The recipe for happiness

Wouldn’t it be great if you could walk into a store and buy a recipe for lifelong happiness?

Recent research seems to suggest that that objective may no longer be out of reach. All you need to do is to follow a few key precepts. Be just, have a goal and be generous. That’s it.

“The just man is happy, and the unjust man is miserable,” Plato declares in The Republic. A noble thought, to be sure, but Socrates’ most famous student didn’t have data to back up his belief. But now the World Values Survey, which has been measuring these parameter in 100 countries since 1981, has the results for happiness.  As part of the 2005-06 wave of the World Values Survey, respondents were asked in face-to-face interviews: On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life? There were also four ethics questions that ask how acceptable or unacceptable they felt a particular practice is: claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled; avoiding paying your fare on public transportation; cheating on taxes; and accepting a bribe. The University of Missouri economist “ found a correlation between how people responded to ethics questions and their satisfaction with life. ..generally, people who believe that these particular ethical scenarios are not acceptable also tend to indicate they are more satisfied with life.”


Admittedly, this measure of ethics is less than ideal. It certainly does not reveal the actual behavior of people. However, the four statements have a common, underlying ethical construct, which is that each of them expresses an action that could either directly or indirectly harm others, or society generally. Also, the measure of happiness is relatively crude. If someone asks you how satisfied you are with your life, your answer can be affected by many things that happened to you that particular day or week or month. But still these findings are consistent with the view that happiness is derived from doing well, and from meeting psychological rather than material or hedonistic needs. While income, personal characteristics and societal values play a role in affecting happiness, so do personal ethics. Plato had it right " the just man is happy".

According to a new study in the Journal of Happiness Studies ( yes, there is such a journal), people who engage in activities that increase competency, such as exercising, studying or working, experience decreased happiness, lower levels of enjoyment and higher levels of stress while doing so. Yet in spite of the negative effects they felt on an hourly basis, the participants reported that they felt happy and satisfied with the same activities when they reflected on them at the end of the day. The study investigated whether people who spend time on activities that fulfill certain psychological needs — the need to be competent, feel connected to others and be autonomous or self-directed — experience greater happiness. They also examined the effects of fulfilling these needs on a person’s moment-to-moment happiness.

It seems that activities promoting autonomy and connectedness increased happiness on an hourly and daily basis, but the greatest increase in momentary happiness was experienced by participants who were involved in something that contributed to their sense of autonomy. It looks like Albert Einstein had it right when he advised, “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal.”

Then there are two new studies that suggest giving to others makes us happy, even happier than spending on ourselves. What’s more, our kindness might create a virtuous cycle that promotes lasting happiness and altruism. In one of the studies, published last year in the Journal of Social Psychology, researchers in Great Britain had participants take a survey measuring life satisfaction, then they assigned all 86 participants to one of three groups. One group was instructed to perform a daily act of kindness for the next 10 days. Another group was also told to do something new each day over those 10 days. A third group received no instructions. After the 10 days were up, the researchers asked the participants to complete the life satisfaction survey again. The groups that practiced kindness and engaged in novel acts both experienced a significant—and roughly equal—boost in happiness; the third group didn’t get any happier. The findings suggest that good deeds do in fact make people feel good—even when performed over as little as 10 days—and there may be particular benefits to varying our acts of kindness, as novelty seems linked to happiness as well.

But kindness may have a longer, even more profound effect on our happiness, according to the second study, published online in the Journal of Happiness Studies in April , where the researchers made two big findings. First, consistent with the British study, people in general felt happier when they were asked to remember a time they bought something for someone else—even happier than when they remembered buying something for themselves. But the second finding is even more provocative: The happier participants felt about their past generosity, the more likely they were in the present to choose to spend on someone else instead of themselves. Not all participants who remembered their past kindness felt happy. But the ones who did feel happy were overwhelmingly more likely to double down on altruism. The results suggest a kind of “positive feedback loop” between kindness and happiness, so that one encourages the other.

So the recipe- be just, have a goal and be kind. Simple isn’t it?