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.
social life will contain a fair amount of discontentment. However, an evolution-ary perspective can also offer a unique perspective on the types of activities and environments that are conducive to facilitating subjective well-being, as well as insights into how individuals can harness their evolved psychologies to better promote subjective well-being in their everyday lives.
What Is Happiness, and How Can We Get More of It?
Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that happiness tracks modern manifes-tations of ancestral signals of evolutionary fitness (Ketelaar, 2004; Nesse, 1990).
Stated differently, happiness is hypothesized to serve as a psychological reward, an internal signaling device that tells an organism that an adaptive problem has been solved successfully or is in the process of being solved successfully. The types of events and situations that are expected to have the biggest positive impact on subjective well-being are those that are related to longstanding adap-tive problems humans have been solving over evolutionary time. Promoting happiness and subjective well-being is thus often merely a matter of exploiting knowledge of evolved desires and attempting to fulfill them (Buss, 2000a, 2000b). Studies of private wishes and goals reveal that the motivations behind them are often intimately correlated with fitness (Buss, 2000a). Included among these are the desires for professional success; achieving intimacy in personal rela-tionships; being more physically attractive; helping friends and relatives; securing personal safety, health, power, and access to high-quality food; and possessing personal and financial resources (King & Broyles, 1997; Petrie, White, Cameron,
& Collins, 1999).
Taking steps to fulfill desires and the goals determined by these desires makes people feel happy. The experience of positive affect serves as an internal reward and motivator, increasing the probability that the individual will continue moving toward accomplishing his or her goals. Current research suggests that the process of moving towards one’s goals may actually be more important to subjec-tive well-being than the end-goal attainment. Working toward reaching goals is correlated with feelings of satisfaction and contentment as long as adequate prog-ress is being made toward the goals at hand (Carver, Lawrence, & Scheier, 1996;
Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Diener et al., 1999; Hsee & Abelson, 1991).
Additional support for the link between solving adaptive problems and sub-jective well-being can be found in the many correlations between subsub-jective well-being and such fitness indicators as health, marital status, and access to finan-cial resources. Researchers have found a strong correlation between subjective well-being and self-perceptions of health (George & Landerman, 1984; Okun et al., 1984), a domain that is very relevant to survival and reproductive success.
Additionally, individuals who have successfully solved the adaptive problem of
securing a long-term mate appear to have greater subjective well-being than their unmated counterparts. Married people report greater happiness than those who have never been married or are divorced, separated, or widowed, even when variables such as age and income are controlled for (Glenn & Weaver, 1988;
Gove, Hughes, & Style, 1983). This finding has been consistently demonstrated in national and regional surveys conducted in the United States (Gove & Shin, 1989) as well as in international studies (Diener et al., 2000). Successfully solving the adaptive problem of securing a long-term mate, in short, seems to produce happiness, although causality likely runs in both directions: Happy individuals are more likely to succeed in attracting mates.
Researchers have also uncovered findings that suggest that there is a rela-tionship between subjective well-being and amount of financial resources avail-able to individuals. Researchers have demonstrated a strong positive relationship between the wealth of a nation and its inhabitants’ average subjective well-being, although increases in income are not inevitably associated with increases in sub-jective well-being (Diener et al., 1993). This finding suggests that having access to sufficient financial resources to solve important adaptive problems such as securing access to food, clean water, and housing may have a significant impact on subjective well-being. Although further research needs to be done on this topic, existing research appears to suggest that solving important adaptive prob-lems, and even the process of working toward solving them, are expected to be linked closely to happiness and subjective well-being.
Interestingly, one finding appears to contradict the evolutionary perspective articulated here: the effects of having children on marital happiness. The birth of a child is typically greeted with great joy by the parents, as one might expect.
Children, after all, are the primary vehicles by which parental genes are repli-cated. Nonetheless, having children produces a decrement in marital happiness in most subpopulations in U.S. culture—a well-documented sociological finding (Glenn & McGlanahan, 1982). One can speculate about possible proximate causes. As effort becomes allocated toward the child, the previous flow of rewards that come from a marital partner decline. Children can add economic stress. And perhaps lacking the large network of extended kin to help ease the burdens of child care, modern nuclear families experience sources of stress unknown to their forebears. Appropriate theoretical interpretation of this appar-ent anomaly—that children reduce rather than enhance marital satisfaction—
must await research that examines more traditional societies, such as the Ache, the Gebusi, and the !Kung San.
On a final note, it is not clear that a reduction in marital satisfaction pro-duces an overall reduction in subjective well-being. Perhaps the specific compo-nents of subjective well-being must be differentiated—well-being around mar-riage; being around work; being associated with dyadic alliances;
well-being associated with kin. A more domain-specific conceptual and empirical strategy may be needed to understand the apparent anomaly between having children and marital happiness.
Harnessing Our Adaptations to Promote Well-Being
An evolutionary perspective suggests a number of domains in which individuals are expected to exhibit a positional bias when making judgments about the desir-ability of certain social outcomes, and this bias can have a negative effect on sub-jective well-being. The feelings of relative deprivation that arise from unfavor-able social comparisons can have the effect of lowering mood and self-esteem (Frank, 1999). However, an evolutionary perspective also predicts that there are a number of domains in which individuals will not exhibit a positional bias (Hill
& Buss, 2006). Individuals choosing to focus their energies into these domains may have greater subjective well-being due to their self-perceptions of perfor-mance being more in their own control. For instance, it has been demonstrated that the positional bias is absent when individuals are reasoning about the num-ber of years that they would like to spend happily married (Hill & Buss, 2006).
Individuals appear to make judgments on this issue independent of information about the number of years their peers have been happily married. Both men and women expressed a strong preference for being happily married for an absolutely longer period of time, even though this meant that their peers have been happily married longer than themselves. Thus, it is likely that working on maintaining a harmonious marital life can have a positive effect on subjective well-being, regardless of how happy others’ marriages are.
Another domain in which individuals’ preferences for social outcomes appear to be relatively unaffected by comparisons with peers is the length of vacation time allotted to them in a given year (Hill & Buss, 2006; Solnick &
Hemenway, 1998). Both men and women judged an absolutely longer vacation to be more desirable than a shorter one, despite the longer one being shorter than the vacations allotted to their coworkers. Shifting focus away from these domains in which the positional bias is present (e.g., income, physical attractiveness) and focusing instead on these and other domains in which it is absent may promote subjective well-being. Individuals who choose to focus their energies on main-taining a long, happy marriage and taking full advantage of available vacation time rather than passing it up may have greater control over their ability to expe-rience subjective well-being, because feelings of success and satisfaction in these domains are less contingent on the performance of others.
Awareness that humans exhibit the positional bias and make extensive social comparisons in delimited domains could potentially assist individuals who want to set up their environments to promote subjective well-being. As described, we live in a huge world where there are an almost infinite number of people with
whom we can compare ourselves. These comparisons can be made with friends, family members, coworkers, and even with people we view on our television sets or in advertisements. One potential avenue to increasing subjective well-being is to take control over our comparison groups. Most of us are not willing to cut off contact with wealthy or attractive friends, family, or coworkers. How-ever, the much less drastic step of taking a temporary or long-term media “fast”
may be a simple way for individuals to promote subjective well-being in their lives. Choosing to limit contact with, or altogether eschewing, media such as fashion magazines, catalogs, and certain television shows may positively affect self-perceptions of attractiveness, status, and wealth. Additionally, a more altruis-tic route to promoting subjective well-being might be found in helping others less fortunate than oneself. Doing so has the potential of not only helping others in a time of need, but also of increasing one’s number of social bonds and provid-ing balance to one’s social comparison groups, both of which have a positive effect on self-perceptions and happiness.
Yet another way individuals can harness their evolved psychologies to pro-mote subjective well-being in the current environment is through the use of modern technological advances to develop and maintain social and familial rela-tionships. Technologies such as cellular telephones, e-mail, and airplanes have been designed—in part—to free us from the barriers of physical distance and allow easy contact with friends and families. Other technologies, such as dating and networking websites, have been created to allow individuals to develop new relationships in a way that renders geographical boundaries virtually obsolete.
Twenty-first-century humans have done everything in their power to ensure that they can stay in touch with even the most distant friends and relatives.
Although telephone calls and 3-day weekends spent visiting with loved ones are no substitutes for having them close at hand daily, taking full advantage of the many technologies that facilitate social relationships may enhance the number and depth of relationships and social networks and, in turn, promote subjective well-being.
Knowledge of evolutionary psychology and our evolved desires can also potentially lead to greater understanding and contentment with our individual goals and values. For instance, throughout human evolutionary history, one of the primary avenues by which men have been able to augment their reproduc-tive success has been through gaining access to the resources necessary to secure access to desirable mates (Buss, 2003). Conversely, women’s reproductive success has been more closely linked to the heavy investment in childbearing and child-rearing (Trivers, 1972). Psychologists have demonstrated that women, on aver-age, express a greater interest than men in spending time with and caring for children (Buss, 2004). Behavioral measures are consistent with these interests, with women devoting more time and energy to raising children than do men (Browne, 2002).
One of the side effects of this sex difference is that many women find the rigid schedules and huge time commitments required for many occupations at odds with their desire to spend time investing in their families. Although many women with families are deeply dedicated to their jobs away from the home, they often endure a great deal of stress trying to balance work and family life.
This fact is likely responsible for the fact that increasing numbers of women, despite being more educated than ever, are choosing to opt out of the labor force to raise children (Still, 2006). This is not to suggest that the secret to a woman’s subjective well-being is to quit her job and stay home with her children or tend to housework. Such a suggestion would render many women—including the first author of this chapter—miserable. Rather, women in the workforce who have families may choose to embrace their evolved desires for family life and seek alternative ways to fulfill these desires in conjunction with their career goals. Dis-cussing flex-time schedules with their bosses and opting to work only part-time while raising children are two ways in which women have begun to better meet the demands of their careers while dedicating the amount of time they desire to their families (Still, 2006). Furthermore, merely understanding that their desires to be with their families are not signs of weakness, but rather the activation of the psychological features shaped by selection, may contribute to women’s feelings of self-worth and subjective well-being.