Everywhere, the flies
hummed. They covered
clothes and people and a
toothbrush that lay abandoned
on a crumbling
wall. To enter the slum from the busy
pedestrian lane that formed its southern
boundary, I had to jump over a moat of
deep sewage. Beyond the sewer, there
was an open central courtyard that had
once been paved, but where now only
a few islands of concrete rose above
the sea of mud. Clustered around the
courtyard was a row of cement rooms,
each housing an entire family. Strung
between these homes, on a spider web
of laundry lines, bright garments hung
like prayer flags. At the far end of the
courtyard was a dark chamber in which
I could vaguely make out the shape of
the Hindu goddess Kali, from whom
many believe Calcutta gets its name.
Past the makeshift temple house was
the clamor of the street, the constant
honking of Ambassador taxicabs and
the grinding engines of diesel trucks.
The slum inside the courtyard was alive
with activity, too. Children ran about playing and helping with
domestic labor. Two women sat on a doorstep, pulling lice from
each other’s hair. A chola stove billowed smoke in unbelievable
quantities. In a far corner, a sow muzzled through debris, bits
of rags, and scraps of food. Three boys brought me a trophy,
the pride of a recent cricket match against a neighboring slum.
The trophy, among other things, led me to believe that life
in this Indian slum was, in the abstract, very similar to life in
the United States. The people had families; the children played
organized sports; there was a local spiritual center, albeit modest;
and many of the men worked regular jobs—at tea shops,
driving taxis, or in construction. Of course, there were important
differences also. The quality of the sanitation could not be
ignored. The open sewer, the presence of animals and flies, all
created an environment in which illness was common and its
consequences severe. Of the seventy-three people I interviewed
in the slum, twenty mentioned serious health complaints, and
ten told me that a close friend or family member had died
within the previous year.
I am one of a small but growing number of social scientists
studying happiness. As researchers, we are interested in what
is going right in people’s lives rather than what is going wrong.
To study the architecture of happiness, we employ a variety of
methods, including huge international surveys and measures
of facial muscular activity; yet despite our methodological
sophistication and large body of research, many people are slow
to accept the idea that happiness can
truly be understood or that Calcutta
is the right place to go looking for it.
“Really,” a close friend of mine said as
I packed my suitcase for India, where I
would conduct research with some of
the poorest slum dwellers in the world,
“how happy can they be?”
How happy can we, as
a species, be? That is
the better question.
And what are the
determinants of happiness?
One of the most striking and
encouraging findings to emerge from
the research is that most people are
at least mildly happy. Time and again,
large surveys in dozens of countries
across the globe have reached this same
conclusion. One study, conducted
by my parents, University of Illinois
psychologists Ed and Carol Diener,
surveyed representative samples in fortythree
nations and found that eighty-six
percent of people were above neutral
on the happiness scale. Consider the people in your own life: Of
ten of your closest friends, how many are at least mildly happy?
Chances are, there might be one or two going through a tough
emotional time, but the rest are probably doing reasonably well.
In the face of increasing rates of antidepressant use and
media reports of school shootings, the idea that most people are
happy can seem puzzling, if not downright wrong. But antidepressant
use and school violence, while serious issues, represent
minority cases; most people live their entire lives without being
treated for depression or experiencing a shooting firsthand. Our
everyday societies, organizations, and relationships work well
only when people are, on average, flourishing emotionally. In
fact, University of Michigan researcher Barbara Frederickson
theorizes that happiness is more than mere pleasant emotional
happenstance; it’s functional. Just as negative emotions serve
to limit our actions (fight, flight, fright), positive emotions
serve the evolutionary function of broadening and building
our resources. Frederickson points to laboratory studies in
which people who are induced into a good mood tend to be
more creative, sociable, and helpful. And in the real world,
happy people tend to be healthier, live longer, and stay married
for more years than their less happy peers. In short, happiness
might not just feel good—it might be good for you.
The idea that happiness has adaptive value has received support
from other academics. In his University of Chicago laboratory,
social neuroscientist John Cacioppo attaches electrodes to the faces of research participants. The
sensitive devices are capable of measuring
tiny shifts in muscular activity
associated with emotion behaviors like
smiling, even before the smile actually
occurs. Participants are shown slides
with images ranging from the negative
to the neutral to the positive: graphic
eye tumors, umbrellas, smiling babies.
People react to highly positive or highly
negative images in the ways one would
expect, but Cacioppo has found that,
on average, research subjects who are
shown emotionally neutral photographs,
such as those of cups, react to the
images as if they were positive. After a
series of experiments that all used similar
methodology, Cacioppo and his colleagues
concluded that humans exhibit
a “positivity offset,” in which they are
likely to interpret neutral surroundings
as positive. According to Cacioppo,
the positivity offset is what led people,
historically, to explore and interact with
what otherwise would be considered
hostile environments, such as the arctic icescape.
The weather in Qaanaaq, a settlement perched on
a gravel beach at the northern end of Greenland,
was terrible. A storm front was rolling in from
Ellesmere Island; the sky was black, and the sea
was choppy. My plane made an emergency landing
at a military base, fueling up for the twenty-minute flight
over the glacier and into Qaanaaq’s airport, which was nothing
more than a leveled strip of beach. As we descended, the
plane rocked and dipped alarmingly, and it sounded as if bits
of ice were glancing off the hull. Greenland, the world’s largest
island, has more than eighty percent of its surface area covered
by ice, nearly two miles thick in some parts. The exposed land
is rocky, barren, and unable to support agriculture or grazing
in any significant quantity. Still, about 600 Inughuit, as the
local Inuit are known, make their home in Qaanaaq, enduring
months of unending winter darkness and braving the occasional
polar bear.
