and unemployment levels play important roles in life quality as experienced by individuals, these measures alone are not sufficient to understand how satisfied and happy people feel in their day-to-day lives. The subjective element is essen-tial because people react differently to the same circumstances and make their evaluations of situations based on their own values, expectancies, and previous experiences (Diener et al., 1999, p. 277).
Given the importance of this emerging field of inquiry, it is surprising that few researchers have yet to explore subjective well-being from an evolutionary perspective. However, given that the underlying mechanisms that generate sub-jective well-being presumably have been shaped by the process of evolution by natural selection, an evolutionary perspective should offer novel insights into the nature and function of well-being in individuals’ lives. In the following sections, we provide an overview of evolutionarily informed research on subjective well-being. First we use an evolutionary perspective to highlight some psychological features and environmental cues that can be detrimental to subjective well-being.
These include discrepancies between modern and ancestral environments and psychological mechanisms that have been shaped by selection to induce subjec-tive distress. We then address psychological features that have been shaped by selection and allow people to feel happy and satisfied with their lives. We close with suggestions for how to harness our evolved psychologies to better promote well-being and propose future avenues for research on subjective well-being from an evolutionary perspective.
coordinated suite of changes (cognitive, affective, physiological, etc.) shaped by selection to alert the bearers that a change has occurred in the internal or external environment that requires attention (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000). The subjective experience of emotions—such as the positive or negative affective shifts associ-ated with emotional experiences—is not viewed as being good or bad, although experienced as such by individuals. Rather, emotions are understood to be fea-tures designed by the evolutionary process based on their ability to help our ancestors survive and reproduce over evolutionary time.
Unfortunately, many of the features that have facilitated successful survival and reproduction do not have the result of making us feel happy or satisfied with our lives. According to one evolutionary psychological hypothesis, feelings of subjective distress and discomfort are evolved psychological responses shaped by selection to signal strategic interference. Strategic interference theory (Buss, 1989) posits that many “negative” emotions, such as anger or jealousy, have been designed by the evolutionary process to signal that someone or something is impeding one’s preferred behavioral strategy. Strategic interference has been hypothesized to function by (1) focusing an individual’s attention on the source of strategic interference while temporarily screening out information that is less relevant to the adaptive problem being faced, (2) prompting storage of the rele-vant information in memory, (3) motivating action to reduce the strategic inter-ference, and (4) motivating action to prevent future such interference.
The human mind likely contains numerous psychological adaptations that have been selected by the evolutionary process based on their ability to signal strategic interference. Some examples of these features are envy (Hill & Buss, 2006a), anxiety (Marks & Nesse, 1994), depression (Price & Sloman, 1987;
Nesse, 2005, 2006), fears and phobias (Marks, 1987), sexual jealousy (Buss, 1988;
Buss, Larsen, Weston, & Semmelroth, 1992; Daly, Wilson, & Weghorst, 1982), low self-esteem (Hill & Buss, 2006a; Kirkpatrick & Ellis, 2001, 2006), and anger and upset (Buss, 1989). Although upsetting to the individual experiencing them, from an evolutionary perspective, such negative emotional responses have been shaped by selection to solve recurrent adaptive problems faced by our ancestors, such as loss of status, sexual coercion, the presence of environmental hazards (e.g., poisonous snakes, spiders), and sexual infidelity. The experience of negative emotions, although subjectively unpleasant, provides the necessary wake-up call to our consciousness to recognize that there is an adaptive problem that needs to be solved, and it subsequently motivates action to solve it.
Consider the adaptive problems associated with social competition. Com-peting successfully against rivals in competitions for access to scarce resources requires extensive social comparisons. Whether attempting to win the heart of a desirable mate, navigate a status hierarchy, or secure a coveted new job, individ-uals must constantly strive for access to desirable resources or positions that others are simultaneously attempting to acquire. Over evolutionary time, selection
would have favored those individuals who took note when social rivals possessed advantages they did not have and felt motivated to acquire those same advantages for themselves. Evidence supports the hypothesis that envy is one such emotional adaptation that has been shaped by selection to signal strategic interference of this nature (Hill & Buss, 2006). Envy, according to this hypothesis, functions to alert a person to a rival’s possible or actual advantage and prompts action designed to (1) acquire these resources for him- or herself, (2) take these resources directly from the rival, or (3) attempt to mitigate any social damage done to him- or her-self via unfavorable social comparisons with the advantaged individual.
The emotion of envy can be damaging to subjective well-being, however.
No one can deny the subjective distress that sometimes follows a friend or rival gaining an advantage that we would like for ourselves. The feelings of resent-ment in response to another’s perceived advantage have soured relationships between siblings, destroyed friendships, and chilled relations among coworkers.
Feelings of upset and hostility can be so visceral and unpleasant that the individ-ual would rather terminate the relationship than continue to experience this uncomfortable reminder of the other’s advantage. Despite the damage that envy can have on subjective well-being, it serves an important function in social com-petitions. Individuals who experience envy in response to a social competitor’s advantage would be appropriately alerted to the advantage and motivated to commence corrective action. Over the course of evolutionary time, individuals who did not feel subjective discomfort in these situations would likely have been outcompeted by their more envious counterparts. Although envy often results in subjective distress, this type of emotional distress functions to motivate adaptive action (Buss, 2000a).
The adaptive problems inherent in social competition can also shed light on some of the cognitive adaptations and decision-making processes that can have a potentially negative impact on subjective well-being. Many resources necessary for successful survival and reproduction are limited in quantity and, as such, not equally available to all who want them. For example, in the domain of mate competition, there are a limited number of men and women who embody the characteristics that men and women most desire in their mates (Buss, 2003).
Because there are fewer “high-mate value” mates than there are individuals who desire them, those few individuals lucky enough to win the hearts of the desir-able necessarily do so at the expense of their competition. The qualities that lead individuals to gain preferential access to desirable mates, over evolutionary time, out-reproduced their mating competitors. Modern humans possess the adapta-tions that led to their success.
Based on this logic, evolutionary psychologists have recently proposed that the human mind should have a “positional bias” in how success is judged in resource competition situations (Hill & Buss, 2006). That is, it is predicted that individuals will be less concerned with how much they have in an absolute sense
and more concerned with how much more they have compared to their peers in a number of delimited domains (Frank, 1999). Using an evolutionary perspec-tive, Hill and Buss (2006) proposed that humans attend to the positional rather than absolute values of (1) resources that are known to affect survival or repro-duction, and (2) personal attributes that affect individuals’ abilities to acquire such resources. They also hypothesized that the positional bias will be sex-differentiated in those domains where the fitness payoffs from competition have differed qualitatively for each sex throughout human evolutionary history.
One domain in which both men and women have generally been found to exhibit the positional bias is when judging the desirability of outcomes such as how much income they would like to have or their preferred amount of educa-tional attainment (Hill & Buss, 2006; Solnick & Hemenway, 1998). Although educational attainment and income are evolutionarily novel concepts, they both correspond with access to financial resources, which can themselves be turned into goods that promote survival and reproduction. New evidence also suggests that the domains in which men and women are most likely to exhibit the posi-tional bias may differ based on the different adaptive problems that each has had to solve over the course of evolutionary history. For instance, the domain of physical attractiveness is one in which women have historically competed more fiercely than men due to the premium that men place on appearance in selecting mates (Buss, 1989). This reasoning has led evolutionary psychologists to predict that women should exhibit the positional bias more than men when reasoning about their preferred levels of physical attractiveness. As predicted, women were found to exhibit the positional bias significantly more than men in this domain (Hill & Buss, 2006).
Because individuals appear to judge their own successes in delimited domains based on comparisons with how everyone else is performing, subjective distress and dissatisfaction with oneself can occur when encountering others who are better off in one of these domains. Furthermore, the positional bias hypothe-sis suggests that even if we are able to work hard enough to gain access to those things of others that we covet, it is not likely to lead to long-term satisfaction and happiness (Frank, 1999). Even though we may feel pleasure after we receive an increase in pay or move into a larger house, it is typically not long before we go back to feeling much the same as we did before the raise or move (although see Diener, Lucas, & Scollon, 2006, for important modifications of this “hedonic treadmill” theory). Even though Americans now live in larger houses that con-tain more color TVs, computers, and cars than they ever have at any point in our history, they are no happier now than they were previously (Frank, 1999; Myers
& Diener, 1995).
Psychological processes such as the positional bias and envy guarantee that long-term satisfaction with one’s income, position in the status hierarchy, or job will be difficult to achieve. These hypothesized adaptations, in addition to other
adaptations designed to cause subjective distress, make the quest for well-being sometimes difficult to achieve.
Discrepancies between Ancestral and Modern Environments
The modern world, for most of us, is quite different from that in which ancestral humans spent the majority of their evolutionary history. Although we do not have a videotaped record of our evolutionary past, archaeological evidence sug-gests that humans spent the majority of their evolutionary history as hunter–
gatherers, living in small groups that likely consisted of between 50 and 200 indi-viduals (Dunbar, 1993). Ancestral humans did not have access to the wealth of conveniences, technologies, and extravagances that are so much a part of modern life. Our current environment offers medical technologies and advances in food procurement that have allowed our populations to grow and average lifespans to lengthen. We have access to hundreds of cable channels, all of which we can watch on our big-screen televisions in the privacy of our own 4,000-square-foot homes. We have machines that wash our clothes, sanitize our dishes, and cook our food. It is hard to argue that we aren’t much better off than were our hunter–gatherer forbearers in a number of ways. However, despite the many ways in which humans have improved their conditions of living, the modern environment also differs from that of our ancestors in ways that can make us feel isolated and alone.
Our ancestors likely spent the majority of their lives surrounded by close allies and kin members. Social transactions typically occurred among individuals who engaged in regular contact. Although the current environment offers an almost overwhelming supply of conveniences not available to our ancestral counterparts, many of us do not have access to the intimate social support systems that likely characterized the conditions through which we have spent the major-ity of our evolutionary history (Nesse & Williams, 1994). The majormajor-ity of people living in the United States live in small family units, typically consisting of between one and four individuals. Rather than being part of a large, extended community of friends and allies, many of us live in large cities where we are sur-rounded by thousands or millions of strangers. This anonymity is exacerbated by the fact that many of us find ourselves having to frequently relocate or travel for employment purposes, both of which make it difficult to develop and sustain meaningful relationships with others. This fact has led some evolutionary psychologists to suggest that one detriment to our subjective well-being—
depression—might partly be explained by the fact that our modern living condi-tions are such that we live in virtual anonymity, removed from the types of social support that are so important to subjective well-being (Nesse, 1990, 2006).
Humans are a very social species. Our well-being is very highly dependent on having access to people with whom we have deep, meaningful relationships.
Researchers exploring the link between well-being and sociality have demon-strated that being with others typically has the effect of improving mood, whereas being alone tends to have the opposite effect (Argyle, 1987; Lewinsohn, Redner, & Seeley, 1991; Sarason, Sarason, & Pierce, 1990).
Activities in the modern environment also differ from those in which humans historically spent their waking hours. Our ancestors had a close connec-tion with the fruits of their labor. Food was gathered to feed one’s family. Meat was procured from cooperative hunting ventures and was brought back to be shared with extended kin and social allies. People had an intimate connection with the work they performed because it had a direct impact on their survival.
This connection contrasts with the types of work that most of us routinely must perform to make a living. The long hours that most of us spend in front of com-puters, copy machines, and hunched over filing cabinets can be socially isolating and far removed from the final product of our labor. This is not to say that most of us would prefer to go back to the days of eating only what we kill. Most of us are perfectly content to spend our daylight hours indoors, away from the “hostile forces of nature.” However, the long hours in the office coupled with feelings of disconnection from the fruits of their labor that people often have can potentially have a negative impact on subjective well-being. Work-related stress and feeling that one’s work is meaningless are both correlated with anxiety and depression (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001), both of which are detrimental to well-being.
Competing with Unbeatable Rivals:
Social Competition with the Super-Elite
Another way in which our evolved psychologies can negatively affect our sub-jective well-being is when those features that have been shaped by selection to facilitate successful social competition interact with our current media-saturated environments. It has been hypothesized the human mind has been shaped by selection to have a positional bias in judging the relative success of outcomes that can have an impact on fitness. Thus, men’s and women’s feelings of satisfaction with how attractive they or their romantic partners are, how much income they have, or how much investment they are garnering from their parents or a mate are dependent on how they stack up relative to their peers. Such biases in our social judgments have been adaptive throughout most of our evolutionary his-tory. They would have allowed individuals to assess the optimal amount of com-petitive effort to put forth to outcompete rivals. However, in our current envi-ronment, not everyone to whom we are daily exposed is an actual social competitor. We need only turn on our televisions or gaze up at a billboard to be exposed to people who are, literally, the richest and most attractive in the world.
Large-scale media exposure increases the size and attractiveness of our reference
groups and the range and grandeur of the possible goals that we can set for our-selves. Using such a skewed reference group to form self-assessments of success and well-being make even the most successful individual feel that he or she can never succeed, despite the fact that the images we see are no more than fantasies created by the media (Sloman & Gilbert, 2000).
Because men and women judge their success with regard to how much income they have, based on where they stand relative to their rivals, for instance, it is possible that media exposure to depictions of others who have immense wealth may have an unnecessarily negative impact on one’s satisfaction with one’s financial holdings. Furthermore, given that most women tend to exhibit the positional bias when making judgments about their own physical attractive-ness, it is likely that constant exposure to the extremely attractive women depicted on television, in film, and in magazines could make women feel unnec-essarily bad about themselves in this domain.
Some empirical evidence supports this supposition. Gutierres and her col-leagues have performed a variety of studies that demonstrate that such media exposure may have negative consequences on individuals’ subjective well-being.
Women subjected to viewing numerous photographs of highly attractive women subsequently felt less attractive themselves and showed a decrease in self-esteem (Gutierres, Kenrick, & Partch, 1999). Consumers of beauty magazines may wish to take note. Men showed a similar pattern after exposures to descriptions of highly dominant and influential men. These results are sex-differentiated in ways predicted by an evolutionary framework and demonstrate an important way in which our current environmental context can have detrimental effects on our feelings of subjective well-being. Exposures to such media also appear to affect how satisfied individuals feel with their romantic partners. In a similar series of studies, researchers discovered that men exposed to multiple images of attractive women subsequently rated their commitment to their current partner as lower than a comparable group of men exposed to images of women average in attrac-tiveness (Kenrick, Gutierres, & Goldberg, 1989; Kenrick, Neuberg, Zierk, &
Krones, 1994). Women exposed to multiple images of dominant, high-status men showed a similar decrement in commitment to and love of their regular partner, compared to a group of women exposed to less dominant men.