what is joy hypothesis

Empathic joy and the empathy-altruism hypothesis

Affiliation.

• 1 Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence 66045-2160.
• PMID: 1941512
• DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.61.3.413

Three experiments tested whether empathy evokes egoistic motivation to share vicariously in the victim's joy at improvement (the empathic-joy hypothesis) instead of altruistic motivation to increase the victim's welfare (the empathy-altruism hypothesis). In Experiment 1, Ss induced to feel either low or high empathy for a young woman in need were given a chance to help her. Some believed that if they helped they would receive feedback about her improvement; others did not. In Experiments 2 and 3, Ss induced to feel either low or high empathy were given a choice of getting update information about a needy person's condition. Before choosing, they were told the likelihood of the person's condition having improved--and of their experiencing empathic joy--was 20%, was 50%, or was 80%. Results of none of the experiments patterned as predicted by the empathic-joy hypothesis; instead, results of each were consistent with the empathy-altruism hypothesis.

Publication types

• Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.
• Helping Behavior

What is empathic joy hypothesis?

The Empathy Joy hypothesis states that the reason for someone helping another in need are positive feelings associated with the altruistic behavior. Helping others is a reward in itself because it brings a person happiness and joy when they commit a helping behavior.

What is the empathy-altruism hypothesis quizlet?

According to the empathy-altruism hypothesis, when people feel empathy toward another person (they experience events and emotions the other person experiences), they attempt to help that person purely for altruistic reasons.

Are empathy and altruism related?

The connection between empathy and altruism is quite simple, according to the empathyaltruism hypothesisempathy is the emotion that triggers an altruistic motive (for a review, see Batson, 2011). … Both egoism and altruism have an ultimate goal of increasing someone’s welfare.

Is empathic emotion a source of altruistic motivation?

Is Empathic Emotion a Source of Altruistic Motivation? It has been suggested that empathy leads to altruistic rather than egoistic mo- tivation to help. … Evidence indicates that feeling empathy for the person in need is an important mo- tivator of helping (cf.

Who proposed empathy altruism hypothesis?

C. Daniel Batson Social psychologist C.Daniel Batson formulated the empathy-altruism hypothesis as a revision and extension of the ideas developed by these philosophers and psychologists.

Which of them is involved in the empathic joy hypothesis?

Kyle Smith, Jack Keating, and Ezra Stotland proposed the empathicjoy hypothesis, which claims that people feeling empathic concern help to get the pleasure of sharing vicariously in the joy that the target of empathy feels when his or her need is removed.

Why does self esteem decline during elementary school?

Self-esteem tends to decline during elementary school because children:can realistically compare their abilities to their peers. Children who believe they are powerless to affect their fate, and so give up, feeling that they should not try to succeed, have developed: learned helplessness.

Why is altruism a part of prosocial behavior quizlet?

Prosocial behavior is any action intended to help others. One motivation for prosocial behavior is altruism, or the desire to help others with no expectation of reward. In this lesson, we exploreprosocial behavior and the elements that social psychologists have identified as predicting it. You just studied 24 terms!

What does the social exchange theory suggest about the nature of altruism quizlet?

Second: According to the social exchange theory, people help others in situations in which they hope it would result in more rewards and fewer cost. … In empathy and altruism perspective, people are more likely to help others when they feel empathy toward that person regardless of what they have to gain.

Are Empaths selfish?

This does not mean that empaths are self-absorbed: it’s quite the opposite, actually. … If an empath needs to remove themselves to a quiet, still space in order to sort themselves out, they’re not being selfish, antisocial, or self-absorbed at all. They just need some stillness for the sake of balance and wellbeing.

Is empathy actually selfish?

Empathy is selfish It is, fundamentally, a selfish tool, as opposed to an altruistic set of impulses. Empathy contextualises oneself. It grounds a person in their surroundings, allowing them to ‘soak up’ the emotions of others, in order to heal themselves and intake new information.

What are altruistic motives?

Behavior is normally described as altruistic when it is motivated by a desire to benefit someone other than oneself for that person’s sake. The term is used as the contrary of self-interested or selfish or egoisticwords applied to behavior that is motivated solely by the desire to benefit oneself.

What is a cognitive explanation for altruism?

While the definition of altruism involves doing for others without reward, there may still be cognitive incentives that are not obvious. For example, we might help others to relieve our own distress or because being kind to others upholds our view of ourselves as kind people.

What do you think is the primary motive for helping behavior egoism or altruism?

Altruistic help Although many researchers believe that egoism is the only motivation for helping, others suggest that altruismhelping that has as its ultimate goal the improvement of another’s welfaremay also be a motivation for helping under the right circumstances.

What does research suggest about the connection between social class and altruism?

What does research suggest about the connection between social class and altruism? People who are not wealthy give a higher proportion of their incomes to charity.

What is the difference between altruism and empathy?

Definition. Altruism is the practice of selfless concern for others’ welfare while empathy is the ability to understand another person’s perspective and to share his or her feelings.

What is the meaning of altruistic behavior?

Altruism is when we act to promote someone else’s welfare, even at a risk or cost to ourselves. … Evolutionary scientists speculate that altruism has such deep roots in human nature because helping and cooperation promote the survival of our species.

What is the difference between altruism and compassion?

is that altruism is regard for others, both natural and moral without regard for oneself; devotion to the interests of others; brotherly kindness; selflessness; contrasted with egoism or selfishness while compassion is deep awareness of the suffering of another, coupled with the wish to relieve it.

Which of the following is a component of empathy quizlet?

What are the three distinct components of empathy? Emotional empathy, empathic accuracy, empathic concern.

What is the competitive altruism approach?

Competitive altruism is a hypothesis that attempts to explain the presence of cooperative behaviors (like helping and sharing) in organisms that don’t have a direct benefit to the organism performing the the behavior.

What are the objectives of social psychology?

The goal of social psychology is to understand cognition and behavior as they naturally occur in a social context, but the very act of observing people can influence and alter their behavior. For this reason, many social psychology experiments utilize deception to conceal or distort certain aspects of the study.

Why does self-esteem drop in adolescence?

Teenagers’ self-esteem is often affected by the physical and hormonal changes they experience, especially during puberty . Teens undergo major changes in their lives and their self-esteem can often become fragile. … Teens who set goals in their lives have higher self-esteem than those who do not.

How do elementary students build self-esteem?

• Five Strategies for Self Esteem.
• Use Positive Encouragement.
• Teach Boundaries and Lessons.
• Provide Feedback and Corrections.
• Correct Inaccurate Beliefs.
• Provide Consistent Love and Support.

How accepting yourself can improve your self-esteem?

Improving Your Self-Esteem

• Positive thinking. Try your best to avoid thinking negative thoughts about yourself. …
• Learn from mistakes. We all screw up a lot. …
• Be adventurous. Try new things, explore new hobbies, eat new foods! …
• Accept yourself. …
• Let your voice be heard. …
• Lend a hand. …
• Practice self-care.

What is altruism example?

Altruism refers to behavior that benefits another individual at a cost to oneself. For example, giving your lunch away is altruistic because it helps someone who is hungry, but at a cost of being hungry yourself. … Recent work suggests that humans behave altruistically because it is emotionally rewarding.

Why is altruism a part of prosocial behavior?

Prosocial behavior covers the broad range of actions intended to benefit one or more people other than oneselfactions such as helping, comforting, sharing, and cooperation. Altruism is motivation to increase another person’s welfare; it is contrasted to egoism, the motivation to increase one’s own welfare.

What is the social exchange theory quizlet?

Social Exchange theory looks at the economics of relationships; how people evaluate the costs and rewards of their current relationships. … -Negative costs are subtracted from positive rewards. -When rewards exceed costs, the overall evaluation is positive. -When costs exceed rewards, the overall evaluation is negative.

What does the social exchange theory suggest about the nature of altruism?

On one hand, social exchange theory posits that people will help only when the benefits of helping outweigh the costs. On the other hand, the empathy-altruism hypothesis says that people are altruistically motivated to help others for whom they feel empathy.

How do evolutionary psychologists use the concepts of kin selection and the reciprocity norm to explain human prosocial behavior?

Evolutionary psychologists used the kin-selection to explain how people would act altruistically first upon their own genetic relatives first before non-genetic relatives because of they share some of the same genes for greater survival for future generations.

How can a social trap create conflict?

In social traps, two or more individuals engage in mutually destructive behavior by rationally pursuing their own self-interests. People in conflict tend to expect the worst of each other, producing mirror-image perceptions that can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Graduated from ENSAT (national agronomic school of Toulouse) in plant sciences in 2018, I pursued a CIFRE doctorate under contract with Sun’Agri and INRAE ​​in Avignon between 2019 and 2022. My thesis aimed to study dynamic agrivoltaic systems, in my case in arboriculture. I love to write and share science related Stuff Here on my Website. I am currently continuing at Sun’Agri as an R&D engineer.

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The Neuroscience of Happiness and Pleasure

The evolutionary imperatives of survival and procreation, and their associated rewards, are driving life as most animals know it. Perhaps uniquely, humans are able to consciously experience these pleasures and even contemplate the elusive prospect of happiness. The advanced human ability to consciously predict and anticipate the outcome of choices and actions confers on our species an evolutionary advantage, but this is a double-edged sword, as John Steinbeck pointed out as he wrote of “the tragic miracle of consciousness” and how our “species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming” ( Steinbeck and Ricketts 1941 ). While consciousness allows us to experience pleasures, desires, and perhaps even happiness, this is always accompanied by the certainty of the end.

Nevertheless, while life may ultimately meet a tragic end, one could argue that if this is as good as it gets, we might as well enjoy the ride and in particular to maximize happiness. Yet, it is also true that for many happiness is a rare companion due to the competing influences of anxiety and depression.

In order to help understand happiness and alleviate the suffering, neuroscientists and psychologists have started to investigate the brain states associated with happiness components and to consider the relation to well-being. While happiness is in principle difficult to define and study, psychologists have made substantial progress in mapping its empirical features, and neuroscientists have made comparable progress in investigating the functional neuroanatomy of pleasure, which contributes importantly to happiness and is central to our sense of well-being.

In this article we will try to map out some of the intricate links between pleasure and happiness. Our main contention is that a better understanding of the pleasures of the brain may offer a more general insight into happiness, into how brains work to produce it in daily life for the fortunate, how brains fail in the less fortunate, and hopefully into better ways to enhance the quality of life.

A SCIENCE OF HAPPINESS?

As shown by the other contributions to this volume, there are many possible definitions and approaches to investigating happiness. Many would agree that happiness has remained difficult to define and challenging to measure—partly due to its subjective nature. Is it possible to get a scientific handle on such a slippery concept? There are several aids to start us off.

Since Aristotle, happiness has been usefully thought of as consisting of at least two aspects: hedonia (pleasure) and eudaimonia (a life well lived). In contemporary psychology these aspects are usually referred to as pleasure and meaning, and positive psychologists have recently proposed to add a third distinct component of engagement related to feelings of commitment and participation in life ( Seligman et al. 2005 ).

Using these definitions, scientists have made substantial progress in defining and measuring happiness in the form of self-reports of subjective well-being, in identifying its distribution across people in the real world, and in identifying how well-being is influenced by various life factors that range from income to other people ( Kahneman 1999 ). This research shows that while there is clearly a sharp conceptual distinction between pleasure versus engagement-meaning components, hedonic and eudaimonic aspects empirically cohere together in happy people.

For example, in happiness surveys, over 80 percent of people rate their overall eudaimonic life satisfaction as “pretty to very happy,” and comparably, 80 percent also rate their current hedonic mood as positive (for example, positive 6–7 on a 10 point valence scale, where 5 is hedonically neutral) ( Kesebir and Diener 2008 ). A lucky few may even live consistently around a hedonic point of 8—although excessively higher hedonic scores may actually impede attainment of life success, as measured by wealth, education, or political participation ( Oishi et al. 2007 ).

While these surveys provide interesting indicators of mental well-being, they offer little evidence of the underlying neurobiology of happiness. That is the quest we set ourselves here. But to progress in this direction, it is first necessary to make a start using whatever evidence is both relevant to the topic of well-being and happiness, and in which neuroscience has relative strengths. Pleasure and its basis offers a window of opportunity.

In the following we will therefore focus on the substantial progress in understanding the psychology and neurobiology of sensory pleasure that has been made over the last decade ( Berridge and Kringelbach 2008 ; Kringelbach and Berridge 2010 ). These advances make the hedonic side of happiness most tractable to a scientific approach to the neural underpinnings of happiness. Supporting a hedonic approach, it has been suggested that the best measure of subjective well-being may be simply to ask people how they hedonically feel right now—again and again—so as to track their hedonic accumulation across daily life ( Kahneman 1999 ). Such repeated self-reports of hedonic states could also be used to identify more stable neurobiological hedonic brain traits that dispose particular individuals toward happiness. Further, a hedonic approach might even offer a toehold into identifying eudaimonic brain signatures of happiness, due to the empirical convergence between the two categories, even if pleasant mood is only half the happiness story ( Kringelbach and Berridge 2009 ).

It is important to note that our focus on the hedonia component of happiness should not be confused with hedonism, which is the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s own sake, and more akin to the addiction features we describe below. Also, to focus on hedonics does not deny that some ascetics may have found bliss through painful self-sacrifice, but simply reflects that positive hedonic tone is indispensable to most people seeking happiness.

A SCIENCE OF PLEASURE

The link between pleasure and happiness has a long history in psychology. For example, that link was stressed in the writings of Sigmund Freud when he posited that people “strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavor has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure” ( Freud and Riviere 1930 : 76). Emphasizing a positive balance of affect to be happy implies that studies of hedonic brain circuits can advance the neuroscience of both pleasure and happiness.

A related but slightly different view is that happiness depends most chiefly on eliminating negative “pain and displeasure” to free an individual to pursue engagement and meaning. Positive pleasure by this view is somewhat superfluous. This view may characterize the twentieth-century medical and clinical emphasis on alleviating negative psychopathology and strongly distressing emotions. It fits also with William James’s quip nearly a century ago that “happiness, I have lately discovered, is no positive feeling, but a negative condition of freedom from a number of restrictive sensations of which our organism usually seems the seat. When they are wiped out, the clearness and cleanness of the contrast is happiness. This is why anaesthetics make us so happy. But don’t you take to drink on that account” ( James 1920 : 158).

Focusing on eliminating negative distress seems to leave positive pleasure outside the boundary of happiness, perhaps as an extra bonus or even an irrelevancy for ordinary pursuit. In practice, many mixtures of positive affect and negative affect may occur in individuals and cultures may vary in the importance of positive versus negative affect for happiness. For example, positive emotions are linked most strongly to ratings of life satisfaction overall in nations that stress self-expression, but alleviation of negative emotions may become relatively more important in nations that value individualism ( Kuppens et al. 2008 ).

By either hedonic view, psychology seems to be moving away from the stoic notion that affect states such as pleasure are simply irrelevant to happiness. The growing evidence for the importance of affect in psychology and neuroscience shows that a scientific account will have to involve hedonic pleasures and/or displeasures. To move toward a neuroscience of happiness, a neurobiological understanding is required of how positive and negative affect are balanced in the brain.

Thus, pleasure is an important component of happiness, according to most modern viewpoints. Given the potential contributions of hedonics to happiness, we now survey developments in understanding the brain mechanisms of pleasure. The scientific study of pleasure and affect was foreshadowed by the pioneering ideas of Charles Darwin, who examined the evolution of emotions and affective expressions, and suggested that these are adaptive responses to environmental situations. In that vein, pleasure “liking” and displeasure reactions are prominent affective reactions in the behavior and brains of all mammals ( Steiner et al. 2001 ) and likely had important evolutionary functions ( Kringelbach 2009 ). Neural mechanisms for generating affective reactions are present and similar in most mammalian brains, and thus appear to have been selected for and conserved across species ( Kringelbach 2010 ). Indeed, both positive affect and negative affect are recognized today as having adaptive functions ( Nesse 2004 ), and positive affect in particular has consequences in daily life for planning and building cognitive and emotional resources ( Fredrickson et al. 2008 ).

Such functional perspectives are consistent with a thesis that is crucial to our aim of identifying the neurobiological bases of happiness: that affective reactions such as pleasure have objective features beyond their subjective ones. This idea is important, since progress in affective neuroscience has been made recently by identifying objective aspects of pleasure reactions and triangulating toward underlying brain substrates. This scientific strategy divides the concept of affect into two parts: the affective state , which has objective aspects in behavioral, physiological, and neural reactions; and conscious affective feelings , seen as the subjective experience of emotion ( Kringelbach 2004 ). Note that such a definition allows conscious feelings to play a central role in hedonic experiences, but holds that the affective essence of a pleasure reaction is more than a conscious feeling. That objective “something more” is especially tractable to neuroscience investigations that involve brain manipulations and can be studied regardless of the availability or accuracy of corresponding subjective reports.

The available evidence suggests that brain mechanisms involved in fundamental pleasures (food and sexual pleasures) overlap with those for higher-order pleasures (for example, monetary, artistic, musical, altruistic, and transcendent pleasures) ( Kringelbach 2010 ).

From sensory pleasures and drugs of abuse to monetary, aesthetic and musical delights, all pleasures seem to involve the same hedonic brain systems, even when linked to anticipation and memory. Pleasures important to happiness, such as socializing with friends, and related traits of positive hedonic mood are thus all likely to draw upon the same neurobiological roots that evolved for sensory pleasures. The neural overlap may offer a way to generalize from fundamental pleasures that are best understood and so infer larger hedonic brain principles likely to contribute to happiness.

We note the rewarding properties for all pleasures are likely to be generated by hedonic brain circuits that are distinct from the mediation of other features of the same events (for example, sensory, cognitive) ( Kringelbach 2005 ). Thus, pleasure is never merely a sensation or a thought, but is instead an additional hedonic gloss generated by the brain via dedicated systems ( Frijda 2010 ).

THE NEUROANATOMY OF PLEASURE

How does positive affect arise? Affective neuroscience research on sensory pleasure has revealed many networks of brain regions and neurotransmitters activated by pleasant events and states (see figures 1 and ​ and2). 2 ). Identification of hedonic substrates has been advanced by recognizing that pleasure or “liking” is but one component in the larger composite psychological process of reward, which also involves “wanting” and “learning” components ( Smith et al. 2010 ). Each component also has conscious and nonconscious elements that can be studied in humans—and at least the latter can also be probed in other animals.

Reward and pleasure are multifaceted psychological concepts. Major processes within reward (first column) consist of motivation or wanting (white), learning (light gray), and—most relevant to happiness—pleasure liking or affect (gray). Each of these contains explicit (top three rows) and implicit (bottom three rows) psychological components (second column) that constantly interact and require careful scientific experimentation to tease apart. Explicit processes are consciously experienced (for example, explicit pleasure and happiness, desire, or expectation), whereas implicit psychological processes are potentially unconscious in the sense that they can operate at a level not always directly accessible to conscious experience (implicit incentive salience, habits and “liking” reactions), and must be further translated by other mechanisms into subjective feelings. Measurements or behavioral procedures that are especially sensitive markers of the each of the processes are listed (third column). Examples of some of the brain regions and neurotransmitters are listed (fourth column), as well as specific examples of measurements (fifth column), such as an example of how highest subjective life satisfaction does not lead to the highest salaries (top) ( Haisken-De New and Frick 2005 ). Another example shows the incentive-sensitization model of addiction and how “wanting” to take drugs may grow over time independently of “liking” and “learning” drug pleasure as an individual becomes an addict (bottom) ( Robinson and Berridge 1993 ).

The schematic figure shows the approximate sensorimotor, pleasure, and social brain regions in the adult brain. (a) Processing linked to the identification of and interaction with stimuli is carried out in the sensorimotor regions of the brain, (b) which are separate from the valence processing in the pleasure regions of the brain. (c) In addition to this pleasure processing, there is further higher-order processing of social situations (such as theory of mind) in widespread cortical regions. (d) The hedonic mammalian brain circuitry can be revealed using behavioral and subjective measures of pleasures in rodents and humans ( Berridge and Kringelbach 2008 ).

HEDONIC HOTSPOTS

Despite having extensive distribution of reward-related circuitry, the brain appears rather frugal in “liking” mechanisms that cause pleasure reactions. Some hedonic mechanisms are found deep in the brain (nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum, brainstem) and other candidates are in the cortex (orbitofrontal, cingulate, medial prefrontal and insular cortices). Pleasure-activated brain networks are widespread and provide evidence for highly distributed brain coding of hedonic states, but compelling evidence for pleasure causation (detected as increases in “liking” reactions consequent to brain manipulation) has so far been found for only a few hedonic hotspots in the subcortical structures. Each hotspot is merely a cubic millimeter or so in volume in the rodent brain (and should be a cubic centimeter or so in humans, if proportional to whole brain volume). Hotspots are capable of generating enhancements of “liking” reactions to a sensory pleasure such as sweetness, when stimulated with opioid, endocannabinoid, or other neurochemical modulators ( Smith et al. 2010 ).

Hotspots exist in the nucleus accumbens shell and ventral pallidum, and possibly other forebrain and limbic cortical regions, and also in deep brainstem regions, including the parabrachial nucleus in the pons (see figure 2d ). The pleasure-generating capacity of these hotspots has been revealed in part by studies in which micro-injections of drugs stimulated neurochemical receptors on neurons within a hotspot, and caused a doubling or tripling of the number of hedonic “liking” reactions normally elicited by a pleasant sucrose taste. Analogous to scattered islands that form a single archipelago, hedonic hotspots are anatomically distributed but interact to form a functional integrated circuit. The circuit obeys control rules that are largely hierarchical and organized into brain levels. Top levels function together as a cooperative heterarchy, so that, for example, multiple unanimous “votes” in favor from simultaneously participating hotspots in the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum are required for opioid stimulation in either forebrain site to enhance “liking” above normal.

In addition, as mentioned above, pleasure is translated into motivational processes in part by activating a second component of reward termed “wanting” or incentive salience, which makes stimuli attractive when attributed to them by mesolimbic brain systems ( Berridge and Robinson 2003 ). Incentive salience depends in particular on mesolimbic dopamine neurotransmission (though other neurotransmitters and structures also are involved).

Importantly, incentive salience is not hedonic impact or pleasure “liking” ( Berridge 2007 ). This is why an individual can “want” a reward without necessarily “liking” the same reward. Irrational “wanting” without liking can occur especially in addiction via incentive-sensitization of the mesolimbic dopamine system and connected structures. At extreme, the addict may come to “want” what is neither “liked” nor expected to be liked, a dissociation possible because “wanting” mechanisms are largely subcortical and separable from cortically mediated declarative expectation and conscious planning. This is a reason why addicts may compulsively “want” to take drugs even if, at a more cognitive and conscious level, they do not want to do so. That is surely a recipe for great unhappiness (see figure 2 , bottom right).

CORTICAL PLEASURE

In the cortex, hedonic evaluation of pleasure valence is anatomically distinguishable from precursor operations such as sensory computations, suggesting existence of a hedonic cortex proper ( figure 2 ). Hedonic cortex involves regions such as the orbitofrontal, insula, medial prefrontal and cingulate cortices, which a wealth of human neuroimaging studies have shown to code for hedonic evaluations (including anticipation, appraisal, experience, and memory of pleasurable stimuli) and have close anatomical links to subcortical hedonic hotspots. It is important, however, to again make a distinction between brain activity coding and causing pleasure. Neural coding is inferred in practice by measuring brain activity correlated to a pleasant stimulus, using human neuroimaging techniques, or electrophysiological or neurochemical activation measures in animals ( Aldridge and Berridge 2010 ). Causation is generally inferred on the basis of a change in pleasure as a consequence of a brain manipulation, such as a lesion or stimulation. Coding and causation often go together for the same substrate, but they may diverge so that coding occurs alone.

Pleasure encoding may reach an apex of cortical localization in a subregion that is midanterior and roughly midlateral within the orbitofrontal cortex of the prefrontal lobe, where neuroimaging activity correlates strongly to subjective pleasantness ratings of food varieties—and to other pleasures such as sexual orgasms, drugs, chocolate, and music. Most important, activity in this special midanterior zone of orbitofrontal cortex tracks changes in subjective pleasure, such as a decline in palatability when the reward value of one food was reduced by eating it to satiety (while remaining high to another food). The midanterior subregion of orbitofrontal cortex is thus a prime candidate for the coding of subjective experience of pleasure ( Kringelbach 2005 ).

Another potential coding site for positive hedonics in orbitofrontal cortex is along its medial edge that has activity related to the positive and negative valence of affective events ( Kringelbach and Rolls 2004 ), contrasted to lateral portions that have been suggested to code unpleasant events (although lateral activity may reflect a signal to escape the situation, rather than displeasure per se) ( O’Doherty et al. 2001 ). This medial–lateral hedonic gradient interacts with an abstraction–concreteness gradient in the posterior-anterior dimension, so that more complex or abstract reinforcers (such as monetary gain and loss) are represented more anteriorly in the orbitofrontal cortex than less complex sensory rewards (such as taste). The medial region that codes pleasant sensations does not, however, appear to change its activity with reinforcer devaluation, and so may not reflect the full dynamics of pleasure.

Still other cortical regions have been implicated by some studies in coding for pleasant stimuli, including parts of the mid-insular cortex that is buried deep within the lateral surface of the brain as well as parts of the anterior cingulate cortices on the medial surface of the cortex. As yet, however, pleasure coding is not as clear for those regions as for the orbitofrontal cortex, and it remains uncertain whether insular or anterior cingulate cortices specifically code pleasure or only emotion more generally. A related suggestion has emerged that the frontal left hemisphere plays a special lateralized role in positive affect more than the right hemisphere ( Davidson and Irwin 1999 ), though how to reconcile left-positive findings with many other findings of bilateral activations of orbitofrontal and related cortical regions during hedonic processing remains an ongoing puzzle ( Kringelbach 2005 ).

It remains still unknown, however, if even the midanterior pleasure-coding site of orbitofrontal cortex or medial orbitofrontal cortex or any other cortical region actually causes a positive pleasure state. Clearly, damage to the orbitofrontal cortex does impair pleasure-related decisions, including choices and context-related cognitions in humans, monkeys, and rats ( Anderson et al. 1999 ; Nauta 1971 ). But some caution regarding whether the cortex generates positive affect states per se is indicated by the consideration that patients with lesions to the orbitofrontal cortex do still react normally to many pleasures, although sometimes showing inappropriate emotions. Hedonic capacity after prefrontal damage has not, however, yet been studied in careful enough detail to draw firm conclusions about cortical causation (for example, using selective satiation paradigms), and it would be useful to have more information on the role of orbitofrontal cortex, insular cortex, and cingulate cortex in generating and modulating hedonic states.

Pleasure causation has been so far rather difficult to assess in humans given the limits of information from lesion studies, and the correlative nature of neuroimaging studies. A promising tool, however, is deep brain stimulation (DBS), which is a versatile and reversible technique that directly alters brain activity in a brain target and where the ensuing whole-brain activity can be measured with Magnetoencephalography (MEG) ) Kringelbach et al. 2007 ). Pertinent to a view of happiness as freedom from distress, at least pain relief can be obtained from DBS of periaqueductal grey in the brainstem in humans, where specific neural signatures of pain have been found ( Green et al. 2009 ), and where the pain relief is associated with activity in the midanterior orbitofrontal cortex, perhaps involving endogenous opioid release. Similarly, DBS may alleviate some unpleasant symptoms of depression, though without actually producing positive affect.

Famously, also, pleasure electrodes were reported to exist decades ago in animals and humans when implanted in subcortical structures, including the nucleus accumbens, septum and medial forebrain bundle ( Olds and Milner 1954 ; Heath 1972 ) ( figure 2c ). However, recently we and others have questioned whether most such electrodes truly caused pleasure, or instead, only a psychological process more akin to “wanting” without “liking” ( Berridge and Kringelbach 2008 ). In our view, it still remains unknown whether DBS causes true pleasure, or if so, where in the brain electrodes produce it.

LOSS OF PLEASURE

The lack of pleasure, anhedonia, is one of the most important symptoms of many mental illnesses, including depression. It is difficult to conceive of anyone reporting happiness or well-being while so deprived of pleasure. Thus anhedonia is another potential avenue of evidence for the link between pleasure and happiness.

The brain regions necessary for pleasure—but disrupted in anhedonia—are not yet fully clear. Core “liking” reactions to sensory pleasures appear relatively difficult to abolish absolutely in animals by a single brain lesion or drug, which may be very good in evolutionary terms. Only the ventral pallidum has emerged among brain hedonic hotspots as a site where damage fully abolishes the capacity for positive hedonic reaction in rodent studies, replacing even “liking” for sweetness with “disliking” gapes normally reserved for bitter or similarly noxious tastes, at least for a while ( Aldridge and Berridge 2010 ). Interestingly, there are extensive connections from the ventral pallidum to the medial orbitofrontal cortex.

On the basis of this evidence, the ventral pallidum might also be linked to human anhedonia. This brain region has not yet been directly surgically targeted by clinicians but there is anecdotal evidence that some patients with pallidotomies (of nearby globus pallidus, just above and behind the ventral pallidum) for Parkinson’s patients show flattened affect (Aziz, personal communication), and stimulation of globus pallidus internus may help with depression. A case study has also reported anhedonia following bilateral lesion to the ventral pallidum ( Miller et al. 2006 ).

Alternatively, core “liking” for fundamental pleasures might persist intact but unacknowledged in anhedonia, while instead only more cognitive construals, including retrospective or anticipatory savoring, becomes impaired. That is, fundamental pleasure may not be abolished in depression after all. Instead, what is called anhedonia might be secondary to motivational deficits and cognitive misap-praisals of rewards, or to an overlay of negative affective states. This may still disrupt life enjoyment, and perhaps render higher pleasures impossible.

Other potential regions targeted by DBS to help with depression and anhedonia include the nucleus accumbens and the subgenual cingulate cortex. In addition, lesions of the posterior part of the anterior cingulate cortex have been used for the treatment of depression with some success ( Steele et al. 2008 ).

BRIDGING PLEASURE TO MEANING

It is potentially interesting to note that all these structures either have close links with frontal cortical structures in the hedonic network (for example, nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum) or belong to what has been termed the brain’s default network, which changes over early development ( Fransson et al. 2007 ; Fair et al. 2008 ).

Mention of the default network brings us back to the topic of eudaimonic happiness, and to potential interactions of hedonic brain circuits with circuits that assess meaningful relationships of self to social others. The default network is a steady state circuit of the brain, which becomes perturbed during cognitive tasks ( Gusnard and Raichle 2001 ). Most pertinent here is an emerging literature that has proposed the default network to carry representations of self ( Lou et al. 1999 ), internal modes of cognition ( Buckner et al. 2008 ), and perhaps even states of consciousness ( Laureys et al. 2004 ). Such functions might well be important to higher pleasures as well as meaningful aspects of happiness.

Although highly speculative, we wonder whether the default network might deserve further consideration for a role in connecting eudaimonic and hedonic happiness. At least, key regions of the frontal default network overlap with the hedonic network discussed above, such as the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices, and have a relatively high density of opiate receptors. And activity changes in the frontal default network, such as in the subgenual cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices, correlate to pathological changes in subjective hedonic experience, such as in depressed patients ( Drevets et al. 1997 ).

Pathological self-representations by the frontal default network could also provide a potential link between hedonic distortions of happiness that are accompanied by eudaimonic dissatisfaction, such as in cognitive rumination of depression. Conversely, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression, which aims to disengage from dysphoria-activated depressogenic thinking, might conceivably recruit default network circuitry to help mediate improvement in happiness via a linkage to hedonic circuitry.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The most difficult questions facing pleasure and happiness research remain the nature of its subjective experience, the relation of hedonic components (pleasure or positive affect) to eudaimonic components (cognitive appraisals of meaning and life satisfaction), and the relation of each of these components to underlying brain systems. While some progress has been made in understanding brain hedonics, it is important not to over-interpret. In particular we have still not made substantial progress toward understanding the functional neuroanatomy of happiness.

In this article, we have identified a number of brain regions that are important in the brain’s hedonic networks, and speculated on the potential interaction of hedonics with eudaimonic networks. So far the most distinctive insights have come from studying sensory pleasures, but another challenge is to understand the how brain networks underlying fundamental pleasure relate to higher pleasures, such as music, dance, play, and flow to contribute to happiness. While it remains unclear how pleasure and happiness are exactly linked, it may be safe to say at least that the pathological lack of pleasure, in anhedonia or dysphoria, amounts to a formidable obstacle to happiness.

Further, in social animals like humans, it is worth noting that social interactions with conspecifics are fundamental and central to enhancing the other pleasures. Humans are intensely social, and data indicate that one of the most important factors for happiness is social relationships with other people. Social pleasures may still include vital sensory features such as visual faces, touch features of grooming and caress, as well as in humans more abstract and cognitive features of social reward and relationship evaluation. These may be important triggers for the brain’s hedonic networks in human beings.

In particular, adult pair bonds and attachment bonds between parents and infants are likely to be extremely important for the survival of the species ( Kringelbach et al. 2008 ). The breakdown of these bonds is all too common and can lead to great unhappiness. And even bond formation can potentially disrupt happiness, such as in transient parental depression after birth of an infant (in over 10 percent of mothers and approximately 3 percent of fathers [ Cooper and Murray 1998 ]). Progress in understanding the hedonics of social bonds could be useful in understanding happiness, and it will be important to map the developmental changes that occur over a lifespan. Fortunately, social neuroscience is beginning to unravel some of the complex dynamics of human social interactions and their relation to brain activations ( Parsons et al. 2010 ).

In conclusion, so far as positive affect contributes to happiness, then considerable progress has been made in understanding the neurobiology of pleasure in ways that might be relevant. For example, we can imagine several possibilities to relate happiness to particular hedonic psychological processes discussed above. Thus, one way to conceive of hedonic happiness is as “liking” without “wanting.” That is, a state of pleasure without disruptive desires, a state of contentment ( Kringelbach 2009 ). Another possibility is that moderate “wanting,” matched to positive “liking,” facilitates engagement with the world. A little incentive salience may add zest to the perception of life and perhaps even promote the construction of meaning, just as in some patients therapeutic deep brain stimulation may help lift the veil of depression by making life events more appealing. However, too much “wanting” can readily spiral into maladaptive patterns such as addiction, and is a direct route to great unhappiness. Finally, happiness of course springs not from any single component but from the interplay of higher pleasures, positive appraisals of life meaning and social connectedness, all combined and merged by interaction between the brain’s default networks and pleasure networks. Achieving the right hedonic balance in such ways may be crucial to keep one not just ticking over but actually happy.

Future scientific advances may provide a better sorting of psychological features of happiness and its underlying brain networks. If so, it remains a distinct possibility that more among us may be one day shifted into a better situation to enjoy daily events, to find life meaningful and worth living—and perhaps even to achieve a degree of bliss.

Acknowledgments

We thank Christopher Peterson, Eric Jackson, Kristine Rømer Thomsen, Christine Parsons, and Katie Young for helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Our research has been supported by grants from the TrygFonden Charitable Foundation to Kringelbach and from the National Institute of Mental Health and National Institute on Drug Abuse to Berridge.

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Theology of Joy & the Good Life

Building a transformative movement driven by a Christian articulation of the joy that attends the flourishing human life.

The Theology of Joy and the Good Life project sought to restore joy to the center of Christian reflection on the nature of the good life and to restore the question of the good life to the core of Christian theology, the world’s colleges and universities, and our most significant global conversations.

Joy is fundamental to human existence and well-being, yet it is an elusive phenomenon that resists definition. For more than two millennia, the articulation and cultivation of joy was at the center of Jewish and Christian scripture, theology, and practices—an articulation and cultivation that in turn was grounded in and evolved over centuries of lived human experience, observation and discernment. Notwithstanding the importance of joy to human well-being and the deep, ancient religious foundations for understanding and cultivating joy, the very idea of joy has all but disappeared from modern theological reflection, is all but ignored by the social sciences, and is increasingly absent from lived experience. The consequence is a “flattening out,” a “graying,” of human life and communities—abundance of entertainment notwithstanding—and a sharp bloom of individual and communal dysfunction.

The Theology of Joy & the Good Life project was made possible by the John Templeton Foundation with additional support from the McDonald Agape Foundation.

What Is Joy?

"I look at joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces. ... Joy in that regard is a work, that can become a state, that can become a way of life."

Willie James Jennings

"In the Jewish tradition, joy is something that happens when God finally does something that people have been waiting for."

N.T. Wright

Content & Programming

Consultations.

We conducted a multidisciplinary study of the traditional scriptural, theological, and devotional foundations for a theology of joy, exploring the most current social science resources that would enrich and inform that theological investigation.

Video Interviews

In conjunction with each Theology of Joy and the Good Life consultation, Miroslav Volf and the Center staff have conducted interviews with a number of contributing scholars.

Learn More →

Theology & the Research Sciences

The project seeks to involve and integrate the work of scholars in a variety of disciplines. For this reason, the project hosted a consultation on Theology and the Research Sciences.

Project Description

The Theology of Joy and the Good Life project has grown out of research conducted during the Center’s 2014 work on the “Theology of Joy.” This research led to several key insights and an operating hypothesis about the nature of joy and its relationship to the good life that we seek to research and test. Our hypothesis is that the good life has three basic dimensions:

• Agential (what you do) 

• Circumstantial (how the world is for you, both materially and culturally) 

• Affective (how you feel) 


Given this formal account, joy is revealed as the crown of the good life, both naming its affective dimension, and yet integrating all three. Joy, as a positive emotion (an affective concern-based construal), is a positive affective response to an objective external good, construed rightly and about which one is rightly concerned.

Therefore, one cannot describe joy adequately without reference to the good life. Likewise, at least on the Christian account, one cannot describe the good life adequately without reference to joy. Each is integral to the other. When this essentially integral relationship of joy and the good life is grasped, it becomes apparent that joy is the affective dimension of the good life and that the good life is the life marked by joy.

This formal description constitutes the working hypothesis of the project , which the full proposal is designed to test by conducting research in three closely-related areas.

• The core body of research investigates joy and the good life so as to test and articulate this fundamental integrity of joy and the good life. That is, this research explores whether and to what extent joy is indeed a dimension of the good life and the good life is one marked by true joy. This research will be advanced through two series of consultations—Joy Among the Virtues, Actions, and Emotions and Joy and the Phenomena of Human Existence—as well as by YCFC research scholars, project leadership team members, and work funded by sub-grants and competitions. This research serves as the foundation for all other project activities, including the development of “Christ and the Good Life,” a new course that invites seminary and divinity school students to reflect on the particular shape the good life assumes when Christ is taken to be the key to human flourishing (offered for the first time in Fall 2015).
• Our 2014 consultation on joy and adolescence concluded that adolescence is a pivotal season for the cultivation of the good life of joy. For this reason, the project also studies factors that foster or inhibit joy in this crucial season of life and translate the fruits of this research into practical tools for youth ministry. This is the focus of the subproject on Joy and Adolescent Faith & Flourishing.
• The project explores joy and its analogs in other traditions, recognizing that the affective dimension of the good life may be described differently in different religious and philosophical traditions. In helping us attend to these differences and the ways that they shape the visions of the good life that motivate our lives, theology can serve as a bridge-builder rather than gatekeeper. This is the focus of the subproject on Joy and its Analogs in Other Traditions which will award eight $20k sub-grants to scholar-practitioners of non-Christian traditions to articulate visions of the good life within these traditions with particular attention to the affective dimension.

In all of its activities, the project seeks to involve and integrate the work of scholars working in sometimes disparate theological subfields, casting vision for a renewed and unified theological academy that places the articulation of normative visions of the good life at the core of its work. For this reason, the project begins in AY15-16 with a series of consultations on the “Future of Theology.”

Over the three years of the Templeton Foundation grant (2015-2018), the project will distribute more than $900,000 in subgrants and prizes, inviting a wide network of scholars, pastors, and seminarians to participate in the life of the project. The project also will sponsor monthly public lectures, support the development of two university courses, produce a growing video library of contributors and guests, edited volumes and books—including an anthology of poetry—and curricula for two church-based youth ministry courses.

Ultimately, the Theology of Joy and the Good Life project aims not only to conduct theological research, but to lay the foundations for a movement pursuing questions of the good life in the academy and the culture more broadly. From the start, the project is led by an extraordinary group of scholars and religious leaders from more than twenty institutions around the globe, including Jürgen Moltmann, Jonathan Sacks, N. T. Wright, and Nicholas Wolterstorff.

The Theology of Joy and the Good Life project is made possible by a $4.2 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation with additional support from the Youth Ministry Initiative , the McDonald Agape Foundation , Yale Center for Faith & Culture donors, and the Yale Divinity School.

Other Legacy Projects

From 2003 to 2018, the Yale Center for Faith & Culture has pursued our purpose along a variety of completed initiatives, always dedicated to building bridges of religious, political, and cultural discourse, fostering truth-seeking conversations, and impacting change in individual and community life. Browse other legacy projects below.

Sarah Smith Memorial Conference

Fostering moral leadership in all spheres of life.

Faith & Globalization

Exploring the profound impact of religious faith in a world where political, economic and social spheres are increasingly interconnected.

Ethics & Spirituality in the Workplace

Encouraging business leaders to incorporate faith-based virtues into their work and promoting efforts to align business practice with authentic human flourishing and the global common good.

A Common Word

Loving our Muslim neighbors by affirming our common call to love God and neighbor.

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There are roughly two philosophical literatures on “happiness,” each corresponding to a different sense of the term. One uses ‘happiness’ as a value term, roughly synonymous with well-being or flourishing. The other body of work uses the word as a purely descriptive psychological term, akin to ‘depression’ or ‘tranquility’. An important project in the philosophy of happiness is simply getting clear on what various writers are talking about: what are the important meanings of the term and how do they connect? While the “well-being” sense of happiness receives significant attention in the contemporary literature on well-being, the psychological notion is undergoing a revival as a major focus of philosophical inquiry, following on recent developments in the science of happiness. This entry focuses on the psychological sense of happiness (for the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being ). The main accounts of happiness in this sense are hedonism, the life satisfaction theory, and the emotional state theory. Leaving verbal questions behind, we find that happiness in the psychological sense has always been an important concern of philosophers. Yet the significance of happiness for a good life has been hotly disputed in recent decades. Further questions of contemporary interest concern the relation between the philosophy and science of happiness, as well as the role of happiness in social and political decision-making.

1.1 Two senses of ‘happiness’

1.2 clarifying our inquiry, 2.1 the chief candidates, 2.2 methodology: settling on a theory, 2.3 life satisfaction versus affect-based accounts, 2.4 hedonism versus emotional state, 2.5 hybrid accounts, 3.1 can happiness be measured, 3.2 empirical findings: overview, 3.3 the sources of happiness, 4.1 doubts about the value of happiness, 4.2 restoring happiness to the theory of well-being, 4.3 is happiness overrated, 5.1 normative issues, 5.2 mistakes in the pursuit of happiness, 5.3 the politics of happiness, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the meanings of ‘happiness’.

What is happiness? This question has no straightforward answer, because the meaning of the question itself is unclear. What exactly is being asked? Perhaps you want to know what the word ‘happiness’ means. In that case your inquiry is linguistic. Chances are you had something more interesting in mind: perhaps you want to know about the thing , happiness, itself. Is it pleasure, a life of prosperity, something else? Yet we can’t answer that question until we have some notion of what we mean by the word.

Philosophers who write about “happiness” typically take their subject matter to be either of two things, each corresponding to a different sense of the term:

• A state of mind
• A life that goes well for the person leading it

In the first case our concern is simply a psychological matter. Just as inquiry about pleasure or depression fundamentally concerns questions of psychology, inquiry about happiness in this sense—call it the (long-term) “psychological sense”—is fundamentally the study of certain mental states. What is this state of mind we call happiness? Typical answers to this question include life satisfaction, pleasure, or a positive emotional condition.

Having answered that question, a further question arises: how valuable is this mental state? Since ‘happiness’ in this sense is just a psychological term, you could intelligibly say that happiness isn’t valuable at all. Perhaps you are a high-achieving intellectual who thinks that only ignoramuses can be happy. On this sort of view, happy people are to be pitied, not envied. The present article will center on happiness in the psychological sense.

In the second case, our subject matter is a kind of value , namely what philosophers nowadays tend to call prudential value —or, more commonly, well-being , welfare , utility or flourishing . (For further discussion, see the entry on well-being . Whether these terms are really equivalent remains a matter of dispute, but this article will usually treat them as interchangeable.) “Happiness” in this sense concerns what benefits a person, is good for her, makes her better off, serves her interests, or is desirable for her for her sake. To be high in well-being is to be faring well, doing well, fortunate, or in an enviable condition. Ill-being, or doing badly, may call for sympathy or pity, whereas we envy or rejoice in the good fortune of others, and feel gratitude for our own. Being good for someone differs from simply being good, period: perhaps it is always good, period, for you to be honest; yet it may not always be good for you , as when it entails self-sacrifice. Not coincidentally, the word ‘happiness’ derives from the term for good fortune, or “good hap,” and indeed the terms used to translate it in other languages often have similar roots. In this sense of the term—call it the “well-being sense”—happiness refers to a life of well-being or flourishing: a life that goes well for you.

Importantly, to ascribe happiness in the well-being sense is to make a value judgment : namely, that the person has whatever it is that benefits a person. [ 1 ] If you and I and have different values, then we may well differ about which lives we consider happy. I might think Genghis Khan had a happy life, because I think what matters for well-being is getting what you want; while you deny this because you think a life of evildoing, however “successful,” is sad and impoverished.

Theories of well-being—and hence of “happiness” in the well-being sense—come in three basic flavors, according to the best-known taxonomy (Parfit 1984): hedonism, desire theories, and objective list theories. Whereas hedonists identify well-being roughly with experiences of pleasure, desire theorists equate it with the satisfaction of one’s desires— actually getting what you want, versus merely having certain experiences. Both hedonism and desire theories are in some sense subjectivist, since they ground well-being in the individual’s subjective states. Objective list theorists, by contrast, think some things benefit us independently of our attitudes or feelings: there are objective prudential goods. Aristotelians are the best-known example: they take well-being ( eudaimonia ) to consist in a life of virtuous activity—or more broadly, the fulfillment of our human capacities. A passive but contented couch potato may be getting what he wants, and he may enjoy it. But he would not, on Aristotelian and other objective list theories, count as doing well, or leading a happy life.

Now we can sharpen the initial question somewhat: when you ask what happiness is, are you asking what sort of life benefits a person? If so, then your question concerns matters of value, namely what is good for people—the sort of thing that ethical theorists are trained to address. Alternatively, perhaps you simply want to know about the nature of a certain state of mind—happiness in the psychological sense. In this case, some sort of psychological inquiry will be needed, either philosophical or scientific. (Laypersons often have neither sort of question in mind, but are really asking about the sources of happiness. Thus it might be claimed, say, that “happiness is being with good friends.” This is not a view about the nature or definition of happiness, but rather a theory about the sorts of things that tend to make us happy. It leaves unanswered, or takes for granted, the question of just what happiness is , such that friends are a good source of it.)

In short, philosophical “theories of happiness” can be about either of at least two different things: well-being, or a state of mind. [ 2 ] Accordingly, there are essentially two bodies of philosophical literature about “happiness” and two sets of debates about its nature, though writers often fail to distinguish them. Such failures have generated much confusion, sometimes yielding bogus disagreements that prove to be merely verbal. [ 3 ] For instance, some psychologists identify “happiness” with attitudes of life satisfaction while remaining neutral on questions of value, or whether Bentham, Mill, Aristotle, or any other thinker about the good life was correct. Such researchers employ the term in the psychological sense. Yet it is sometimes objected against such claims that life satisfaction cannot suffice for “happiness” because other things, like achievement or knowledge, matter for human well-being. The objectors are confused: their opponents have made no claims about well-being at all, and the two “sides,” as it were, are simply using ‘happiness’ to talk about different things. One might just as sensibly object to an economist’s tract on “banks” that it has nothing to say about rivers and streams.

Which use of ‘happiness’ corresponds to the true meaning of the term in contemporary English? Arguably, both. The well-being usage clearly dominates in the historical literature through at least the early modern era, for instance in translations of the ancient Greeks’ ‘ eudaimonia ’ or the Latin ‘ beatitudo ’, though this translation has long been a source of controversy. Jefferson’s famous reference to “the pursuit of happiness” probably employed the well-being sense. Even later writers such as Mill may have used the term in its well-being sense, though it is often difficult to tell since well-being itself is often taken to consist in mental states like pleasure. In ordinary usage, the abstract noun ‘happiness’ often invites a well-being reading. And the locution ‘happy life ’ may not naturally take a psychological interpretation, for the simple reason that lives aren’t normally regarded as psychological entities.

Contrast this with the very different meaning that seems to attach to talk of “ being happy.” Here it is much less clear that we are talking about a property of a person’s life; it seems rather to be a property of the person herself. To be happy, it seems, is just to be in a certain sort of psychological state or condition. Similarly when we say that so-and-so “is happy” (as opposed to saying that he is leading a happy life). This psychological usage, arguably, predominates in the current vernacular. Researchers engaged in the self-described “science of happiness” usually do not take themselves to be making value judgments when they proclaim individuals in their studies to be happy. Nor, when asserting that a life satisfaction study shows Utahans to be happier than New Yorkers, are they committing themselves to the tendentious claim that Utahans are better off . (If they are, then the psychology journals that are publishing this research may need to revise their peer-review protocols to include ethicists among their referees.) And the many recent popular books on happiness, as well as innumerable media accounts of research on happiness, nearly all appear to take it for granted that they are talking about nothing more than a psychological condition.

Henceforth ‘happiness’ will be used in the long-term psychological sense, unless otherwise specified. Note, however, that a number of important books and other works on “happiness” in recent decades have employed the well-being sense of the term. Books of this sort appear to include Almeder 2000, Annas 1993, 2011, Bloomfield 2014, Cahn and Vitrano 2015, Kenny and Kenny 2006, McMahon 2005, McPherson 2020, Noddings 2003, Russell 2013, White 2006, and Vitrano 2014, though again it is not always clear how a given author uses the term. For discussion of the well-being notion, see the entry on well-being . [ 4 ]

2. Theories of happiness

Philosophers have most commonly distinguished two accounts of happiness: hedonism , and the life satisfaction theory. Hedonists identify happiness with the individual’s balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience, in the same way that welfare hedonists do. [ 5 ] The difference is that the hedonist about happiness need not accept the stronger doctrine of welfare hedonism; this emerges clearly in arguments against the classical Utilitarian focus on happiness as the aim of social choice. Such arguments tend to grant the identification of happiness with pleasure, but challenge the idea that this should be our primary or sole concern, and often as well the idea that happiness is all that matters for well-being.

Life satisfaction theories identify happiness with having a favorable attitude toward one’s life as a whole. This basic schema can be filled out in a variety of ways, but typically involves some sort of global judgment: an endorsement or affirmation of one’s life as a whole. This judgment may be more or less explicit, and may involve or accompany some form of affect. It may also involve or accompany some aggregate of judgments about particular items or domains within one’s life. [ 6 ]

A third theory, the emotional state view, departs from hedonism in a different way: instead of identifying happiness with pleasant experience, it identifies happiness with an agent’s emotional condition as a whole, of what is often called “emotional well-being.” [ 7 ] This includes nonexperiential aspects of emotions and moods (or perhaps just moods), and excludes pleasures that don’t directly involve the individual’s emotional state. It might also include a person’s propensity for experiencing various moods, which can vary over time, though several authors have argued against this suggestion (e.g., Hill 2007, Klausen 2015, Rossi 2018). Happiness on such a view is more nearly the opposite of depression or anxiety—a broad psychological condition—whereas hedonistic happiness is simply opposed to unpleasantness. For example, a deeply distressed individual might distract herself enough with constant activity to maintain a mostly pleasant existence—broken only by tearful breakdowns during the odd quiet moment—thus perhaps counting as happy on a hedonistic but not emotional state view. The states involved in happiness, on an emotional state view, can range widely, far more so that the ordinary notion of mood or emotion. On one proposal, happiness involves three broad categories of affective state, including “endorsement” states like joy versus sadness, “engagement” states like flow or a sense of vitality, and “attunement” states like tranquility, emotional expansiveness versus compression, and confidence. Given the departures from commonsensical notions of being in a “good mood,” happiness is characterized in this proposal as “psychic affirmation,” or “psychic flourishing” in pronounced forms.

A fourth family of views, hybrid theories , attempts an irenic solution to our diverse intuitions about happiness: identify happiness with both life satisfaction and pleasure or emotional state, perhaps along with other states such as domain satisfactions. The most obvious candidate here is subjective well-being , which is typically defined as a compound of life satisfaction, domain satisfactions, and positive and negative affect. (Researchers often seem to identify happiness with subjective well-being, sometimes with life satisfaction, and perhaps most commonly with emotional or hedonic state.) The chief appeal of hybrid theories is their inclusiveness: all the components of subjective well-being seem important, and there is probably no component of subjective well-being that does not at times get included in “happiness” in ordinary usage.

How do we determine which theory is correct? Traditional philosophical methods of conceptual or linguistic analysis can give us some guidance, indicating that some accounts offer a better fit with the ordinary concept of happiness. Thus it has been argued that hedonism is false to the concept of happiness as we know it; the intuitions taken to support hedonism point instead to an emotional state view (Haybron 2001). And some have argued that life satisfaction is compatible with profoundly negative emotional states like depression—a suffering artist might not value emotional matters much, and wholeheartedly affirm her life (Carson 1981, Davis 1981b, Haybron 2005, Feldman 2010). Yet it might seem counterintuitive to deem such a person happy. At the same time, people do sometimes use ‘happiness’ to denote states of life satisfaction: life satisfaction theories do seem faithful to some ordinary uses of ‘happiness’. The trouble is that HAPPINESS appears to be a “mongrel concept,” as Ned Block (1995) called the concept of consciousness: the ordinary notion is something of a mess. We use the term to denote different things in different contexts, and often have no clear notion of what we are referring to. This suggests that accounts of happiness must be somewhat revisionary, and that we must assess theories on grounds other than simple fidelity to the lay concept of happiness—“descriptive adequacy,” in Sumner’s (1996) terms. One candidate is practical utility: which conception of happiness best answers to our interests in the notion? We talk about happiness because we care about it. The question is why we care about it, and which psychological states within the extension of the ordinary term make the most sense of this concern. Even if there is no simple answer to the question what happiness is, it may well turn out that our interests in happiness cluster so strongly around a particular psychological kind that happiness can best, or most profitably, be understood in terms of that type of state (Haybron 2003). Alternatively, we may choose to distinguish different varieties of happiness. It will be less important how we use the word, however, than that we be clear about the nature and significance of the phenomena that interest us.

The debate over theories of happiness falls along a couple of lines. The most interesting questions concern the choice between life satisfaction and affect-based views like hedonism and the emotional state theory. [ 8 ] Proponents of life satisfaction see two major advantages to their account. First, life satisfaction is holistic , ranging over the whole of one’s life, or the totality of one’s life over a certain period of time. It reflects not just the aggregate of moments in one’s life, but also the global quality of one’s life taken as a whole (but see Raibley 2010). And we seem to care not just about the total quantity of good in our lives, but about its distribution—a happy ending, say, counts for more than a happy middle (Slote 1982, Velleman 1991). Second, life satisfaction seems more closely linked to our priorities than affect is, as the suffering artist case illustrates. While a focus on affect makes sense insofar as we care about such matters, most people care about other things as well, and how their lives are going relative to their priorities may not be fully mirrored in their affective states. Life satisfaction theories thus seem to fit more closely with liberal ideals of individual sovereignty, on which how well my life is going for me is for me to decide. My satisfaction with my life seems to embody that judgment. Of course a theory of happiness need not capture everything that matters for well-being; the point is that a life satisfaction view might explain why we should care so much about happiness, and so enjoy substantive as well as intuitive support. [ 9 ]

But several objections have been raised against life satisfaction views. The most common complaint has already been noted, namely that a person could apparently be satisfied with her life even while leading a highly unpleasant or emotionally distressed existence, and it can seem counterintuitive to regard such a person as happy (see section 2.2). Some life satisfaction theorists deny that such cases are possible (Benditt 1978), but it could also be argued that such possibilities are part and parcel of life satisfaction’s appeal: some people may not get much pleasure out of life because they don’t care particularly about affective matters, and a life satisfaction theory allows that they can, in their own fashion, be happy.

Two other objections are more substantive, raising questions about whether life satisfaction has the right sort of importance. One concern is whether people often enough have well-grounded attitudes of life satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Evaluating one’s life as a whole can be a complicated business, and there is some question whether people typically have well-defined attitudes toward their lives that accurately reflect how well their lives measure up relative to their priorities. Some research, for instance, suggests that life satisfaction reports tend to reflect judgments made on the spot, drawing on whatever information comes readily to mind, with substantial influences by transient contextual factors like the weather, finding a dime, etc. (Schwarz and Strack 1999). Debate persists over whether this work undermines the significance of life satisfaction judgments, but it does raise a question whether life satisfaction attitudes tend to be well-enough grounded to have the kind of importance that people normally ascribe to happiness.

The third objection is somewhat intricate, so it will require some explaining. The claim is that a wide range of life satisfaction attitudes might be consistent with individuals’ perceptions of how well their lives are going relative to what they care about, raising doubts about the importance of life satisfaction (Haybron 2016). You might reasonably be satisfied when getting very little of what you want, or dissatisfied when getting most of what you want. One reason for this is that people tend to have many incommensurable values, leaving it open how to add them up. Looking at the various ups and downs of your life, it may be arbitrary whether to rate your life a four out of ten, or a seven. A second reason is that life satisfaction attitudes are not merely assessments of subjective success or personal welfare: they involve assessments of whether one’s life is good enough —satisfactory. Yet people’s values may radically underdetermine where they should set the bar for a “good enough” life, again rendering the judgment somewhat arbitrary. Given your values, you might reasonably be satisfied with a two, or require a nine to be satisfied. While it may seem important how well people see their lives going relative to what they care about, it is not obviously so important whether people see their lives going well enough that they are willing to judge them satisfactory.

If life satisfaction attitudes are substantially arbitrary relative to subjective success, then people might reasonably base those attitudes on other factors, such as ethical ideals (e.g., valuing gratitude or noncomplacency) or pragmatic concerns (e.g., comforting oneself). Shifts in perspective might also reasonably alter life satisfaction attitudes. After the funeral, you might be highly satisfied with your life, whereas the high school reunion leaves you dissatisfied; yet neither judgment need be mistaken, or less authoritative.

As a result, life satisfaction attitudes may be poor indicators of well-being, even from the individual’s own point of view. That people in a given country register high levels of life satisfaction may reflect nothing more than that they set the bar extremely low; they might be satisfied with anything short of pure agony. Another country’s citizens might be dissatisfied with their lives, but only because they set the bar much higher. Relative to what they care about, people in the dissatisfied nation could be better off than those in the satisfied nation. To take another example, a cancer patient might be more satisfied with his life than he was before the diagnosis, for he now looks at his life from a different perspective and emphasizes different virtues like fortitude and gratitude as opposed to (say) humility and non-complacency. Yet he need not think himself better off at all: he might believe himself worse off than he was when he was less satisfied. Neither judgment need seem to him or us to be mistaken: it’s just that he now looks at his life differently. Indeed, he might think he’s doing badly, even as he is satisfied with his life: he endorses it, warts and all, and is grateful just have his not-so-good life rather than some of the much worse alternatives.

For present purposes, the worry is that life satisfaction may not have the kind of significance happiness is normally thought to have. This may pose a difficulty for the identification of life satisfaction with happiness: for people frequently seem to use happiness as a proxy for well-being, a reasonably concrete and value-free stand-in that facilitates quick-and-dirty assessments of welfare. Given the discovery that someone is happy, we might infer that he is doing well; if we learn that someone is unhappy, we may conclude that she is doing poorly. Such inferences are defeasible: if we later find that the happy Ned’s wife and friends secretly hate him, we need not decide that he isn’t happy after all; we simply withdraw the conclusion that he is doing well. So long as happiness tracks well-being well enough in most cases, this sort of practice is perfectly respectable. But if we identify happiness with life satisfaction, then we may have a problem: maybe Sally is satisfied only because she values being grateful for the good things in life. This sort of case may not be merely a theoretical possibility: perhaps the very high rates of self-reported life satisfaction in the United States and many other places substantially reflects a broad acceptance of norms of gratitude and a general tendency to emphasize the positives, or perhaps a sense that not to endorse your life amounts to a lack of self-regard. It is not implausible that most people, even those enduring great hardship, can readily find grounds for satisfaction with their lives. Life may have to be pretty hard for a person to be incapable of affirming it.

Despite these concerns there is significant intuitive appeal in the idea that to be happy is to be satisfied with one’s life. Perhaps a different way of conceiving life satisfaction, for instance dispensing with the global judgment and aggregating particular satisfactions and dissatisfactions, would lessen the force of these objections. Alternatively, it is possible that idealized or qualified forms of life satisfaction would mitigate these concerns for some purposes, such as a theory of well-being. [ 10 ]

A second set of issues concerns the differences between the two affect-based views, hedonism and emotional state. The appeal of hedonism is fairly obvious: the pleasantness of our experience is plainly a matter of great significance; many have claimed it to be the only thing that matters. What, by contrast, motivates the emotional state account, which bears obvious similarities to hedonism yet excludes many pleasures from happiness? The question of motivation appears to be the chief worry facing the emotional state theory: what’s to be gained by focusing on emotional state rather than pleasure?

One argument for taking such a view is intuitive: some find it implausible to think that psychologically superficial pleasures invariably make a difference in how happy one is—the typical pleasure of eating a cracker, say, or even the intense pleasure of an orgasm that nonetheless fails to move one, as can happen with meaningless sexual activity. The intuitive distinction seems akin to distinctions made by some ancient philosophers; consider, for instance, the following passage from Epictetus’s Discourses :

‘I have a headache.’ Well, do not say ‘Alas!’ ‘I have an earache.’ Do not say ‘Alas!’ And I am not saying that it is not permissible to groan, only do not groan in the centre of your being . ( Discourses , 1.18.19, emphasis added).

The Stoics did not expect us never to feel unpleasant sensations, which would plainly be impossible; rather, the idea was not to let such things get to us , to impact our emotional conditions.

Why should anyone care to press such a distinction in characterizing happiness? For most people, the hedonic difference between happiness on an emotional state versus a hedonistic view is probably minimal. But while little will be lost, what will be gained? One possibility is that the more “central” affects involving our emotional conditions may bear a special relation to the person or the self , whereas more “peripheral” affects, like the pleasantness of eating a cracker, might pertain to the subpersonal aspects of our psychologies. Since well-being is commonly linked to ideas of self-fulfillment, this sort of distinction might signal a difference in the importance of these states. Another reason to focus on emotional condition rather than experience alone may be the greater psychological depth of the former: its impact on our mental lives, physiology, and behavior is arguably deeper and more pervasive. This enhances the explanatory and predictive significance of happiness, and more importantly its desirability: happiness on this view is not merely pleasant, but a major source of pleasure and other good outcomes (Fredrickson 2004, Lyubomirsky, King et al . 2005). Compare health on this score: while many think it matters chiefly or entirely because of its connection with pleasure, there are few skeptics about the importance of health. As well, emotional state views may capture the idea that happiness concerns the individual’s psychological orientation or disposition : to be happy, on an emotional state theory, is not just to be subjected to a certain sequence of experiences, but for one’s very being to manifest a favorable orientation toward the conditions of one’s life—a kind of psychic affirmation of one’s life. This reflects a point of similarity with life satisfaction views of happiness: contra hedonism, both views take happiness to be substantially dispositional, involving some sort of favorable orientation toward one’s life. But life satisfaction views tend to emphasize reflective or rational endorsement, whereas emotional state views emphasize the verdicts of our emotional natures.

While hedonism and emotional state theories are major contenders in the contemporary literature, all affect-based theories confront the worries, noted earlier, that motivate life satisfaction views—notably, their looser connection with people’s priorities, as well as their limited ability to reflect the quality of people’s lives taken as a whole.

Given the limitations of narrower theories of happiness, a hybrid account such as a subjective well-being theory may seem an attractive solution. This strategy has not been fully explored in the philosophical literature, though Sumner’s “life satisfaction” theory may best be classified as a hybrid (1996; see also Martin 2012). In any event, a hybrid approach draws objections of its own. If we arrive at a hybrid theory by this route, it could seem like either the marriage of two unpromising accounts, or of a promising account with an unpromising one. Such a union may not yield wholesome results. Second, people have different intuitions about what counts as happiness, so that no theory can accommodate all of them. Any theory that tries to thus risks pleasing no one. A third concern is that the various components of any hybrid are liable to matter for quite different reasons, so that happiness, thus understood, might fail to answer to any coherent set of concerns. Ascriptions of happiness could be relatively uninformative if they cast their net too widely.

3. The science of happiness

With the explosive rise of empirical research on happiness, a central question is how far, and how, happiness might be measured. [ 11 ] There seems to be no in-principle barrier to the idea of measuring, at least roughly, how happy people are. Investigators may never enjoy the precision of the “hedonimeter” once envisaged by Edgeworth to show just how happy a person is (Edgeworth 1881). Indeed, such a device might be impossible even in principle, since happiness might involve multiple dimensions that either cannot be precisely quantified or summed together. If so, it could still be feasible to develop approximate measures of happiness, or at least its various dimensions. Similarly, depression may not admit of precise quantification in a single number, yet many useful if imprecise measures of depression exist. In the case of happiness, it is plausible that even current measures provide information about how anxious, cheerful, satisfied, etc. people are, and thus tell us something about their happiness. Even the simplest self-report measures used in the literature have been found to correlate well with many intuitively relevant variables, such as friends’ reports, smiling, physiological measures, health, longevity, and so forth (Pavot 2008).

Importantly, most scientific research needs only to discern patterns across large numbers of individuals—to take an easy case, determining whether widows tend to be less happy than newlyweds—and this is compatible with substantial unreliability in assessing individual happiness. Similarly, an inaccurate thermometer might be a poor guide to the temperature, but readings from many such thermometers could correlate fairly well with actual temperatures—telling us, for instance, that Minnesota is colder than Florida.

This point reveals an important caveat: measures of happiness could correlate well with how happy people are, thus telling us which groups of people tend to be happier, while being completely wrong about absolute levels of happiness. Self-reports of happiness, for instance, might correctly indicate that unemployed people are considerably less happy than those with jobs. But every one of those reports could be wrong, say if everyone is unhappy yet claims to be happy, or vice-versa, so long as the unemployed report lower happiness than the employed. Similarly, bad thermometers may show that Minnesota is colder than Florida without giving the correct temperature.

Two morals emerge from these reflections. First, self-report measures of happiness could be reliable guides to relative happiness, though telling us little about how happy, in absolute terms, people are. We may know who is happier, that is, but not whether people are in fact happy. Second, even comparisons of relative happiness will be inaccurate if the groups being compared systematically bias their reports in different ways. This worry is particularly acute for cross-cultural comparisons of happiness, where differing norms about happiness may undermine the comparability of self-reports. The French might report lower happiness than Americans, for instance, not because their lives are less satisfying or pleasant, but because they tend to put a less positive spin on things. For this reason it may be useful to employ instruments, including narrower questions or physiological measures, that are less prone to cultural biasing. [ 12 ]

The discussion thus far has assumed that people can be wrong about how happy they are. Is this plausible? Some have argued that (sincerely) self-reported happiness cannot, even in principle, be mistaken. If you think you’re happy, goes a common sentiment, then you are happy. This claim is not plausible on a hedonistic or emotional state view of happiness, since those theories take judgments of happiness to encompass not just how one is feeling at the moment but also past states, and memories of those can obviously be spurious. Further, it has been argued that even judgments of how one feels at the present moment may often be mistaken, particularly regarding moods like anxiety. [ 13 ]

The idea that sincere self-reports of happiness are incorrigible can only be correct, it seems, given a quite specific conception of happiness—a kind of life satisfaction theory of happiness on which people count as satisfied with their lives so long as they are disposed to judge explicitly that they are satisfied with their lives on the whole. Also assumed here is that self-reports of happiness are in fact wholly grounded in life satisfaction judgments like these—that is, that people take questions about “happiness” to be questions about life satisfaction. Given these assumptions, we can plausibly conclude that self-reports of happiness are incorrigible. One question is whether happiness, thus conceived, is very important. As well, it is unlikely that respondents invariably interpret happiness questions as being about life satisfaction. At any rate, even life satisfaction theorists might balk at this variant of the account, since life satisfaction is sometimes taken to involve, not just explicit global judgments of life satisfaction, but also our responses to the particular things or domains we care about. Some will hesitate to deem satisfied people who hate many of the important things in their lives, however satisfied they claim to be with their lives as a whole.

In a similar vein, the common practice of measuring happiness simply by asking people to report explicitly on how “happy” they are is sometimes defended on the grounds that it lets people decide for themselves what happiness is. The reasoning again seems to presuppose, controversially, that self-reports of happiness employ a life satisfaction view of happiness, the idea being that whether you are satisfied (“happy”) will depend on what you care about. Alternatively, the point might be literally to leave it up to the respondent to decide whether ‘happy’ means hedonic state, emotional state, life satisfaction, or something else. Thus one respondent’s “I’m happy” might mean “my experience is generally pleasant,” while another’s might mean “I am satisfied with my life as a whole.” It is not clear, however, that asking ambiguous questions of this sort is a useful enterprise, since different respondents will in effect be answering different questions.

To measure happiness through self-reports, then, it may be wiser to employ terms other than ‘happiness’ and its cognates—terms whose meaning is relatively well-known and fixed. In other words, researchers should decide in advance what they want to measure—be it life satisfaction, hedonic state, emotional state, or something else—and then ask questions that refer unambiguously to those states. [ 14 ] This stratagem may be all the more necessary in cross-cultural work, where finding suitable translations of ‘happy’ can be daunting—particularly when the English meaning of the term remains a matter of contention (Wierzbicka 2004).

This entry focuses on subjective well-being studies, since that work is standardly deemed “happiness” research. But psychological research on well-being can take other forms, notably in the “eudaimonic”—commonly opposed to “hedonic”—literature, which assesses a broader range of indicators taken to represent objective human needs, such as meaning, personal growth, relatedness, autonomy, competence, etc. [ 15 ] (The assimilation of subjective well-being to the “hedonic” realm may be misleading, since life satisfaction seems primarily to be a non -hedonic value, as noted earlier.) Other well-being instruments may not clearly fall under either the “happiness” or eudaimonic rubrics, for instance extending subjective well-being measures by adding questions about the extent to which activities are seen as meaningful or worthwhile (White and Dolan 2009). An important question going forward is how far well-being research needs to incorporate indicators beyond subjective well-being.

The scientific literature on happiness has grown to proportions far too large for this article to do more than briefly touch on a few highlights. [ 16 ] Here is a sampling of oft-cited claims:

• Most people are happy
• People adapt to most changes, tending to return over time to their happiness “set point”
• People are prone to make serious mistakes in assessing and pursuing happiness
• Material prosperity has a surprisingly modest impact on happiness

The first claim, that most people are happy, appears to be a consensus position among subjective well-being researchers (for a seminal argument, see Diener and Diener 1996). The contention reflects three lines of evidence: most people, in most places, report being happy; most people report being satisfied with their lives; and most people experience more positive affect than negative. On any of the major theories of happiness, then, the evidence seems to show that most people are, indeed, happy. Yet this conclusion might be resisted, on a couple of grounds. First, life satisfaction theorists might question whether self-reports of life satisfaction suffice to establish that people are in fact satisfied with their lives. Perhaps self-reports can be mistaken, say if the individual believes herself satisfied yet shows many signs of dissatisfaction in her behavior, for instance complaining about or striving to change important things in her life. Second, defenders of affect-based theories—hedonistic and emotional state views—might reject the notion that a bare majority of positive affect suffices for happiness. While the traditional view among hedonists has indeed been that happiness requires no more than a >1:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, this contention has received little defense and has been disputed in the recent literature. Some investigators have claimed that “flourishing” requires greater than a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative affect, as this ratio might represent a threshold for broadly favorable psychological functioning (e.g., Larsen and Prizmic 2008). While the evidence for any specific ratio is highly controversial, if anything like this proportion were adopted as the threshold for happiness, on a hedonistic or emotional state theory, then some of the evidence taken to show that people are happy could in fact show the opposite. In any event, the empirical claim relies heavily on nontrivial philosophical views about the nature of happiness, illustrating one way in which philosophical work on happiness can inform scientific research.

The second claim, regarding adaptation and set points, reflects well-known findings that many major life events, like being disabled in an accident or winning the lottery, appear strongly to impact happiness only for a relatively brief period, after which individuals may return to a level of happiness not very different from before. [ 17 ] As well, twin studies have found that subjective well-being is substantially heritable, with .50 being a commonly accepted figure. Consequently many researchers have posited that each individual has a characteristic “set point” level of happiness, toward which he tends to gravitate over time. Such claims have caused some consternation over whether the pursuit and promotion of happiness are largely futile enterprises (Lykken and Tellegen 1996; Millgram 2000). However, the dominant view now seems to be that the early claims about extreme adaptation and set points were exaggerated: while adaptation is a very real phenomenon, many factors—including disability—can have substantial, and lasting, effects on how happy people are. [ 18 ] This point was already apparent from the literature on correlates and causes of happiness, discussed below: if things like relationships and engaging work are important for happiness, then happiness is probably not simply a matter of personality or temperament. As well, the large cross-national differences in measured happiness are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of personality variables. Note that even highly heritable traits can be strongly susceptible to improvement. Better living conditions have raised the stature of men in the Netherlands by eight inches—going from short (five foot four) to tall (over six feet)—in the last 150 years (Fogel 2005). Yet height is considered much more heritable than happiness, with typical heritability estimates ranging from .60 to over .90 (e.g., Silventoinen, Sammalisto et al . 2003). [ 19 ]

The question of mistakes will be taken up in section 5.2. But the last claim—that material prosperity has relatively modest impacts on happiness—has lately become the subject of heated debate. For some time the standard view among subjective well-being researchers was that, beyond a low threshold where basic needs are met, economic gains have only a small impact on happiness levels. According to the well-known “Easterlin Paradox,” for instance, wealthier people do tend to be happier within nations, but richer nations are little happier than less prosperous counterparts, and—most strikingly—economic growth has virtually no impact (Easterlin 1974). In the U.S., for example, measured happiness has not increased significantly since at least 1947, despite massive increases in wealth and income. In short, once you’re out of poverty, absolute levels of wealth and income make little difference in how happy people are.

Against these claims, some authors have argued that absolute income has a large impact on happiness across the income spectrum (e.g., Stevenson and Wolfers 2008). The question continues to be much debated, but in 2010 a pair of large-scale studies using Gallup data sets, including improved measures of life satisfaction and affect, suggested that both sides may be partly right (Kahneman and Deaton 2010; Diener, Ng et al . 2010). Surveying large numbers of Americans in one case, and what is claimed to be the first globally representative sample of humanity in the other, these studies found that income does indeed correlate substantially (.44 in the global sample), at all levels, with life satisfaction—strictly speaking, a “life evaluation” measure that asks respondents to rate their lives without saying whether they are satisfied. Yet the correlation of household income with the affect measures is far weaker: globally, .17 for positive affect, –.09 for negative affect; and in the United States, essentially zero above $75,000 (though quite strong at low income levels). For more recent discussions of empirical work, see Jebb et al. 2018 along with relevant chapters in Diener et al. 2018 and the annual World Happiness Reports from 2012 onward (Helliwell et al. 2012). Research on the complex money-happiness relationship resists simple characterization, but a crude summary is that the connection tends to be positive and substantial, strong at lower income levels while modest to weak or even negative at higher incomes, and stronger and less prone to satiation for life evaluation than emotional well-being metrics. But again, these are very rough generalizations that gloss over a variety of important factors and admit of many exceptions across both individuals and societies.

In short, the relationship between money and happiness may depend on which theory of happiness we accept: on a life satisfaction view, the relationship may be strong; whereas affect-based views may yield a much weaker connection, again above some modest threshold. Here, again, philosophical views about the nature and significance of happiness may play an important role in understanding empirical results and their practical upshot. Economic growth, for instance, has long been a top priority for governments, and findings about its impact on human well-being may have substantial implications for policy.

It is important to note that studies of this nature focus on generic trends, not specific cases, and there is no dispute that significant exceptions exist—notably, populations that enjoy high levels of happiness amid low levels of material prosperity. Among others, a number of Latin American countries, Maasai herders, Inughuit hunter-gatherers, and Amish communities have registered highly positive results in subjective well-being studies, sometimes higher than those in many affluent nations, and numerous informal accounts accord with the data. [ 20 ] Such “positive outliers” suggest that some societies can support high levels of happiness with extremely modest material holdings. The importance of money for happiness may depend strongly on what kind of society one inhabits. An interesting question, particularly in light of common environmental concerns, is how far the lessons of such societies can, or should, be transferred to other social forms, where material attainment and happiness are presently more tightly coupled. Perhaps some degree of decoupling of happiness and money would be desirable.

So the role of money in happiness appears, at this juncture, to be a mixed bag, depending heavily on how we conceive of happiness and what range of societies we are considering. What (else), then, does matter most for happiness? There is no definitive list of the main sources of happiness in the literature, partly because it is not clear how to divide them up. But the following items seem generally to be accepted as among the chief correlates of happiness: supportive relationships, engagement in interesting and challenging activities, material and physical security, a sense of meaning or purpose, a positive outlook, and autonomy or control. [ 21 ] Significant correlates may also include—among many others—religion, good governance, trust, helping others, values (e.g., having non-materialistic values), achieving goals, not being unemployed, and connection with the natural environment. [ 22 ]

An illustrative study of the correlates of happiness from a global perspective is the Gallup World Poll study noted earlier (Diener, Ng et al . 2010; see also Jebb et al. 2020). In that study, the life satisfaction measure was more strongly related to material prosperity, as noted above: household income, along with possession of luxury conveniences and satisfaction with standard of living. The affect measures, by contrast, correlated most strongly with what the authors call “psychosocial prosperity”: whether people reported being treated with respect in the last day, having family and friends to count on, learning something new, doing what they do best, and choosing how their time was spent.

What these results show depends partly on the reliability of the measures. One possible source of error is that this study might exaggerate the relationship between life satisfaction and material attainments through the use of a “ladder” scale for life evaluation, ladders being associated with material aspirations. Errors might also arise through salience biases whereby material concerns might be more easily recalled than other important values, such as whether one has succeeded in having children; or through differences in positivity biases across income levels (perhaps wealthier people tend to be more “positive-responding” than poorer individuals). Another question is whether the affect measures adequately track the various dimensions of people’s emotional lives. However, the results are roughly consonant with other research, so they are unlikely to be entirely an artifact of the instruments used in this study. [ 23 ] A further point of uncertainty is the causal story behind the correlations—whether the correlates, like psychosocial prosperity, cause happiness; whether happiness causes them; whether other factors cause both; or, as is likely, some combination of the three.

Such concerns duly noted, the research plausibly suggests that, on average, material progress has some tendency to help people to better get what they want in life, as found in the life satisfaction measures, while relationships and engaging activities are more important for people’s emotional lives. What this means for happiness depends on which view of happiness is correct.

4. The importance of happiness

Were you to survey public attitudes about the value of happiness, at least in liberal Western democracies, you would likely find considerable support for the proposition that happiness is all that really matters for human well-being. Many philosophers over the ages have likewise endorsed such a view, typically assuming a hedonistic account of happiness. (A few, like Almeder 2000, have identified well-being with happiness understood as life satisfaction.)

Most philosophers, however, have rejected hedonistic and other mental state accounts of well-being, and with them the idea that happiness could suffice for well-being. [ 24 ] (See the entry on well-being .) Objections to mental state theories of well-being tend to cluster around two sets of concerns. First, it is widely believed that the non-mental conditions of our lives matter for well-being: whether our families really love us, whether our putative achievements are genuine, whether the things we care about actually obtain. The most influential objection of this sort is Robert Nozick’s experience machine case, wherein we are asked to imagine a virtual reality device that can perfectly simulate any reality for its user, who will think the experience is genuine (Nozick 1974). Would you plug in to such a machine for life? Most people would not, and the case is widely taken to vitiate mental state theories of well-being. Beyond having positive mental states, it seems to matter both that our lives go well and that our state of mind is appropriately related to how things are. [ 25 ]

A second set of objections concerns various ways in which a happy person might nonetheless seem intuitively to be leading an impoverished or stunted life. The most influential of these worries involves adaptation , where individuals facing oppressive circumstances scale back their expectations and find contentment in “small mercies,” as Sen put it. [ 26 ] Even a slave might come to internalize the values of his oppressors and be happy, and this strikes most as an unenviable life indeed. Related worries involve people with diminished capacities (blindness, Down Syndrome), or choosing to lead narrow and cramped or simpleminded lives (e.g., counting blades of grass). Worries about impoverished lives are a prime motivator of Aristotelian theories of well-being, which emphasize the full and proper exercise of our human capacities.

In the face of these and other objections most commentators have concluded that neither happiness nor any other mental state can suffice for well-being. Philosophical interest in happiness has consequently flagged, since its theoretical importance becomes unclear if it does not play a starring role in our account of the good.

Even as happiness might fail to suffice for well-being, well-being itself may be only one component of a good life , and not the most important one at that. Here ‘good life’ means a life that is good all things considered, taking account of all the values that matter in life, whether they benefit the individual or not. Kant, for example, considered both morality and well-being to be important but distinct elements of a good life. Yet morality should be our first priority, never to be sacrificed for personal happiness.

In fact there is a broad consensus, or near-consensus, among ethical theorists on a doctrine we might call the priority of virtue : broadly and crudely speaking, the demands of virtue or morality trump other values in life. [ 27 ] We ought above all to act and live well, or at least not badly or wrongly. This view need not take the strong form of insisting that we must always act as virtuously as possible, or that moral reasons always take precedence. But it does mean, at least, that when being happy requires acting badly, one’s happiness must be sacrificed. If it would be wrong to leave your family, in which you are unhappy, then you must remain unhappy, or find more acceptable ways to seek happiness.

The mainstream views in all three of the major approaches to ethical theory—consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics—agree on some form of the priority of virtue. Where these views chiefly differ is not on the importance of being good, but on whether being good necessarily benefits us. Virtue ethicists tend to answer in the affirmative, the other two schools in the negative. Building virtue into well-being, as Aristotelians do, may seem to yield a more demanding ethics, and in some ways it does. Yet many deontologists and consequentialists—notably Kant—advocate sterner, more starkly moralistic visions of the good life than Aristotle would ever have dreamt of (e.g., Singer 1972).

Happiness, in short, is believed by most philosophers to be insufficient for well-being, and still less important for the good life. These points may seem to vitiate any substantial role for happiness in ethical thought. However, well-being itself is still regarded as a central concept in ethical thought, denoting one of the chief elements of a good life even if not the sole element. And there are reasons for thinking happiness important, both practically and theoretically, despite the worries noted above.

Even if happiness does not suffice for well-being—a point that not all philosophers would accept—it might still rate a privileged spot in theories of well-being. This could happen in either of two ways.

First, happiness could be a major component of a theory of well-being. Objective list theories of well-being sometimes include happiness or related mental states such as enjoyment among the fundamental constituents of well-being. A more ambitious proposal, originated by L.W. Sumner, identifies well-being with authentic happiness —happiness that is authentic in the sense of being both informed and autonomous (Sumner 1996). The root idea is that well-being involves being happy, where one’s happiness is a response of one’s own (autonomous), to a life that genuinely is one’s own (informed). The authenticity constraint is meant to address both experience machine-type worries and “happy slave” objections relating to adaptation, where happiness may be non-autonomous, depending on manipulation or the uncritical acceptance of oppressive values. Since these have been the most influential objections to mental state accounts of well-being, Sumner’s approach promises to considerably strengthen the position of happiness-centered approaches to well-being, and several philosophers have developed variants or close relations of the authentic happiness theory (Brülde 2007, Haybron 2008a, Tiberius and Plakias 2010, Višak 2015). The approach remains fairly new, however, so its long-term prospects remain unclear. [ 28 ]

A second strategy forsakes the project of giving a unitary theory of well-being, recognizing instead a family of two or more kinds of prudential value. Happiness could be central to, or even exhaustive of, one of those values. Shelly Kagan, for instance, has suggested that welfare hedonism could be correct as a theory of how well a person is doing, but not of how well a person’s life is going, which should perhaps be regarded as a distinct value (Kagan 1992, 1994). In short, we might distinguish narrow and wide well-being concepts. An experience machine user might be doing well in the narrow sense, but not the wide—she is doing well, though her life is quite sad. Happiness might, then, suffice for well-being, but only in the narrow sense. Others have made similar points, but uptake has been limited, perhaps because distinguishing multiple concepts of prudential value makes the already difficult job of giving a theory of well-being much harder, as Kagan pointedly observes. [ 29 ] An interesting possibility is that the locution ‘happy life’, and the corresponding well-being sense of happiness, actually refers to a specific variety of well-being—perhaps well-being in the wide sense just suggested, or well-being taken as an ideal state, an ultimate goal of deliberation. This might explain the continued use of ‘happiness’ for the well-being notion in the philosophical literature, rather than the more standard ‘wellbeing.’

The preceding section discussed ways that happiness might figure prominently even in non-mental state theories of well-being. The question there concerned the role of happiness in theories of well-being. This is a different question from how important happiness is for well-being itself. Even a theory of well-being that includes no mention at all of happiness can allow that happiness is nonetheless a major component or contributor to well-being, because of its relation to the things that ultimately constitute well-being. If you hold a desire theory of well-being, for instance, you will very likely allow that, for most people, happiness is a central aspect of well-being, since most people very much desire to be happy. Indeed, some desire theorists have argued that the account actually yields a form of hedonism, on the grounds that people ultimately desire nothing else but happiness or pleasure (Sidgwick 1907 [1966], Brandt 1979, 1989).

Happiness may be thought important even on theories normally believed to take a dismissive view of it. Aristotelians identify well-being with virtuous activity, yet Aristotle plainly takes this to be a highly pleasant condition, indeed the most pleasant kind of life there is (see, e.g., NE , Bk. I 8; Bk. VII 13). You cannot flourish, on Aristotelian terms, without being happy, and unhappiness is clearly incompatible with well-being. Even the Stoics, who notoriously regard all but a virtuous inner state as at best indifferent, would still assign happiness a kind of importance: at the very least, to be unhappy would be unvirtuous; and virtue itself arguably entails a kind of happiness, namely a pleasant state of tranquility. As well, happiness would likely be a preferred indifferent in most cases, to be chosen over unhappiness. To be sure, both Aristotelian and Stoic accounts are clear that happiness alone does not suffice for well-being, that its significance is not what common opinion takes it to be, and that some kinds of happiness can be worthless or even bad. But neither denies that happiness is somehow quite important for human well-being.

In fact it is questionable whether any major school of philosophical thought denies outright the importance of happiness, at least on one of the plausible accounts of the matter. Doubts about its significance probably owe to several factors. Some skeptics, for example, focus on relatively weak conceptions of happiness, such as the idea that it is little more than the simple emotion of feeling happy—an idea that few hedonists or emotional state theorists would accept. Or, alternatively, assuming that a concern for happiness has only to do with positive states. Yet ‘happiness’ also serves as a blanket term for a domain of concern that involves both positive and negative states, namely the kinds of mental states involved in being happy or unhappy. Just as “health” care tends to focus mainly on ill health, so might happiness researchers choose to focus much of their effort on the study and alleviation of unhappiness—depression, suffering, anxiety, and other conditions whose importance is uncontroversial. The study of happiness need be no more concerned with smiles than with frowns.

5. The pursuit and promotion of happiness

The last set of questions we will examine centers on the pursuit of happiness, both individual and collective. Most of the popular literature on happiness discusses how to make oneself happier, with little attention given to whether this is an appropriate goal, or how various means of pursuing happiness measure up from an ethical standpoint. More broadly, how if at all should one pursue happiness as part of a good life?

We saw earlier that most philosophers regard happiness as secondary to morality in a good life. The individual pursuit of happiness may be subject to nonmoral norms as well, prudence being the most obvious among them. Prudential norms need not be as plain as “don’t shoot yourself in the foot.” On Sumner’s authentic happiness view of well-being, for instance, we stand to gain little by pursuing happiness in inauthentic ways, for instance through self-deception or powerful drugs like Huxley’s soma , which guarantees happiness come what may (Huxley 1932 [2005]). The view raises interesting questions about the benefits of less extreme pharmaceuticals, such as the therapeutic use of antidepressants; such medications can make life more pleasant, but many people worry whether they pose a threat to authenticity, perhaps undercutting their benefits. It is possible that such drugs involve prudential tradeoffs, promoting well-being in some ways while undermining it in others; whether the tradeoffs are worth it will depend on how, in a given case, the balance is struck. Another possibility is that such drugs sometimes promote authenticity, if for instance a depressive disorder prevents a person from being “himself.”

Looking to more broadly ethical, but not yet moral, norms, it may be possible to act badly without acting either immorally or imprudently. While Aristotle himself regarded acting badly as inherently imprudent, his catalogue of virtues is instructive, as many of them (wit, friendliness, etc.) are not what we normally regard as moral virtues. Some morally permissible methods of pursuing happiness may nonetheless be inappropriate because they conflict with such “ethical” virtues. They might, for instance, be undignified or imbecilic.

Outwardly virtuous conduct undertaken in the name of personal happiness might, if wrongly motivated, be incompatible with genuine virtue. One might, for instance, engage in philanthropy solely to make oneself happier, and indeed work hard at fine-tuning one’s assistance to maximize the hedonic payoff. This sort of conduct would not obviously instantiate the virtue of compassion or kindness, and indeed might be reasonably deemed contemptible. Similarly, it might be admirable, morally or otherwise, to be grateful for the good things in one’s life. Yet the virtue of gratitude might be undermined by certain kinds of gratitude intervention, whereby one tries to become happier by focusing on the things one is grateful for. If expressions of gratitude become phony or purely instrumental, the sole reason for giving thanks being to become happy—and not that one actually has something to be thankful for—then the “gratitude” might cease to be admirable, and may indeed be unvirtuous. [ 30 ]

A different question is what means of pursuing happiness are most effective . This is fundamentally an empirical question, but there are some in-principle issues that philosophical reflection might inform. One oft-heard claim, commonly called the “paradox of hedonism,” is that the pursuit of happiness is self-defeating; to be happy, don’t pursue happiness. It is not clear how to interpret this dictum, however, so that it is both interesting and true. It is plainly imprudent to make happiness one’s focus at every moment, but doubtful that this has often been denied. Yet never considering happiness also seems an improbable strategy for becoming happier. If you are choosing among several equally worthwhile occupations, and have good evidence that some of them will make you miserable, while one of them is likely to be highly fulfilling, it would not seem imprudent to take that information into account. Yet to do so just is to pursue happiness. The so-called paradox of hedonism is perhaps best seen as a vague caution against focusing too much on making oneself happy, not a blanket dismissal of the prospects for expressly seeking happiness—and for this modest point there is good empirical evidence (Schooler, Ariely et al . 2003, Lyubomirsky 2007).

That happiness is sometimes worth seeking does not mean we will always do a good job of it (Haybron 2008b). In recent decades a massive body of empirical evidence has gathered on various ways in which people seem systematically prone to make mistakes in the pursuit of their interests, including happiness. Such tendencies have been suggested in several domains relating to the pursuit of happiness, including (with recent surveys cited):

• Assessing how happy we are, or were in the past (Haybron 2007)
• Predicting (“forecasting”) what will make us happy (Gilbert 2006)
• Choosing rationally (Kahneman and Tversky 2000, Gilovitch, Griffin et al . 2002, Hsee and Hastie 2006)

A related body of literature explores the costs and benefits of (ostensibly) making it easier to pursue happiness by increasing people’s options; it turns out that having more choices might often make people less happy, for instance by increasing the burdens of deliberation or the likelihood of regret (Schwartz 2004). Less discussed in this context, but highly relevant, is the large body of research indicating that human psychology and behavior are remarkably prone to unconscious social and other situational influences, most infamously reported in the Milgram obedience experiments (Doris 2002, 2015, Haybron 2014). Human functioning, and the pursuit of happiness, may be more profoundly social than many commentators have assumed. [ 31 ]

Taken together, this research bears heavily on two central questions in the philosophical literature: first, the broad character of human nature (e.g., in what sense are we rational animals? How should we conceive of human autonomy?); second, the philosophical ideals of the good society and good government.

Just a decade ago the idea of happiness policy was something of a novelty. While it remains on the fringes in some locales, notably the United States, in much of the world there has been a surge of interest in making happiness an explicit target of policy consideration. Attention has largely shifted, however, to a broader focus on well-being to reflect not just happiness but also other welfare concerns of citizens, and dozens of governments now incorporate well-being metrics in their national statistics. [ 32 ]

Let’s consider the rationale for policies aimed at promoting well-being. In political thought, the modern liberal tradition has tended to assume an optimistic view of human nature and the individual’s capacities for prudent choice. Partly for this reason, the preservation and expansion of individual freedoms, including people’s options, is widely taken to be a central goal, if not the goal, of legitimate governments. People should be freed to seek the good life as they see it, and beyond that the state should, by and large, stay out of the well-being-promotion business.

This vision of the good society rests on empirical assumptions that have been the subject of considerable debate. If it turns out that people systematically and predictably err in the pursuit of their interests, then it may be possible for governments to devise policies that correct for such mistakes. [ 33 ] Of course, government intervention can introduce other sorts of mistakes, and there is some debate about whether such measures are likely to do more harm than good (e.g., Glaeser 2006).

But even if governments cannot effectively counteract human imprudence, it may still be that people fare better in social forms that influence or even constrain choices in ways that make serious mistakes less likely. (Food culture and its impact on health may be an instructive example here.) The idea that people tend to fare best when their lives are substantially constrained or guided by their social and physical context has recently been dubbed contextualism ; the contrary view, that people do best when their lives are, as much as possible, determined by the individuals themselves, is individualism (Haybron 2008b). Recent contextualists include communitarians and many perfectionists, though contextualism is not a political doctrine and is compatible with liberalism and even libertarian political morality. Contextualism about the promotion of well-being is related to recent work in moral psychology that emphasizes the social character of human agency, such as situationism and social intuitionism. [ 34 ]

Quite apart from matters of efficacy, there are moral questions about the state promotion of happiness, which has been a major subject of debate, both because of the literature on mistakes and research suggesting that the traditional focus of state efforts to promote well-being, economic growth, has a surprisingly modest impact on happiness. One concern is paternalism : does happiness-based policy infringe too much on personal liberty? Some fear a politics that may too closely approximate Huxley’s Brave New World, where the state ensures a drug-induced happiness for all (Huxley 1932 [2005]). Extant policy suggestions, however, have been more modest. Efforts to steer choice, for instance in favor of retirement savings, may be paternalistic, but advocates argue that such policies can be sufficiently light-handed that no one should object to them, in some cases even going so far as to deem it “libertarian paternalism” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). [ 35 ] The idea is that gentle “nudges,” like setting default options on hiring forms to setting aside money for retirement, interfere only trivially with choice, imposing little or no cost for those who wish to choose differently, and would very likely be welcomed by most of those targeted.

Also relatively light-handed, and perhaps not paternalistic at all, are state efforts to promote happiness directly through social policy, for instance by prioritizing unemployment over economic growth on the grounds that the former has a larger impact on happiness. Other policies might include trying to reduce commute times, or making walkable neighborhoods and green space a priority in urban planning, again on happiness grounds. Some may deem such measures paternalistic insofar as they trade freedom (in the form of economic prosperity) for a substantive good, happiness, that people value unevenly, though it has also been argued that refusing to take citizens’ values like happiness into consideration in policy deliberation on their behalf can amount to paternalism (Haybron and Alexandrova 2013).

A related sort of objection to happiness-based policy argues that happiness, or even well-being, is simply the wrong object of policy, which ought instead to focus on the promotion of resources or capabilities (Rawls 1971, Nussbaum 2000, Quong 2011, Sen 2009). Several reasons have been cited for this sort of view, one being that policies aimed at promoting happiness or well-being violate commonly accepted requirements of “liberal neutrality,” according to which policy must be neutral among conceptions of the good. According to this constraint, governments must not promote any view of the good life, and happiness-based policy might be argued to flout it. Worries about paternalism also surface here, the idea being that states should only focus on affording people the option to be happy or whatever, leaving the actual achievement of well-being up to the autonomous individual. As we just saw, however, it is not clear how far happiness policy initiatives actually infringe on personal liberty or autonomy. A further worry is that, happiness isn’t really, or primarily, what matters for human well-being (Nussbaum 2008).

But a major motivation for thinking happiness the wrong object of policy is that neither happiness nor well-being are the appropriate focus of a theory of justice . What justice requires of society, on this view, is not that it make us happy; we do not have a right to be happy. Rather, justice demands only that each has sufficient opportunity (in the form of resources or capabilities, say) to achieve a good life, or that each gets a fair share of the benefits of social cooperation. However plausible such points may be, it is not clear how far they apply to many proposals for happiness-based policy, save the strongest claims that happiness should be the sole aim of policy: many policy decisions are not primarily concerned with questions of social justice, nor with constitutional fundamentals, the focus of some theories of justice. Happiness could be a poor candidate for the “currency” of justice, yet still remain a major policy concern. Indeed, the chief target of happiness policy advocates has been, not theories of justice, but governments’ overwhelming emphasis on promoting GDP and other indices of economic growth. This is not, in the main, a debate about justice, and as of yet the philosophical literature has not extensively engaged with it.

However, the push for happiness-based policy is a recent development. In coming years, such questions will likely receive considerably more attention in the philosophical literature.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• World Database of Happiness , Erasmus University of Rotterdam.
• Positive Psychology Center , University of Pennsylvania.
• The Happiness and Well-Being Project , with Suggested Readings and links to Funded Research , Saint Louis University.

Aquinas, Thomas | Aristotle | Bentham, Jeremy | character, moral: empirical approaches | communitarianism | consequentialism | economics: philosophy of | emotion | ethics: ancient | ethics: virtue | hedonism | Kant, Immanuel | liberalism | Mill, John Stuart | moral psychology: empirical approaches | pain | paternalism | Plato | pleasure | well-being

Acknowledgments

For helpful comments, many thanks are due to Anna Alexandrova, Robert Biswas-Diener, Thomas Carson, Irwin Goldstein, Richard Lucas, Jason Raibley, Eric Schwitzgebel, Stephen Schueller, Adam Shriver, Edward Zalta, and an anonymous referee for the SEP. Portions of Section 2 are adapted from Haybron 2008, “Philosophy and the Science of Subjective Well-Being,” in Eid and Larsen, The Science of Subjective Well-Being , and used with kind permission of Guilford Press.

Copyright © 2020 by Dan Haybron < dan . haybron @ slu . edu >

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3 The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis: What and So What?

C. Daniel Batson, Department of Psychology, University of Kansas.

• Published: 05 October 2017
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Do we humans ever, in any degree, care for others for their sakes and not simply for our own? The empathy-altruism hypothesis offers an affirmative answer to this question. It claims that empathic concern (defined as “other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of another in need”) produces altruistic motivation (“a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing the other’s welfare”). Research over the past 40 years testing this hypothesis against egoistic alternatives has provided quite strong support. Empathy-induced altruistic motivation does seem to be within the human repertoire. This empathy-induced altruism may have its biological roots in generalized parental nurturance. Practical implications of the empathy-altruism hypothesis include both benefits and liabilities—for the targets of empathy, for others, and for the person feeling empathic concern. Implications of the empathy-altruism research for the content and conduct of compassion science are suggested.

Think of all the time and energy we spend helping others. In addition to daily courtesies and kindnesses, we send money to aid disaster victims halfway around the world, and to save whales. We stay up all night with a friend who just suffered a broken relationship. We stop to comfort a lost and frightened child until his mom appears. Sometimes the help is truly spectacular, as when Wesley Autrey jumped onto a subway track with the train bearing down in order to save a young man who had fallen while having a seizure. Or when rescuers in Nazi Europe risked their own lives and the lives of family members to shelter Jews.

Why do we do these things? What motivates such behavior? Is it true that “the most disinterested love is, after all, but a kind of bargain, in which the dear love of our own selves always proposes to be the gainer some way or other” ( La Rochefoucauld, 1691 , Maxim 82)? Or are we also capable of altruism?

The significance of the latter possibility depends on what you think altruism is. If, like most behavioral and social scientists, you think of it as personally costly helping—or as helping to gain self-administered rewards such as a warm glow or avoidance of guilt—the existence of altruism cannot be doubted. But to say we are capable of such altruism tells us nothing we did not already know. These conceptions trivialize the centuries-old egoism-altruism debate. In that debate, altruism refers to a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing another’s welfare; egoism refers to a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing our own welfare. The dominant view in Western thought has long been that our motivation is always exclusively egoistic, as La Rochefoucauld said.

The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

The empathy-altruism hypothesis takes the motivational conceptions of altruism and egoism seriously. It states that empathic concern produces altruistic motivation , challenging the belief in universal egoism (Batson, 1987 , 2011 ). To understand this deceptively simple hypothesis, it is necessary to be clear about what is and is not meant by both empathic concern and altruistic motivation.

Empathic Concern

In the empathy-altruism hypothesis, empathic concern means other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need . This other-oriented emotion has been called by several names besides “empathic concern,” including compassion, tenderness, sympathy , and pity . (Note that while many people use the term compassion to refer to a form of the emotional state I’m calling “empathic concern,” some people use the term to refer to motivation as well as emotion, making it more equivalent to the whole empathy-altruism hypotheses. I wish to leave the emotion-motivation link open for empirical investigation, not have it determined in advance by definitional decree. The nature of this link is the focus of the empathy-altruism hypothesis.) The label applied to the other-oriented emotion is not crucial. What is crucial is that the emotion involves feeling for the other, not feeling as the other feels. Let me add four quick points of clarification.

First, when saying that the other-oriented emotion called empathic concern is “congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need,” I refer to a congruence of valence, not of specific content. The valence is positive when the perceived welfare of the other is positive, and negative when the perceived welfare is negative. So it would be congruent to feel, for example, sad or sorry for someone who is upset and afraid. Or to feel compassion for the unconscious victim of a mugging, as did the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:33). Second, although the term “empathy” is broad enough to include situations in which there is no perceived need—such as when we feel empathic joy at another’s good fortune ( Smith, Keating, & Stotland, 1989 ; Stotland, 1969 )—not all empathic emotion is hypothesized to produce altruistic motivation: only the empathic concern felt when another is perceived to be in need. Without perceived need, there is no motivation to increase the other’s welfare.

Third, empathic concern as defined here is not a single, discrete emotion but includes a whole constellation of emotions. It includes feelings that people report as sympathy, compassion, softheartedness, tenderness, sorrow, sadness, upset, distress, concern, grief , and more. Fourth, although feelings of sympathy and compassion are inherently other-oriented, we can feel sorrow, distress, and concern that are self-oriented, as when something bad happens directly to us. Both other-oriented and self-oriented versions of these emotions may be described as feeling sorry or sad, upset or distressed, concerned or grieved. This breadth of usage invites confusion. The relevant psychological distinction does not lie in the emotional label used— sad, distressed, concerned —but in whose welfare is the focus of the emotion. Are we feeling sad, distressed, or concerned for the other, or are we feeling this way as a result of what has befallen us (including, perhaps, the experience of seeing the other suffer)?

In recent years the term “empathy” has been applied to a range of phenomena besides the other-oriented emotion just described (see Batson, 2009 , for a partial review). Here is a quick list:

Knowing another’s thoughts and feelings.

Adopting the posture or matching the neural response of another.

Coming to feel as another feels.

Feeling personal distress at witnessing another’s suffering.

Imagining how you would think and feel in another’s place.

Imagining how another thinks and feels.

A general disposition (trait) to feel for others.

Each of these phenomena is distinct from the other-oriented feeling that I am calling empathic concern —or, for short, empathy . The empathy-altruism hypothesis makes no claim that any of these other phenomena produces altruistic motivation, except if and when they evoke empathic concern. Moreover, the hypothesis makes no claim that any of these other phenomena is either necessary or sufficient to produce empathic concern. As a result, to find evidence in favor of the empathy-altruism hypothesis should not be taken as evidence that any of these other phenomena produces altruistic motivation.

Altruistic Motivation

Altruism and egoism in the egoism-altruism debate have much in common. Each refers to a motivational state. Each is concerned with the ultimate goal of that motivational state. And, for each, the ultimate goal is to increase someone’s welfare. These common features provide the context for highlighting the crucial difference: Whose welfare is the ultimate goal—another person’s or our own?

“Ultimate goal” here refers to means–end relations in the psychological present, not to a metaphysical first or final cause, and not to a biological function. An ultimate goal is an end in itself. In contrast, an instrumental goal is a stepping stone on the way to an ultimate goal. Both instrumental and ultimate goals should be distinguished from unintended consequences , results of an action that are not its goal. Each ultimate goal defines a distinct goal-directed motive. Hence, altruism and egoism, which have different ultimate goals, are distinct motives even though they can co-occur. Moreover, they are motivational states , not personal dispositions or traits . The contrast in the egoism-altruism debate is between these motivational states—egoism and altruism—not between types of people—egoists and altruists.

Many forms of self-benefit can be derived from helping. Some are obvious, such as when we get material rewards or public praise, or when we escape public censure. But even when we help in the absence of external rewards, we can still benefit. Seeing a person or animal in need may cause us to feel distress, and by relieving the other’s distress, we relieve our own. Or when we help, we may feel good about ourselves for being kind; or we may escape guilt and shame for failing to do what we think we should.

The empathy-altruism hypothesis does not deny that altruistically motivated helping brings self-benefits like these. But it claims that the self-benefits of empathy-induced helping are unintended consequences rather than the ultimate goal. Additionally, the empathy-altruism hypothesis does not claim that a person feeling empathic concern experiences only altruistic motivation. Such a person can experience other motives arising from other sources, including the conditions that evoke empathic concern—such as perception of the other as in need. Nor does this hypothesis claim that empathic concern is the only source of altruistic motivation; it is mute about other possible sources. Given that other phenomena have been called “empathy,” there can even be other empathy-altruism hypotheses. To date, however, no other such hypotheses have been carefully tested.

Why Worry About the Motivation to Help?

As long as the person in need receives help, why worry about whether the underlying motivation is altruistic or egoistic? The answer depends on our interest. If we are only interested in getting help for this person in this situation, the nature of the motivation may not matter. But if we are interested in knowing more generally when and where help can be expected—and how effective it is likely to be (perhaps with an eye to creating a more caring society)—then understanding the underlying motivation is crucial. If, for example, I am motivated to help to impress you, then when you will not know that I have helped, I will not help.

As argued by Kurt Lewin (1951) , explanatory stability of human action is found in the link of a given motive to its ultimate goal, not in behavior or consequences. Behavior is highly variable. Occurrence of a particular behavior, including helping, depends on the strength of the motive or motives that might evoke that behavior, as well as on (a) the strength of competing motives, (b) how the behavior relates to each of these motives, and (c) other behavioral options available in the situation at the time. It also depends on whether the behavior promotes an instrumental or an ultimate goal. The more directly a behavior promotes an ultimate goal, and the more uniquely it does so among the behavioral options available, the more likely it is that the behavior will occur. Behavior that promotes an instrumental goal can change if either (a) the causal association between the instrumental and ultimate goal changes, or (b) behavioral pathways to the ultimate goal arise that bypass the instrumental goal.

Yet—complicating matters—we infer motivation from behavior; specifically, from the pattern of behavior across situations that vary in the best way to reach different possible ultimate goals. This inference has allowed us to test the empathy-altruism hypothesis.

Current Status of the Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis

Over the past four decades, more than 35 experiments have been conducted to test the empathy-altruism hypothesis—the hypothesis that empathic concern produces altruistic motivation—against a range of egoistic hypotheses that claim instead that the motivation produced by empathic concern is directed toward the ultimate goal of obtaining one or another self-benefit. As just suggested, the research strategy has been to experimentally vary situations so we can make meaningful inferences from the pattern of behavior about the ultimate goal of the empathy-induced motivation. (See Batson, 2011 , for a comprehensive review of the experiments.)

With remarkable consistency, results of these experiments have supported the empathy-altruism hypothesis. The few results that initially seemed to contradict that hypothesis have not stood up to further examination. To the best of my knowledge, there is at present no plausible egoistic explanation for the cumulative results. This evidence has led me to tentatively conclude that the empathy-altruism hypothesis is true: Other-oriented feeling for a person in need (empathic concern) produces motivation with the ultimate goal of removing the empathy-inducing need (altruistic motivation). The evidence has also led me to conclude that this motivation can be surprisingly powerful.

Antecedents of Empathic Concern

If empathic concern produces altruistic motivation, what produces empathic concern? The theory of altruistic motivation of which the empathy-altruism hypothesis is the core specifies two key antecedents of empathic concern: (a) perception of another as in need, and (b) intrinsic valuing of the other’s welfare (see Batson, 2011 ).

Perception of another as in need:

Perceiving need involves seeing a negative discrepancy between the other’s current state and what is desirable for the other on one or more dimensions of well-being. Dimensions of well-being include the absence of physical pain, negative affect, anxiety, stress, danger, and disease, as well as the presence of physical pleasure, positive affect, satisfaction, and security. Perceived needs can, of course, vary in magnitude. The magnitude appears to be a function of three factors: (a) the number of dimensions of well-being on which discrepancies are perceived, (b) the size of each discrepancy, and (c) the perceived importance of each of these dimensions for the overall well-being of the person in need.

The negative discrepancy at issue concerns the well-being of the person in need, not of the person feeling empathy. But the perception at issue is by the person feeling empathy, not by the person in need. There are times when people perceive themselves to be in need, yet others do not. These others will not experience empathic concern—unless they consider the person’s false perception of need itself to be a need. Alternatively, there are times when people do not perceive themselves to be in need, yet others do. These others may well feel empathic concern.

Intrinsic valuing of the other’s welfare:

The type of valuing of another’s welfare that evokes empathic concern is intrinsic rather than extrinsic ( Allport, 1961 ). The other is valued in his or her own right, not for what he or she may be able to provide. More colloquially, intrinsic valuing of another’s welfare is spoken of as caring or loving .

How Could Empathy-Induced Altruism Have Evolved?

Extending consideration of antecedents of empathic concern back in time raises the question of how empathy-induced altruistic motivation could have evolved. What evolutionary function might such motivation serve? The most plausible answer seems to be that empathic concern evolved as part of the parental instinct among higher mammals, especially humans (Batson, 2010 , 2011 ; Bell, 2001 ; de Waal, 1996 ; Hoffman, 1981 ; McDougall, 1908 ; Zahn-Waxler & Radke-Yarrow, 1990 ). If mammalian parents had not been intensely interested in the welfare of their very vulnerable progeny, these species would have quickly died out.

No doubt, we humans have inherited key aspects of our parental instinct from ancestors we share with other mammalian species. But in humans, this instinct is considerably less automatic and more flexible. The human parental instinct goes well beyond nursing, providing other kinds of food, protecting, and keeping the young close—activities that characterize parental care in most mammalian species. It includes inferences about and anticipation of the desires and feelings of the child (“Is that a hungry cry or a wet cry?” “She won’t like the fireworks; they’ll be too loud”). It also includes goal-directed motives and appraisal-based emotions ( Scherer, 1984 ).

Of course, we humans do not feel empathic concern only for our own children. As long as there is no preexisting antipathy, we can feel empathy for a wide range of others in need, including nonhumans ( Batson, Lishner, Cook, & Sawyer, 2005 ; Shelton & Rogers, 1981 ). This extension may reflect cognitive generalization whereby we “adopt” the other as progeny, producing intrinsic valuing and, thereby, empathic concern and altruistic motivation when the other is in need ( Batson, 2011 ; Hoffman, 1981 ).

Two factors would facilitate the emergence of such generalization: (a) human cognitive capacity, including symbolic thought and analogic reasoning; and (b) lack of evolutionary advantage in early human hunter-gatherer bands for strict limitation of empathic concern and parental nurturance to offspring. In these bands, those in need were often one’s children or close kin. And survival of one’s genes was tightly tied to the welfare even of those who were not close kin ( Hrdy, 2009 ; Kelly, 1995 ; Sober & Wilson, 1998 ).

To the extent that the human nurturing impulse relies on appraisal-based other-oriented emotions such as empathic concern, it should be relatively easy to generalize. In contemporary society, the prospect of such generalization appears more plausible when you think of the emotional sensitivity and tender care typically provided by nannies, workers in daycare centers, adoptive parents, and pet owners.

If the roots of human altruism lie in generalized parental nurturance, then altruism is woven tightly into our nature and into the fabric of everyday life. It is neither exceptional nor unnatural, but a central feature of the human condition. Rather than looking for altruism only in acts of extreme self-sacrifice, we should see it manifested in our everyday experience. The empathy-altruism research indicates that it is.

Other Antecedents?

Much research has shown that the combination of perception of need and adopting an imagine-other perspective (i.e., imagining how the person in need is thinking and feeling) can produce empathic concern. And several individual-difference variables, including general emotionality, emotion regulation, psychopathy, attachment style, and gender, may affect the level of empathic concern. But an imagine-other perspective and these individual differences all seem to function as moderators of the effect of the two key antecedents of empathic concern—need and valuing—not as additional antecedents. That is, it is unclear that any of them affect empathic concern except through their effect on perception of need, intrinsic valuing, or both (see Batson, 2011 , for a discussion of this point).

Practical Implications

Now that we have the “what” of the empathy-altruism hypothesis before us, we can turn to the “so what?”—the implications. I will focus first on practical implications, then briefly on the implications for compassion science. The research on practical implications suggests that empathy-induced altruism is not an unalloyed good. It offers benefits but also has liabilities, and we need to be aware of both. (For a more extensive discussion and review of relevant research, again see Batson, 2011 .)

Benefits of Empathy-Induced Altruism

1. more, more sensitive, and less fickle help..

Perhaps the least surprising benefit is that feeling empathic concern leads us to help the target(s) of empathy more. Even before the empathy-altruism hypothesis was tested, there was evidence that empathic concern can increase the likelihood of helping (e.g., Coke, Batson, & McDavis, 1978 ; Krebs, 1975 ). Now that we know empathic concern produces altruistic motivation, we have reason to believe it can improve the quality of help as well.

Empathy-induced altruism is likely to motivate help that is more sensitive to the needs of the person for whom empathy is felt. Egoistic goals such as gaining rewards and avoiding punishments can often be reached, even if our help does not alleviate the needy individual’s suffering. For these goals, it is the thought that counts. But to the degree that we are altruistically motivated, it is the other’s welfare that counts. Experimental evidence supports this reasoning. Unlike those feeling little empathy, individuals induced to feel empathic concern tend to feel good after helping only if the other’s need is relieved ( Batson, Dyck, Brandt, Batson, Powell, McMaster, & Griffitt, 1988 ; Batson & Weeks, 1996 ). Highlighting sensitivity to future consequences, Sibicky, Schroeder, and Dovidio (1995) provided evidence that empathic concern actually reduces helping when that help, although meeting an immediate need, will be detrimental in the long-term: Think of refusing to give a beloved child unhealthy treats.

In addition to producing more sensitive helping, altruistic motivation is also likely to be less fickle than egoistic motives for helping. Research indicates that individuals experiencing relatively low empathy—and hence a predominance of egoistic over altruistic motivation—are far less likely to help when either (a) they can easily escape exposure to the need without helping, or (b) they can easily justify to themselves and others a failure to help ( Batson, Duncan, Ackerman, Buckley, & Birch, 1981 ; Batson et al., 1988 ; Toi & Batson, 1982 ). The practical implications of these findings are clear. Easy escape and high justification for not helping are common characteristics of many helping situations. Amidst the blooming, buzzing confusion of everyday life, we can almost always find a way to direct attention elsewhere or to convince ourselves that inaction is justified. Given this, the practical potential of empathy-induced altruistic motivation looks promising indeed. In the research just cited, individuals experiencing relatively high empathy showed no noticeable decrease in readiness to help under conditions of easy escape, high justification, or both.

2. Less aggression.

A second benefit of empathy-induced altruism is inhibition of aggression. To the degree that feeling empathic concern for someone produces altruistic motivation to maintain or increase that person’s welfare, it should inhibit any inclination to aggress against or harm that person. This inhibitory effect was impressively demonstrated by Harmon-Jones, Vaughn-Scott, Mohr, Sigelman, and Harmon-Jones (2004) . They assessed the effect of empathy on anger-related left-frontal cortical electroencephalographic (EEG) activity following an insult. As predicted by the empathy-altruism hypothesis, relative left-frontal cortical EEG activity—which is typically increased by insult and promotes aggression (and which increased in a low-empathy condition)—was inhibited in their high-empathy condition.

Note that empathic feelings should not inhibit all aggressive impulses, only those directed toward the target of empathy. Indeed, it is easy to imagine empathy-induced altruistic anger and aggression , in which empathy for Person A leads to increased anger and aggression toward Person B, if B is perceived to be a threat to A’s welfare ( Buffone & Poulin, 2014 ; Hoffman, 2000 ; Vitaglione & Barnett, 2003 ).

More broadly, empathy may counteract a particularly subtle and insidious form of aggression—blaming the victims of injustice. In his classic work on the just-world hypothesis, Melvin Lerner (1980) found that research participants were likely to derogate a person whom they perceived to be the innocent victim of suffering. This derogation presumably served to maintain participants’ belief that people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Protecting belief in a just world in this way can lead to what William Ryan (1971) called blaming the victim . Ryan suggested that we are likely to react to the victims of unjust discrimination and oppression in our society by unconsciously blaming them. If they have less, they must be less deserving.

Derogation and blaming the victim are all-too-common alternatives to caring about the suffering of others. These processes can lead to smug acceptance of the plight of those less fortunate as just and right. But empathy-induced altruism may counteract this tendency. In an important follow-up to Lerner’s classic experiments, Aderman, Brehm, and Katz (1974) found that perspective-taking instructions designed to evoke empathy eliminated derogation of an innocent victim.

3. Increased cooperation and care in conflict situations.

There is also evidence that empathy-induced altruistic motivation can increase cooperation and care in conflict situations. Paradigmatic of such situations is a one-trial Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this two-person dilemma, it is always in each person’s material best interest to “defect” (compete), regardless of what the other person does. Theories that assume we humans are always and exclusively self-interested—such as game theory and the theory of rational choice—predict no cooperation in a one-trial Prisoner’s Dilemma. In contrast, the empathy-altruism hypothesis predicts that if one person in such a dilemma is induced to feel empathy for the other, this person will experience two motives—self-interest and empathy-induced altruism. Although self-interest is best satisfied by defecting, altruism is best satisfied by cooperating. So the empathy-altruism hypothesis predicts that empathy should lead to increased cooperation in a one-trial Prisoner’s Dilemma. Batson and Moran (1999) reported an experiment in which they found precisely these results (also see Batson & Ahmad, 2001 ; Rumble, van Lange, & Parks, 2010 ).

What about real-world conflicts? Might the introduction of empathy-induced altruism be worth pursuing there, too? Stephan and Finlay (1999) pointed out that the induction of empathy is often an explicit component of techniques used in conflict-resolution workshops that address long-standing political conflicts, such as between Arabs and Israelis. Workshop participants are encouraged to express their feelings—their hopes and fears—and to actively adopt the perspective of those on the other side of the conflict ( Burton, 1987 ; Fisher, 1994 ; Kelman, 1997 ; Kelman & Cohen, 1986 ; Rouhana & Kelman, 1994 ). These efforts should facilitate both perception of the other as in need and sensitivity to the other’s welfare, which should in turn increase empathic concern.

4. Improved attitudes and action toward members of stigmatized groups.

Is it possible that empathy-induced altruism might be used to improve attitudes toward, and action on behalf of, stigmatized groups? There is reason to think so. Batson, Polycarpou, Harmon-Jones, Imhoff, Mitchener, Bednar, Klein, and Highberger (1997) found that inducing empathy for a member of a stigmatized group could improve attitudes toward the group as a whole. This attitude-improvement effect has now been found for many stigmatized groups, including people with physical disabilities, homosexuals, people with AIDS, the homeless, even convicted murderers and drug dealers ( Batson, Chang, Orr, & Rowland, 2002 ; Batson et al., 1997 ; Clore & Jeffrey, 1972 ; Dovidio, Johnson, Gaertner, Pearson, Saguy, & Ashburn-Nardo, 2010 ; Finlay & Stephan, 2000 ; Vescio, Sechrist, & Paolucci, 2003 ). And the improved attitudes can, in turn, increase action to help the group ( Batson et al., 2002 ). Underscoring the broad applicability of empathy-induced attitude change, Shelton and Rogers (1981) found that inducing empathy for whales led to more positive attitudes that were reflected in increased intention to help save whales. Schultz (2000) found that empathy induced for animals being harmed by pollution improved attitudes toward protecting the natural environment. Berenguer (2007) did, too.

There are practical reasons to use empathy to improve attitudes toward and action on behalf of the disadvantaged, downtrodden, and stigmatized of society—at least initially. The induction of empathy is likely to be easier than trying to improve attitudes through methods such as direct intergroup contact. Novels, movies, and documentaries show that it is relatively easy to induce empathy for a member of a stigmatized group. Moreover, this empathy can be induced in low-cost, low-risk situations. Rather than the elaborate arrangements often required to create direct, cooperative, personal contact, we can be led to feel empathy for a member of a stigmatized group as we sit comfortably in our own home. Finally, empathy-inducing experiences can be controlled to ensure that they are positive far more readily than can live, face-to-face, direct contact. For real-world examples of the induction of empathic concern to improve attitudes toward a stigmatized group, see Stowe (1851/2005) and Paluck (2009) . For a review of the range of programs that have used empathy to improve such attitudes in educational settings, see Batson and Ahmad (2009) .

5. Self-benefits.

Shifting focus from the person in need, empathy-induced altruism may also benefit the person who is altruistically motivated. Long-term studies of volunteers and providers of social support have noted improved psychological and physical well-being among these help-givers ( Brown, Nesse, Vinokur, & Smith, 2003 ; Luks, 1991 ). And there is evidence that volunteers who provide personal care live longer than non-volunteers, even after adjusting for the effect of other predictors of longevity such as physical health and activity level ( Oman, 2007 ). Importantly, this effect on longevity seems to be limited to those who volunteer for other-oriented rather than self-oriented reasons (Konrath, Fuhrel-Forbis, Lou, & Brown, 2012).

Still, at this point, it is not clear that these health benefits are due to empathy-induced altruism. They might instead be due either to the esteem-enhancement that volunteering provides, or to the feelings of accomplishment and competence. And even if the benefits are due to empathy-induced altruism, a caution is in order: Intentional pursuit of these health benefits may be doomed to failure. To use empathy-induced altruism as a way to reach the ultimately self-serving ends of gaining more meaning and better health involves a logical and psychological contradiction. As soon as benefit to the other becomes an instrumental means to gain self-benefits, the motivation is no longer altruistic.

Liabilities of Empathy-Induced Altruism

Not all practical implications of the empathy-altruism hypothesis are positive. Along with the benefits described, empathy-induced altruism has some serious liabilities.

1. It can cause harm.

Altruistic motivation is potentially dangerous. As evolutionary biologists have long pointed out (e.g., Dawkins, 1976 ), altruism may lead us to incur costs in time and money, even loss of life. When 28-year old Lenny Skutnik was asked why he dove into the ice-strewn Potomac River to rescue a drowning plane-crash victim, he said, “I just did what I had to do.” When first responders to the World Trade Center on September 11 th pushed forward to help trapped civilians in spite of flames, toxic gasses, and other obvious dangers, many died. I cannot say to what extent these heroic acts were motivated by empathy-induced altruism, but I can say that whatever motivated them put the actors squarely in harm’s way.

Not only can empathy-induced altruism be harmful to the altruistically motivated person, it can also hurt the target. Balzac, one of our most astute observers of the human condition, graphically portrayed this irony in his classic novel Père Goriot (Balzac, 1834/1962). Goriot’s selfless love spoiled his daughters, drove them from him, and ultimately destroyed both them and him. Balzac’s message: Altruism may be part of human nature, but like aggression, it must be held carefully in check lest it prove destructive. Graham Hancock made a similar point in his scathing indictment of international aid programs in Lords of Poverty (1989) .

Even when helping is clearly appropriate, empathy-induced altruism can at times make matters worse. This is especially true when effective help requires a delicate touch. Think of surgeons: It is no accident, argued neurophysiologist Paul MacLean (1967) , that surgeons are prohibited from operating on close kin. When operating on one’s sister rather than a stranger, deep feelings of concern and a desperate desire to relieve her suffering may cause a normally steady hand to shake.

2. It can lead to paternalism.

As discussed earlier, the most plausible account of the evolutionary roots of empathy-induced altruistic motivation is that it reflects cognitive generalization of human parental nurturance. If true, this account reveals a potentially serious liability. It suggests that people for whom empathic concern is felt are metaphorically seen as childlike—dependent, vulnerable, and needing care—at least in terms of their ability to address the need in question. Consistent with this possibility, research has found that we feel greater empathic concern for more baby-faced and more vulnerable adults ( Dijker, 2001 ; Lishner, Batson, & Huss, 2011 ; Lishner, Oceja, Stocks, & Zaspel, 2008 ).

Sometimes, to be perceived as dependent, vulnerable, and needing care poses no problem. Most of us happily defer to the expertise of physicians, police, firefighters, and mechanics when we need their help. But at other times, the consequences can be tragic. Teachers and tutors can, out of genuine concern, fail to enable students to develop the ability and confidence to solve problems themselves. They can instead foster unnecessary dependence, low self-esteem, and a reduced sense of efficacy ( Nadler, Fisher, & DePaulo, 1983 ). Physical therapists, physicians, nurses, friends, and family members can do the same for patients with physical or mental disabilities. So can social workers trying to care for the poor and disadvantaged. To see someone in need as dependent and vulnerable may lead to a response that perpetuates if not exacerbates the problem. It may produce paternalism.

Effective parenting requires sensitivity about when to intervene and when to stand back, as well as about how to structure the child’s environment to foster coping, confidence, and independence. Effective help requires much the same ( Fisher, Nadler, & DePaulo, 1983 ). Recall the adage about teaching the hungry to fish rather than giving them fish.

3. Not all needs evoke empathy-induced altruism.

Many of the pressing social problems we face today do not involve personal needs of the sort likely to evoke empathic concern. Such concern is felt for individuals, but many problems are global. Think of environmental protection, nuclear disarmament, and population control. These problems are not encountered as personal needs; they are broader and more abstract. It is difficult if not impossible to feel empathy for an abstract concept like the environment, world population, or the planet—although personalizing metaphors like Mother Earth may move us in that direction.

Not only is it difficult to evoke empathy for these pressing global needs, but many cannot be effectively addressed with a personal helping response. They must be addressed in political arenas and through institutional and bureaucratic structures. The process is long and slow. It is not a process for which emotion-based motives, including empathy-induced altruism, are apt to be very effective ( Hardin, 1977 ). Like other emotions, empathic concern diminishes over time.

Empathy’s limited endurance may also undercut its ability to motivate the sustained helping efforts often required of community-action volunteers (see Omoto & Snyder, 1995 ). Empathy-induced altruism may be effective in initiating volunteer action, but other motives may need to take over if a volunteer is to continue for the long haul.

4. It can lead to empathy avoidance.

What if you do not want to be altruistically motivated? After all, altruistic motivation can cost you. It can lead you to spend time, money, and energy on behalf of another. Awareness that empathy produces altruism may arouse an egoistic motive to avoid feeling empathic concern and the resulting altruistic motive. Shaw, Batson, and Todd (1994) provided evidence that this empathy-avoidance motive is likely to arise when you are aware—before exposure to a person in need—that (a) you will be asked to help this person, and (b) helping will be costly (also see Cameron & Payne, 2011 ). Empathy avoidance might be aroused, for example, when you see a homeless person on the street, or hear about the plight of refugees, or see news footage of the ravages of famine. It may lead you to cross the street, close your ears, change channels.

Empathy avoidance may also be a factor in the experience of burnout among those who work in the helping professions ( Maslach, 1982 ). But the conditions for empathy avoidance among helping professional do not seem to be the ones specified by Shaw et al. (1994) . Among professionals, empathy avoidance is more likely to result from the perceived impossibility of providing effective help than from the perceived cost of helping. Aware that limited resources (e.g., too little time) or the intractability of the need (e.g., terminal illness) makes effective help impossible, some physicians, chronic-care nurses, therapists, counselors, and welfare case workers may try to avoid feeling empathy in order to avoid the frustration of thwarted altruistic motivation (López-Pérez, Ambrona, Gregory, Stocks, & Oceja, 2013: Stotland, Mathews, Sherman, Hansson, & Richardson, 1978). They may turn their patients or clients into objects rather than people, and treat them as such. Other professional helpers may, over time, find that their ability to feel empathic concern is exhausted, leading to what has been called compassion fatigue . There are limits to how often one can draw from the emotional well. (For some possible antidotes, see Halpern, 2001 .)

Empathy avoidance may also occur in response to the suffering of members of the opposition in inter-group conflicts. Whether the opposition is a rival sports team or a national, tribal, or ethnic out-group, their suffering may be more apt to produce schadenfreude —malicious glee—than empathic concern ( Cikara, Bruneau, & Saxe, 2011 ; Hein, Silani, Preuschoff, Batson, & Singer, 2010 ).

Empathy avoidance may even have played an important, chilling role in the holocaust. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, reported that he “stifled all softer emotions” in order to carry out his assignment: the systematic extermination of 2.9 million people ( Hoess, 1959 ).

5. It can produce immoral action.

Perhaps the most surprising implication of the empathy-altruism hypothesis is that empathy-induced altruism can lead to immoral action. This implication is surprising because many people equate altruism with morality. The empathy-altruism hypothesis does not.

Often, of course, empathy-induced altruism produces action judged moral—as when it leads us to help the needy or comfort the sick—but not always. Batson, Klein, Highberger, and Shaw (1995) found that empathy-induced altruistic motivation can also lead people to give preferential treatment to a person for whom they feel empathy in violation of their own moral standards of fairness (also see Blader & Rothman, 2014 ). Egoism, altruism, and moral motivation are, it seems, three distinct forms of motivation, each of which can conflict with another (see Batson, 2011 , for discussion of the distinctions).

More broadly, there is evidence that empathy-induced altruism can lead to partiality in our decisions as a society about who among the many in need will get our assistance. Several decades ago, Time magazine essayist Walter Isaacson (1992) commented on the “photogenics” of disaster. He raised the possibility that the decision to intervene in Somalia but not Sudan occurred because those suffering in Somalia proved more photogenic. They evoked empathic concern and altruistic motivation in a way that those in the Sudan did not. Isaacson reflected: “Random bursts of compassion provoked by compelling pictures may be a suitable basis for Christmas charity drives, but are they the proper foundation for a foreign policy?” ( Time , December 21, 1992; similarly, see Bloom, 2016 ).

6. It can undermine the common good.

Not only does the empathy-altruism hypothesis predict that empathy-induced altruism can lead to immoral action, but also that it can lead us to act against the common good in a social dilemma. A social dilemma arises when three conditions co-occur:

Persons have a choice about how to allocate their scarce resources (time, money, energy).

Regardless of what others do, to allocate the resources to the group is best for the group as a whole, but to allocate to a single individual (oneself or another group member) is best for that individual.

If all allocations are to separate individuals, each individual is worse off than if all allocations are to the group.

In modern society, social dilemmas abound. They include recycling, carpooling, reducing pollution, voting, paying taxes, contributing to public television or the local symphony—to name but a few.

Guided by the assumption of universal egoism that underlies game theory, it has generally been taken for granted that, in a social dilemma, the only individual to whom we would allocate scarce resources is ourselves. But the empathy-altruism hypothesis predicts that if you feel empathic concern for another member of the group, you will be altruistically motivated to benefit that person. So, if you can allocate resources to him or her, then rather than the two motives traditionally assumed to conflict in a social dilemma—self-interest and the common good—three motives are in play. If, along with egoism (self-interest), the altruistic motive is stronger than the desire to promote the common good, the latter will suffer.

How often do empathy-induced altruistic motives arise in real-world social dilemmas? It is hard to think of a case where they do not. They arise every time we try to decide whether to spend our time or money to benefit ourselves, the community, or another individual about whom we especially care. I may decline to participate in a neighborhood clean-up project on Saturday, not because I want to play golf, but because my son wants me to take him to a movie. Whalers may kill to extinction—and loggers clear-cut—not out of personal greed but to provide for their families.

Consistent with this empathy-altruism prediction, Batson, Batson, Todd, Brummett, Shaw, and Aldeguer (1995) found that research participants placed in a social dilemma allocated some of their resources to a person for whom they felt empathy, reducing the overall collective good. And Oceja, Heerdink, Stocks, Ambrona, López-Pérez, and Salgado (2014) found that, if there is reason to believe that other individuals in the group have needs similar to the need that induced empathy, resources may be preferentially allocated to them as well.

Highlighting a situation in which empathy-induced altruism poses an even greater threat to the common good than does self-interested egoism, Batson, Ahmad, Yin, Bedell, Johnson, Templin, and Whiteside (1999) found that when allocation decisions were to be made public, empathy-induced altruism reduced the common good more than did self-interest. Why is this so? There are clear social norms and sanctions against the pursuit of our self-interest at the expense of what is best for all: selfish and greedy are stinging epithets ( Kerr, 1995 ). Norms and sanctions against showing concern for another person’s interests—even if doing so diminishes the common good—are far less clear. How do whalers and loggers stand up to the public outcry about over-depletion of natural resources? It is easy. They are not using these resources for themselves, but to care for their families.

If altruism poses such a threat to the common good, why are there not societal sanctions against altruism like those against egoism? Perhaps it is because society makes one or both of two assumptions: “Altruism is always good,” or “Altruism is weak.” The empathy-altruism research provides evidence that each of these assumptions is wrong.

Implications for Compassion Science

In closing, let me briefly suggest some implications of the empathy-altruism research for the content and the conduct of compassion science.

Content of Compassion Science

Concerning content, I will focus on only one question: Might compassion training based on Tibetan Buddhism meditation practices broaden the benefits and limit the liabilities of empathy-induced altruism? There is reason to think it might.

The practice called loving-kindness meditation seems designed to extend the range of others to whom the meditator wishes health, happiness, and well-being—that is, the range of others whose welfare is intrinsically valued. The strategy is to start with our love for an intrinsically cared-for other (e.g., our mother), then gradually expand the circle of care to include acquaintances, strangers, all humans (even enemies) and, eventually, all sentient beings. If, as I have suggested, intrinsic valuing of the other’s welfare is one of the two necessary antecedents of empathy-induced altruism, this practice should increase the range of targets for whom the meditator feels empathic concern when that target is in need. This should, in turn, produce altruistic motivation to have the need removed. And so, this meditation practice should combat the liabilities of empathy-induced altruism that arise from its natural partiality; namely, the greater likelihood that it is experienced in response to the needs of family, friends, and in-group members.

Compassion meditation seems designed to extend the meditator’s sensitivity to the needs of a wider range of others by increasing his or her readiness to recognize, understand, and feel for their suffering. Once again, the strategy is to start by focusing on the needs of close others and the compassion we naturally feel for them, then work on extending this response to a widening circle of others that eventually includes all sentient beings. If successful, compassion meditation should increase the range of targets whose needs we perceive. It should also increase the accuracy of that perception. And if perception of the other as in need is a necessary antecedent of empathy-induced altruistic motivation, this practice should increase that motivation by combatting three of the liabilities of naturally occurring empathy-induced altruism—paternalism, failure of the need of some others to evoke empathic concern, and empathy avoidance.

If these two closely related forms of meditation have the suggested effects, the result of combining them should be extension of empathic concern and empathy-induced altruistic motivation beyond its normal bounds. We should see a clear increase in the range of targets for whom empathic concern is felt, which should in turn increase the breadth and strength of altruistic motivation, thereby producing a more sensitive behavioral response to the targets’ needs. These meditation practices should take us beyond the empathy-induced motivational state of the empathy-altruism hypothesis to a point where altruism becomes a pervasive aspect of character—a trait . We should see what Matthieu Ricard (2015, pp. 22–23) calls an altruistic disposition , in which altruism becomes “a way of being.” This line of thought, which Ricard elaborates, leads to a new research hypothesis: the expansion of empathy-induced altruism hypothesis .

Is this expansion hypothesis correct? That is, does practice of these forms of meditation in fact produce the hypothesized effects? Like the empathy-altruism hypothesis, the expansion hypothesis is empirical even though it, too, focuses on internal psychological processes that are difficult to assess—perceptions, values, emotions, and motives. There are many impressive anecdotes, legends, secondhand reports, and testimonials regarding the cultivation and expansion of altruism as a result of meditation. But, as with naturally occurring altruism, such accounts cannot be taken as scientific evidence. They are only suggestive.

In recent years, researchers have gone beyond these accounts to collect some relevant empirical evidence—the beginnings of a behavioral science of compassion. For example, there are reports that loving-kindness meditation can (a) increase positive feelings toward a same-sex stranger ( Hutcherson, Seppala, & Gross, 2008 ) and (b) decrease implicit inter-group bias against blacks and the homeless ( Kang, Gray, & Dovidio, 2014 ). And there are reports that compassion-meditation training can (a) increase willingness to incur monetary cost to compel an unfair Decider in a Dictator Game to compensate the Recipient (Weng, Fox, Shackman, Stodola, Caldwell, Olson, Rogers, & Davidson, 2013; see Weng, Schuyler, & Davidson, Chapter 11 , this volume), and (b) perhaps increase willingness to give one’s seat in the research laboratory waiting room to a woman on crutches without being asked (Condon, Desbrodes, Miller, & DeSteno, 2013; see Condon & DeSteno, Chapter 22 , this volume—I say “perhaps” because this last effect was not statistically reliable, only a non-significant trend).

But, although encouraging, the empirical research to date does not provide a persuasive answer to the question of whether meditation practices extend empathic concern and empathy-induced altruistic motivation in the ways predicted by the expansion hypothesis. Better empirical tests are needed, ones that go beyond testing whether meditation training increases helping behavior. Like the empathy-altruism hypothesis, the expansion hypothesis is not simply about increased helping. It is about empathic emotion and altruistic motivation—and specifically about the extension of these beyond their normal range.

How could we get better tests of the expansion hypothesis? This question directs us to the implications of empathy-altruism research for the conduct of research in compassion science.

Conduct of Compassion Science

The empathy-altruism research highlights two principles that compassion-science researchers may want to follow. First, it is important to assess predicted outcomes as directly as possible. If we predict effects of meditation practice on perception of need, or on valuing others’ welfare, or on empathic concern, or—most crucially—on altruistic motivation, we need to assess those effects rather than something else, such as helping. To assess helping behavior in a single situation tells us little about the nature of the underlying values, emotions, and motives. The motivation could be egoistic, altruistic, both, or neither. Only by assessing the pattern of helping across situations created to vary in a way that enables us to distinguish alternative motivational possibilities can we draw meaningful inferences about motivation. Even sophisticated neurophysiological measures fail to provide clear information about the nature of a person’s motivation—or emotion. At least thus far, neuroimaging measures only indicate that some motivation or emotion is present, not which . This first principle might be summarized as follows: We need to test our predictions, not proxies .

Second, when we find supportive data, we need to look for and test contrary explanations for these data. The contrary explanations should include both methodological ones (e.g., subtle cues as to appropriate behavior) and theoretical ones (e.g., an egoistic desire for meditators to see themselves, or be seen by others, as altruistic). This need is especially urgent when, as is likely in compassion science, the researcher is hoping his or her hypothesis is correct. Such hope creates strong pressure toward a confirmation bias—toward the researcher’s looking for data consistent with the hypothesis and stopping there. I think we need to go two steps further: (1) We need to actively pursue plausible contrary explanations for our results; and (2) we need to design studies that would allow our cherished hypotheses—including the expansion hypothesis—to show themselves to be wrong if they are. This principle can be summarized thus: We need to test for disconfirmation, not confirmation .

Only by following these two principles are we likely to produce a science of compassion that goes beyond preaching to the choir—that is, a science that can speak to the skeptic as well as to those already convinced of the power of meditation practices and other forms of compassion training to expand the scope of empathy-induced altruism.

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Inside the science of empathetic joy

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Mass grief. Mass outrage. Seemingly everywhere.

But can we also learn to share in each other’s joy?

“When you ask people to report on the empathetic experiences that they’ve had, they resonate with other people’s positive feelings just as much as their negative ones, if not more," Jamil Zaki says. "And yet, I don’t think they realize how they can apply it in their own lives.”

Today, On Point : The science of empathetic joy and how we can experience more of it.

Amelie , On Point listener.

Eve Ekman , meditation teacher and a contemplative social scientist designing tools to support emotional awareness.

Shelly Gable , professor and chair of psychological brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Principal Investigator of Emotions, Motivation, Behavior and Relationships at the (EMBeR) Lab.

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Transcript: A Listener Shares Her Story Of Sympathetic Joy

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: We put a call out to listeners a few days ago to share stories about empathetic joy with us. And you left us a really beautiful message, and I wanted to share it more broadly with On Point listeners, Amelie. So I'm wondering if you could just start by telling us the story of your friend Gina. When did you first meet?

AMELIE: So we met as kids. We were in junior high together, which is seventh and eighth grade. Became fast friends at school. And I went to a different high school, so we drifted apart a little bit, but loosely stayed in touch and reconnected again in our twenties.

CHAKRABARTI: Reconnected again. Okay. And what brought you together? What allowed for that reconnection?

AMELIE: So I had seen on, I believe it was Facebook or social media, that she had been diagnosed with leukemia. And so, of course, my heart went out to her and I reached out again, I believe, over text.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so then what happened after that?

AMELIE: So she was kind of in and out of treatment eventually for years. And I stuck by her through a lot of those kind of rounds of ups and downs. But also I was dealing with my own unrelated, but related to cancer decisions for myself. And as two people who were quite young and dealing with that sort of thing, it really brought us together.

CHAKRABARTI: So you really were there for each other in the time of, sounds like both your both mutual, greatest need. But she did pass away, you said.

AMELIE: Yep. In the pandemic.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, yeah. So that must've been really hard.

AMELIE: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: So, you know what's interesting is that your experience of empathetic joy that led you to call us begins with the story of Gina. But it's with somebody else and something else that happened to a colleague of yours that made you resonate with with joy. Can you tell us that?

AMELIE: Yeah, exactly. So, at the time I was working in sales, and I was working closely with somebody who was much, much older than myself or Gina, but also was dealing with cancer treatments. And we weren't very close, personally. Myself and my colleague, but we worked together every day, so we had a kind of a closer professional relationship. And she was very positive, super smart, really good at what she does. And very, very, like I said, very kind of positive about things.

And I just remember one day she walked into the office and looked at me and was like, my cancer markers are down. And I remember just feeling what I describe now as an electric shock, like I remember going like, Yes! Like kind of in the same way that people who just saw their favorite team score a goal or whatever, you know, like I was like, Yes, of course. I was like, No way. Like, This is great!

And just feeling that kind of elation and like truly for her, but also kind of based on the understanding and my own personal knowledge of what that could feel like, kind of at my core.

CHAKRABARTI: Tell me more, though, about it. Like, it sounds like it was almost not just an emotional feeling, or even a spiritual feeling, but even almost like a physical reaction you had.

AMELIE: Yeah. As I describe it, I'm like, tensing my arms, you know? And I'm like, turning into, like, a tense, excited muscle, you know? And it's just really electrifying, I think.

CHAKRABARTI: Can you tell me a little bit more about how you think your ability to experience that joy relates to, you know, not just your own story with cancer, but thinking back to Gina, where we started, like, how do you think all those things are wound together that led you to experience that electric moment of happiness for someone else?

AMELIE: Yeah. I mean, I am of the philosophy that I don't have to experience something exactly in order to feel it for somebody else. I think we kind of borrow from our experiences, and our feelings to feel something like empathetic joy. And so with cancer, you know, anyone who's had any experience with, you know, a loved one or personally or anything, with that treatment, you know, it's really a lot of waiting. It's usually not like a one and done sort of deal.

And so waiting can feel quite gloomy and it can feel like positive news is kind of an impossibility, even though we know statistically it can be quite positive. And, you know, treatment can work, To kind of see that right in front of me in my colleague, it let me say, Oh, it can work. And this is really meaningful not just for me, and not just for my friend, but for anybody who feels that what they're going through is not insurmountable, but it can happen, you know, like we can get through. And here was the evidence right in front of me.

CHAKRABARTI: How are you doing now?

AMELIE: I'm doing well. Yeah. I don't work for the same company anymore. I work at a different one. And, you know, I'm super happy and really grateful for a lot of the different lessons that I've learned from my friend.

CHAKRABARTI: And do you think that now, because of this experience, that maybe ... you'll be seeking out more moments to experience that kind of, like, really profound, empathetic joy?

AMELIE: Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things I kind of learned from the experience is ... I feel that I can recognize potential for that feeling in other people. So, you know, different colleagues perhaps, or friends are struggling with something. I really see it and understand the weight of it and understand how important it is to, you know, for them to know that these challenges are surmountable. And yeah, I feel that I can recognize those things to a much greater degree than I could before.

Related Reading

Greater Good Magazine : " What Is Sympathetic Joy and How Can You Feel More of It? " — "Our cats love my partner. When presented with two laps, the cats will choose hers, almost every time. In the morning, our kitten Leif nurses on her shoulder, his little paws making biscuits."

The Atlantic : " ‘Self-Care’ Isn’t the Fix for Late-Pandemic Malaise " — "If years could be assigned a dominant feeling (1929: despair; 2008: hope), 2021’s might be exhaustion. As the coronavirus pandemic rumbles through its 20th month, many of us feel like we are running a race we didn’t sign up for, and it’s getting longer every mile we run."

This program aired on June 7, 2022.

• Why science says you deserve to be happy
• First Person: Adrienne Maree Brown Finds Joy In Finding Her People
• For Latinos, the Uvalde shooting has an extra layer of grief and trauma
• How the media can cover mass shootings while respecting space for grief

Jonathan Chang Producer/Director, On Point Jonathan is a producer/director at On Point.

Meghna Chakrabarti Host, On Point Meghna Chakrabarti is the host of On Point.

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Sympathetic Joy

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Unlike Yiddish ( fargin ) and Sanskrit ( muditā ), English has no single word to describe the practice of sharing someone else’s joy at their success. Sympathetic joy has also escaped attention in philosophy. We are familiar with schadenfreude, begrudging, envy, jealousy, and other terms describing either (a) pleasure at someone else’s misfortune or (b) displeasure at someone else’s good fortune. But what, exactly, is sympathetic joy? I argue that it is a short-term or long-term feeling of great delight at another’s good fortune, requiring no more than minimal understanding of the relevant person and event. It is intensified relative to understanding, sharing, and positive disposal. It is importantly different from empathetic emotions and also from vicarious pride. It may be group-directed. Empirical research suggests it occurs fairly often, activates the brain in the same way as does sympathetic sadness, and may increase our well-being. It is primarily not a reactive attitude (an emotional reaction to good or bad will), but, rather, a sign of good will toward another.

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For philosophical studies of envy, see for examples D’Arms & Jacobsen (2005), Farrell ( 1980 , 1989 ), Protasi ( 2016 ), Smith ( 1991 , 2008 ), and Taylor ( 2006 ).

I see no reason to think sympathetic joy is any different from many other emotions such as joy and hate, in the following respect: it can occur short-term or long-term (Fischer et al. 2018, Ben Ze’ev, 2018). This is consistent with the plausible thought that, all else equal, sympathetic joy’s positive intensity is relative to the period in which experienced. For example, someone who experiences sympathetic joy for five decades might experience it with a significantly weaker intensity, on average throughout those five decades, than someone who experiences it for just five minutes. I say more about related distinctions, in the next section.

It may be natural to conflate jealousy with envy, but see Purshouse ( 2004 ) for a helpful distinction between them. I will just refer to jealousy here, remaining neutral as to how to distinguish it from envy and related attitudes.

It is interesting to consider whether sympathetic joy is exemplified in what philosophers call compersion , that is, “the positive feelings about their partner’s romantic intimacy with another person” (Brunning 2020 : 225). For instructive clarifications of compersion, see for example Ben-Ze’ev (2019), Brunning ( 2020 ), De Sousa ( 2018 ), and Mogilski et al. ( 2019 ). One might argue that compersion is certainly an example of sympathetic joy, since the person experiencing compersion may experience joy at the good fortune of another, namely, their partner. But a person who experiences sympathetic joy may not feel glad “about the situation of everyone involved”, whereas compersion is normally characterized in such a way (ibid. 229). I would suggest that compersion is sometimes, though not always, an instance of sympathetic joy. But this discussion deserves a separate article, and I set this topic aside for present purposes.

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What is sympathetic joy and how can you feel more of it, science is discovering how we can be happy with other people and why that's good for us..

Our cats love my partner. When presented with two laps, the cats will choose hers, almost every time. In the morning, our kitten Leif nurses on her shoulder, his little paws making biscuits.

Am I jealous? Nope. I feel really happy seeing a woman I love being adored by cats I love.

Scientists have a name for this feeling, which they borrowed from the Buddhist ethic of Muditā: sympathetic joy, which is sometimes called appreciative joy, empathic joy, vicarious reward, or (more broadly) positive empathy. By whatever name, it’s the unadulterated goodness we feel when something good happens for someone else.

That sounds great, but there are times when it can be hard to feel sympathetic joy, yes? Especially if we’re feeling personally threatened or unhappy with our own lives. There are many unpleasant emotions that can diminish the opportunity to share in other people’s joy: fear, jealousy, envy, stress, and resentment, among others.

Even if we do experience sympathetic joy with most people most of the time, there will still be times when we just want that warm fluffy cat on our own laps instead of someone else’s, or fall into despair over why the cat (or our boss, or the world) doesn’t like us as much.

Research is starting to document why sympathetic joy happens and when it doesn’t. It’s discovering as well why sympathetic joy is good for us and good for the people around us—and how we can cultivate more of it in our lives. Here’s a rundown of what the research so far suggests.

The rewards of sympathetic joy

Sympathetic joy might sound noble, but what’s in it for you?

I’m kidding, sort of—in fact, there are benefits for the person who can connect with another’s joy. Several studies show how witnessing another’s good fortune can activate the brain’s reward system. Beyond just feeling good, the ability to feel sympathetic joy has been linked to greater life satisfaction and happiness .

More sympathetic joy might also help make us a more compassionate society. More and more studies are finding a link with sympathetic joy and our willingness to help other people—and the likelihood we’ll actually do it.

Sympathetic joy also seems to result in better personal relationships . A 2018 paper found that “although having a partner who empathizes with one’s negative emotions is good for relationships, having a partner who (also) empathizes with one’s positive emotions may carry even greater benefits,” as the authors write.

Polyamorous people —those who have multiple romantic relationships with the consent of all involved—have a name for the happiness of seeing your partner experience pleasure or fall in love with someone else: compersion . A 2013 study of just over 300 polyamorous people found that the more they experienced this species of sympathetic joy, the more satisfied they were with their relationships—a result echoed by two other studies published last year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior , one of which involved 5,000 people.

Sympathetic Joy Quiz

Do you notice joy in others and share in their happiness?

Sympathetic joy may also result in better outcomes on the job. One 2016 study measured sympathetic joy in over 1,200 predominantly white teachers who mainly taught students of color. The teachers who were more likely to take joy in their students’ good experiences felt more connected to them—and the students had higher academic achievement. Another study of teachers and frontline health care workers found that those who experienced more sympathetic joy on the job showed less burnout and higher satisfaction at work.

This is a good place to mention that there are many unanswered questions about sympathetic joy. Most of the studies I read were conducted with young people in China or the United States. So, what does sympathetic joy look like elsewhere in the world? How does culture shape it? Does sympathetic joy have a developmental arc, rising and falling over the course of our lives?

While we may not yet have good answers to those questions, neuroscience is starting to map what path sympathetic joy takes through our bodies.

What sympathetic joy looks like in your brain

In recent years, scientists have tried to figure out if sympathetic joy looks different from other kinds of connection in the human brain, such as when we become distressed by other people’s pain. The answers are revealing why sympathetic joy is so powerful.

We’ll start with the overlap. For example, studies from the early 2000s show that empathy for other people’s good and bad feelings both activate the medial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which are associated with identifying, and assessing the significance of, our own and others’ mental states. Similarly, good feelings in ourselves and the good ones we perceive in other people both engage the nucleus accumbens (which signals pleasure) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (which supports learning to like whatever or whoever brings that pleasure).

So, given those similarities, what makes sympathetic joy distinct in the brain? A series of studies published during the past few years have shed more light on what makes it different from other kinds of resonance—and it seems to come down to a question of emphasis.

One group of researchers slid study participants into functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines as they watched an episode of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” (yes, this is funny) to try to measure their brain activity as they saw happy and sad scenes in the TV show.

In fact, there were differences in brain response to positive and negative events on the screen, with empathic joy engaging frontostriatal circuitry more strongly. This neural pathway is thought to start in the prefrontal cortex, and it seems to support deliberate mental processes like regulating emotion, planning, and decision making. On the other hand, witnessing negative experiences provoked a stronger response in the insula, an area that signals visceral experiences like pain or present-moment awareness.

That result is echoed by a 2021 study , which found that while all kinds of empathy activate frontostriatal circuitry, sympathetic joy triggers more activation, engaging “a much broader network of prefrontal subregions relative to empathy for negative emotion,” as the researchers write.

What blocks sympathetic joy?

Why do those findings matter for you and me? It suggests we tend to respond in a more straightforward way to people in trouble, in identifying their pain and even feeling it in ourselves. Sympathetic joy can involve more mental processes, like deciding what deserves our attention, and choosing how to interpret that information and how to respond to the situation. In other words, sympathetic joy may just have more moving parts.

It can also be stymied by other feelings. Sometimes, it’s our anxieties that get in the way of our natural inclination to be sympathetically joyful. If a friend loses their job and you see their distress, it is very likely that you’ll feel genuine concern, which would automatically light up this brain circuitry. But if you kinda hate your own job and the same friend then gets a better one than yours…well, it’s entirely possible that those same prefrontal subregions won’t glow with happiness for them.

You can be forgiven for feeling envy instead of joy on their behalf; it’s pretty common. Indeed, a study published this year by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that social comparisons with people perceived as doing better than us were more likely to provoke envy and schadenfreude than sympathetic joy. There are quite a few studies showing that anxiety reduces empathy —and it seems sound to speculate that feeling anxious might affect your ability to feel sympathetic joy. 

Differences with other people can also get in the way of feeling empathy for them, especially if the difference involves status and power. As people’s incomes rise, for example, empathy for those lower on the ladder tends to fall . Many, many studies show that we have a harder time feeling empathic concern for people in out-groups —racial, national, or otherwise. While there doesn’t seem to be much research on sympathetic joy toward people in out-groups, the studies to date do suggest that human differences would make it harder to feel.

How to cultivate sympathetic joy

For those reasons and more, there are times when it can be hard to feel sympathetic joy. I’m not always happy to see the cats purring on the lap of my partner. Sometimes I even think: Why do they prefer her to me when I’m the one who feeds them, dammit? It really isn’t fair, now that I’m thinking about it.

If you find self-pity, jealousy, or envy chasing away your sympathetic joy, remember that you can get it back with some intention and effort. Fortunately, sympathetic joy is like a muscle that you can build up with some mental exercise, just like any other feeling or behavior. You can start by taking our new quiz measuring your sympathetic joy—the results will not be scientific, though it is based on a validated scale developed mainly in China.

Finding out where you stand according to the quiz might help you to reflect on your capacity for feeling good with other people when they have a good experience—and it will give you a starting point for cultivating that ability. This will involve learning to better manage your own distress, reducing the compulsion to make comparisons, and strengthening your sense of common humanity with other people.

Here are some exercises researchers recommend for opening the door to positive empathy, most of which are borrowed from other articles in Greater Good or from our website of science-tested practices, Greater Good in Action .

Watch a competition without taking sides. This suggestion comes from Kelly McGonigal in a 2017 article for Greater Good . “Appreciate the effort, skill, or artistry of all competitors—and celebrate the joy of whoever wins,” she writes. “Feel glad for their success, and watch how they celebrate it with others. See if you can extend your empathic joy to how they share the moment with friends, family, coaches, or teammates.”

Capitalize on positive events . When people close to us—friends, family members, significant others—tell us about positive things that happened to them, these moments have the potential to make us feel significantly closer to one another—depending on how we respond. This activity offers tips for responding in a way that has been shown to nurture positive feelings on both sides of the relationship and to increase feelings of closeness and relationship satisfaction.

Try to ease envy . Life is full of reminders of what we lack. In a 2013 article for Greater Good , psychologist Juliana Breines suggests  five steps to reducing desire for what other people have, including naming envy and cultivating gratitude.

Write a self-compassionate letter . Writing in a self-compassionate way can help you replace your self-critical voice with a more compassionate one—one that comforts and reassures you rather than berating you for your shortcomings. First, identify something about yourself that makes you feel ashamed, insecure, or not good enough. Write down how it makes you feel. Then try expressing compassion, understanding, and acceptance for the part of yourself that you dislike. Feeling more compassion for yourself can help open the door to feeling joy for the good things in the lives of other people.

Try loving-kindness meditation . This meditation increases happiness in part by making you feel more connected to others—to loved ones, acquaintances, and even strangers. Research suggests that when people practice loving-kindness meditation regularly, they start automatically reacting more positively to others, and their social interactions and close relationships become more satisfying. Loving-kindness meditation can also reduce your focus on yourself—which can, in turn, help you to share in other people’s happiness.

Try the common humanity meditation . Recognizing our common humanity means acknowledging that we are all humans, facing some of the same problems. We all experience suffering and stress, loss, and pain. We all want to be loved and experience contentment. Listen to this guided meditation created by Sean Fargo, a former Buddhist monk, to not only improve your relationship with yourself but also help build compassion for others.

Try meeting someone’s gaze. A study published in 2021 by the journal NeuroImage found that deliberately locking eyes with another person can help you to feel genuinely happy for them when they share good news. This technique isn’t a slam dunk: Cultural differences and neurodivergence can affect the meaning and appropriateness of eye contact. That’s why it requires intention, effort, and good judgment. But while eye contact might feel sometimes risky, the reward could be a greater sense of connection and joy.

Let someone do something nice for you. This is another one from Kelly McGonigal. “This might not seem like a practice of empathic joy, but it becomes one when you begin to pay attention to how happy it makes the other person,” she writes. “Sometimes our own discomfort with receiving kindness, or fear of being a burden to others, gets in the way of seeing that joy.”

About the Author

Jeremy Adam Smith

Uc berkeley.

Jeremy Adam Smith edits the GGSC's online magazine, Greater Good . He is also the author or coeditor of five books, including The Daddy Shift , Are We Born Racist? , and (most recently) The Gratitude Project: How the Science of Thankfulness Can Rewire Our Brains for Resilience, Optimism, and the Greater Good . Before joining the GGSC, Jeremy was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.

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Joy vs. Happiness

It might not even be "happiness" that you were initially seeking..

Posted December 18, 2012 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

You were out looking for a little happiness when you stumbled upon Dr. Jekyll as he was appearing wonderful and considerate. Strangely, before you knew it, evil Mr. Hyde was instead dismantling anything that resembled happiness and leaving in its wake, destruction, and despair.

Despair is a long way from the happiness you were initially seeking. How did you get from mere happiness-seeking to a totally despairing life? How can you embrace the happiness that you set out to find?

It might not even be "happiness," per se, that you were initially seeking. You might have been looking for someone who was introspective, spiritual and existential. But you tell me.

Happiness is external. It's based on situations, events, people, places, things, and thoughts. Happiness is connected to your hope for a relationship or your hope for a future with someone. Happiness is linked to that "someday when I meet the right guy," or "when he starts changing and acting right," or "when he goes to counseling."

Happiness is future-oriented and it puts all its eggs in someone else's basket. It is dependent on outside situations, people, or events to align with your expectations so that the end result is your happiness. These expectations can be seen especially during the holidays, when whether or not you have a "Merry Christmas" or a "happy holiday" depends on whether or not he is with you, shows up, isn't drunk, isn't cheating, or a list of other behaviors you expect for a "happy holiday" experience. Unfortunately, pathology rarely obliges in that way. So when the relationship falls thru, or he isn't wonderful at Christmas, or you kick him out, or he cheats again, or he runs off with your money, or he was a con artist, then your holidays were not "happy" and your happiness was crushed.

Unhappiness is the result. It's a typical and inevitable result in pathological love relationships. After all, it's the only way it can turn out. There are no happy endings to pathological relationships. After Christmas and New Year, he will still be pathological and you will still have the same problems you had in November. You notice that The Institute has not written a book called "How to Have a Happy Relationship With a Pathological."

Chronic unhappiness leads to despair and depression . Remember the emotional roller coaster you rode with him? You were happy when he was good, and miserable when he was bad? You were hypnotically lulled into happy-land when you were with him and in intrusive thought-hell when you weren't? Your happiness was hitched to his rear end. When he was around (and behaving) you were happy. When he wasn't, your happiness followed his rear end right out the door and you were obsessing, wondering, and pacing.

Happiness is what you feel when he says the "right" romantic stuff, buys you a ring, or moves in. But happiness is not joy because joy is not external, it can't be bought and it is not conditional on someone else's behavior. In fact, joy is not contingent on anything in order to exist. You don't have to have "him" for the holidays to have joy. Likewise, you don't have to get revenge , snoop out his shortcomings, tell the new girlfriend the truth or anything else in order to have joy. You can lose in court with him, already have lost your life savings to him, watch him out with a new woman, or live out of the back of your car and still have joy.

You're probably thinking, "Sure, you can have joy in those circumstances if you are Mother Teresa!" Joy is almost a mystery, isn't it? It's a spiritual quality that is internal. My mother had a lot of joy and I learned from watching her joy. Her pathological man ran off with her life savings forcing her to work well past retirement . It forced her to live simply so she moved to a one-room beach shack and drove a motorcycle. For cheap entertainment, she walked the beach and painted nudes. She drank cheap grocery store wine that came in a box, bought her clothes from thrift shops, and made beach totes from crocheting plastic grocery bags together. She recycled long before it was hip to do it. But what she recycled most and best was pain ... into joy.

Instead of looking externally for yet another relationship to remove the sting of the last one, or to conquer the boredom she might feel at being alone...she cultivated internal and deep abiding joy. It was both an enigma and a privilege to watch this magnificent life emerge from the ashes of great betrayal.

I use her a lot as an example of someone who went ahead and got a great life and turned this rotten deal into an exquisite piece of art called her life. Anyone who spoke of my mother spoke most of her radiant joy. She had the "it" factor long before it was even called "it." Women flocked to her to ask, "How did you do it? How did you shed the despair and bitterness of what he did and grow into this? This bright, shining, joyful person? What is your secret?"

Somewhere along that rocky path of broken relationships with pathological men, she learned that happiness is fleeting if it's tied to a man's shirttails. She watched too many of the shirttails walk out the door with her happiness tied to his butt. In order to find the peacefulness that resides inside, she had to learn what was happiness and what was joy.

The transitory things of life are happiness-based. She had a big house and lost a big house when she divorced my father. She had a big career and lost a big career when she got "too old," according to our culture, to have the kind of job she had. She had diamonds and lost diamonds.

So she entered into voluntary simplicity where the fire of purging away 'stuff' left a clearer picture and path to the internal life. When stuff, people, and the problems they bring fall away there is a stillness. Only in that stillness can we ever find the joy that resides inside of us, dependent on nothing external in order to exist. During this holiday season, this is a great concept to contemplate.

Her joy came from deeply held spiritual beliefs but it also came from a place even beyond that. Joy comes when you make peace with who you are, where you are, why you are, and who you are not with. When you need nothing more than your truth and the love of a good God to bring peace, then you have settled into the abiding joy that is not rocked by relationships. It's not rocked by anything.

It wasn't rocked as she lay dying four years ago in the most peaceful arms of grace—a blissful state of quiet surrender and anticipation. Those who were witness to her death still tell me that her death brought new understanding to them about the issue of real joy. Joy in all things ... death of a dream, death of a relationship, death of a body. Joy from within, stripped-down, naked and beautiful.

Untie your happiness from the ends of his shirttails.

Merry Christmas and peace to you in this season of peaceful opportunities!

Gender Disclaimer: The issues The Institute writes about are mental health issues. They are not gender issues. Both females and males have the types of Cluster B disorders we often refer to in our posts. Our readership is approximately 90% female, therefore, we write for those most likely to seek out our materials. We highly support male victims and encourage others who want to provide support to male victims to encompass the issues we discuss only from a female perpetrator/male-victim standpoint. Cluster B Education is a mental health issue applicable to both genders.

Sandra L. Brown, M.A. , is CEO of The Institute for Relational Harm Reduction and Public Pathology Education.

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Motivation and emotion/Book/2021/Empathy-altruism hypothesis

• 2.1 What is the empathy-altruism hypothesis?
• 2.2.1 Empathy
• 2.2.2 Altruism
• 2.2.3 Hypothesis
• 2.3.1 Increase in sensitive help, decrease in fickle help
• 2.3.2 Decrease in aggression and derogation
• 2.3.3 Increase in cooperation
• 3.1.1 Healthcare workers
• 3.1.2 Educators
• 3.1.3 Volunteers
• 3.2 Practicality of the empathy-altruism hypothesis
• 4.1 It can feel good
• 4.2 Other motivating benefits
• 5 Conclusion
• 7 References
• 8 External links

Overview [ edit | edit source ]

A common trait that is seen and heard every day is altruism , whether it is a news story about a good Samaritan helping a person or animal from danger, a worker sharing their meal with a co-worker who forgot their lunch, or helping a loved one with a problem. There are many speculations and theories about why humans are altruistic, but one perspective that has been well researched is the empathy-altruism hypothesis (EAH). The EAH is an educated idea that the emotional state of empathy motivates altruism.

The empathy-altruism hypothesis [ edit | edit source ]

[ Provide more detail ]

What is the empathy-altruism hypothesis? [ edit | edit source ]

The empathy-altruism hypothesis (EAH) is a motivational theory which investigates why humans can perform acts that are purely recognised as helping another reach a satisfying state of wellbeing. The EAH is often discussed by examining empathy and altruism separately. This is because the EAH is one of many theories of motivation, with similar theories such as the social exchange theory and empathic-joy hypothesis competing to explain why humans are compelled to help others when there is no obvious reward. It is vital to understanding the importance of the key terms of EAH and why it is regarded as a hypothesis and not a theory or fact.

Key terms [ edit | edit source ]

The EAH, as illustrated by Batson (1987) describes that “empathic concern produces altruistic motivation” (Batson et al., 2015, p. 1). The EAH is better understood by unpacking:

• what is meant by empathic concern and
• what is meant by altruistic motivation.

Empathy [ edit | edit source ]

Empathy is a cognitively complex emotion that allows a person to understand another individual, usually from perspective taking and emotions such as compassion and tenderness (Batson et al, 2015 & Reeve, 2018). Modern researchers classify empathy into two parts; cognitive empathy and emotional empathy (Reeve, 2018). Cognitive empathy involves understanding another’s feelings by reducing one’s own perspective to account for the perspective of the other. Emotional empathy involves “other focused feelings” (Reeve, 2018, p. 358) such as compassion, concern, sympathy and tenderness (see Figure 1). Most people use both aspects of empathy and don’t usually use one more than the other (Reeve, 2018). Empathy is very similar to empathic concern , where in both cases, an individual can empathise with another, however, empathic concern involves an extra level of congruence and positive regard.

Altruism [ edit | edit source ]

Altruism at its core, is a behaviour where an individual acts selflessly with the ultimate goal of helping another and promoting their welfare (Batson et al., 2015; Greater Good, n.d.). Altruism is investigated heavily in social psychology as it is one of the few traits that displays selfless instead of selfish effects (Cherry, 2021). There are two forms of altruism; evolutionary altruism and psychological altruism. Evolutionary altruism examines the cost of oneself acting in a way that puts them at risk, but benefits the survival of others and giving them a better chance to pass on genes (Batson et al., 2015; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013 & Taylor, 2010). Psychological altruism, in contrast, is the desire to reach an “ultimate goal of increasing another’s wellbeing” (Batson et al., 2015, p. 3) without thinking about self-interest (Taylor, 2010). However, altruism doesn’t have to be a method of complete selflessness. As Batson et al. (2015) explain, modern researchers class altruism as a form of egoism, with the goal of receiving an internal reward for helping another reach an appropriate state of wellbeing. (This will be discussed in more detail under Motivation and reward ).  

Hypothesis [ edit | edit source ]

Additionally, it is crucial to understand why it is a hypothesis, not a fact or theory. A hypothesis is a limited scientific idea or assumption that is used as a starting point for identifying or guessing scientific phenomena that is not yet proven (Bradford, 2017b; Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Hypotheses differ from facts, theories and laws as they do not attempt to explain certain factors or reasoning, but instead form a possible idea that can be tested, theorised and researched, which may lead to finding possible answers (Bradford, 2017b; Merriam-Webster, n.d.).

Why is the empathy-altruism hypothesis relevant? [ edit | edit source ]

A common question about any theory, fact, law or hypothesis is ‘why is it relevant?’. There are reasons behind many physiological and psychological mechanisms regarding the human body, such as the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates the flight-or-fight response, or laughter, which helps to make and maintain social bonds. The EAH is relevant for a number of reasons, including a decrease in fickle help, decreased aggression and increased cooperation in conflicting situations [ explain? ] .

Increase in sensitive help, decrease in fickle help [ edit | edit source ]

Studies investigating the EAH often find positive correlations between the level of empathy and the level of altruistic motivation involved. As Batson et al. (2015) explains, the more empathetic we are towards an individual, the more likely we are to help. Furthermore, experiments tested by Batson et al. (1981, 1988) found that people with lower signs of empathy expressed, resulting in a stronger mindset of egoism , were more likely to escape the situation (see Table 1 for a simple comparison) of seeing another in need of help, if the option of escape was easy (Batson et al.,2015).

Decrease in aggression and derogation [ edit | edit source ]

Aggression and acts of violence typically negatively affect another’s wellbeing, which can inflict fear and sadness onto the recipient. This conclusion, made by Batson et al. (2015) emphasises the importance of empathy-induced altruism as a means of not making another’s wellbeing any worse than what it already is, and therefore should reduce the inhibition of aggression. Numerous older studies investigated the effects of aggression and derogation towards specific minority groups. Significant studies performed by Melvin Lerner and William Ryan highlighted the rate of derogation towards certain minority groups (Batson et al., 2015). The rates, which were rather high, implied that it is common for people to unconsciously blame those individuals or groups of people for the discrimination that they receive. As Batson et al. (2015) explains however, the EAH as expected, somewhat counteracts derogative and aggressive behaviour through the use of perspective-taking and wanting to help the targeted individuals reach a desirable state where they aren’t to blame.

Increase in cooperation [ edit | edit source ]

When a conflict arises, no matter if it is a political debate, business argument or a financial dispute, the first action is for oneself to begin by using egoism in an effort of self-interest. This is a common path to take as no one wants to be left with a negative outcome. Thus, Batson et al. (2015) and numerous others (Batson & Moran, 1999; Klimecki, 2019) have conducted studies which identify the benefits of cooperation and strengthen the idea of empathic-inspired altruism as a key type of altruistic motivation in both theoretical and real situations. Results from these studies suggest that although the EAH does have a positive effect on cooperation, dispute resolution is not drastically improved. However, implementing empathic behaviours such as perspective-taking improves the probability of empathy helping participants reach a mutually beneficial outcome (Batson et al., 2015; Batson & Moran, 1999). Overall, there are numerous reasons as to why the EAH is relevant to humans in every day life. There is more depth to unpack, specifically the applications of the EAH.  

Applications of the empathy-altruism hypothesis [ edit | edit source ]

Where and how is the empathy-altruism hypothesis applied [ edit | edit source ].

There is a limited evidence that highlights the practical applications of the EAH, as people are often motivated by different things to reach a goal. It is also difficult to gather when the EAH takes effect in settings outside of experiments such as in a professional workplace, as these actions cannot be recorded (Batson et al., 2015). Instead, one way to find the potential benefits is to examine workplaces which require individuals to have and display empathy-induced altruism. Empathy-induced altruism is a specific type of altruism, as the result of altruistic behaviours derives from feelings of empathy more so than other feelings that lead to altruism such as pride, pity or egoism. Three examples of workplaces that enforce the use of empathy-directed altruism include workers in the healthcare industry, educators and people working in volunteer groups. Although other forms of motivation such as the desire for money, stability and enjoyment are also prevalent, some consistency of empathy-induced altruism is needed to be successful in these roles.

Healthcare workers [ edit | edit source ]

Communication is one of the most vital skills a healthcare professional needs (Moudatsou et al., 2020). When talking with patients or clients, a health care profession (HCP) must understand their feelings and opinions, before using that to help assess the patient’s or client’s needs. By using empathy-induced altruism, HCPs are able to first assess the wellbeing of their patient or client. Using empathy-related techniques, HCPs can gain insight into the other’s perspective, giving the HCP a better understanding of why they are feeling a particular way (i.e., nervous, angry, upset, etc.) and what they can do to relieve any negative feelings by trying to restore the patient/client’s wellbeing (Moudatsou, 2015).

Although there is an emphasis on empathy in the healthcare industry, some studies have shown a decrease in altruistic motivation in general. Empathy-induced care seems to differentiate between empathy-induced altruism as expressed by Feldman (2017), meaning that although medical staff are likely to be empathetic, decisions involving altruism have no significant effect on helping patients or clients. This is due to increased working hours and burnout, which are common causes for the decline in empathy-induced altruism.

Educators [ edit | edit source ]

Education is a life-long experience, and is a crucial factor in how successful people are, not just in terms of financial success, but success in regards to wellbeing, needs, social success and self-actualisation (Michaela, 2015). Similar to healthcare workers, educators need some form of empathy-induced altruism to better reach out towards others. For example, as Fry and Runyan (2017) mention, teaching empathic concern in classrooms gives students the opportunity to understand its importance, and for them to use it in practical applications and experience the benefits for themselves. This reasoning, should encourage teachers to act as role models and to provide both the knowledge of empathic concern, and to enforce the practicality of empathy-derived altruism. This however, is not always the case.

Olitalia et al. (2013) performed an experiment on teachers in Jakarta to analyse where the altruism derived from, and the emotions and motivations behind altruism by the teachers. Olitalia et al. (2013) found that teachers were more altruistically driven by feelings of egoism and personal distress, rather than from empathic concern. Similar to healthcare workers, this concludes that egoistic-derived altruism appears to be favoured over empathy-derived altruism.  

Volunteers [ edit | edit source ]

Volunteering is one of the most altruistic things a person can do. As a result, it is common for one to think that empathy-derived altruism would be at its peak for individuals heavily or somewhat involved in charity work and other similar prosocial experiences. Studies conducted by Davis et al. (1999) have identified that individuals with higher levels of empathic concern were more likely to perform altruistic behaviours such as volunteer work, which gave them direct experiences with those they were helping.

Similar to roles in teaching and healthcare, volunteer workers can be motivated egoistically just as much as they can be from empathetic concern. Researchers examining the applications of altruism thus turn to using terms that can be achieved through either self-oriented or other-oriented motivations such as helping behaviours or prosocial behaviours (Einolf, 2008). This is designed to find the significance of altruism that derives from either empathic concern, egoism or both. Einolf (2008) further explains that although the applications of empathy-derived altruism can be difficult to conclude since other applications deriving from self-oriented behaviours may be present, there is a significant correlation between the level of empathic concern an individual has, and the amount of volunteering that they perform or would like to perform. This shows that there is some application of the EAH in regards to volunteering.

Practicality of the empathy-altruism hypothesis [ edit | edit source ]

The EAH also has practical applications in how people deal with obstacles. Similar to where and how the EAH is applied, the best way for examining the practicality is to look at empathy-derived altruism and empathic concern. This is because empathy-derived altruism and empathic concern can be identified as real-world behaviours, which can therefore be tested and better understood.

Empathic concern can be used in everyday life, as well as in professional settings as mentioned before. The best examples stem from social interactions which can be fixed or relieved through empathic concern. Results found by Depow et al. (2021) suggests, as seen in Figure 2, that people find it easier to empathise with positive emotions such as joy and happiness, over negative emotions like sadness or distress. This highlights that empathic concern regarding fixing the wellbeing of others is considerably harder than empathic concern regarding an individual who is already at a positive state of wellbeing. It is important at this point to ask yourself, do you feel that you would empathise more with your co-worker who is having a bad day at work, or with your best friend who landed their dream job? Batson et al. (2015) however, suggests that it is easier to empathise with someone who is currently in a situation that you have experienced already or currently. So, although studies have explored that people may empathise more with their best friend getting their dream job, it is just as likely that individuals may feel motivated to help those that are experiencing similar negative experiences that they have once experienced such as a bad day at work, therefore leading towards an empathy-derived type of altruism.

Is egoistic-derived altruism the same thing as empathy-derived altruism?

Imagine coming into work on a Monday and you see your co-worker is late for work, in tears saying that their house was brought down by a wild fire on the weekend. According to empathic concern, which of these would be the best response to comforting your co-worker?

Motivation and reward- Why are people motivated to help, what is the benefit? [ edit | edit source ]

The EAH examines the possibility of empathic concern as the key determinant that leads to altruistic motivation. This hypothesis does not include forms of selfishness or egoism, but instead looks at selfless qualities as the driving force behind altruistic behaviour (Batson et al., 2015). The EAH does not neglect or disprove other key determinants of altruism such as personal distress or social rewards, but instead tries to focus on a single aspect. However, if the ultimate goal of empathy-derived altruism is to help the recipient improve their state of wellbeing, is it enough to drive individuals to making more altruistic acts?

It can feel good [ edit | edit source ]

In most cases, helping others makes one feel good. It can give the actor a sense of accomplishment and reinforce positive feelings. As Lahvis (2016) mentions, feeling good is a consequence of empathetic-altruism, it is not the goal. Other forms of altruism such as the empathic-joy hypothesis or social-exchange theory states that feeling good can be the ultimate goal of helping another individual (Batson et al., 1991). The EAH also establishes a cost-benefit analysis, as seen in Figure 3, but instead of weighing up the rewards for performing altruistic actions such as the social-exchange theory, the EAH differentiates the best choice between:

• helping the recipient
• getting another individual to help the recipient or
• to do nothing at all (Batson et al., 2015).

Batson et al. (2015) also mention that these choices depend on specific circumstances and other forms of motivation present. Choosing to do nothing or getting another individual to aid the recipient does not imply that the EAH was not in effect, but instead shows that the cost-benefit analysis proved that the worst choice to make for that particular situation is to help, either because the risks of harm were too high, or harm could be brought out in another (Batson et al., 2015). In order for empathy-derived altruism to make one feel good, the cost-benefit analysis should sway towards the first two options, as doing something makes one feel good about improving another’s wellbeing in some way (Batson et al., 2015). There are however, more benefits to empathic-derived altruism besides feeling good.

Other motivating benefits [ edit | edit source ]

Other benefits that can derive from altruistic behaviours include social and extrinsic rewards. One idea suggests that empathic-altruism might be the initial motivation of helping another, however, an extrinsic reward placed afterwards may shift one’s motivation. A study conducted by Warneken and Tomasello (2014) investigated the altruistic tendencies of infants aged 20 months before and after they received an extrinsic reward. Extrinsic rewards appeared to reduce the likeliness of future altruistic behaviours. Warneken and Tomasello (2014) demonstrated that humans are altruistic by nature, meaning that they are most likely empathy-derived, but prosocial rewards can deeply affect the likeliness of altruistic behaviours, either by reducing the tendency to help, or by changing one’s mindset to help as it benefits oneself with a reward. Additionally, Lahvis (2016) highlights that altruistic efforts might be a result of the camaraderie effect, which incorporates feelings of empathy with social motivation. The camaraderie effect combines parts of the EAH, with the desire to socialise with others as a leading factor for wanting to help the wellbeing of another. To summarise, altruistic behaviours driven from empathy may be the initial reason for helping another’s wellbeing, however, other factors can steer individuals away from altruistic behaviour or adjust their motivations behind it.

Conclusion [ edit | edit source ]

The EAH theory attempts to explain if and how people perform altruism purely to improve the wellbeing of another. It is important to understand the foundations of the key words involved in the theory, specifically empathy and altruism. The EAH continues to gain and lose support as more experiments are conducted. This is because there are numerous other forms of motivation and goals that shift the reasoning of performing altruistic actions.

The EAH can be implemented in all workplaces, but the most likely places to find empathy-derived altruism comes from individuals whose jobs require a lot of empathy to succeed, such as healthcare workers, educators and volunteers. While altruistic behaviours may begin from an empathic emotion, other forms of motivation and rewards can change one’s reason for choosing to be altruistic or not. This includes personal distress branching from egoism and extrinsic rewards stemming from social recognition and social motivation.  

See also [ edit | edit source ]

• Altruism (Wikipedia)
• Altruism and empathy (Book chapter, 2014)
• Compassion and empathy (Book chapter, 2014)
• Egoism (Wikipedia)
• Empathic concern (Wikipedia)
• Empathy (Wikipedia)
• Empathy (Book chapter, 2011)
• Empathy and emotional wellbeing (Book chapter, 2015)
• Guilt and empathy (Book chapter, 2018)
• Hypothesis (Wikipedia)
• Social exchange theory (Wikipedia)

References [ edit | edit source ]

Batson, C. D. (1987). Prosocial Motivation: Is it ever Truly Altruistic? Advances in Experimental Social Psychology , 20, 65–122. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0065- 2601(08)60412-8

Batson, C. D., Batson, J. G., Slingsby, J. K., Harrell, K. L., Peekna, H. M., & Todd, R. M. (1991). Empathic joy and the empathy-altruism hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 61(3), 413–426. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.61.3.413

Batson, C. D., Lishner, D. A., & Stocks, E. L. (2015). The Empathy–Altruism Hypothesis. The Oxford Handbook of Prosocial Behavior , 1–27.

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External links [ edit | edit source ]

• Aggression vs. altruism: crash course psychology (YouTube, 2015)
• Helping and prosocial behaviour (noba project.com, 2021)
• Introduction to social exchange theory in social work (Online MSW Programs.com)
• Jane Elliott's blue eyes brown eyes experiment (YouTube, 2020)
• The power of empathy (Tedx, 2013)
• What is empathy? (YouTube, 2014)

• Resources needing clarification
• Motivation and emotion/Book/2021
• Motivation and emotion/Book/Altruism
• Motivation and emotion/Book/Empathy

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