Giving something a name is not an explanation

Last time I claimed that research on happiness without an evolutionary psychology approach was useless. Since I’m in the minority here, it’s only fair that I explain myself. I already gave you the short version. So consider this the long version.

We can give different kinds of explanations for psychological phenomena, moving back and forth on the spectrum of proximate and ultimate explanations. These don’t differ in how true they are, but rather in how “informative” they are. It’s both true that good Chinese food as well as [something with dopamine] causes me to be happy. Also something with genes. It depends on the context which explanation is more informative. Similarly, it’d be perfectly fine to write a blog about the neurological causes of happiness; or genetic causes for that matter. It’d be thrilled about both actually. But with this blog I’m mainly interested in evolutionary explanations for happiness. I find them to be more informative for my life since they deal with variables that I’m in some position to manipulate—potential pharmacological interventions notwithstanding.

The problem with most psychological “theories” of happiness is that they do none of this. Most of them simply run a more or less rigorous factor analysis, give a psychological-sounding name to some cluster of observed behavior patterns or traits, and mistake this for an informative explanation. That’s wrong. “Loss aversion” is not some fundamental human trait. It’s just the name we give to some cluster of consistently observed behavior. It’s not like some people shy away from conflict because they are agreeable. “Agreeableness” is just the name we give to some cluster of consistently observed behavior. It’s true that we can make predictions based on these clusters, but we should not mistake them for informative explanations. Similarly, you cannot explain human happiness by proclaiming “needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy” as self-determination theory posits for instance. It’s not a theory. It’s just naming a cluster of observed behavior and claiming it’s a theory.

The problem is that these statements kind of feel like explanations; similar to “he cheats a lot because he has adulterous tendencies”. (This is probably related to How an Algorithm Feels From Inside.) But the lack of explanatory power becomes apparent when contrasted with a proper explanation. Compare “humans feel unhappy without friends because they have a need for relatedness” and “humans feel unhappy without friends because in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness those who did not seek and maintain friendships had less support to rely on which made them less likely to reproduce”. The latter is much less likely to be followed by a “why” question—my rigorous test for the informativeness of an explanation. That’s why I decided to ignore large parts of the “theoretical” literature on happiness.

An evolutionary approach on the other hand can actually tell us something useful about the function of happiness and—based on that—generate hypotheses about which factors likely contribute to human happiness. All of that before looking at the data. We simply ask: Given evolutionary imperatives and the environment, what would we expect to make people happy? Then we go and check the data. That’s what I want to do on this blog.

It’s true that evolutionary psychology has received a lot of criticism over the years—a whole Wikipedia article worth of criticism. I won’t rehash the arguments here, but rely on argument by authority instead:

Edouard Machery in “Discovery and Confirmation in Evolutionary Psychology” (The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Psychology):

“Evolutionary psychology remains a very controversial approach in psychology, maybe because skeptics sometimes have little first-hand knowledge of this field, maybe because the research done by evolutionary psychologists is of uneven quality. However, there is little reason to endorse a principled skepticism toward evolutionary psychology: Although clearly fallible, the discovery heuristics and the strategies of confirmation used by evolutionary psychologists are on a firm grounding.”

It’s true that human experience and factor analysis combined with trial and error will get you a long way toward figuring out what makes humans happy. So if you’re solely interested in that, this is not the blog you’re looking for. I suggest you take a look at one of these MOOCs (Coursera, EdX) instead. If, however, you’re interested in why that damn gratitude journal makes you happy, just wait for post #132.