Evolutionary psychology has yielded important insights into a number of research domains within psychology, including the science of subjective well-being. Evolutionary psychology provides insights into obstacles that can have a negative effect on subjective well-being. Discrepancies between current environ-ments and those inhabited by our distant ancestors, psychological features that have been designed to cause upset and distress, and the interaction between the two can have detrimental effects on subjective well-being. Evolutionary psychol-ogy also yields insight into the types of factors that will make us happy and makes suggestions about ways in which we might harness our evolved psychologies to facilitate subjective well-being. Little research has yet been done on subjective well-being from an evolutionary perspective.
Nonetheless, early research from this perspective appears promising (Hill &
Buss, 2006). First, an evolutionary perspective serves heuristic value in leading researchers to domains likely to be of critical importance—those tributary to solving statistically recurrent problems of survival and reproduction. Second, it leads to hypotheses not produced by other perspectives. None but an evolution-ary perspective, for example, would lead to the nonobvious prediction that women’s well-being will rise near ovulation, when they peak in reproductive value, and that men will lack these predictable monthly variations in subjective well-being (see Buss, 2000a). Third, an evolutionary perspective provides a pow-erful metatheory for explaining why humans (and other organisms) have well-designed psychological systems that produce happiness and unhappiness. In at least these three ways, an evolutionary perspective can make important concep-tual and empirical contributions to a domain about which all humans care deeply.
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5
The Pursuit of Happiness in History
D
ARRINM. M
CM
AHONIf the pursuit of happiness is as old as history itself, then it is surely worth ask-ing what the sources have to say about this perennial human quest. The time to do so is now. For at no other point in human history have so many men and women believed with such unquestioned certainty that they should be happy, that this is their inherent state and natural right. Thomas Jefferson’s proud affirmation in the Declaration of Independence that the pursuit of happi-ness is a basic human entitlement—a truth at once God-given and self-evident—has slowly evolved into a much wider assumption about its capture and attainment. We deserve to be happy, Americans and many others now tend to believe, and we should be so.
In truth, the assumption that happiness is the natural human state is a rela-tively recent phenomenon—the product of a dramatic shift in human expecta-tions carried out since the 18th century. Remembering that fact and recalling, too, the received wisdom of some of the many historical observers who have pointed out the potential perils of pursuit may help us view our own search for happiness in a slightly different light. In the end, I want to suggest that perhaps the best way to find happiness, paradoxically, may well be to look for something else.
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