of theories claiming to explain the empirical studies. Some numbers: “Happiness” has about 2 million results on google scholar; “well-being” more than 4 million, the Oxford Handbook of Happiness runs to over 1,000 pages.

The contributions of evolutionary psychology in this field compare rather poorly. My best guess is that there are less than one hundred articles with a decidedly evolutionary bend on how happiness or well-being works. Add to that the one book I could find. This might get you up to 1,000 pages in total, but it’s close. As far as I can tell there are only two scholars who have published somewhat consistently on this “intersection”: Bjørn Grinde and Randolph Nesse. In light of the insight that all psychology is evolutionary psychology, this is bad.

At least I’m not the only one who noticed. From Lehmann (2009), emphasis mine:

In their Handbook of Positive Psychology, Snyder and Lopez (2002) introduce positive psychology as a new and exciting paradigm of human behavior from a viewpoint emphasizing human strengths. Admittedly, the book performs well in integrating a multitude of theoretical perspectives, ranging from the strongly cognitive to the biological to the interpersonal, demonstrating how many different orientations may be employed to investigate positive psychology constructs. One exception to this smorgasbord of theoretical orientations concerns the dearth of evolutionary explanations offered for positive psychological phenomena.

It did not get much better over the years. From the Oxford Handbook of Happiness (2013), chapter 65: “An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective on Happiness”:

However, despite growing interest in this important area of research, surprisingly few researchers have begun to explore happiness from an evolutionary perspective (with a few notable exceptions, e.g., Buss, 2000a ).

In the latest volume of the Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2015) there is not one article on happiness or well-being. Nesse’s chapter on mental health deserves an honorable mention. All the evolutionary psychologists are probably busy investigating mating and stirring up controversy.

Long story short: I have not seen a decent attempt by evolutionary psychologists to provide a coherent account of well-being or happiness, and integrate it with the existing empirical literature. Grinde’s book is the closest attempt, but he fails in my opinion. He is obsessed with the idea of discords, does not proceed very systematically, and I found his engagement with the existing literature lacking.

So my goal for this blog is to fill this gap in the research landscape. I will try to develop a coherent and accessible account of happiness, based on evolutionary psychology and the empirical findings as I perceive and interpret them. In order to justify sidestepping a lot of the research mentioned in the opening paragraph, I will give a brief defense of taking a strong evolutionary perspective in my next post. But honestly, I don’t expect this to convince many skeptics. So if you don’t think evolutionary psychology is an appropriate perspective to take here, this blog is probably not for you.

On the one hand, I am not particularly well qualified to do any of this. On the other hand, given the lack of attention from other, “more serious” scholars, I think a well-educated somewhat intelligent person can make progress here. Still, let’s proceed with caution.