By Anders Sandberg[1] and Krisztina Jedlovszky[2]

Abstract

Can one define happiness in a useful way? This report looks at the main meanings of happiness as a concept and what they entail, inspired by interest in finding ways of enhancing it. We arrive as a pragmatic definition of happiness as a multidimensional state of positive emotion, subjective well-being, and actual well-being. This wide-sense definition regards the phenomenon as a spectrum of interlinked modules ranging over many time scales, levels of processing, and types of individual and social activities.

Introduction

Happiness is a “suitcase word”, to borrow Marvin Minsky’s phrase about consciousness: a word where we pack multiple meanings, not so much denoting one concept but several different yet somehow related concepts. Unpacking the suitcase requires some work since so much has been stuffed into it. 

Daniel M. Haybron, in Happiness: a very short introduction begins by stating[3]

Instead of saying, unequivocally, that ‘happiness is x’, we should instead say that ‘happiness is usefully thought of as x’.

The meanings that matter are those that we can properly care about, and have some bearing on practical concerns. There are many subtle points of deep importance to philosophy and psychology that may be outside this scope.

The goal here is to map out the key concepts and then attempt at finding a useful set of definitions that can guide further investigation. In particular, we are interested in finding ways of enhancing happiness (when appropriate) individually and on a large scale. 

This is complicated by the fact that we care about some further suitcases. A key distinction is between happiness as a mental state, feeling well, and happiness as well-being, a life that is going well. These are separate concepts but clearly intertwined[4]. Further concepts that matter are meaning, mental health, absence of suffering, life satisfaction, and so on. A practical program to enhance happiness on a large scale needs to be aware of such concepts and be open to considerations of which parts of this domain are amenable to enhancement and worth enhancing.

Definitions of happiness in circulation

There are several types of definitions of happiness in circulation, and together they hint at a broader structure of happiness.

Happiness as a state (“I am happy”)

The most common way of speaking about happiness is as a state one is in. 

This is often an emotional state, and usually regarded as one of the basic emotions[5]. However, even this has potentially different elements in the form of feelings of contentment, joy, gratification, satisfaction, and well-being. It has positive hedonic valence (and may even be defined by this) and is often described in terms of pleasure. However, happiness can vary in arousal and motivational state from passive bliss to driven, joyful action[6]. In models of emotions happiness often covers a region of more finely divided states.

It is worth noting that while the basic emotion may be nearly contentless (e.g. you can feel undirected joy or serenity), usually it will be directed to objects or be responses (e.g. gratitude due to a gift) and have further cognitive, sensory, and emotional content (e.g. imagined scenarios, smells, affiliations to others).

The other key distinction, the root of significant theoretical and practical work, is between hedonic and eudaimonic happiness. Hedonic happiness are states of pleasure and enjoyment, eudaimonic happiness are states of meaning and purpose. While eudaimonic happiness is often described as more active, achieved by doing meaningful actions and achieving excellence, there can clearly be passive states of experiencing meaning (and active hedonic enjoyment).

It is entirely possible to have discordant mixes of eudaimonia and hedonia. Lack of both is the empty life without pleasure or meaning, while plenty of hedonia but little eudaimonia would be the sweet life: enjoyable but meaningless. Eudaimonia but little hedonia would be a striving life: meaningful, but sour since there are no rewards for this excellence. The best combination may simply be hedonia and eudaimonia, a flourishing full life[7].

States of happiness are often seen as fleeting, affected by circumstances and our own thoughts. This transience also makes generating happy feelings relatively straightforward in most cases. Friendly social interactions, jokes, aesthetic impressions, positive surprises - normally they trigger happy states. There is also a competitive aspect with negative emotions: many happy-making experiences and activities distract from more negative states, but conversely being unhappy can often make normally delightful interventions less effective. Interventions that reduce the negative states have the double effect of increasing the overall valence and making other happy-making interventions effective. 

Happiness as a trait or disposition (“A happy person”)

Happiness is also described as a trait of a person, often linked to their personality (which is their stable, characteristic set of behavior, cognitions and emotional patterns). A happy person is someone who experiences frequent positive emotions and infrequent negative emotions. 

This may be due to a biologically caused hedonic setpoint, but can also be due to other personality traits (e.g. extroverts tend to be more happy than introverts)[8], outlook, and learned behaviors (e.g. coping). The result is a palette of emotional states and responses that can be more or less conducive to experience happiness. Since personality is relatively stable and these inner causes often are consistent across external situations this produces a somewhat consistent result. Furthermore, frequent positive affect also helps achieve many desirable life outcomes[9], creating a feedback process maintaining the state.

Dispositional happiness is not necessarily unchangeable[10] . Life events affect subjective well-being, and outlooks and mental behaviors can change. This is typically a slow process, but research has found various apparently effective pathways e.g. environmental interventions, building positive relationships, cultivating gratitude, optimistic habits, living-in-the-moment mindfulness, developing a sense of purpose etc. 

Contentment

While accounts of happiness often stress the positive aspects, absence of negative feelings or situations also clearly play a role. Hedonic accounts involve lack of suffering, eudaimonic accounts lack meaninglessness. Too much negative affect is seen as hindering happiness (small amounts, or the right kind, can enhance it: achievement is often thrown into relief by the struggle preceding it). States of serenity and contentment may be deeply enjoyable despite not containing positive valence, since they avoid the negative states. 

Many believe that there is a tension between being content and wanting to improve. However, being free from having to avoid negatives can allow (gentle) pursuit of the better. Typically enhancement of contentment focuses on learning to reduce negative emotions, stress, and unhappiness-increasing internal drivers, whether via meditation, CBT, or learning useful outlooks. 

Subjective well-being and life satisfaction (“My life is going well”)

Various accounts try to combine multiple threads in how people experience the overall quality of their lives. Typically subjective well-being (SWB) is said to involve having frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and cognitive evaluations such as life satisfaction[11]. Exactly how these components link varies somewhat between different accounts (e.g. are they three separate components, due to a core SWB factor, causing/influencing each other, or something else?)[12].

SWB combines emotional states (affective balance) with evaluations of how well life is going in general or in specific areas (life satisfaction). Both are typically measured using self-reporting, often using questionnaires but sometimes using experience sampling. SWB is well studied since it is intended as a measure, and hence the foundation for much investigation into happiness. 

Philosophical well-being (“A life well lived”)

Well-being in philosophy deals with what is non-instrumentally or ultimately good for a person[13]. This is related to but not the same as health (well-being of the organism) or subjective well-being (feeling good): well-being is that which we ought to strive for because it actually is good for us. This is more of a normative concept than happiness - the ‘should’ is of the same kind as when we say we should be just. It is possible in this account to be mistaken about one’s level of well-being, and it might even be that we have not yet discovered what it is (if it even exists).

The main theories about well-being are hedonism, preference/desire satisfaction, and objective list theories. The hedonist account regards well-being as the highest balance of pleasure over pain. Accounts vary over how to characterize the pleasure or pain/suffering.  The satisfaction account measures well-being by how much our desires or preferences are fulfilled. Here the difficulty lies in expressing what desires count - not all desires lead to happiness even if they are perfectly fulfilled. Objective list theories regard well-being as constituted by a list of goods (e.g. knowledge, friendship, freedom) that are needed for a good life. Which goods should be on the list and why differs between different thinkers[14]. 

How to enhance well-being varies between different theories but in most everyday cases it coincides with what the more psychological theories suggest. However, philosophical accounts often go beyond the individual and discuss how collective or universal well-being can be improved.

Luck (“A happy coincidence…”)

The English word happy is derived from the medieval word hap, meaning chance, a person’s luck, fortune or fate: when it emerged in the late 14th century happy meant "lucky, favored by fortune, being in advantageous circumstances, prosperous".[15] In this account happiness is something lucky, an enjoyable bonus rather than a key part of life or goal. 

While luck may appear impossible to affect, there is a growing literature suggesting that we can make our own luck by being open for positive opportunities and taking them when they occur. This is a trainable skill or habit.

Instrumental causes (“Happiness is a…”)

It is common to list what causes happiness, either because they trigger happiness in the person or because they are proper reasons to be happy. Such causes are obvious means for enhancing happiness, although they may be both individual and situation-dependent. 

Meaning 

Meaning is not the same as happiness, but a major contributor or complement. As noted by Roy Baumeister et al.[16] happiness tends to be present oriented, while meaning integrates past, present and future. They also put it as “Happiness was linked to being a taker rather than a giver, whereas meaningfulness went with being a giver rather than a taker.”: meaningful activity is often other-directed or other-caring. On the other hand, what constitutes a meaningful act or experience may be culturally defined in ways happiness often isn’t. Finding meaning requires a different kind of examination of one’s life and emotions than finding happiness.

Social nature of happiness

Much happiness is shared – it emerges from meaningful or warm social relations, interactions with family and friends, or in group activities. These are social causes of happiness that also (usually) make all involved happier.

But it may also spread socially: we tend to pick up on moods around us and reflect them back, producing a feedback effect. Group happiness might be an emergent phenomenon where individual feelings or habits of happiness are amplified or even generated through social and technological mediation. Clearly social media can have an important role in enabling or preventing this from happening.

Striving for happiness

Happiness is intrinsically attractive, often instrumentally good, but also maybe something good in itself. 

Why does happiness exist? An evolutionary account would be that motivational systems evolved to make organisms select actions that help them survive better and hence have more descendants. Aversive systems such as pain and fear signal conditions where action must be taken to avoid risk, while positive emotions signal conditions that should be sought out. In our evolutionary lineage this produces pleasure signals when goals are met, we anticipate them being met imminently or find something valuable by surprise: the deep neural basis for the emotion of happiness. This is purely instrumental for evolutionary fitness. Yet we humans can create new goals we find rewarding (since the capacity to learn or shift to new goals is very adaptive), and we can abstract our experiences into the abstract concept “happiness”. This leads to us striving for it for its own sake, in a sense short-circuiting what evolution aimed at. Yet from a human perspective, discarding the ruthless fitness maximization of nature in favor of our own relatively freely choosable aims increases our happiness and dignity[17]. 

If happiness is intrinsically attractive, why do we need help to enhance it? One reason is that people often do not recognize what makes them happier, and even then they may not choose it. The reasons vary, from cognitive biases to competing goals such as self-definition[18]. We are also often ignorant of our options, especially in the complex, changing modern world. Getting better information about options, recognizing which ones fit our happiness, and getting support to use them would enhance happiness.

In many situations we experience happy states or live a happy life when we have done well. There are actual reasons to be happy, and happiness a signal that these reasons are present[19]. One issue with enhancing happiness is that we might improve the signal rather than the reasons. Feeling accomplishment when nothing has been accomplished is a mistake, no matter how enjoyable. Hence any enhancement of happiness beyond hedonism needs to be sensitive to what we regard as actual sources of value, either by making us respond to them more, by pursuing them more successfully, or finding new sources of value.

The happiness spectrum

One useful way of considering happiness is along a time spectrum. At the brief end we have instant pleasures and emotional state. General feelings and enjoyable activities extend over longer time spans. Beyond that we have happiness as a trait, affecting the overall emotional tenor of days, months, and years. On the long timescale we also have life projects, well-being and eudaimonic happiness: a life well lived. While these components are different things they often strongly link to each other.

As we move from the brief pleasures to full well-being the dimensionality increases. Pleasure is in itself not about something, but a fulfilling relationship involves deep cognitive, emotional and social components - we love a particular person for various conscious and unconscious reasons, in a particular way, framed by mutual interactions and the surrounding society. Well-being may have a few fundamental components[20], but each of these encompass highly individual understandings and goals that differ from person to person. 

Along this spectrum interventions to help things along can take different forms. They can also act in different ways: by heightening a form of happiness, protecting it from unhappiness factors, giving coping mechanisms that internalize the protection, acting as prioritization or selection mechanisms that help choosing one’s happiness types, and training in achieving more complex forms of well-being.

Do we need a diverse “happiness diet”? We may conjecture from the above accounts that while the long-term high-dimensional pursuits may provide deep rewards tending towards the eudaimonic, they do not necessarily produce the hedonic rewards. Since long-term goals and habits need reinforcement by our often short-term emotions and thoughts, ensuring that there are enough pleasant experiences to motivate and relax us for the large projects (without distracting from them) appears necessary for long-term success. Conversely, forms of emotional and hedonic happiness often habituate, and an easy way of avoiding this is to shift between a variety of positive states. 

Cultural differences

It is also worthwhile to note that there are a fair bit of cultural differences in how people understand happiness and what it is linked with in life. Lay definitions often stress the psychological dimension (with harmony, satisfaction and positive emotions as the most common elements), but also include family, relations, health, etc. These definitions are to some degree predicted by demographics (e.g. older people more often stress spiritual elements than younger) and, to a smaller degree, cultural values. Positive emotion definitions in the more individualistic West tend towards exciting high-arousal emotions while emotion definitions in more collectivistic eastern societies have tended towards emphasizing low arousal positive emotions.[21]

Perhaps even more importantly for projects aiming to enhance happiness is that there are individual and cultural differences in whether happiness is seen as a positive thing that should be enhanced. Happiness may lead to optimism bias, risk-taking, and setting excessive expectations, but many also think it might cause restorative bad events (bad luck, envy, evil eye etc.), suffering, or distraction from spiritual/religious goals. Happiness may be seen as something that should be taken with moderation or intrinsically problematic[22]. Also, perceived pressure to be happy can itself be a source of unhappiness[23].

Another consideration is under what material conditions people seek happiness. While there is evidence that the positive impact of wealth on happiness declines with increasing wealth, it is still a factor - especially when there are perceived or absolute scarcities causing unhappiness, or when resources can be used to buy experiences, training or time. Strategies of contentment via lowered expectations and focus on inner states do not require much material goods, but are not automatically optimal.

What would a working definition of happiness be for us?

So, how is happiness usefully thought of for this project?

We aim to improve on happiness, so aspects of the concept that we cannot improve are outside the scope - except for aspects of happiness that interventions can impair, which we need to give due consideration of. 

We do not just want to improve the momentary emotional state, however delightful that might be, but the mid- to long-range happiness and wellbeing of large groups of people. They are going to be diverse, individually and culturally, and have multidimensional forms.

Hence, we arrive at a placeholder definition:

Happiness (in our sense) is a multidimensional state of positive emotion, subjective well-being, and actual well-being.

Doubtless some readers will feel slightly cheated by the broad and apparently all-encompassing definition. However, it was selected in the light of the above background with the aim of being the focus of actual attempts of enhancement.

• It has components, but the key thing is how they hang together to generate the overall state. 

• There can be different levels of intervention, aiming at different parts of the happiness spectrum, different contributing factors, or ways they interlink.

• It is not static: we respond to events, we learn how to be happier, we become happy with new things. Happiness research will doubtlessly also progress.

• Multimodal measures are harder to game. A narrow measure easily falls for Goodhart’s law, where optimizing for it loses sight of the actual good we are seeking: carefully defined, diverse measures have better chances of leading us towards the desired outcomes[24]. 

• For maximally safe enhancement of happiness one can focus on achieving the preconditions for happiness or safeguard against happiness-reducers. This is also ethically important: interventions that carry risk are far harder to research and apply in an ethical manner. 

This paper has unpacked the suitcase of happiness, and tried to outline what the general contents are and how they are packed together. The next step is to use this understanding to provide practical means of achieving the multidimensional but attractive value of these contents. 

References

[1] Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford.

[2] Happiness Foundation, London, Technical Report #2022-1, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford

[3] Haybron, D. M. (2013). Happiness: A very short introduction (Vol. 360). Oxford University Press.

[4] Haybron, Dan, "Happiness", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),     https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/happiness/ 

[5] Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition & emotion, 6(3-4), 169-200.

[6] Also, happiness is more stable than pleasure. Pleasure can come and go much faster than happiness.

[7] Henderson, L. W., Knight, T., & Richardson, B. (2013). An exploration of the well-being benefits of hedonic and eudaimonic behaviour. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(4), 322-336.

[8] Steel, P., Schmidt, J., & Shultz, J. (2008). Refining the relationship between personality and subjective well-being. Psychological bulletin, 134(1), 138.

[9] Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success?. Psychological bulletin, 131(6), 803.

[10] This means it is not a psychological trait (in a very strict sense); see Veenhoven, R. (1994). Is happiness a trait?. In Social Indicators Research 32, 101-160. ; Diener, E., Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., & Smith, H. L. (1999). Subjective well-being: Three decades of progress. Psychological bulletin, 125(2), 276.

[11] Diener, E. (1984). Subjective Well-Being. Psychological Bulletin, 95(3), 542-575.

[12] Busseri, M. A., & Sadava, S. W. (2011). A review of the tripartite structure of subjective well-being: Implications for conceptualization, operationalization, analysis, and synthesis. Personality and social psychology review, 15(3), 290-314.

[13] Crisp, Roger, "Well-Being", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/well-being/

[14] It is also the most popular theory among surveyed philosophers, getting about half of the votes: https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5206

[15] https://www.etymonline.com/word/happy

[16] Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., Aaker, J. L., & Garbinsky, E. N. (2013). Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. The journal of positive psychology, 8(6), 505-516.

[17] Evolution is at most a local fitness maximizer, not a happiness maximizer. Hence we should expect that even in the best case we have evolved to be happy in just situations that would have maximized our evolutionary fitness in our ancestral environment, not in our current environment, nor with our own preferences and present options. Happiness enhancement appears to succeed at meeting the evolutionary optimality challenge for being a good enhancement in Bostrom, N., & Sandberg, A. (2009) The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement, In Human Enhancement, eds. Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): pp. 375-416.

[18] Hsee, C. K., & Hastie, R. (2006). Decision and experience: why don't we choose what makes us happy?. Trends in cognitive sciences, 10(1), 31-37.

[19] This is where most people’s intuitions diverge from the hedonist account in philosophy, which states that it is indeed the feeling that has the value. As Nozick’s famous “experience machine” thought experiment shows, most regard at least some of the reasons to be happy as more important than the happiness.

[20] E.g. Ryff and Keyes list the dimensions of self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life and personal growth. Ryff, C. D., & Keyes, C. L. M. (1995). The structure of psychological well-being revisited. Journal of personality and social psychology, 69(4), 719.

[21] Delle Fave, A., Brdar, I., Wissing, M. P., Araujo, U., Castro Solano, A., Freire, T., ... & Soosai-Nathan, L. (2016). Lay definitions of happiness across nations: The primacy of inner harmony and relational connectedness. Frontiers in psychology, 7, 30. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00030/full

[22] Joshanloo, M., Lepshokova, Z. K., Panyusheva, T., Natalia, A., Poon, W. C., Yeung, V. W. L., ... & Jiang, D. Y. (2014). Cross-cultural validation of fear of happiness scale across 14 national groups. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45(2), 246-264.

[23] Dejonckheere, E., Rhee, J., Baguma, P., Barry, O., Becker, M., Bilewicz, M., ... & Bastian, B. (2022). Perceiving societal pressure to be happy is linked to poor well‑being, especially in happy nations. Scientific Reports.

[24] Manheim, D. (2018). Building Less Flawed Metrics: Dodging Goodhart and Campbell's Laws. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/98288/

Appendix A: links to existing aggregate happiness indices

There is a large literature on measuring and indexing happiness, far too wide to review in this introductory paper. The above discussion of subjective well-being shows a fairly common approach. A future paper will hopefully give a map of how different indices touch on different parts of our definition, and what aspects have not yet been measured or indexed that may be worth exploring.

Generally indices either measure individual happiness or collective aggregates: there appear to be a dearth of intermediate measures for group happiness. The collective aggregates are of interest for the development of “happiness GDP” and similar concepts for setting societal objectives promoting well-being. Below is an overview of aggregate measures.

Appendix B: approaches towards happiness

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