Bruce Hood on the Science of Happiness

Are university students unhappy? We won’t generalize, but many are, and this was something Bruce Hood noted. Being an experimental psychologist who teaches at the University of Bristol,  an opportunity presented itself. Why not start a course on the science of happiness, and while teaching it collect data from the students attending?

The resulting course (created with advice from one his former students, Laurie Santos) proved popular, and Hood last year published a book, The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Hood explains to interviewer David Edmonds the scientific basis of happiness, some details on how to measure it, and then some of those lessons for harvesting its benefits.

Hood explains how scholarship has determined some genetic basis for happiness, how circumstances contribute to but don’t dictate happiness, and how individuals focus more on the negative than the positive, which clearly not the most nurturing environment for happiness. There is a bias towards negativity, he says, “So that’s why we know the negative things more quickly and more loudly than the positive.”

That sounds bad (see – negative). But there’s another bias at play, one that also favors optimism, that Hood attempts to harness. “So we tend to see the future as grim, and we have these distortions. But what’s interesting, if you ask people, ‘Do you think to yourself individually you’ll be better off in five years’ time?’ Then it seems to switch. People seem to say, ‘Yeah, I think I will be better.’ So, it’s a kind of interesting paradox that we think the world’s going to hell in a basket. And yet, as individuals, we think things can get better.”

Hood’s research interests arose around the visual development of infants, and then evolved to include intuitive theories, self-identity, essentialism and the cognitive processes behind magical thinking in adults. It was in relation to those that Hood first appeared on Social Science Bites, addressing the human belief in the supernatural. You can listen to that podcast, and also enjoy a lovely Alex Cagan poster built around the episode.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: Professor Bruce Hood is a psychologist who several years ago introduced a new course at Bristol University. It’s called The Science of Happiness. He’s also now authored a successful book with the same name.

Bruce Hood. I normally say welcome to Social Science Bites, but with you, I have to say welcome back to Social Science Bites because you’re the first interviewee we’ve had who has appeared for the second time. Although the first time I think was 15 years ago. But Bruce Hood, welcome to Social Science Bites.

Bruce Hood: Oh my goodness. Dave, you made me feel old again. Well, thank you. I’m delighted to be back again, and obviously I love the podcast. So yeah, let’s go for it.

Dave Edmonds: So, we’re talking today about the science of happiness. It seems strange to talk about a science of happiness. Do we even have a snappy definition of what happiness is?

Bruce Hood: Well, that’s a good question. You know, when I was putting this course together right at the beginning, there were lots of things I could have called it. I was trying to attract a whole cohort of sort of young millennial types, and I wanted them to kind of understand in a very brief instance what the course was supposed to be about. So I just called it “The Science of Happiness,” which has turned out to be kind of controversial as a term because most people think of happiness as this elusive, ephemeral thing that is nebulous and you can’t even kind of describe it. But actually there is a science basis for studying emotions, and happiness to me is really a combination of feelings and emotions, but also the way that we think about the world. So, for example, happiness also includes the notion of feelings of success.

So yes, it’s a short title. It’s snappy. But it was done deliberately just to sort of convey the general theme of what I was talking about.

Dave Edmonds: Your early research was on the cognitive development of children. This seems quite a leap for you. Tell us why you turned to happiness as a research topic.

Bruce Hood: Well, out of desperation, to be honest, Dave. I was working in university sectors and like a lot of my colleagues, we’ve witnessed a sea change in the students. They’re incredibly anxious these days and they’re scoring much higher on levels of mental dysphoria. So they’re generally unhappier. That’s pretty bad. I don’t like to see unhappy students, but they’re also more difficult to teach because they’re constantly worrying about their performance then this really disrupts the whole educational process. 

So this was back in 2018 and we’ve had a bit of a crisis at Bristol University with a spate of suicides. Now look, this was not specific to Bristol, but the press descended on us and called it a toxic environment, which was really, really unfair, because literally if you’d looked around the sector, you would have found that everyone was having a problem. And I discovered that a former student of mine, Laurie Santos, who’s had this meteoric rise, who I had taught originally when I was at Harvard, she was in charge of a college in Yale. And she was also experiencing a problem, so she felt she wanted to put a course on. So I contacted Laurie, and this course in Yale, by the way, had been a phenomenal success.

She shared her notes, and my version of the course, I called it The Science of Happiness, to kind of attract people. And I put it on just to see if anyone would be interested and 600 turned up, even though it wasn’t a credit-bearing course. So that showed me that there was a real demand here. And from then on I just decided to put my effort into trying to make students happier.

So yeah, it’s a big departure from my earlier work on development. But actually I go back to my understanding my theorizing what’s going on in child development to try and provide what I think is a coherent model of what is the science or the basis of happiness.

Dave Edmonds: Before we get to the lessons to how to become happy, I’ve always thought one of the interesting aspects of happiness is, it seems to me. asymmetrical with pain. When you’re in pain, you’re very conscious that you’re in pain. It’s very present. But when you’re happy, it’s something you sort of look back on afterwards; you’ve had a pleasant conversation or an enjoyable meal, but you’re not happy in the present.

Bruce Hood: Ohh, David, that’s astute as always — nothing less I expect from you. Absolutely. In fact, I could have called the course The Science of Unhappiness because it’s really about the unhappiness that we kind of have, which is so pervasive. We’ve evolved the brain which really pays attention to when things are not going right, and just like pain. It’s a signal to tell you to change your behavior. So we don’t really notice when things are going well, just as you point out. But I wouldn’t have done so well if I kind of called the course The Science of Unhappiness, because I would have put people off. But you’re absolutely right. There is a bias towards the negativity as complacency, somewhat to when things are going right. So that’s why we know the negative things more quickly and more loudly than the positive.

Dave Edmonds: So we’re going to get to the lessons in a moment. One more question before we get there. Is there a hereditary basis to happiness? Do some of us just emerge from the womb happy?

Bruce Hood: Well, yes there is. There is a biological basis and so we can do a thing called behavioral genetics, which is basically a fancy way of saying is that we look at the relationship between genes and behavior by studying twins who are either identical or non-identical. You can work out the degree of relatedness, and then you can factor in how much of that is the biology and how much of that is the environment. And this is how we know that the genetics for intelligence and sexuality, these sorts of things. Optimism and happiness are pretty close to intelligence, so it’s around about 40 percent of heritability. That doesn’t mean 40 percent of your heritability is down to your parents. It means on average, if you look across a big population, it averages out to around 40 percent. Some people are very much like their parents and some people are very unlike their parents. But if you look at the population as a total, it’s only 40 percent.

Which means, that for most of us, there are other factors playing a role in what makes us happy. And I put it down to circumstances. But even then, there are additional factors which are things like how do you interpret or process events? And that’s largely down to developmental processes and society. And the way that we’ve been trained to cope with adversity.

Dave Edmonds: But circumstances might mean having a very unhappy family that you’re brought up in. It might mean being from a very poor family of having to struggle, those sorts of things.

Bruce Hood: Well, the thing about behavioral genetics is even though we talk about these as different factors, we have to recognize they’re all interrelated. Poor upbringing is related to genes to some extent, is related to circumstances, so they’re all interrelated. Unfortunately, they’re very difficult to tease apart. But yes, I think it’s kind of an interesting point: two people could face exactly the same adversity and yet one seems to recover much more quickly than the other, so I think it’s really our capacity to recover, not so much. Having a baseline of happiness, as it were. It’s more how do you deal when things are not going right? So I think that’s where we can make a difference because you can’t control uncontrollable events in life, you can’t control your genes, but what you probably can do is you can help people overcome things.

So it’s not unlike education. There’s a genetic basis for intelligence, but everyone recognizes that education is valuable to everyone. In the same way I would suggest that positive psychology and what we’re talking about is the sorts of things that can make a difference.

Dave Edmonds: Now your claim is that we can make ourselves happier by adopting certain lessons from the empirical research. Let’s go through some of that. As I understand it, a key one is that loneliness is not good for us. We need social interaction with friends and family.

Bruce Hood: Absolutely. The overarching framework is this idea that we need to shift away from being very self-centered or egocentric to becoming more allocentric. Now in development, this is a normal pathway. So children are very egocentric when they’re born. They have to kind of learn that other people have their own minds. They have their own attitudes, their own belief systems, because when children are very young, they assume everyone knows of things the same way as they do. But in order to become a contributing member of society, we’ve got to recognize and negotiate and communicate and cooperate with others. So we need to literally expand our networks to become more other-focused.

Now, there are mechanisms which consolidate that and amplify that. So for example, being ostracized or rejected or neglected is really painful and literally it registers in the pain centers of the brain in the same way as social isolation or hitting your hand with a hammer. This is a signal from nature telling us to take a course of aversive action to be included again.

Now, if that becomes profound and chronic, as in the case of loneliness, then this actually impacts on us, not just in terms of our mental health, but also our physical health. Which is really quite surprising because we can understand being a bit lonely. But actually, studies show that if you look at the factors that contribute to an earlier death, loneliness is one of the strongest factors and it reduces life expectancy on about average 10 to 15 years.

Dave Edmonds: Which is an extraordinary statistic. Another thing you point to is the importance of optimism. Tell us about that.

Bruce Hood: Yeah, optimism is an interesting one, isn’t it? Because most people, you ask them, you know, how are things going? And the majority of us think the world is going to hell in a basket. And clearly I don’t know when this goes out, but at the current moment, we’re going through a real kind of economic crisis. So I think everyone is really terrified about the future. So we think things are terrible. We don’t really think things are going to be better in the future. But objectively, if you just take the long-term view, we are actually a lot better than we were 100 years ago. Everyone has a shower. Most people can have a shower, but 100 years ago that would have been a rarity, but now it’s commonplace. So we get used to all the comforts of life. We get used to all the things like education. Having our children survive beyond age of 2 is a kind of expected.

A hundred years ago, though, we would have been very different. We’ve got a very short-term view of things. So we tend to see the future as grim, and we have these distortions. But what’s interesting, if you ask people, “Do you think to yourself individually you’ll be better off in five years’ time?” Then it seems to switch. People seem to say, “Yeah, I think I will be better.” So, it’s a kind of interesting paradox that we think the world’s going to hell in a basket. And yet, as individuals, we think things can get better. And I think this comes down to a drive of optimism bias. Tali Sharot has talked about this. We tend to think that our lives will get better, and that, of course, motivates us to keep living and keep trying.

Dave Edmonds: If you think everybody these days has a shower every day, I need to introduce you to my sons. But that point about, we think things are going to get better over a five-year period. There’s a very nice way of illustrating that. You talk about a ladder experiment. Can you explain that?

Bruce Hood: Well, this is the Cantril ladder. This is actually a really common technique to assess people’s attitudes. It’s actually the measure they use on the World Happiness Report. I don’t know if you know about that, Dave, but every year they ask countries and they do sampling of several thousand people and it’s a continuous process and they say, imagine your life as a ladder with 10 steps on it. Imagine the best possible life you could have is the top of the ladder at 10 and the worst possible life is 0. Where do you think you are on the ladder?

But they’ve also done this for people to project what they think they’ll be in five-years’ time. And when you ask that question, where do you think you’ll be at in five years’ time, the average is around about 7 on the ladder. So most people are above what would be the median.

Dave Edmonds: Why do you think optimism is good for us?

Bruce Hood: Well, I think the alternative, which is extreme pessimism, would be self-defeating. Obviously, we’d never put ourselves forward. Optimists are more resilient, they’re happier people, so they project more positivity. We tend to like being around people who are optimistic. So as a disposition, it’s important to try and adopt that.

But I would say also you have to be somewhat careful because you can be optimistic in some frames of your life and pessimistic in others. So it’s not as if it’s an entirely blanket approach. And what you don’t want to be is unrealistically optimistic, because then you become reckless. Someone who doesn’t believe anything can ever go wrong is probably going to make some incorrect decisions. So there has to be a balance. But given the choice, I would suggest that we try to see the silver lining by adopting that attitude, you’re going to be more likely to overcome those setbacks.

Dave Edmonds: Right. Because you would think there was a spectrum from pessimism to realism to optimism, and you might think intuitively that realism was the way to go.

Bruce Hood: Yes, but then of course, there are times where we do have to push ourselves that extra mile and that requires a belief that things will be better. I mean, take marriage. Everyone thinks their marriage is going to succeed even though we know that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce and even divorce lawyers believe their marriages are going to succeed. So it’s not gullible, but we have to have this really hopeful view that things are going to work out. Otherwise we wouldn’t get married.

Dave Edmonds: Is this really a disposition we can do anything about?

Bruce Hood: Yes, you can, and I think it’s all to do with reframing the circumstances. So, I talk a lot about the way that left to our own devices. We tend to blow things out of proportion. We ruminate about things, and we think that things can never get better. So what I recommend is a technique which comes from Marty Seligman. He’s one of the forefathers of positive psychology and basically it comes in two parts. It’s called ABCDE. The ABC is you identify what is the adversity, what you believe has gone wrong and what do you think the consequences of it. I recommend to my students and anyone listening that you invest in a journal: you write down if something’s gone bad and you’re thinking really pessimistically about it. Maybe something happened in the past or you gave a bad interview or whatever. You write down exactly what you think went wrong, what you believe was the interpretation and what will the consequences be. So, what you’re doing is you’re articulating in as much detail as possible everything that’s negative.

Having done everything like that, you then switch gear into the so-called D and E – D is dispute and E is energized. You switch gears. You look at the evidence you’ve just written down and you come up with alternatives for it. Like a good defense lawyer, you undermine every argument. You say, “Well, you don’t think you had a good interview, but in fact there was some good evidence and you’ve done in the past. And by the way, you know, Dave thinks you’re great. That’s why you’re on the second time again.” And once you kind of go through that process, and then look back at what you just wrote, you can realize that something which was preoccupying you 15 minutes ago you’ve now resolved and this should then give you enough strength to move on.

So, if you do this over enough times, you can start to adopt a more optimistic view rather than ruminating, and being stuck in the past.

Dave Edmonds: It seems to me that linked to this debate is how we view other people. And there’s a fascinating study that you cite, which comes from the University of Chicago, about an imaginary woman called Barbara. Can you just explain that?

Bruce Hood: So, this is a study looking at the way first impressions really impact upon us and more importantly, the emphasis that we put on negative information. So we hear about Barbara and we learn that she’s been bad for a couple of occasions and we asked people to estimate how long is it before she starts acting good so that you can think that she’s changed into a better person. And we have the reverse situation where she’s actually being good and then does something bad. And the general finding is that if you have a negative impression about someone, it takes a lot longer and more evidence for you to change your impression.

Whereas if they have been good for a long time, you don’t really seem to notice it. So we are sensitive to negative information, and we give that much more credence than when people are being very good. And it goes back to this bias I mentioned earlier that in our brain we pay more attention to potential threats and people who are going to do us wrong. It’s really a system to just focus on those who are potentially enemies.

Dave Edmonds: Let’s get to one more lesson. You suggest that we try and control our attention. What does that mean?

Bruce Hood: OK, so this I think has been one of the biggest discoveries for me in this world, because not only am I teaching this course, but we actually run studies and I have been fascinated by what I think is a remarkable discovery. Namely that if we’re not focused on a task and paying attention to things, our minds are wandering about 50 percent of the time. You know you’re driving along, you’re not actually paying attention. That’s kind of alarming if you think your pilots and your chauffeurs — not that I have a chauffeur! – but If people are not paying attention 50 percent of the time, it does make you wonder what’s going on. Now this is a study done by [Matthew] Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert at Harvard. This is really quite shocking because when they asked them at the same time, “OK, what are you thinking about? And by the way, how happy are you?” When people’s minds are wandering, they’re generally unhappy. Why? Well, because they’re ruminating about things that haven’t gone right or they’re worrying about things coming up in the future.

So we ran this study on a couple of weeks ago with our students and we found that their minds were wandering 60 percent of the time. So even more so! And again we found this really interesting relationship between unhappiness and mind wandering. Now, if they were thinking about something really positive, yeah, that was fine. But if it was something neutral or something which was nasty, of course they were feeling unhappy. So I think this is really interesting because we know that when you’re not focused on a task, there’s a circuitry in the brain called the default mode network which kicks into action. This was discovered by chance. We put people into brain scanners and told them just relax, don’t think about anything and what they found, paradoxically, was this network kicks into action. And this network represents our self, represents others and it’s the network whereby we ruminate and we assimilate, and we think about what’s gone wrong in the past and what’s going to go wrong in the future. So I think this is what’s going on during mind wandering: we are slipping into this egocentric, self-focused concern about things which makes us generally unhappy.

Dave Edmonds: This sounds like it’s linked to something we touched on earlier about happiness being connected to flow, as it were, we need to be deeply engrossed in an activity.

Bruce Hood: That’s absolutely true. So Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi introduced this concept of flow, and it’s a very simple formula. It’s basically you need to be in a situation where you’re presented with a task which isn’t greatly beyond your ability, but tasking enough for you to rise to the occasion. So it’s really engrossing. You don’t want a task which is too overwhelming because you’ll never get through it, or a task which is so easy  and dull that you find it boring. But when you find that sweet spot of a task which seems to demand your attention, then this pulls you along and time seems to evaporate. Indeed, you lose that sense of self. It can be so absorbing, and this is often associated with extreme moments of happiness and not necessarily the bliss, but the sense of contentment.

Dave Edmonds: So sometimes we have the luxury of being able to select which tasks we engage in, but sometimes we don’t. In the latter case, do you have suggestions for how we focus our attention?

Bruce Hood: Well, one of the things that we recommend is that we need to discover what are our strengths. The ways that you can do that: You can do personality tests to discover what are your individual strengths and interests, and if you can find activities which match those strengths — so for me, it’s largely to do with writing and creativity. These are the two areas which I’m good at. And by the way, when I start writing on a project I can lose hours when I’m in that mode of flow. So I think the ideal situation I understand not everyone can find this, but if you can find something which taps into your strengths, then it shouldn’t become work so much it becomes much more of a calling. So it’s really understanding yourself and putting yourself in the situations where you feel most comfortable.

Dave Edmonds: Is it more difficult in the modern world with social media and zillion other distractions?

Bruce Hood: Yeah. I think one of the big problems is the ubiquitous nature of social media. It’s kind of funny when you when you ask people how things going you often hear. “I’m busy.” Everyone’s really, really busy, but busy doing what? Well, often answering really ridiculous sort of notifications on their phones. Because attention is the new economy; attention is the new currency for the technology companies. They want your attention. And they design all these interfaces deliberately to try and capture your attention, and unfortunately, we relinquish that far too easily, in my opinion. Which is why in my classes, for example, I get the students to turn their phones off. They’re not allowed to use their phones, and not because I’m worried they’re going to have social media issues, it’s because I want their full attention. You cannot be dividing your attention between listening to someone and monitoring your phone at the same time.

Dave Edmonds: So we’ve only been through a few of your lessons, but if I were to follow the complete recipe, would it work? Would I become happier? How long would this effect last?

Bruce Hood: OK, so the course is called The Science of Happiness, and so everything I say is evidence-based. In other words, we actually measure happiness levels of the students before and after the course, and we follow them up. And every year we’ve run the course, we find exactly the same magnitude of effect, which is about a10 to 15 percent — depending on which measures you’re looking at — Increase in positive scores.

That’s not insignificant. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be 10 to 15 percent happier or healthier or wealthier or lighter? We could all do with that. So, it’s not transformative for some students, by the way. They do change their lifestyles, for most of them, they experience this increase, but there’s good and bad news. The good news is, of course, you get the increase. The bad news is that we followed them up six months later and a lot of them have gone back down to baseline again.

Why? Well, because of all these distractions, it needs to become part of your lifestyle in order to sort of see the benefits. The good news is that we also followed students up two years later, before they graduate, because they take the course in the first year. And those students who kept up with the activity,  they had sustained and maintained their elevated well-being. So it does work.

Again, it’s not going to change you overnight. I make the comparison between physical health and mental health. You don’t go into the gym and pick up a weight, and then you’re suddenly fit. You’ve got to make it part of your lifestyle in order to sort of prioritize these sorts of things. And if you can do that, then in general, yeah, you should get better.

Dave Edmonds: I can imagine critics saying, “Well, this is all very well, but it’s tinkering around the edges.” We’re going through potentially this huge economic crisis. At the moment, the factors that really affect our well-being are public policy issues to do with distribution of wealth. Huge issues like that, not whether we can try and make ourselves more optimistic on a day-to-day basis.

Bruce Hood: OK, so I think that we can draw the analogy with economics. There’s a field called microeconomics and macroeconomics. OK, so we can think about the macro effects as what you’re talking about. And I would agree entirely with you. So for example, going back to World Happiness Report I mentioned. Every year it’s run, we find that a clustering of countries right at the top who seemed to be the happiest countries. And these are the Nordic countries as in Norway, Finland, Sweden. Why? Well, they’re not walking around with big smiles on their face, deliriously happy. The reason is because they feel safe. They have really strong social support, they have much more equality. The countries which are the unhappiness have much more inequality, such as the United States. And that’s getting worse.

So yes, you’re right. Policy plays a really important role. It’s our sense of connection to others and our interconnectedness, which goes back to what I was saying about becoming less egocentric, less individualistic, and more connected to others. So yes, you can make probably more sustained important societal change by changing our economic policy.

But you can also make a change at your individual life, and this is where you start to draw the right comparisons. When you live in a very individualistic society like the States or the UK, we tend to be unhappier because we’re drawing the wrong comparisons. We’re competing against others, and unrealistic expectations. If you are brought up in a society where it’s much more egalitarian and you see the relevant situation of everyone else, you’re going to be a happier person.

And that’s why, if you’re very individualistic and very self-centered, you’re going to get used to your material things very, very quickly. You’re going to just aspire to the next thing. You get on what’s called the hedonic treadmill. So you get very used to things. If on the other hand, you have a much more interconnected view of life, you can see and appreciate there are other people who have got things going on their lives, which maybe are more paramount to them — and that helps you to get your own life into perspective. So yeah, micro/macro.

Dave Edmonds: I know you a little and it seems to me that you’re a pretty happy chap. How do you rate yourself on the happy scale?

Bruce Hood: Oh, I’m definitely about an 8, even though I’ve had a pretty challenging childhood — I do talk about that. But yeah, I have always been very optimistic about things. That said, I have actually become better after teaching this course, so I can see how I’ve improved. It might be just I’m getting older, but I think the goals I’m chasing these days are a little bit more realistic and I’m less anxious about failure.

David Edmonds: Bruce Hood, thank you very much indeed.

Bruce Hood: Thank you, Dave.