The Social Psychology of Living Well

Joseph P. Forgas, Roy F. Baumeister, Joseph P. Forgas, Roy F. Baumeister

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351189699
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How to live well and the search for meaning have long been of intense concern to humans, perhaps because Homo sapiens is the only species aware of its own mortality. In the last few decades, empirical psychology made a major contribution to this quest. This book surveys groundbreaking work by leading international researchers, demonstrating that social psychology is the core discipline for understanding well-being and the search for meaning. Basic conceptual and theoretical principles are discussed, drawing on philosophy, evolutionary theory and psychology, followed by a review of the role of purposeful, motivated activity and self-control in achieving life satisfaction. The role of emotional and cognitive processes and the influence of social, interpersonal and cultural factors in promoting a happy and meaningful life are discussed. The book will be of interest to students, practitioners and researchers in the behavioral and social sciences, as well as to laypersons for whom improving the quality of human life and understanding the principles of well-being are of interest.

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The Social Psychology of Living Well

Historical, Social and Cultural Perspectives

Joseph P. Forgas and Roy F. Baumeister

The topic of this book, how to live well, is one of the oldest and most universal questions that has preoccupied human beings since the dawn of history. Philosophers, writers and artists and, more recently, empirical social scientists struggled to understand how life should be lived, and how well-being and life satisfaction could be optimized. The ability to think about and reflect on the nature of our own existence and its possibilities is a uniquely human capability and in a sense is as defining a hallmark of our species as is our intelligence. The way we respond to these questions has a profound metaphysical significance and, at the same time, also has powerful practical implications for the ways that individuals, groups and societies at large should regulate their affairs.

Topics that deal with the question of how to live well were traditionally addressed by scientists working in a number of interlinked disciplines, including psychology, evolutionary theory, economics, sociology, history and political science. In the present book, we would like to argue that social psychology occupies an important and privileged position when it comes to understanding the nature of human well-being. In this introductory chapter in particular, we will start with a brief review of the alternative philosophical orientations that speak to the question of how to live well.

Next, the role of some of the most important social psychological processes in achieving a ‘good life’ will be discussed, and the functions of specific strategies in promoting well-being will be considered. And finally, the contribution of the different chapters included here to the achievement of life satisfaction will be summarized.

Philosophical Antecedents

How to live well has been a perennial question asked by philosophers since time immemorial. It is perhaps not surprising that it was philosophers who were among the first to seek such answers, possibly because such philosophical reflection might in themselves produce a degree of dysphoria. Many of their insights may still strike us as highly relevant today—indeed, ancient philosophers such as Socrates, Epicurus, Epictetus, Zeno and many others offer us advice that could come straight out of a popular book of positive psychology today. Thus, in introducing this book, it seems appropriate to start where it all began… .

Seeking Happiness and Avoiding Pain: Hedonism

The philosophy of hedonism is sometimes considered as the most important simple and sovereign principle that can explain all human behaviour (Allport, 1954/1968). This idea is almost as old as human civilization. Already in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, probably the first ever recorded advocacy of hedonism, Siduri suggested that the main concern of humans should be to fill their bellies, make merry, and let their days be full of joy. Looking at the message conveyed by most contemporary marketing and advertising gurus, one could be forgiven for thinking that secretly they are all disciples of Siduri.

Subsequent antique philosophers such as Democritus and later the Cyrenaics elaborated the doctrine of hedonism further, emphasizing the importance of immediate sensations as the most relevant criteria of knowledge and conduct. According to them, the wise person should be in control of pleasures, and this requires judgment to evaluate the different pleasures. Love, friendship, altruism and justice can all provide pleasure; these are ideas that are frequently echoed in contemporary positive psychology, and in several of the chapters here as well (see also Baumeister; Huppert; Gable; and Fiedler and Arslan, this volume).

Ultimately, it was Epicurus (c. 341–c. 270 BC), probably the greatest philosophical exponent of hedonism, who believed that the highest good was to seek modest, sustainable ‘pleasures’ such as a state of tranquility and freedom from fear. These are states that can be obtained by knowledge, reflection, friendship and living a virtuous and temperate life. Epicurus gave much useful advice about how to live well, advice that is reiterated in many contemporary books on well-being, and indeed in this volume. His emphasis on friendship, communality and aesthetic pleasures rather than seeking material possessions is echoed by some of the contributors here (for example, Sedikides, Wildschut & Stephan; Simpson et al.; Amichai-Hamburger & Etgar, this volume).

Utilitarianism

The philosophy of hedonism was neglected in subsequent centuries when the ascetic precepts of dogmatic Christianity focused attention on the promised (and yet to be confirmed …!) pleasures of the afterlife, as distinct from the well-deserved suffering in this life derived from the concept of original sin. However, the presumptuous notion that a good life can and perhaps should be lived in this world did not entirely disappear. It was as an indirect consequence of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment that the notion of hedonism in this world re-emerged in a new guise and with renewed force in Europe. It was utilitarian philosophers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill who sought to translate Epicurean principles into an ethical theory of appropriate social and collective behaviour that provides the foundations of the contemporary rational, rather than religious, system of morality and well-being.

Utilitarian ethics argues that all action should be directed toward achieving the greatest total amount of happiness for the largest number of people. Utilitarian ethics assumes that all actions can be evaluated in terms of their moral worth, and so the desirability of an action is determined by its resulting hedonistic consequences. This is a consequentialist creed, assuming that the moral value and desirability of an action can be determined from its likely outcomes. Jeremy Bentham suggested that the value of hedonistic outcomes can be quantitatively assessed, so that the value of consequent pleasure can be derived by multiplying its intensity and its duration. In contrast, the other major exponent of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, argued for a more qualitative approach, assuming that there can be different subjective levels of pleasure. Higher-quality pleasures are more desirable than lower-quality pleasures. Less sophisticated creatures (like pigs!) have an easier access to the simpler pleasures, but more sophisticated creatures like humans have the capacity to access higher pleasures and should be motivated to seek those.

Hedonism and utilitarianism are rather optimistic creeds, assuming that through rational thought and analysis humans can achieve positive outcomes and live a good life. This rational and hopeful approach to the good life they share with most modern psychological thinking on the topic, and indeed, it is this orientation that motivates this volume. A somewhat more pessimistic approach to the perennial question of how to live well is provided by the philosophical tradition of Stoicism, that emphasizes the acceptance and understanding of inevitable negative outcomes. However, both philosophical schools, hedonism and Stoicism, share a belief in the ultimate power of individuals to live a good life through their own efforts and rational processes.

Accepting Negative Outcomes: Stoicism

Perhaps the earliest philosophical tradition that explicitly teaches the need to accept and manage adversity is Stoicism, a school founded by Zeno in the 3rd century BC. Stoicism emphasizes the development of self-control as a means of managing destructive emotions, through becoming a clear and unbiased thinker. We can readily recognize the recurrence of this idea in several of the contributions to this book, including the chapters by Baumeister; Fiedler and Arslan; Forgas; Sheldon; Fritz & Lyubomirsky, and others. Stoicism is a means for improving a person’s ethical and moral well-being, by learning to accept the natural order of things. A Stoic adapts and amends his or her desires to suit the world and so remains contented even in the face of adversity.

The Stoics taught that destructive emotions always resulted from errors in judgment, a conflict between the will and the natural order. To live a good life, we need to understand and accept the rules of the natural order; thus, the sage person becomes immune to misfortune. There is more than a passing resemblance here to some of the basic tenets of Buddhism. It is rather remarkable that whereas Eastern ideologies such as Buddhism have become highly influential and had a huge influence on popular culture as an attractive means to improve well-being, essentially similar messages coming to us from antiquity from the Stoics remain largely unheeded (see also Kalkstein, Hubbard & Trope, this volume).

The solution to evil and unhappiness, according to Stoic philosophy, is to examine one’s own judgments and behavior and determine where they diverge from the universal reason of nature. Stoics also accepted that suicide is permissible for a wise person in circumstances that prevent them from living a virtuous life. Suicide could also be justifiable if one fell victim to severe pain or disease. Stoicism is not just a philosophy but a way of life requiring constant practice, including focusing on the present and daily reflection—these are ideas that indeed share a great deal of similarity with Eastern practices of meditation and mindfulness.

Stoics were also the first tolerant cosmopolitans. They held that every individual is part of the universal spirit, and differences in birth, rank and status should be of no importance in social relationships. They advocated the universal brotherhood of humanity and the natural equality of all human beings. Stoic writers such as Epictetus, Seneca, Cicero and Marcus Aurelius anticipated a kind of thought system based on individualism, tolerance, self-knowledge, acceptance and self-control that had a major influence on Western civilizations ever since. Just like Stoicism, Christianity also asserts an inner freedom in the face of the external world, and the futility and ephemeral nature of worldly possessions and attachments. The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in particular have been highly regarded by many Christians throughout the ages, and would not be out of place in any contemporary book of advice on how to live a good life.

Evolutionary Considerations

In contemporary Western societies, at least since the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, living well in many people’s minds is inextricably linked to material wealth. Even at the political level, it is typically assumed that well-being is somehow directly linked to measures of economic performance such as annual growth or gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. In fact, there is now very strong evidence that this relationship between wealth and well-being only holds up to a certain standard of living. Once societies reach that level, further increases in wealth do not produce an appreciable increase in well-being and happiness. So, something quite fundamental is wrong with the overwhelming emphasis on economic progress as the sole means of improving well-being, at least once a reasonable standard of living has been reached.

Why should this be so? Modern humans in fundamental ways are no different from our evolutionary hunter-gatherer ancestors, who eked out a precarious existence living in small, intimate social groups. We all evolved as thoroughly social creatures, surrounded by the same small group of people from birth to death, and humans derived and maintained a sense of identity and status from the daily face-to-face interactions within that group. This pattern of living changed fundamentally about three hundred years ago, when the philosophy of Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the industrial revolution ushered in a fundamentally different epoch in human affairs, the age of the individual. Radical social changes, including dramatic increases in social and geographical mobility, also created new opportunities for living well while at the same time disrupting the traditional social bases of identity and interpersonal connection.

Liberating individuals from the social constraints of small group life had a revolutionary effect. It enabled us to become much freer, much richer and much healthier, live much longer and, up to a point, become much happier. But we also lost something: we lost the natural sense of belonging, identity and community that comes from the intense social life of the small group. Most of us probably only experience this kind of belonging for a short time, perhaps in our high school years. So a sense of connectedness—perhaps a kind of brotherhood or ‘fraternite’ in the sense that the French Revolution emphasized—is also essential to human well-being, as several of the chapters here also suggest (see, for example, Gable; Simpson et al.; Sheldon; Kalkstein, Hubbard & Trope, this volume). By way of contrast, the medieval European peasant may have seen barely a couple hundred other human beings in his or her entire lifetime, but such a person was firmly entrenched in social bonds that remained stable until death. In contrast, the modern European urban dweller often sees more people than that in a single day, has social interactions and contacts with countless others—but relationship partners come and go, and apart from the strongest family bonds, almost no social connections endure for decades. Quantity has replaced intensity (quality) in human interaction.

While freedom and individualism are certainly liberating, the loss of social connection and identity will become more problematic and more debilitating as our material well-being progresses. In a way, what limits further increases in well-being in modern societies is the problematic nature of our social contacts. For human beings, naturally selected by evolution to be intensely sociable and to rely on others for their daily survival, living as an isolated individual is not without its problems. Yet social trends also show that more and more people do live alone, often by choice.

We see plenty of evidence for this ‘attachment gap’ all around us. Survey evidence for loneliness, isolation and social shyness is all around us (Zimbardo, 1990). Of course, people are not lonely because they are forced to be—they are lonely as a consequence of their freely made individual choices. People prefer independence, privacy, autonomy and freedom. These are all desirable objectives, but they can only be effectively achieved if we chose to liberate ourselves from the social constraints that enduring close relationships demand. Even though these are freely made choices, the unforeseen consequence of remaining isolated from our fellow human beings can be a great source of discomfort and unhappiness.

Consumption and Well-Being

There is another intriguing and less obvious line of evidence demonstrating the unsatisfied need for identity and connectedness, coming from the fields of marketing and advertising. Increasingly, the goods we work for, desire and purchase are not bought because of their actual usefulness, but because they promise to tell others (and ourselves) something about the kind of people we are (or would like to be). Often, the things we buy are not bought for their actual utility, but are identity products that promise to satisfy the deep-seated desire for social status and connectedness.

Advertised brand names are increasingly not about guarantees of quality and reliability, but are indications of status. What is the possible point of branding an expensive watch or a perfume with brand names such as ‘Burberry’ (a rain coat maker), ‘Gucci’ (a fashion house), ‘Porsche’ (a car maker) or ‘Mont Blanc’ (a pen maker)? These brands never made a watch and never will—attaching their name to an overpriced but otherwise undistinguished luxury product has nothing to do with utility or quality, it is purely and simply a badge of desired social status and identity. Or take the example of running shoes; these used to be humble items of great utility, mass produced and sold cheaply everywhere. A few decades ago, manipulative advertisers managed to convince customers that running shoes are more than just shoes—they can be important sources of status and identity. The illusion of rugged individualism (‘Just do it’) can now be bought, communicated and displayed by paying exorbitant prices for a particular brand of shoes by masses of misguided consumers.

Even more bizarre is the huge international business that developed around selling branded water in bottles—a colourless, tasteless, transparent liquid that flows freely from every tap (and actually, about a quarter of bottled water sold is actually tap water; e.g. Torres, 2016). Who would have thought that people can be persuaded to pay outrageous prices, often in excess of what a bottle of reasonable wine might cost, for water, just because it is labelled ‘Evian’ or ‘San Pellegrino’? This is truly a triumph of advertising over common sense. Clearly, what is being sold and bought here is not water, but an image, a badge of identity and social status, all supported by a huge advertising budget that the consumers actually pay for.

The point is, if people are willing to pay their hard-earned money to buy such otherwise useless identity products, there must be a huge unsatisfied need out there for a real sense of status and identity, something that normally could not be purchased but must be achieved within an organic and meaningful social environment such as a group. The lack of increase in well-being and life satisfaction for some decades now in rich Western countries despite our increasing affluence suggests that we might have reached the limits of improving well-being through material progress alone. Clearly the key i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 The Social Psychology of Living Well: Historical, Social and Cultural Perspectives
• Part I Conceptual Issues
• Part II The Role of Purposeful Activities in Living Well
• Part III Affective and Cognitive Aspects of Living Well
• Part IV Social and Cultural Factors in Living Well
• Index
• Backcover