The Pursuit of Unhappiness

Abstract

Modern reflection about the good life and the good society has been dominated by a spirit of liberal optimism, according to which people typically know what's good for them and make prudent choices in pursuit of their interests. As a result, people tend to do best, and pretty well at that, when given the greatest possible freedom to live as they wish. This appealing doctrine rests on a bold assumption about human psychology: namely, that people have a high degree of aptitude for securing their well-being given arbitrarily high levels of option freedom. Yet a large body of empirical research suggests that people are systematically prone to make a variety of serious errors in the pursuit of happiness. These errors are probably serious enough to place liberal optimism's psychological assumptions in doubt. If people do tend to fare best in the option-rich environments traditionally favored by liberal moderns, notably classical economists, this may not be mainly through the prudent exercise of choice. Or perhaps human beings actually benefit from certain constraints or burdens on choice.

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Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1071822
7/18/2007 1
The Pursuit of Unhappiness
Daniel M. Haybron
Department of Philosophy, Saint Louis University
1
Abstract: Modern reflection about the good life and the good society has been dominated by a
spirit of liberal optimism, according to which people typically know what’s good for them and
make prudent choices in pursuit of their interests. As a result, people tend to do best, and pretty
well at that, when given the greatest possible freedom to live as they wish. This appealing doc-
trine rests on a bold assumption about human psychology: namely, that people have a high degree
of aptitude for securing their well-being given arbitrarily high levels of “option freedom.” Yet a
large body of empirical research suggests that people are systematically prone to make a variety
of serious errors in the pursuit of happiness. These errors are probably serious enough to place
liberal optimism’s psychological assumptions in doubt. If people do tend to fare best in the op-
tion-rich environments traditionally favored by liberal moderns, notably classical economists, this
may not be mainly through the prudent exercise of choice. Or perhaps human beings actually
benefit from certain constraints or burdens on choice.
I don't need any of this! I don't need this stuff, and I don't need you. I don't need
anything except this [picks up ashtray] and that's it. . . . I don't need one other
thing, not one—I need this! The paddle game, and the chair, and the remote con-
trol, and the matches, for sure. . . . And this! And that’s all I need. Except the ash-
tray, the remote control, the paddle game, this magazine and the chair. I don't
need one other thing.
Navin R. Johnson, The Jerk
2
1. Introduction
For most of the living world, the good life is mainly a matter of context. Given the right
setting and a good dose of luck, most organisms tend to do well, or at least to succeed in their
terms: that’s basically how they’re wired. Conversely, put a typical creature in the wrong setting
and—good luck or no—it is lost, pretty much guaranteed a quick death. For perhaps the majority
of life forms, almost every place on earth is “the wrong setting” (a fact that gives zookeepers no
end of headaches). Not so, it seems, for Homo sapiens, a species so adaptable that its members
can flourish just about anywhere, probably including space. This is not because they are hard to
kill, like cockroaches and rats, but because they are smart. Though rather needy in purely physi-
cal terms, these tropical primates have a remarkable talent for engineering whatever environment
they find themselves in to suit their purposes. They are “ecological engineers,” to use Kim
Sterelny’s apt expression (2003). Impressed by their seemingly boundless ingenuity, many of
them, at least in the brief era leading up to the twenty-first century, have thought that their spe-
cies largely transcends context. For its members really need only one thing: freedom, including
the resources needed to pursue their goals. Give them that, and they’ll take care of themselves
1
Draft, July 12, 2007; please do not cite without permission. [acknowledgements]
2
Navin Johnson’s words, from the Carl Reiner film, were spoken (and possibly authored) by Steve Martin.

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1071822
7/18/2007 2
just fine (modulo of course bad luck and the occasional mistake). If an individual needs some-
thing that can be gotten, she will typically figure out what that is and either secure it for herself
or enter into cooperative arrangements with others—community, for instance—to get it. Given,
that is, sufficient freedom to make of her life what she will. Whether the primates are correct in
these beliefs remains to be seen, as their brave experiment in freedom is still getting under way at
the time of this writing. While their attempts at civilization-building have tended to meet with
mixed results, there is cause for optimism in the astonishing gains in longevity and the standard
of living that were achieved for a large portion of the species in the decades preceding this in-
quiry—due in no small measure to the progress of freedom.
The idea that freedom is what human beings fundamentally need to have their best shot at
flourishing is a central tenet of modern liberal thought. Since it is indisputable that human beings
are in some sense a freedom-loving species, an important question is how “freedom” is to be un-
derstood here. Liberal modernity has tended to view freedom primarily as self-determination,
floridly conceived: to a first approximation, the ability to shape our lives in accordance with our
own priorities. This conception gets its most eloquent sustained expression in Mill’s justly ad-
mired On Liberty. Here is a recent statement of one of its central elements. Defending a child’s
right to an “open future” in a discussion of Amish educational practices, Joel Feinberg writes that
an “education should equip the child with the knowledge and skills that will help him choose
whichever sort of life best fits his native endowment and matured disposition. It should send him
out into the adult world with as many open opportunities as possible, thus maximizing his
chances for self-fulfillment.”
3
The implication is that freedom, including having a wide array of
options, is good for us. A life rich in options is, in fact, our best bet for attaining well-being.
While we may not be geniuses, we still tend to know what’s best for us and how to get it. More-
over, many would add, we tend to do rather well when empowered to live in the manner that
seems best to us.
Such appears to be the spirit of the modern age: a spirit of optimism about the individual-
ized pursuit of well-being, founded in Enlightenment trust of the individual and her powers of
reason. Since “Enlightenment optimism” is vague, additionally encompassing epistemological
and historical views, and since the optimism in question concerns the effects of certain freedoms
associated with liberalism on well-being, I will call it liberal optimism. Liberals need not be op-
timists in the present sense; besides weakened forms of liberal optimism there is room for liberal
pessimism as well as, in between, what we might call liberal sobriety. Yet one does not often
hear it suggested that the ideal of empowered and unfettered living is, from a prudential stand-
point, a bad thing, or merely the least bad option of a sorry lot. You certainly won’t hear it from
many economists.
Liberal optimism is obviously appealing, but it rests on some nontrivial assumptions.
Here I want to consider the plausibility of liberal optimism’s chief psychological doctrine, which
I will call the Aptitude assumption. Roughly, Aptitude maintains that human psychology is well-
adapted to environments offering individuals a high degree of freedom to shape their lives as
they wish. We have the psychological endowments needed to do well, indeed best, in such envi-
ronments by choosing lives for ourselves that meet our needs.
In this paper I will discuss recent work in empirical psychology that raises significant
doubts about Aptitude. This research challenges Aptitude via a Systematic Imprudence thesis:
Human beings are systematically prone to make a wide range of serious errors in matters
3
Feinberg 1992, p. 84; emphasis added. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser recently offered a particularly explicit
statement of this sentiment in the popular media (Glaeser 2007).

7/18/2007 3
of personal welfare. These errors are weighty enough to substantially compromise the
expected lifetime well-being for individuals possessing a high degree of freedom to shape
their lives as they wish, even under reasonably favorable conditions (education, etc.).
Others have made similar claims in recent years, but usually the worry is narrower, or concerns
general questions of rationality, without addressing the question of overall lifetime well-being.
4
Note the emphasis on a wide range of errors: our tendencies to eat badly or save too little money
are well-known, but they are usually—certainly by most economists—considered to be excep-
tions to a general rule of rational, prudent conduct. If Systematic Imprudence is correct, then the
truth of Aptitude becomes at least an open question. Liberal optimism consequently rests on a
questionable view of human nature: we may not be well-equipped for the individualized pursuit
of happiness, perhaps even tending unwittingly to be pursuers of unhappiness when given the
freedom to fashion our lives according to our own designs.
My discussion will build on an earlier paper where I challenged people’s ability to accu-
rately assess their past and present well-being (Haybron forthcoming-a). Here I focus directly on
matters of prediction and choice. After explicating Aptitude in §2, I will survey a number of re-
sults from the empirical literature concerning our potential for error. §4 will step back and con-
sider the significance of these results, placing them in the context of broader developments in
psychology and noting some other reasons for thinking them problematical for Aptitude.
The central contention of this paper is that the individualized pursuit of well-being is
probably substantially undercut by systematic tendencies toward imprudence: the Systematic
Imprudence thesis is very likely true. This in turns suggests that a key assumption of liberal op-
timism, Aptitude, may well prove to be false. I will not be claiming that the Aptitude assumption
is in fact false or unwarranted. The point is rather that we should take this possibility seriously; it
should be considered a live option. The truth of Aptitude should be considered an open question.
This conclusion may be vaguer than we would prefer, but it carries substantial force: insofar as
certain policy and social decisions depend on Aptitude, for instance, they will be called into
question. And the direction of future research depends heavily on which hypotheses we take to
be live, and which foreclosed. My chief goal here is to clarify our views about the hypotheses
worth taking seriously regarding the pursuit of well-being. A secondary aim is to sharpen our
grasp of the remarkably bold psychological assumptions underlying much modern thought about
human nature, the good life, and the good society.
I will assume in what follows that people are pretty smart: like other life forms, human
beings are quite good at what they do, which includes the use of their formidable rational powers
in the promotion of their interests. The question is whether “what human beings do” should be
understood in the first instance to include fashioning lives for themselves in the sorts of option-
rich environments traditionally favored by liberals. The discussion will also assume that happi-
ness is centrally important for well-being, and that happiness is to be understood along the lines
of an emotional state view: to be happy is roughly for one’s emotional condition to be broadly
favorable, embodying a kind of psychic affirmation (see, e.g., Haybron 2005, forthcoming-b).
But it would make little difference if we accepted instead a hedonistic account of happiness, or
4
For good reviews, see Gilbert 2006, Hsee and Hastie 2006, Trout 2005, Shafir and LeBoeuf 2002. See also Botti
and Iyengar 2006, Camerer, Issacharoff et al. 2003, Camerer, Loewenstein et al. 2005, Diener and Seligman 2004,
Frank 1999a, Kahneman 1994, Kahneman 2003, Kahneman and Thaler 2006, Rabin 1998, Schooler, Ariely et al.
2003, Schwartz 2000, Schwartz 2004, Stich 1999, Sunstein and Thaler 2003. I will not review the economic litera-
ture detailing the role of liberal optimism in classical economic thought, as economists’ views in this regard are so
well-known, but references can be found in many of the articles just cited (see, e.g., Botti and Iyengar 2006).

7/18/2007 4
any of a wide variety of theories of welfare. While there is much dispute about the precise role of
happiness in well-being, few would deny that emotional matters play a very major part in well-
being for most people. Depression, anxiety, and other forms of unhappiness tend not, on any
popular view, to be associated with flourishing.
Some may doubt either that human beings characteristically do seek happiness—perhaps,
to update Nietzsche’s quip, only the American does that—or that they should, say because hap-
piness is best secured by not pursuing it, as the alleged paradox of hedonism suggests. In which
case the idea that people tend not to do so well at the pursuit of happiness may seem neither sur-
prising nor important. I do not think such doubts will survive the reflections to follow. But my
arguments do not presuppose that people solely or even mainly seek happiness in leading their
lives, or that an explicit focus on happiness is always the best way to achieve it. I do assume that
most people have reason to care, and do in fact care, about how happy they are in their lives. (It
is hardly wisdom to disregard the fact that practicing law makes you miserable when deciding
whether to continue doing so.) In any event much of my case applies to prudential goods other
than happiness, and to choices not aimed at promoting the individual’s happiness.
Finally, I do not intend to challenge liberalism; still less do I wish to defend illiberal con-
servative or communitarian political doctrines. For the moral imperative to respect individual
autonomy by recognizing a broad sphere of personal liberty seems to me non-negotiable. The
question I want to examine is how well-equipped we are to benefit from certain freedoms. Our
moral entitlements are another matter.
2. The target: Liberal optimism’s Aptitude assumption
To speak of an “Aptitude” assumption raises the question, aptitude for what? The crude
answer given above was: for the individualized pursuit of well-being. It will help to sharpen what
is meant by this. The idea is roughly that we have the psychological equipment needed to secure
our well-being when empowered to live as we wish—when, that is, we enjoy a very broad kind
of self-determination. Let me explain.
The standard liberal ideal of self-determination has narrower and broader aspects. Narrow
self-determination roughly concerns freedom from the predations, whims, or domination of other
people—in one sense of the term, autonomy. This includes the “basic liberties,” the rights to
noninterference and democratic participation that, among other things, commonly underwrite
constitutional guarantees. Such liberties might be enjoyed by individuals who have little scope to
shape their lives, say because they live in an isolated community with limited resources. The
preservation of such freedoms arguably constitutes the essential core of liberalism. But liberal
moderns typically cherish, in addition, a much broader form of self-determination centering on
freedom in the sense of having a wide range of options, specifically effective rather than merely
formal options. Call this option freedom, as distinct from other types of freedom such as auton-
omy or noninterference, though I will often omit the qualifier. Option freedom can be understood
in a variety of ways, but we need not commit to any particular formulation here.
5
I will assume
that the options must not be indisputably worthless or utterly trivial; probably no one will think
that our freedom is meaningfully enhanced by the option to be boiled in eleven different kinds of
oil, or to choose among a million styles of shrink-wrap for their aspirin.
According to the liberal ideal of broad self-determination, people will enjoy sufficient
option freedom that they confront an option-rich environment—or, to take a cue from Feinberg’s
5
For a helpful discussion, see Pettit 2003.

7/18/2007 5
notion of an open future, a situation of unbounded choice. The idea is that individuals face an
effectively limitless array of significant options spanning many, perhaps most, domains of life,
thus affording tremendous scope for people to pursue arbitrarily varied, and often quite creative,
ways of life.
6
“Effectively” means that this is how it seems to the agent, or perhaps how it will
seem to the agent assuming she is reasonable. (We might prefer the latter formulation since one
possible type of error is failing myopically to recognize how much freedom one really has.) Up-
per-middle class American communities might constitute a paradigm of this sort of environment.
An environment might offer many significant options in life without qualifying as unbounded;
many working-class communities might be like this. Importantly, situations of unbounded choice
shift our focus from trying to pick the best item from some menu to imagining what we most
want and then setting out to realize that alternative. Call the associated ideal of self-
determination unbounded self-determination. (Note that broader forms of self-determination
need not be stronger than narrower ones. For instance, it is possible to infringe people’s basic
liberties without seriously reducing their options.)
We can distinguish degrees of boundedness or unboundedness, with isolated agrarian or
hunter-gatherer communities representing a narrowly bounded choice situation, and lower-
middle class urban communities being more broadly bounded. A further distinction concerns the
“hardness” or permeability of the bounds: growing up in a factory town, you might face a pretty
simple default choice situation, with relatively narrow bounds, in that you are expected to stick
around and enter one of a few occupations. Yet those bounds may be “soft”: given a passion for
philosophy, say, a motivated individual can leave town and seek her fortune in academia.
The focus thus far on boundedness is incomplete, since options ideally should be not only
unbounded but unburdened: as easily pursued as possible, consistently with the goods to be at-
tained. (Difficulty is essential to the realization of some values.) So the liberal ideal of option
freedom involves unbounded and unburdened choice and self-determination. This point is im-
portant, e.g. because societies can burden choice through incentives, social norms and the like
without actually limiting options. But I will usually set it aside for convenience.
The question of Aptitude, then, is this: is human psychology well-adapted to managing
arbitrarily high levels of option freedom? Specifically, Aptitude claims that:
Given (more or less) the greatest possible option freedom, and otherwise reasonably fa-
vorable conditions, individuals will tend to choose prudently, so that most can expect to
do well over the course of their lives, and better than they would given less freedom to
shape their lives.
7
If Aptitude is false, it does not follow that people tend to do better given limits on their option
freedom, or that the unbounded society is not the best environment for human welfare. While
that is one possibility, it may also be that most people don’t do well under any circumstances—
the liberal Utopia may not very happy, but other arrangements are worse still; call this “cruel
world liberalism.” (I do not know how many commentators have explicitly claimed that people
do well given lots of option freedom, but the sentiment is clearly widespread among liberal mod-
erns. It is unlikely that many thinkers would gladly embrace the suggestion that their ideal soci-
ety is merely the least unattractive of our options.) Another possibility is that people don’t need
to be prudent to benefit from high levels of option freedom: perhaps individual needs are highly
idiosyncratic, so that even the imprudent benefit from having lots of options, or the inherent or
collective benefits of option freedom suffice to make it our best bet despite our tendencies to err.
6
Cf. Pettit on option freedom as “non-limitation” (2003).
7
“More or less” and similar provisos are meant to allow for a fringe of special cases like trivial options.

7/18/2007 6
I take it that any of these results would be interesting, and surprising to many.
We can distinguish a less ambitious version of this view, Weak Aptitude: human beings
tend to choose prudently enough in conditions of unbounded and unburdened self-determination
that they can expect to do better than if they had less option freedom. People may not do well,
and they might be imprudent, but they have sufficient aptitude that, for whatever reason, they
tend to do best when given broad scope to live as they wish. (Though perhaps they will benefit
from modest constraints or burdens on choice. Note that even the imprudent can’t benefit from
option-rich living if they are wildly imprudent, with the judgment of toddlers.) So the option-rich
society is still the best for human well-being, say because its economic benefits promote human
comfort and health enough to outweigh the costs of imprudence. If Weak Aptitude is false, then
the option-rich society is not the best environment for human welfare. I will not challenge Weak
Aptitude here, but it will be worth considering whether its truth is entirely obvious.
Back to Aptitude. To assess its plausibility, we can ask the following questions:
1. Do people know how happy they are, and were in the past?
2. Do people know what will make them happy?
3. Do people choose well given their beliefs?
Aptitude requires a reasonably affirmative response to each of these questions, skepticism about
happiness aside.
8
I discussed the first question in an earlier paper (forthcoming-a), so here we
will focus on the second and third. I will sometimes discuss these matters in terms of rationality,
but I do not wish to put much weight on any particular conception of rationality. There has been
a heated debate about how far our psychological quirks show us to be systematically irrational,
and we have little to gain by wading into it.
9
Irrationally or not, people make mistakes.
To keep things manageable, I will discuss only a few of the many relevant phenomena
that have been documented, and even those cannot be covered in much detail; I encourage the
reader to examine the empirical literature directly. Even a cursory examination of that work
should make it apparent that, if anything, the following arguments understate the magnitude of
the problems. So diverse are our psychological limitations in this realm that it is exceedingly
unlikely that I just happened to hit upon precisely those cases that are most damaging for the Ap-
titude assumption. Because the literature in this area is still young and rapidly developing, I will
not claim the empirical research discussed below to be definitive; most of the results should be
regarded as provisional and subject to revision in light of future research. But they were chosen
in part because they are liable to seem fairly plausible once they are pointed out.
I will set aside the most obvious sources of mistakes, such as myopia and weakness of
will: privileging nearer or easier goods at the expense of our long-term welfare (see, e.g.,
Loewenstein 1996, Frederick, Loewenstein et al. 2003). I will also pass over a wide range of in-
teresting phenomena, such as base rate neglect and the conjunction fallacy, that have been docu-
mented in recent work on human reasoning, for instance in the heuristics and biases literature.
10
While virtually any tendencies to depart from perfect rationality could have adverse effects on
our well-being, many errors seem unlikely to pose a serious threat to our prudential competence.
Nor will I discuss the impact of consumer culture and marketing, since they may form no neces-
sary part of the option-rich liberal society.
The Aptitude assumption is not implausible. But neither is it trivial. Consider the sorts of
8
Again, many of the points to follow can be adapted to a wide range of prudential goods, and thus could be main-
tained even by those who consider happiness badly overrated.
9
For helpful discussion and review, see Samuels et al. 2002a, 2002b.
10
For reviews of this literature, see Koehler and Harvey 2004.

7/18/2007 7
choices that people living in the unbounded society have to get right if they are to achieve good
lives. They must choose well concerning, among other things: what to do for a living, whom if
anyone to settle down with, whether to have children, how to raise them, how to balance work
and personal relationships, whom to seek friendships with, how to participate in community life,
how to spend their leisure time, what if any hobbies to pursue, where and in what sort of com-
munity to live, how to manage their material wealth and prepare for the future, how to care for
their health, what if any place religion will have in their lives, what kind of education to pursue,
how and in what ways to develop their talents, etc. In most of these areas, human beings tradi-
tionally have had little or no choice. In some of these areas, a single mistake can ruin one’s life.
11
The task is demanding. Are we up to it? An earlier paper raised substantial doubts about one part
of the equation: our ability accurately to assess how we have done, or are doing now (Haybron
forthcoming-a). How about our capacities regarding prediction and choice?
3. Problems of prediction and choice
3.1 The impact bias
Let’s begin with prediction: do we know what will make us happy? Are we, in short,
good at affective forecasting? There is good evidence that we are not.
12
The most serious diffi-
culties noted in the literature relate to adaptation. With most events, large and small, we tend to
adapt quickly, probably within a few months, and return to our prior level of happiness (or mis-
ery, as the case may be).
13
This is the well-known phenomenon of hedonic adaptation. I have ar-
gued elsewhere that claims about adaptation may often be exaggerated (e.g., Haybron 2005,
forthcoming-a). But there can be no question that hedonic adaptation is a very real phenomenon,
and that many events have surprisingly little effect on our long-term happiness.
The problem is that affective forecasts tend to overlook adaptation. When predicting how
an event will make us feel, we typically imagine what it will be like at the time of the event and
then project this feeling long into the future—far longer, in general, than it will actually last. This
tendency has been found in numerous studies covering a wide range of matters, including tenure
decisions, romantic breakups, election outcomes, being rejected for jobs, sports events, etc.
14
A
likely cause of many such errors is that forecasters overlook the fact that we tend quickly to take
successes for granted and to move quickly past failures, rationalizing them in various ways or
changing our priorities so that they come to seem less important. It is natural, for instance, to
think about events in relation to our present commitments; but of course this will lead us astray
insofar as those commitments are liable to change.
While researchers have tended to focus attention on neglect of specific mechanisms of
adaptation, like “ordinization” or the “psychological immune system,” we can set aside such par-
ticulars here and simply regard the current phenomenon as adaptation neglect. This in turn re-
sults in an impact bias, and is indeed the most prominent source of this bias.
15
The impact bias is
11
Thus the economist’s idealization of agents as rational choosers may be seriously misleading for predicting indi-
vidual well-being even if it yields fairly accurate predictions of behavior. If your choices are utility-maximizing 99%
of the time, then someone might reliably predict your behavior by assuming you to be a utility maximizer. But that
other 1% could wreak havoc with your life, which is basically the point of literary tragedies.
12
For reviews, see Wilson and Gilbert 2003, Gilbert 2006, as well as Wilson et al. 2002 and Gilbert et al. 1998.
13
Brickman and Campbell 1971, Suh, Diener et al. 1996.
14
Gilbert, Pinel et al. 1998.
15
Gilbert, Driver-Linn et al. 2002. The authors previously called it a “durability bias” (Gilbert, Pinel et al. 2002).

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a broad tendency to overestimate the enduring emotional impact of future events. This tendency
is deeply problematical for the pursuit of happiness. Adaptation neglect, for instance, makes us
prone to exaggerate the importance of monetary outcomes for our happiness, since financial
gains typically yield only short-term emotional benefits. Complaints about materialism doubtless
owe much to this sort of error. And employers who offer generous signing bonuses know well
what they’re doing: the recipients may picture themselves reveling in their windfall, not recog-
nizing that the joy will soon fade.
The impact bias has many sources, but I will note just one other. The isolation effect is a
kind of framing effect, where the way we represent an event alters our perception of it. In this
case people contemplating alternative scenarios tend to isolate distinguishing features of the op-
tions, and disregard features shared in common.
16
In affective forecasting, this can cause us to
exaggerate the differences between our options, leading us to believe the choice more important
than it really is. For example, college students in one study were asked to forecast their overall
level of happiness in the following year if they lived in dormitories they deemed desirable or un-
desirable.
17
The students predicted they would be much happier in the desirable housing, when in
fact it made little difference which housing they received. The error arose because the subjects
framed the choice in a way that focused attention solely on the physical aspects of their housing,
features that tend to have little impact on happiness. What they overlooked, evidently due to an
isolation effect, were the great commonalities between their prospective living situations (such as
that their friends would room with them in any event). Thus a second study found that students
primed to think about other features of their situations, such as the social aspects, predicted
smaller differences in their happiness between the alternatives. Continuing the real estate theme:
anyone familiar with recent home-buying trends in the United States should have little difficulty
seeing the practical upshot of the isolation effect. It may explain, in part, why many affluents
find themselves glumly contemplating the dim financial prospects brought on by their half-
furnished McMansions. By fixating too closely on the differences between their options, people
forget how similarly their options will affect their lives. Hence they can sacrifice too much to get
the “better” option.
3.2 Positive Illusions
If we are unrealistically optimistic in predicting outcomes, we will tend to make some
bad choices. There is considerable evidence of a general tendency toward positive illusions in
thinking about ourselves and our lives, raising serious concerns about our ability to make impor-
tant life decisions wisely. At least three types of positive illusion contribute to this worry.
18
First,
we tend to have inflated opinions of ourselves: most of us are above average, in most respects, in
our minds. Thus, for instance, most people have been found to rate themselves more favorably
16
Kahneman and Tversky 1979. A related effect is focalism, or the focusing illusion, where a narrow focus on the
matter of interest causes us to overlook other factors that impact our happiness (Wilson et al. 2000, Schkade and
Kahneman 1998, and Kahneman 1999). A further possible source is worth mentioning: some things may loom too
large in prospect because we fail to anticipate changes in comparison classes. E.g., we may want a higher status job
because we correctly envision that being higher status when around our current peers would make us happier, for-
getting that we will later be comparing ourselves to a different group of higher-status peers.
17
Dunn, Wilson et al. 2003.
18
The locus classicus in this literature is Taylor and Brown 1988; see also Taylor and Brown 1994. My discussion
draws largely on their articles, and further references can be found there. There has been considerable debate about
various particulars, notably whether positive illusions really promote well-being (see, e.g., Colvin and Block 1994,
Colvin, Block et al. 1995). But there is little question that positive illusions are prevalent, at least in the West.

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than observers do on various personality measures. And people tend to see positive personality
and other attributes as more descriptive of themselves than most people, and negative attributes
as less descriptive. Most of us think, for example, that we are above-average drivers.
Second, we tend to overestimate our control over outcomes. For example, subjects tend to
believe that they have more control over a roll of the dice if they personally throw them than if
someone else does. Third, most people are unrealistically optimistic, believing their futures to be
brighter than the evidence warrants. Thus we typically think ourselves more likely than our peers
to experience pleasant events, such as liking our first job or receiving a good salary, and less
likely to experience negative ones, like having difficulty finding a job or getting into a car acci-
dent.
19
We also tend to overestimate our performance on future tasks, more so to the extent that
we see the task as important to us. And our predictions of the outcomes of a wide range of tasks
correspond less to what is really likely than to what we desire, or see as socially desirable.
Few will be surprised to learn that people sometimes overestimate their virtues, or take an
overly optimistic view of their prospects. But what is striking is how pervasive these tendencies
appear to be. Taylor and Brown argue that they are prerequisites for mental health: evidently,
just about everyone appears to view the world through positive illusions but the depressed, or
those suffering from low self-esteem. Perhaps we are better off with them than without. (George
Will recently observed that minor-league baseball would scarcely be possible otherwise.) But
positive illusions clearly pose difficulties for the pursuit of happiness. Doubtless they lead many
of us to make poor financial decisions; economist Robert Frank observes that “most of us have
an unwarranted, not to say preposterous, degree of optimism regarding our own future well-
being.”
20
Thus, he suggests, we may underestimate our risk of serious illness and so be unwilling
to buy health insurance. Perhaps a similar excess of optimism causes many youths to seek ca-
reers as practicing attorneys despite hearing horror stories about the widely alleged miseries of
the profession: they may figure they’ll be among the lucky few who find happiness in it.
There has been some debate about whether positive illusions are cultural artifacts peculiar
to certain societies, particularly Western ones, and not universals of human psychology. (In fact
this is a worry for many results in the psychological literature, since it is so hard to get globally
representative samples.) There is indeed good evidence that certain cultures, notably East Asian
ones, exhibit positive illusions less than in the United States and other Western nations, and in
some cases not at all (e.g., Heine, Lehman et al. 1999). But studies have found evidence of such
biases—e.g., the “better than average” effect—even in the most disputed cultures such as Japan,
and some investigators report that positive illusions in such cultures focus on different attributes,
namely those valued in such “collectivist” societies.
21
One possibility is that tendencies toward
positive illusions are indeed universals of human nature, but that cultural norms can moderate,
neutralize, or even reverse them, as well as influencing the domain over which they operate.
Were there such tendencies, we might expect some cultures to embrace norms of modesty and
humility to maintain social solidarity. It would be useful to know if there are any societies lack-
ing such norms which also fail to exhibit positive illusions.
In any event, it is likely that at least some positive illusions will not pose difficulties for
19
A seminal source on “unrealistic optimism” is Weinstein 1980.
20
“Not Insured, and Not Worried,” The New York Times, October 6, 1999.
21
See, e.g., Endo, Heine et al. 2000, Sedikides, Gaertner et al. 2003, Mezulis, Abramson et al. 2004, Sedikides,
Gaertner et al. 2005. For doubts, see Heine 2005, Heine and Hamamura 2007.

7/18/2007 10
the pursuit of happiness in some cultures.
22
One thing to note is that this does not help those in
the other cultures. But more importantly, doubts about the universality of positive illusions
probably strengthen my case. For the cultures exhibiting diminished positivity biases are also
collectivist cultures that reject liberal ideals about the individualized pursuit of well-being. You
might avoid certain positive illusions if you keep reminding yourself that, as they say in Japan,
“the nail that stands out gets pounded down” (Markus and Kitayama 1991). But such an outlook
is not likely to find many fans among liberal optimists. Positive illusions appear to correlate with
the extent to which a society embraces the ideals characteristic of liberal optimism. So it is ques-
tionable whether cultural influences on positive illusions could provide support for the liberal
optimist. Indeed, they probably make things worse: the liberal’s individualistic emphasis may
well exacerbate positive illusions.
3.3 Lay rationalism
Here’s the thorn in my side—I never did care for Faulkner’s Plowman’s Folly—I
enjoy plowing. Just this past year the [Soil Conservation Service] technician told
me, in all seriousness, that if I’d join the no-till crowd I’d be freed from plowing,
and then my son or I could work in a factory. . . .
I failed to get his point.
Amish farmer David Kline (1990, pp. xviii-xix)
Lay rationalism is a tendency to base decisions on “rationalistic” attributes, such as eco-
nomic values, rather than “soft” attributes like predicted experience or happiness.
23
Roughly, the
idea is that we often choose options that fare better according to “hard” criteria like monetary
payoff, even where we predict that those options will be worse for our experience of life.
Consider a suggestive early study, where undergraduate students were asked to imagine
that they had just received a graduate degree in communications, and that they were considering
one-year jobs at two different magazines (Tversky and Griffin 1991). Magazine A offers them a
job paying $35,000, but other workers with the same experience and training at that magazine
receive $38,000. Magazine B, on the other hand, offers a lower salary of $33,000, but the co-
workers earn only $30,000. Half the students were then asked “Which job would you take?” The
other half were asked “At which job would you be happier?” Even though 62% of the subjects
judged that the lower-salary, higher-relative-position job at Magazine B would make them hap-
pier, 84% of the subjects chose the higher salary job at Magazine A. A crucial gap in this study,
however, is that subjects might have guessed that the extra money earned at Magazine A would
yield greater happiness afterward, or outside the workplace.
But a series of studies by Christopher Hsee et al. indicates that this was not likely the case
(2003). In a variant of the Tversky and Griffin study, for instance, they confronted subjects with
22
The difficulty of speaking generically of “positive illusions,” as if they constituted a natural kind, is fairly plain.
One complication is the body of literature on “negativity bias” and the idea that generally “bad is stronger than
good” in human psychology (see, e.g., Baumeister, Bratslavsky et al. 2001, Rozin and Royzman 2001). It appears
that, while we do tend to put a positive spin on ourselves and our lives, we also tend to react much more strongly to
negative than positive information. The latter may in part be why we do the former: if the bad is hard on us, we may
be motivated to view ourselves as favorably as we can. Negativity bias can raise problems of its own.
23
The term, and the characterization of the issue, hails from Hsee et al. 2003. (Although I simplify in some re-
spects.) The authors also discuss the relation between lay rationalism and our better-known tendencies to let affect
drive choices inordinately. For related issues, see Frey and Stutzer 2004, Amir and Ariely 2007.

7/18/2007 11
a choice of taking a job with a small (100 sq ft) office or one with a larger (170 sq ft) office,
where the smaller office involves a similarly qualified coworker getting a same-sized office, but
the larger office has a coworker receiving an even bigger office. While only 34% of subjects pre-
dicted greater happiness in the larger-office job, 57% chose to work there. Another study ma-
nipulated which variables were seen as hard or soft; researchers asked students imagining they
were shopping for a stereo to choose between two equally expensive Sony models, based on two
attributes (e.g., “richness” or “sounding powerful”). For each of two groups, one attribute was
labeled “objective,” the other “subjective.” In particular, “power” was called objective in one
case and subjective in the other. In each group, a larger number of respondents predicted that the
stereo faring better on the “subjective” attribute would yield greater enjoyment, while larger
numbers chose the “objectively” superior model.
Why should people’s choices be biased toward “hard” qualities in this way? A major rea-
son may be that such decisions are easier to justify. Subjects in a further study were instructed to
imagine making a hiring decision. Those who expected to have to justify their decision to them-
selves later exhibited greater lay rationalism than those who did not.
The potential of lay rationalism to subvert human welfare should not be underestimated:
probably the most important things in life, beyond the bare necessities of existence, tend to be
“soft,” and hence at a disadvantage relative to “harder” factors.
24
Thus one’s choice of an occu-
pation may tend to depend excessively on matters like income rather than how rewarding it will
be, or how worthwhile. And the excessive materialism so often lamented nowadays just is, more
or less, a tendency to weight economic factors too heavily in personal decisions. Lay rationalism
could help us to explain the prevalence of materialism without having to claim that people over-
whelmingly have materialistic values: for the most part, the values people endorse in surveys are
decidedly non-materialistic.
25
Indeed, there appears to be a massive disconnect between people’s
values, at least in the United States, and the way they live. It may simply be that our most impor-
tant values, like family, friends, and personal happiness fare poorly in rationalistic terms next to
money, possessions and the like. And so our choices fail to cohere with our values.
One of the persistent mysteries of development, at least for many of those who have seen
it in action, is why so many people seem eagerly to trade decent, or at least tolerable, situations
for bad. Why, for instance, do so many indigenous people freely abandon a functional way of life
for the alcoholic, fetid desolation of life below even the bottom rung of civilization’s ladder?
26
Who do so many towns gladly embrace tourist development, only to find themselves demoral-
ized and alienated, bereft of the close-knit community and meaningful work that once sustained
them? Doubtless such appearances are often the product of wishful thinking by outsiders who
romanticize the lives of people is less-developed communities. But genuine cases of such mis-
24
This fact presents a problem for scientific research on well-being: how do you apply scientific methods to what is
often impossible to articulate, much less quantify? A recent review of the hunter-gatherer literature, for example,
expresses bafflement at the widespread acceptance of the “original affluent society” view among anthropologists,
despite serious flaws in the best-known quantitative studies used to support the idea that many hunters enjoy a very
high quality of life (Kaplan 2000; for the origins of this view, see Sahlins 1968). Perhaps the idea persists, not be-
cause of neo-Rousseauian romanticism, but because the researchers who have actually dwelt among hunters have
often observed a way of life whose gratifications are substantial but not readily quantified (see, e.g., Bird-David
1992, p. 25, who notes that “most specialists. . .recognized, if only intuitively, that Sahlins ‘had a point’”).
25
See, e.g., a 2004 poll by Widmeyer Research for the Center for a New American Dream at
http://www.newdream.org/about/PollResults.pdf.
26
Perhaps most do so less than freely, say because their habitat has been compromised. But not all seem to.

7/18/2007 12
takes are not uncommon.
27
Lay rationalism cannot be the only factor behind such mistakes, but it
may be particularly salient: for the compensations of development are nothing if not conspicu-
ous. There is nothing intangible or mysterious about the allures about greater wealth, health, and
high-tech amusements, or convenience and physical comfort. Whereas the benefits enjoyed by
many non-urban peoples are often difficult even to articulate—a supportive community and fam-
ily life, freedom from hurry and the compressing forces of a sprawling civilization, an engaging
and meaningful relationship with the land, and the quiet pleasures of exercising skill in a wide
range of life-sustaining tasks.
28
We should not be surprised if a species of lay rationalists might
tend to go for the former sorts of goods over the latter, even if the rewards are smaller. It would
be hard to justify choosing greater inconvenience and discomfort, or less wealth, simply because
the attendant way of life somehow—you can’t really say how—seems more fulfilling.
In Malaysia some years ago, a psychologist visiting a rural village was shown an elabo-
rate machine devised by a local inventor, which the villagers proudly demonstrated for their
guest.
29
It was a mill, which in the course of a few minutes hulled enough rice to supply five or
six families for a meal. Normally it would take a half hour for those families to hull as much
rice—a vigorous daily task for the women and girls who do it, using a large mortar and pole. In a
half hour, the psychologist estimated, this machine could supply the entire village with a day’s
rice. Yet the machine lay idle: they did not use it, save to show it off. The psychologist, who had
been raised among such peoples, surmised that this was because the women clearly enjoyed hull-
ing the rice, singing and laughing as they worked, and would miss the ritual if freed up to do . . .
what? Their lives were not rushed; they didn’t need a time-saver. Yet how many people in like
circumstances would refuse such a convenience? To the lay rationalist in us, such reluctance to
be liberated from work is liable to seem insane.
30
I have discussed lay rationalism, the impact bias, and positive illusions as distinct phe-
nomena, but we should bear in mind that they might exhibit perverse synergies when taken to-
gether. Lay rationalism, for instance, may tend to privilege risky goods at the expense of sure
things, an example being wealth versus relationships. Often you get the latter more or less by de-
fault—just hang around and be a decent friend, sibling, etc. Whereas monetary success is usually
a much riskier venture, and most people who set out to get rich don’t even come close. This
might not be such a problem if we tend to assess our odds of success, and the nature of the pay-
off, reasonably well: our rationalistic bias would be tempered by the recognition of our dim
prospects and the fast-decaying rewards of a triumph. But of course we aren’t like that: we tend
to think we’ll beat the odds and that we’ll be lastingly happier when we do, so that our positive
illusions and impact biases encourage us to place the stupid bet that our rationalistic inclinations
laid out for us, thus magnifying their impact.
This small sampling of biases does not even come close to exhausting the hurdles our
brains present to us in the pursuit of happiness. But together they indicate that we may be biased
to pursue goods that do little to advance our well-being over the goods that really do benefit us,
27
A colleague who works with a quasi-hunter-gatherer society tells me that the people he studies “love their lives,”
and that it is not uncommon for hunters who leave their tribe for civilization eventually to return to the hunter-
gatherer way of life. One member of the tribe he studies did so even after receiving a bachelor’s degree from a
European university with bright employment prospects, having found life in Western countries “miserable.”
28
Indeed the latter tend to be invisible, as they are the pleasures of engagement or flow, which preclude attending to
how one feels (Csikszentmihalyi 1990).
29
Wolff 1994, pp. 176-183.
30
One could readily imagine well-meaning development agencies “gifting” villages with this sort of contrivance—
perhaps resulting mainly in more time spent watching television. See also “Seven Amish Farms,” in Berry 1981.

7/18/2007 13
and that such biases are encouraged by inflated views of our chances for success.
3.4 The Jerk and Larson’s cow: or why people remain in bad situations
The best evidence that people make reasonable decisions in conducting their lives might
seem to be the fact that they so often choose to stick with those decisions: if their lives are so
bad, why don’t they change things when they have the chance? One reason may be loss aver-
sion: giving losses more weight than gains in choice, for human beings have a strong aversion to
loss.
31
A great deal has been written on loss aversion, and since the basic idea is already familiar
to many, I will note just one study here. In a classic illustration of this phenomenon, subjects in
one group were given a choice between receiving a coffee mug or a sum of money, namely the
minimum amount of money they would prefer to the mug; subjects in a second group were given
a mug and then asked how much money it would take to get them to give up (“lose”) the mug.
Whereas subjects in the first condition valued the mug at a median of $3.12, those in the second
group valued it at $7.12 (Kahneman, Knetsch et al. 1990). In short, subjects put a higher pre-
mium on avoiding a loss (giving up the mug) than on achieving a gain (acquiring the mug). The
effect is quite general, and extends beyond monetary scenarios. And it can shape important life
decisions. An overworked professional who wants to “downshift” to a less stressful and more
rewarding, but less lucrative, line of work may find this choice inordinately difficult: it would
mean giving up many possessions, social standing, etc. And while these things may not strike her
as particularly important in the abstract, or in prospect, they will loom large in her decision-
making as losses, to the point that she may lack the nerve to make the change. Like Steve Mar-
tin’s Jerk, we often find that giving up things entails difficulties well beyond their value.
While losses might tend to impact our happiness more than gains to some extent, loss
aversion appears primarily to be a phenomenon of choice rather than outcome; there is no evi-
dence that it affects happiness to anywhere near the same degree. Loss aversion could be simply
a forecasting phenomenon: we predict that losses will hurt more than gains will benefit, and
choose accordingly (see, e.g., Kermer, Driver-Linn et al. 2006). But our aversion to losses may
be more basic to choice than that, and at least somewhat independent of our forecasts (see, e.g.,
Kahneman 1999). As with our would-be downshifter, we may recognize that giving up certain
things would be for the best, yet be unwilling to pull it off.
A second reason we might expect people to acquiesce in less than desirable circum-
stances concerns the processes driving their evaluations of their lives: people’s evaluations of
their lives probably exhibit a positive bias in most cases. Our general tendency toward positive
illusions would be one reason to expect this: given that our perceptions of ourselves and our fu-
tures tend quite generally to be excessively rosy, it would be surprising if we did not tend to ap-
ply a similar tint to the stories of our lives. Thus, for instance, the “sense-making” processes by
which we assimilate events into our life narratives, and which appear to be a major source of ad-
aptation, likely influence our evaluations asymmetrically: the influence of both good and bad
events on our evaluations of our lives tends to dwindle with time as they cease to be novel and
fade into the background; but the shift will be stronger for negative events if sense-making proc-
esses exhibit positive biases (see, e.g., Gilbert, Pinel et al. 1998, Wilson, Gilbert et al. 2002, Gil-
bert 2006). Such biases could both dampen adaptation to positive events and enhance adaptation
to negative events, even transforming them into positive events, as happens when we end up re-
casting a failure or setback as a good thing, say because it made possible some of the goods we
now enjoy. Consider how often we hear people say things like “it was all for the best,” or “even
31
The literature on this is massive. See, e.g., various papers in Kahneman and Tversky 2000.

7/18/2007 14
so, I wouldn’t change a thing.” In fact the motivation to make the best of a bad situation, and cast
our lives in the best possible light, appears to be strong and pervasive (see, e.g., Ross and Wilson
2003). Nobody wants to think her life a pathetic failure, and most people are probably willing to
go to great lengths to cast their lives in a favorable light—a factor, no doubt, in the high levels of
reported life satisfaction across cultures (Diener and Diener 1996, Diener and Suh 1999, Biswas-
Diener, Vittersø et al. 2005). Perhaps this tendency is not universal, given that some cultures
make a sport of complaining, and even frown on professions of happiness. But even an inveterate
kvetch could very well, when pressed to set aside the wisecracks and make an honest assessment
of his life, admit that his life is actually pretty good—keynehore.
32
This sort of positivity bias need not involve an illusion, or indeed be unreasonable at all,
given the norms governing the way we think about our lives (Haybron 2005, 2007). People can
reasonably register satisfaction with their lives under an extremely broad range of conditions,
including great hardship, because evaluating our lives is an ethically loaded endeavor that re-
flects on our characters, so that a reasonable judgment isn’t simply a matter of how well we are
doing. Think of how bad one’s life would have to be that one could not reasonably endorse it,
and even take pleasure in reflecting on it. Imagine that you are a highly sought-after attorney,
wildly successful in your professional accomplishments and material possessions, but struggling
also with loneliness, chronic mild depression and a brood of selfish children forever bickering
over the fortune you’ve accumulated. Must you be dissatisfied with your life? You might rea-
sonably feel that so to regard your life would make you a needy, soft, weak-minded and ungrate-
ful fool. This is the life you’ve chosen and made for yourself. Not to endorse it, warts and all,
may seem to you an immature failure to accept the consequences of your decisions. Indeed, it
may seem a kind of self-repudiation, and hard to reconcile with a healthy degree of self-regard.
(Thinking yourself or your life a failure when the facts do not compel you to do so might involve
an unseemly lack of self-regard.) And so you may, without error, affirm your life.
Another factor in cases like this may be a kind of retrospective lay rationalism: a ten-
dency when reflecting on our lives to give excessive weight to “hard,” quantifiable, or otherwise
easy-to-justify factors like material success, accomplishment, and social status. I know of no em-
pirical tests of this idea, but it seems very likely to be a factor in people’s assessments of their
lives. For one is less likely to complain when the only grounds for it are not so conspicuously
significant, or are relatively intangible—a vague sense of malaise, ennui, emptiness, alienation,
loneliness, estrangement from loved ones, etc. Yet such intangibles make up a great part, if not
the lion’s share, of well-being.
“Wendell . . . I’m not content,” says Gary Larson’s bejeweled cow to her husband, a bull,
who watches television from his comfy chair as she sips a martini. Yet for all the absurd splendor
she may have an excellent point. Any outwardly successful person who senses that things have
somehow come up short risks feeling a bit like Larson’s cow if he pursues such doubts very far.
I would conjecture that the norms concerning life satisfaction attitudes, coupled with lay
rationalism and a broad tendency to accentuate the positives when thinking about ourselves and
our lives, exert a strong upward pressure on most people’s attitudes toward their lives, so that
people will tend to exhibit higher levels of life satisfaction than well-being, and in general will
be less dissatisfied than we might expect given their quality of life. As a result, people may often
remain in less desirable circumstances despite the existence of better options.
4. Assessing the threat to Aptitude
32
Yiddish for “no evil eye,” or “knock on wood.”

7/18/2007 15
4.1 Are these harmless quirks?
I take it to be obvious that these phenomena are not merely peripheral concerns of little
more than academic interest. While no one expects us to be perfectly competent seekers of hap-
piness, the sheer mass of potentially weighty difficulties suggests a darker picture than we might
have anticipated. Now it may be objected that the problems discussed in this paper could easily
be corrected by educating people about them. Certainly such knowledge can help, but it is a sta-
ple of the literature that most of the difficulties that have been documented are deeply ingrained
in most people’s psychologies, so that even specialists in this research, who ought to know better
if anyone does, tend to exhibit them.
33
Moreover, careful reflection is costly and relatively infre-
quent, with most behavior being automatic and intuitive. You might, say, avoid positive illusions
when coolly deliberating about a career choice.
34
But such choices typically take place over ex-
tended periods of time, and rarely depend solely on moments of calm reflection. Even if you re-
alize, when thinking carefully, that you will probably be just as miserable as most associates at
the prestigious law firm you are considering, you may still tend most of the time to envision
yourself among the happy minority, and end up taking the job despite your better judgment. At
any rate, even where the suitably trained can eliminate a given error, the benefits of an open fu-
ture are not normally thought to accrue only to those who receive a lot of special training.
Another possible cause for optimism is the oft-cited evidence that most people, in the
United States and most other countries, are in fact happy. This claim appears to be widely ac-
cepted in the subjective well-being literature, and given traditional views of happiness it is well
supported (Diener and Diener 1996). Indeed, to judge by self-reported happiness we Americans
already live in Utopia: in one of the largest worldwide surveys of happiness, the World Values
Survey (WVS) out of the University of Michigan, 94% of Americans reported being happy in
1995, a fairly typical result of such studies. Since even in the best conceivable society we should
expect some people not to be happy at any given time—death in the family, incurable disease,
unhappy personality, foolishness, sheer bad luck, etc.—this figure indicates we are in the vicinity
of a theoretical limit. In terms of percent happy, we are doing about as well as a society possibly
can. Except for Iceland, where 97% claim to be happy. In fact a number of countries match or
exceed the United States, and Venezuela and the Philippines trail close behind, at 93%.
35
Besides
self-reported happiness figures like these, there are two main lines of evidence for the idea that
most people are happy: most people report being satisfied with their lives, and people typically
experience more positive than negative affect. I have argued elsewhere that in fact none of these
points supports the idea that most people are happy (Haybron 2005, 2007, forthcoming-a, forth-
coming-c). Moreover, most people being happy would not suffice to underwrite liberal optimism
since, e.g., people might be happy despite high levels of option freedom, not because of them.
Still, the level of happiness in the population does speak to the gravity of the issues here,
as well as to the ability of individuals to reliably assess their own well-being. So is it true that all
but about 6% of the American public are happy, as they claim to be in the WVS? There is some
direct evidence, e.g., from experience sampling studies, that most people in fact are not happy
(Haybron 2005, forthcoming-a). Here let’s consider some indirect evidence. One of the largest
studies of mental health found that nearly half of Americans can expect at some point to suffer a
psychological disorder, usually emotional, and typically starting in childhood (Kessler, Berglund
33
See, e.g., Larrick 2004, Shafir and LeBoeuf 2002, Trout 2005. [More references]
34
See Gollwitzer and Kinney 1989, Taylor and Gollwitzer 1995.
35
Inglehart and Klingemann 2000. The WVS dataset can be searched online at
http://www.worldvaluessurvey.com/. Even if we could be significantly happier, these are still pretty Utopian figures.

7/18/2007 16
et al. 2005). The present rate of depression, in particular, appears to be about ten times that of a
century ago; interestingly, it is also said to be five to ten times that found in today’s Amish, one
of several reasons for thinking the measured increase is genuine (Seligman 1990). Estimates of
depression range upwards from two percent of the population at any time, with most estimates
being higher; a recent study reports a one-month prevalence of major depression alone of 5.2%.
36
The one-year prevalence cited in another major study, the NCS, was 10.3% (Kessler, DuPont et
al. 1999; the average depressive episode lasts about six months).
Many people appear to being experiencing high levels of stress: 40% of Americans in one
survey, for instance, said their jobs are “very or extremely stressful,”
37
The American Psycho-
logical Association reports that 47% of Americans are “concerned” about the level of stress in
their lives, 15% are “very concerned,” and 43% suffer adverse health effects from stress.
38
A re-
cent news report claims that “half of all heads of household are too tired to put much time or ef-
fort into evening meal preparation.”
39
And 42% of a random sample of 3,400 workers told re-
searchers they felt “used up” by the end of the workday.
40
It is estimated that about 3.1% suffer a
generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) in a single year (Kessler, DuPont et al. 1999, Kessler, Chiu
et al. 2005; the diagnosis requires at least six months of anxiety, and GAD tends to be longer-
lasting than MD). The one-year rate for all anxiety disorders, not counting specific phobias, is
over 9% (Kessler, Chiu et al. 2005). With comorbidity of GAD and major depression (MD) be-
ing about 60%, the one-year prevalence of GAD without MD was 1.3%. This suggests, then, that
nearly 12% of the population has one of these two disorders in a given year. Assuming, conser-
vatively, that the rate of these disorders at any given time is half that, we arrive at an estimate
that close to 6% of the population has one of these two unpleasant conditions at any point in
time. This, note, is about the same as the population of all non-happy Americans in the WVS.
Turning to other disorders, the rate of substance abuse disorder in the same period was
3.8%, and impulse control disorders occurred in 8.9% of the population (Kessler, Chiu et al.
2005). Note that only about 45% of individuals with one disorder have more than one, so these
figures are not entirely overlapping Overall the one-year rate of mental illness was 26.2%—over
a quarter of the population. You can reasonably question whether this many people actually have
mental illnesses, but it would be hard to maintain that most of these individuals are happy.
Some may be happy only because they are medicated. In 2006, antidepressants were pre-
scribed for about 11% of American adults under the age of 44.
41
A different source reports that
5.7% of the population received a prescription for SSRI’s (the most common class of antidepres-
sants) in September 2006 alone; the number of prescriptions sold in that month was well over
10,000,000. During the same month, 6.2% were prescribed benzodiazepines and other anxiety
medications, 1.7% received sleeping pills, and 1.9% were prescribed stimulants, mostly for
36
[(Journal of Psychiatric Research; V.41; 2007; p207)]. There is good reason to think the depression figures are too
low; see Shedler, Mayman et al. 1993. [Klerman finding of 31% mild depression in British 25-year-olds, 1986, cited
in Oliver James book, and The Observer].
37
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (1999), citing a large study by Northwestern National Life.
38
“Stress and Mind/Body Health,” February 23, 2006, posted at:
http://www.greenbergresearch.com/articles/1670/1889_APAStressReport.pdf.
39
“Tired of Having Too Much to Do?” The Boston Globe, February 20, 2003. From research by ACNielsen.
40
Research by the Families and Work Institute, cited by Veninga 2000.
41
Figures from Medco, reported in “F.D.A. Expands Suicide Warning on Drugs,” The New York Times, May 3,
2007.

7/18/2007 17
ADHD.
42
Applying the comorbidity rates used above to the prescription drug data, we can guess
that roughly 8% of the population takes medication for depression or anxiety in a given month.
We do not know what proportion of these individuals are happy, but it seems likely that most of
them would not be happy without their drugs.
Restful sleep has long been recognized as a sign of happiness, and troubled sleep a sign
of the reverse (Haybron 2005). Sleep is also important causally, since sleep deprivation tends not
to conduce to happiness. So how do we sleep? Estimates of insomnia in the American population
are cited in one source as ranging from 10% to 34%, and a large health study found that 17.4%
reported regularly having insomnia or trouble sleeping in the past year (Pearson, Johnson et al.
2006). (The DSM-IV defines insomnia as a complaint about sleep at least three times a week for
at least a month.) A recent commentary notes an estimate that 30-45% of the population at any
time has a sleep complaint, while 10-15% have chronic insomnia (Quan 2006). Americans report
getting an average of about seven hours of sleep a night, down from about nine hours in 1900.
Yet a study that tracked the actual sleep behavior of 669 participants found an average of only
6.1 hours of sleep per night (Lauderdale, Knutson et al. 2006).
Let me note one further area of interest: loneliness. We are an intensely social species,
and in many societies exile is considered comparable to, or worse than, death (as it was by Soc-
rates). Yet as of 1994, about 12% of American adults lived alone; in a 1990 Gallup poll, over
36% of Americans reported feeling lonely.
43
In 2004 a widely-cited study found that Americans
averaged only two (2.08) confidants—individuals with whom they can discuss important matters
(McPherson, Brashears et al. 2006). Nearly half have no more than one confidant. Over half have
no friends in whom they can confide, and a quarter of Americans have no confidants at all.
These figures represent a dramatic weakening of social networks just since 1985; e.g., the per-
centage having no confidants at all more than doubled, from 10% to 24.6%.
It is basically impossible that 94% of Americans are happy.
44
Clearly, many Americans
are not happy, and indeed many are plainly unhappy. But how much of this owes to the sort of
imprudence we have been discussing? This of course cannot be answered with any precision. But
we may find it instructive to note that in the late 1990s, when the economy was booming, the av-
erage American household carried $7000 in high-interest credit card debt; the savings rate was
zero (and is now negative); and one family in 68 filed for bankruptcy.
45
We reportedly work, on
average, more hours than a medieval peasant, enjoying a leisurely pace of life only compared to
our Dickensian recent past (Schor 1992). Around 2% of married couples in the United States di-
vorce each year—more than double the rate in 1960—yet the greater ease of exit from bad rela-
tionships has been met with a decline in marital satisfaction. Only half of fifteen-year-olds live
with their biological father. (Reflect on that figure for a moment. This is not a problem for hu-
42
[Permission to cite this source?]. These figures will overlap insofar as some individuals received more than one
class of medication during that month.
43
“Loneliness Can Be the Death of Us,” The Boston Globe, April 22, 1996. [House sizes]
44
I doubt many researchers believe this either, including those making the “most people are happy” claim. (“Most”
is a far cry from “almost all.”) As I have argued elsewhere (2007, forthcoming-a, forthcoming-c), these doubts need
not impugn the utility of self-report measures in telling us about relative levels of happiness. Even if everyone exag-
gerates, it may still be that happier people tend to report higher levels of happiness than less happy people.
45
On credit card debt and the savings rate, see Schor 1999; on bankruptcies, see Frank 1999b. The U.S. Department
of Commerce reported that the personal savings rate in 2005 was -0.5 percent (see “As Personal Savings Fall, a
Comeuppance Is Due,” The New York Times, February 4, 2006).

7/18/2007 18
man welfare; it is a social disaster, on a par, arguably, with serious material poverty.
46
) Ameri-
cans watch an average of over 4.2 hours of television a day.
47
And 75% of college freshmen say
that being financially “very well off”—not just comfortable or secure—is their primary objective
in life.
48
About the same percentage reportedly expects to become millionaires.
49
Almost 20% of
Americans think they already belong to the richest one percent and a further 20% believe they
will in the future.
50
Given the way many Americans eat, that future may be pretty short, or at
least unpleasant: some 60% of us are overweight, with at least a quarter obese, and a recent lon-
gitudinal study found that close to 90% of young to middle-aged adults can expect to become
overweight; about half will become obese.
51
But help may be on the way: a Harris poll of poten-
tial parents in the United States found that over 40% would like to genetically engineer their
children “to make them smarter” and to “upgrade them physically.”
52
Such is life in our strange Utopia, where almost everyone thinks they are happy. I will
mostly spare the reader the dispiriting litany of dysfunction that arguably characterizes childhood
and youth in the contemporary United States, such as the 17% of Princeton and Cornell students
who practice forms of self-abuse like cutting and burning themselves (Whitlock, Eckenrode et al.
2006). But in light of our concern with freedom’s dividends, it is worth mentioning the recent
studies by Luthar and Csikszentmihalyi suggesting significant inverse relationships between so-
cioeconomic status and well-being among American teenagers.
53
In one of Luthar’s studies, e.g.,
tenth grade girls in an affluent suburb, with paradigmatically open futures, registered clinically
significant symptoms of depression and anxiety at remarkably high rates—in each case, 22%.
These rates are significantly higher than typical rates for American teens, indeed three times
higher in the case of depression. It is not known how many more were subclinically unhappy.
4.2 The results in broader context: converging developments in psychology
Now suppose that nature’s real purpose for you. . . were that you should survive, thrive,
and be happy—in that case nature would have hit upon a very poor arrangement in ap-
pointing your reason to carry out this purpose! . . . In short, nature would have taken
care that reason didn’t intrude into practical use and have the presumption, with its weak
insight, to think out for itself the plan of happiness and how to get it.
Kant, Groundwork, Paton trans., p. 6
The psychological phenomena charted above are not outliers, a collection of interesting
but isolated trivia. They are just a few of many related effects that have been documented in the
46
It is a disaster in part because most of the United States lacks any provision for effective communal childrearing.
(For those raised by two parents: would you prefer that one of them left the family, or that your family was poor?
Perhaps many of these children would be better off in some third world countries, with intact families.) The figures
on family breakdown are cited in Layard 2005.
47
Census figures reported in the New York Times, “Who Americans Are and What They Do, in Census Data,” De-
cember 15, 2006. The cited figure was 1548 hours of television per year.
48
Ibid. By contrast, in 1970 79 percent placed developing “a meaningful philosophy of life” at the top—itself not
necessarily a great idea, but probably better than rank greed.
49
David Brooks, “A Nation of Grinders,” The New York Times, June 29, 2003.
50
David Brooks, “The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest,” The New York Times, January 12, 2003.
51
Cutler, Glaeser et al. 2003, Vasan, Pencina et al. 2005. A recent article in a U.S. Department of Agriculture
magazine suggests that Americans’ rapid weight gain in recent decades may be a “rational response” to changing
technology and prices (Kuchler, Golan et al. 2005).
52
Cited in Andrews 2004.
53
Csikszentmihalyi 1999, Csikszentmihalyi and Schneider 2000, Luthar and Becker 2002, Luthar 2003.

7/18/2007 19
recent literature on heuristics and biases in human judgment and choice. Placed in the context of
three other developments in psychological research from the last few decades—evolutionary
psychology, dual process psychology, and situationist psychology—this work is part of a broader
corpus that could signal an emerging view of human nature. That picture may depart substan-
tially from the dominant images of philosophical lore. On this view, we probably should not ex-
pect human beings to possess much aptitude for unbounded living; if such a way of life benefits
us, it may largely be in spite of our cognitive endowments, not because of them. In this section I
will sketch an outline of the view in question. There will be little argument in defense of this
view; the point is not to convince the reader of an account of human nature, but to offer a plausi-
ble background story that could situate the findings discussed here in a broader context. Insofar
as that story does seem plausible, it will give us further reason to doubt the Aptitude assumption.
We can approach the first development, evolutionary psychology, with a natural objec-
tion: how could we fail to be competent at securing our well-being? Natural selection hardly
tends to be kind to massive prudential ineptitude, the objection goes, and the simple fact that we
made it through the Darwinian sieve might seem to indicate that most of us somehow manage to
conduct our lives pretty well, at least from a self-interested perspective. In fact it is not clear how
far we should expect evolutionary processes to select for prudent behavior, since natural selec-
tion ultimately favors not prudence but fecundity, broadly speaking: inclusive fitness. The male
peacock would surely be better off without an elaborate tail to drag around and attract predators,
but no matter: the tail serves the genes, not the bird. Similarly, it might have been adaptive for
early human males to have more or less as many mates, and children, as they could manage; but
success in that endeavor may not have made their lives simpler, or them happier.
54
But let’s set this caveat aside and suppose that evolutionary forces did indeed yield a
fairly high degree of prudence in our Pleistocene ancestors. While there may be some important
exceptions, such as our oversized libidinous urges, this supposition does not seem implausible.
Human beings, on this assumption, are pretty good at promoting their interests in the sorts of
Stone Age settings they evolved to deal with—the “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness,”
or EEA, as it is called in the evolutionary literature.
55
It does not follow that human psychology
is well-equipped to manage other sorts of environments, such as the option-rich societies that
concern us here. How sanguine should we be on this count?
Consider that virtually all of human history, between 90 and 99 percent of it depending
on when you start counting, has taken place within hunter-gatherer societies. And whatever
“post”-hunter-gatherer evolution might have occurred has had only some 10-12,000 years to
work its magic, with the great majority of that taking place within highly traditional agrarian so-
cieties that are not exactly paradigms of the liberal ideal. From a biological perspective, we are
basically a hunter-gatherer species. Of course, the mere fact that we evolved in a certain kind of
environment does not even come close to showing that we cannot flourish in very different cir-
cumstances. Organisms often manage to thrive in circumstances differing from those they
evolved to inhabit, and human beings are a particularly adaptable species. On the other hand, we
do not have merely a difference between hunter-gatherer and option-rich societies: we have a
vast difference, in ways that matter, in the demands these environments place on people. Hunters
have nothing like the power we enjoy to shape our lives. They probably do not, in any meaning-
54
Thanks to Gerardo Camilo for discussion, and for suggesting examples along these lines.
55
For useful discussion and reviews of the relevant literature, see Barkow 1997, Nesse and Berridge 1997, Buss
2000, Grinde 2002, Nesse 2004, Nesse 2005. A major aspect of this work is “mismatch theory,” according to which
much contemporary ill-being arises from a mismatch between the EEA and the current environment.

7/18/2007 20
ful sense, form life plans of their own at all. They cannot choose friends and partners from a
large pool of candidates; select an occupation from a virtually limitless array; decide which of
many leisure activities to pursue; or move to California or New York or Paris or the jungles of
Papua New Guinea; convert to a new religion; fashion their own religion; decide on their moral
principles; set out to become an artist, a monk, or a captain of industry; and so forth. It is ques-
tionable that they often have to make important life decisions concerning complex matters they
know little about, as we do when deciding on an occupation. Indeed it is doubtful how far most
hunters make long-term plans at all. (See, e.g., Everett 2005.) By and large one takes life as it
comes and lives the way everyone else lives, leaving it to many generations of collective experi-
ence and decision to have given the answer to Socrates’s question: how should I live?
Compared to our predecessors, we need to be able to devise and pursue a much more ex-
tensive and varied set of plans ranging over much longer periods of time, solving simultaneously
for many more variables—including novel ones not even known to our parents—predicting and
tracking their evolution and interactions over weeks, months, years, or even a lifetime. We must
sustain longer chains of prudent choice in pursuit of more complex hierarchies of goals. As well,
we must reason effectively in a more diverse array of domains (such as deliberating about our
values). In stark contrast to the conditions in which we evolved, life in the unbounded society
requires setting one’s own priorities and successfully pursuing a complex and varied set of goals
that will, over the course of a lifetime, satisfy both the individual’s diverse priorities and, of
course, the individual himself. In accomplishing this, the agent must effect a three-way conver-
gence of his motivations, his emotional makeup, and his arbitrarily diverse priorities. And all
these things must come together, often with little advice or precedent from others, with a very
low serious error rate. Happiness takes many choices; unhappiness needs only one.
Should we expect individuals optimized for Pleistocene lifestyles to come equipped for
unbounded living? We should wonder whether any life-form could be up to the job: the sort of
“bounded” rationality we have been discussing in this paper is not simply a fact about our little
primate brains; it is a fact about any kind of brain we could possibly hope to encounter in nature.
So numerous and complex are the decisions human beings must make, even in the constrained
circumstances of the EEA, that cognitive shortcuts will be inevitable no matter how smart we
are.
56
True, we do pretty clearly possess a potent domain-general capacity for reasoning well
about virtually anything that isn’t too large or complicated for us to grasp. That’s how we know
the problems discussed in this paper are problems. But—as I will explain a bit further below—
this capacity is limited: slow, resource-intensive, capable of dealing only with very limited
amounts of information, and prone to performance errors, with an unsure grip on our motiva-
tional structure (indeed perhaps more often in the grip of our motivational structure). We need
the shortcuts, and some other source of motivation, to take up the slack. The trouble is that the
shortcuts and motivational tendencies we evolved appear to have been designed to deal with
fairly specific sorts of problems, most of them short-term problems. And while we share some of
the problems confronting our hunter-gatherer ancestors, such as detecting cheaters in social ex-
change, the overlap in environmental demands is—to put it mildly—less than complete.
In short, our important choices in life must accomplish a remarkable harmonization of
56
This theme is prominent in Gerd Gigerenzer’s work (see, e.g., Gigerenzer 2002). His and other work in ecologi-
cal rationality and evolutionary psychology is often positioned in sharp opposition to the heuristics and biases litera-
ture we have been discussing, notably by the authors themselves. But the conflict is largely artificial—there is hardly
any incompatibility between evolutionary psychology and the idea that people systematically make errors in certain
domains (on this, see Samuels, Stich et al. 2002a). Quite the contrary.

7/18/2007 21
many factors that are utterly removed from the conditions of the Pleistocene world, while at the
same time being relatively immune to heuristics and biases and motivational tendencies better
suited to that world than our own. It is possible that our evolutionary endowments will transfer
effectively to life in the unbounded society, so that we are well-adapted for this sort of situation
despite its gross novelty. Hunter-gatherer societies are themselves quite varied, for instance, con-
tending in many different ways with a wide range of physical and social circumstances, so per-
haps the adaptability that served us there will do the same for individuals in option-rich societies.
This is possible. But it does not seem likely, and the burden of argument lies with the liberal op-
timist who wants to assert it. (Indeed, the interesting question seems not to be why we make so
many mistakes, but why most people blessed with open futures manage to survive into old age.
Judging by the frequency with which parents in option-rich communities must rescue their adult
children from their own blunders, the answer may be that most people manage to stay alive only
because they live in a society in which the basics of survival require very little skill.)
It may be helpful to reflect on one of our better known tendencies toward imprudence:
our propensity to overindulge in sweets and fats, to the point that it basically kills many of us.
We have evolved a formidable sweet tooth and “fat” tooth—a sensible disposition in light of the
dietary constraints facing our Pleistocene ancestors. Perhaps human beings have evolved other
“teeth” as well—such a “stuff” tooth or a “status” tooth—that cause us to seek certain things
even when doing so threatens our interests.
Looking beyond evolutionary arguments, is there more direct evidence that human psy-
chology actually is that way, beyond the heuristics and biases documented earlier? There is, from
two broad lines of research. According to the first, dual process psychology, rational decision
seems to play a surprisingly humble role in the conduct of human life.
57
While the field remains
very much in development, there appears to be widespread agreement that human mental proc-
esses involve two different systems (or sets thereof): first, the analytic or reasoning system,
which subserves explicit or “conscious” thought, slowly processes information in a resource-
intensive, serial, rule-based manner, often involving language, and is under voluntary control;
and second, the intuitive or automatic system, or systems, which operate quickly, holistically,
and automatically. They are not under the direct control of the analytic system. They also com-
prise the lion’s share of our mental lives, and are the prime movers of most of our judgment and
behavior, at least proximately. A variety of studies, for instance, have found that we frequently
confabulate explanations of our behavior that have nothing to do with why we really acted—and
we are not in on the joke. (Our subjective impression that rational processes tend to drive behav-
ior may be skewed by the fact that the analytic system, wherein our inner monologue occurs, ef-
fectively holds the microphone. Studies of split-brain patients—where for instance the language-
using hemisphere sincerely avows pure love for the patient’s spouse while the right hemisphere
evinces unambiguous dislike—offer some chilling evidence to this effect.
58
) And our explicit
ideals can have depressingly little to do with our behavior; for example, one study found that
subjects primed with subliminal exposure to pictures of black males tended to get much angrier
after a subsequent computer failure than those shown white males—and that the intensity of the
reactions bore little connection to the views about race that subjects expressed in a questionnaire
(Bargh, Chen et al. 1996). If the general picture suggested by this body of research is right, then
we should expect many choices to depart from the classical canons of rational deliberation, often
57
See Wegner and Bargh 1998, Bargh and Chartrand 1999, Shafir and LeBoeuf 2002, Kahneman 2003, Stanovich
2004, Hassin, Uleman et al. 2005, Bargh and Williams 2006, Haidt 2006.
58
[Gazzaniga, Schiffer 1998]

7/18/2007 22
conforming instead to the sorts of heuristics and biases, such as loss aversion, that characterize
automatic processing. (The heuristics and biases research is sometimes taken to fall under the
umbrella of dual process psychology, which is possibly misleading, since it seems possible that
some biases reflect the characteristics of rational rather than automatic processes.)
Notice that this much is compatible with the idea that reason is nonetheless the usual and
proper determinant of the important choices we make. Perhaps the analytic system sets the basic
agenda, leaving it largely to the automatic systems to handle the details. This remains a live hy-
pothesis, but at least some researchers doubt that it is the right picture. Jonathan Haidt, for in-
stance, depicts the relationship between the two systems using an “elephant and rider” metaphor,
with the elephant corresponding to the intuitive system and the rider representing the reasoning
system (Haidt 2006). The elephant dwarfs the rider, who will have a hard time getting the ele-
phant to do anything it doesn’t want to. Still, one might think that the rider is basically in charge.
Yet Haidt points out that the analytic system is a recent—and still somewhat buggy—
evolutionary innovation, appended to a basically intuitive brain that previously managed pretty
well without it. The analytic system, he suggests, gives us a tremendously useful tool for per-
forming certain tasks. But, at bottom, its job is to enable a basically intuitive organism to do
those things: the rider, Haidt argues, exists to serve the elephant. Put another way, it’s not that
intuition is a tool that a rational creature often employs; it’s rather, to put it crudely, that reason is
a tool that a basically instinctual creature often employs to accomplish certain ends. For the most
part, the intuitive system sets the agenda.
I do not claim to have given a convincing argument for this notion, and Haidt’s own ar-
guments for it are not decisive. (In fairness, he is writing for a wide audience, and it is not clear
what a conclusive argument for such a broad conclusion could look like.) While some elements
of his account may be overstated somewhat, it is not at all implausible that something in
neighborhood of this view is correct. We should take the possibility seriously. And if this view is
at least in the right ballpark, then we should expect even people’s important decisions to be
shaped substantially by the workings of the automatic systems rather than rational deliberation,
perhaps reflecting the kinds of biases discussed in this paper. While it may be possible for reason
to assert itself and make rational deliberation, unskewed by our varied assortment of biases and
heuristics, the determinant of our major decisions, this will at least be an uphill battle.
59
Returning briefly to the evolutionary perspective, we can see how such a division of cog-
nitive labor might have made more sense for our ancestors than for us: for the hunter contending
constantly with the natural world, the automatic systems’ speed and holistic processing of vast
amounts of information would be crucial to daily survival. Explicit deliberation would have its
place, to be sure, but probably a more limited place. Fashioning a life of one’s own in an option-
rich society, however, probably requires far more deliberation and planning, placing much
stronger demands on the analytic system. Offhand, it seems plausible that this mode of living is
more analytically-oriented than the hunter’s way of life. (It is not uncommon for those who have
lived close to the land to remark on the extraordinary cognitive differences between that exis-
tence and life within urbanized society, for instance talking about a shift to the “animal” mind in
the former case, as contrasted with the “calculating” mindset one acquires in the latter. The for-
mer also tends, perhaps not coincidentally, to be characterized as much more gratifying, not to
say more fully “human,” brutish metaphors notwithstanding. Indeed, making the shift to that
mindset can seem as if previously idled cylinders in one’s psyche have suddenly begun to fire. I
have not heard anyone say this of the transition to civilized life.) If the sort of option-rich living
59
Recall the previously cited disconnect between Americans’ expressed values and their way of life.

7/18/2007 23
favored by liberal optimists does indeed rest more heavily on analytic processing than the hunter-
gatherer mode of life, then, again, we might expect a host of errors to arise that were not much of
a problem for early humans: the distribution of cognitive burdens would differ substantially from
what we evolved with, placing greater weight on the slow, information-poor, psychologically
burdensome, and error-prone analytic system than it was designed to bear—indeed, effectively
putting it in charge of designing our lives, something it never did in our evolutionary ancestors.
Complementing the dual process model of human psychology is the situationist paradigm
in social psychology. Made prominent in the recent literature on virtue theory by philosophers
like John Doris and Gilbert Harman, situationism maintains that human behavior depends far less
on matters of personality and character than we tend to suppose, and far more on external fea-
tures of the situation. Paradigm studies in this tradition include the Milgram research on obedi-
ence, the Stanford Prison Experiment, Darley and Batson’s work showing the effects of hurry on
“good Samaritan” behavior, research on the “bystander effect,” and Isen’s study showing the im-
pact of finding a dime on helping behavior.
60
This represents only a tiny fraction of the literature,
but the general moral is this: human behavior is extraordinarily sensitive to situational factors,
particularly social factors, so that such influences can easily motivate us to act in ways having
nothing to do with, or worse conflicting with, our express priorities. Some have even argued that
matters of values, character and personality play a relatively small role in explaining most behav-
ior, though this is controversial.
61
While moral behavior has gotten the most attention, there is no
reason to think situational influences are limited to that: doubtless the effects are quite general.
Stated crudely, how we choose to live may depend mainly on who we’re with, not who we are.
62
(And perhaps as well on other situational factors, though it seems likely that social factors will
have the strongest systematic effect.)
Turning to the pursuit of happiness, situationist theory would have us expect people’s
personal choices to depend strongly on the choices of those around them. For if trivial situational
factors can lead us into gross violations even of our most strongly held values, such as torturing
innocents, imagine their potential to shape ordinary prudential decisions, where less is at stake.
Interestingly, there may be a good situationist reason why people given lots of choice tend not to
make more of a mess of things than they do: they don’t take advantage of the freedom, choosing
instead to do pretty much what everyone else is doing. If everyone you know is going into busi-
ness, for instance, then you are not likely to sign up for the Peace Corps, even if there is excellent
reason for you to think that it would be a highly rewarding option for you. The upside of such a
tendency is that if a certain occupational choice or way of life often leads to disaster, it will
probably not be chosen by large numbers of people. Situationism may thus seem to support Apti-
tude insofar as situational effects discourage crazy decisions. But such support may be cancelled
out if it means that people won’t take advantage of the freedoms that the unbounded society of-
fers. A more worrisome possibility is that situational effects may compound some of the issues
raised in this paper: they may, for instance, tend to intensify lay rationalism, adding external
pressures in that direction to our internal tendencies. It is also possible that unbounded societies
60
For reviews, see Ross and Nisbett 1991 and Doris 2002. One reason for the power of situational influences is that
many of our preferences are inchoate, unstable and easily influenced or reversed by trivial contextual factors, as a
large body of research has shown (see, e.g., Kahneman and Tversky 2000).
61
In fact both the situationist and evolutionary psychology paradigms in psychology are highly controversial. But I
am not relying on their most tendentious claims here, and there is no disputing both that situational influences can be
surprisingly strong and that evolutionary forces played a major role in shaping human psychology.
62
This point must not be confused with the platitude that culture shapes how we live. In part the point is, less obvi-
ously, that our behavior is continually shaped by social forces, to a great extent independently of our values.

7/18/2007 24
would tend to generate pernicious situational effects of their own, say by weakening communal
bonds and thereby subjecting people more to unhelpful influences from strangers—for instance,
increased concern for conspicuous markers of status and other behavior aimed at securing ap-
proval from relatively anonymous others. Such processes could, ironically, yield greater homo-
geneity among persons in some respects as the heterogeneity of their options increases.
Situationist psychology dovetails nicely with the considerations from dual process and
evolutionary psychology we have been exploring. Situationism is essentially an extension of dual
process psychology, since situational effects are highly automatic, unmediated by rational proc-
esses. It thus strengthens the dual process case for a less rationalistic view of human nature.
From an evolutionary perspective, it would make sense for hunter-gatherers to be highly sensi-
tive to their environment, responding to many cues without recourse to slow and clumsy rational
processes. It makes good sense as well for people to be delicately attuned to others around them,
constantly adapting themselves to fit with their social situation. Human beings have to be capa-
ble of getting along with virtually all other members of their species, since they have tended to
live in close quarters with each other, with little choice over their companions. So the sort of
strong character that would resist Milgram situations might not have been adaptive on a large
scale. Situationism suggests that we are quite thoroughly social creatures, more so than most of
us would like to think. Haidt’s elephant may be largely a herd or pack animal.
These points suggest a more sentimentalist and communal view of human nature than we
tend to find in the liberal tradition—indeed, in most philosophical thought, period. Liberal think-
ers, and many philosophers before them, have tended to stress the individual’s rational delibera-
tions as the fundamental and proper guide to human life, properly lived, thus taking a view of
ourselves that is in an important sense both rationalistic and individualistic.
63
If something like
the story sketched here proves correct, then we may need to rethink common assumptions about
the nature of the beast we are dealing with. (Of course one might accept this description of hu-
man nature while deeming it basically irrelevant to ethical claims about how we ought to live.
But the resulting ethic is not likely to be very attractive.)
Some might feel this suggests an ignoble portrait of human nature. Aristotle’s view it
isn’t, but it bears remarking that the “rational animal” of philosophical lore does not obviously
constitute a more dignified portrayal of ourselves. Suppose we really are fundamentally rational
beings whose natures are best fulfilled by planning and executing our lives as seems best to us on
reflection—more or less on the model of the gods. This at least appears to be the model of hu-
man rationality found in Aristotle, as well as the Judeo-Christian tradition, where we are thought
to partake of the divine insofar as we fulfill our natures as rational creatures, made in God’s im-
age. In essence, we have the intellects of third-rate divinities. (Or fourth rate, to judge from the
spectacular ineptitude most people show at philosophical reasoning.)
It is not clear how this image is supposed to be inspiring: at least the other animals are
good at what they do. Perhaps we should fix our attention instead in a more terrestrial direction,
at our animal heritage. From this perspective, our rationality may still be in some ways—for in-
stance, morally—the most important thing about us. But it appears to be a fragmented, biologi-
cally messy affair pieced together from the available resources to cope with particular sorts of
problems, and fitted into a primate brain with lots of other agendas. It is neither a third-rate nor a
63
Interestingly, Kant seems not to be among those holding this view, as the rather pessimistic quote at this section’s
outset suggests. But of course his liberalism does not depend on liberal optimism, as Mill’s does. Note that Humean
sentimentalism about motivation, on which reason alone cannot motivate people to act, is perfectly compatible with
rationalism in the sense intended here. For Humeans can still accord a special place to reflective deliberation.

7/18/2007 25
fourth-rate version of the all-purpose deliberative instrument envisioned by so many. That seems
to be the wrong way of looking at it altogether. The human mind is not necessarily faulty or un-
derdeveloped; it might be extremely effective within its natural domain. But it was not designed
to function on the model of a lesser deity. To cast aspersions on our intellects for failing to do
that well may be like faulting wolves for hunting in packs.
None of this proves that we are not amply equipped to thrive in the sorts of option-rich
environments favored by liberal modernity. But I don’t need to prove it: for our purposes it suf-
fices to make the idea just plausible enough that it becomes an open question whether human na-
ture is congenial to the speculations of liberal optimism. And the idea that we are prone system-
atically to make serious mistakes in the individualized pursuit of happiness should not be re-
garded as an esoteric possibility, much less an outright fiction. It should be the default view.
In fact it has been, for virtually all of human history. The question of Aptitude is not new,
save perhaps in the extreme form that liberal optimism poses it. Probably all cultures have con-
sidered it, and outside of modern liberal societies the uniform answer has been resoundingly
negative: to stray from the tried and true path in life, even within the relatively undemanding
confines of a highly bounded society, is not just to violate the norms of one’s tradition. It is to
court personal disaster. Probably most traditional cultures include, in the repertoire of stories
handed down across the generations, cautionary tales about the woes destined to befall the youth
who veers too far from the old ways. Liberal societies, by contrast, tend to favor a more optimis-
tic and inspiring kind of tale. Exemplified in any number of children’s movies, this sort of story
exhorts the individual to cast off the bonds of tradition and make her own path in life. To which,
perhaps, should be added a coda: good luck; you’re going to need it.
4.3 A needy species?
It may be objected that the arguments of this paper have focused too narrowly on one side
of the Aptitude assumption: whether people have the aptitude for pursuing well-being in certain
environments depends substantially on the nature of the task, and not just the psychological re-
sources they bring to bear on it. And a correct understanding of what actually promotes human
welfare would reveal that liberal optimism can get by with a fairly modest Aptitude assumption.
For human needs are such that people don’t need much aptitude to profit from high levels of op-
tion freedom. The reason for this, the objection goes, is that individuals have highly diverse na-
tures, so that what they need to flourish is correspondingly diverse. And however error-prone
people may be, they are knowledgeable enough about their own natures that their particular
needs will more likely be met if they have the power to arrange their lives as they see fit than if
they do not. If Jones has a passion for philosophy, and Smith a love affair with ceramic minia-
tures, they can be pretty foolish and still have a better chance of fulfilling their interests if given
the opportunity to engage in those pursuits than if confined in a highly traditional society where
those options don’t exist. And if this sort of view is right, then it looks like we will need many
options indeed if we are going to accommodate the boundless diversity of human tastes, tem-
peraments, talents, and inclinations. This thought is implicit in Feinberg and Mill.
This objection takes human beings to be, in an important way, extremely needy: whereas
most organisms have pretty much the same needs for flourishing as the other members of their
species, our natures are strongly idiosyncratic, imposing quite specific and arbitrarily diverse re-
quirements that must be met if we are to find happiness. It is no surprise, then, that we should
need a lot of options if very many of us are to have our best shot at flourishing. Homo sapiens,
on this picture, is a high-maintenance animal. Its members have such specific, unique, and in-

7/18/2007 26
flexible needs that they require a sprawling technological civilization offering each an effectively
limitless range of options for living. They can get by with less, but then their prospects for self-
fulfillment will be compromised, as Feinberg thought they are for the Amish. Some, including I
suspect Amish farmers like David Kline, might call it the “Princess and the Pea” model of hu-
man nature. I will call it, less pejoratively, the “special needs” assumption.
Are human beings a needy species in this way? We can all grant that human natures are
extremely diverse, with no two people benefiting from exactly the same things. The question is
whether our idiosyncrasies are rigid, concern matters that are central to our well-being, and are
well-enough known to us—sufficiently, that is, to remove pressure from the Aptitude assumption
generated by the psychological findings discussed in this paper. Some people are certainly like
this: notably, those described by Mill as having “strong natures,” especially forceful personalities
like Picasso and Mill himself. Such individuals can easily benefit from the life of unbounded
choice, since they tend to be driven by strong internal compasses that point in atypical directions.
Best, probably, to give them the leeway they need to seek their destinations. Conversely, such
persons often languish in confining circumstances—this being the stuff of many fictions set in
Victorian England—for they cannot be made happy by what satisfies most. They are rather
needy individuals in the sense just mentioned.
64
Having a strong nature may lower the bar for Aptitude. But it is a very strong and surely
implausible claim to suggest that most people are like this. (Mill didn’t think so; he argued that
we all benefit from allowing the strong few to develop their talents.) Indeed, the situationist lit-
erature suggests the reverse: most of us are pretty adaptable, and tend to conform to those around
us. It is not that we are docile sheep; a more charitable and plausible reading of the situationist
moral is that we tend to go with the flow, to get along, and make the best of the circumstances
we face. When you have to sleep in a hut with your mother-in-law, that probably makes sense.
Perhaps we tend also to be made happy by pretty much the same things, at least in the
essentials. (Obviously tastes vary tremendously, but that doesn’t show that the basic conditions
for our happiness are not pretty similar.) Empirical research points to substantial commonalities
in the sources of human happiness, with strong and supportive social relations being the most
important determinant, probably across all cultures, and engagement in interesting and meaning-
ful activity (particularly if it induces states of “flow”), among other things, also being crucial.
But the literature does not tell us whether individuals’ needs might still be idiosyncratic enough
to require an option-rich regime. Idiosyncrasies are inherently difficult to study.
A more promising route might be to consider the well-being of people living without so
many options. On the supposition that people’s natures are strongly idiosyncratic, we ought to
find substantially lower levels of well-being in strongly bounded societies. Of course, there are
two difficulties here: first, we don’t yet have very robust measures of well-being across cultures,
since the usual self-report-based methods are subject to cultural biases; and second, option-rich
societies may tend to exhibit higher levels of well-being for reasons having nothing to do with
their ability to accommodate personal eccentricities. But suppose we had evidence that the mem-
bers of some highly bounded societies actually find their way of life pretty satisfying, limits to
their well-being owing mainly to extrinsic factors like periodic hunger and disease. Indeed, that
their way of life, considered as such, truly is fulfilling for most of them, despite the limited menu
of options. That would at least weaken the case for a view of human nature as strongly idiosyn-
cratic, particularly since Mill/Feinberg-type arguments for such views tend to emphasize that it is
in what we find fulfilling that we are most importantly idiosyncratic.
64
Of course they need not, pace the Princess and the Pea, be needy in the sense of being soft.

7/18/2007 27
I know of no definitive proof that such societies exist, but it would probably be unwise to
bet against it. There is certainly no shortage of anecdotes purporting to describe such societies,
from numerous New World accounts of “white Indians” abandoning Western civilization to live
among indigenous peoples to prominent claims—indeed, according to one critic, the dominant
view (Kaplan 2000)—in the contemporary anthropological literature about hunter-gatherer bands
constituting the “Original Affluent Society” (Sahlins 1968). Such portrayals can notoriously be
overheated—consider just the question of life expectancy—but they are hardly spun whole
cloth.
65
It is noteworthy that skeptics tend rightly to focus, not on the way of life—which is
probably what drives the romanticism—but on the (for our purposes) irrelevant extrinsics such as
longevity. It bears remarking as well that life in many “folk” societies appears to exhibit features
that are known to be highly correlated with subjective well-being: in particular, strong social net-
works and—particularly given the lack of specialization in such societies—challenging, mean-
ingful activities. (Traditional Aborigines have much to gripe about, but Camus’ plaints about the
pointlessness of everyday life probably aren’t among them.) The “hunter” part of hunter-
gatherer, e.g., may not be a particularly oppressive means of earning one’s keep. Indeed it seems
pretty clear that unless enculturated to the contrary, most people—men, anyway—like to hunt.
66
Hard empirical data on such questions remain difficult to come by, but an important re-
cent study of subjective well-being among three small-scale societies—the Maasai, Inughuit, and
Amish—found very high levels of reported life (and domain
67
) satisfaction and happiness across
the board, and strongly positive overall affect on affect balance and (among the Inughuit) experi-
ence sampling measures (Biswas-Diener, Vittersø et al. 2005). Reported life satisfaction among
all three groups (5.4 out of 7 for the Maasai and 5.1 for the other two) was higher than that found
in American college students (4.9) and Illinois nurses (4.8). The Maasai have been described by
the lead investigator as expressing unambiguous contentment with their lives, envying nothing in
Western society save the health care [check]. This study hardly proves that people in those socie-
ties are better off than affluent Westerners, nor that they are happier (or even, for that matter,
happy). And even assuming that they are happy, it may be that they could find still greater ful-
fillment given more freedom to choose how they live. But it certainly is not obvious that the
typical Amish or Maasai child faces a probable future of frustrated self-fulfillment. (They may
be worse off than us in other respects, of course.) Reading David Kline’s account of life in one
Amish community, for instance, one would be hard-pressed to regard him or his children, or
most of the neighbors he discusses, as trapped (Kline 1990). By and large, human needs proba-
bly aren’t that eccentric.
The common tendency to think that human needs are strongly idiosyncratic, requiring a
diverse menu of options to give us a decent shot at well-being, may result partly from a confu-
sion about the fact that most people historically, and even today, would have been better off with
more control over the way they live. Exploited peasants turning boulders to gravel, browbeaten
sweatshop workers, and isolated suburban housewives have typically confronted, not just a short
menu of options in life, but a short menu of bad options. Even the privileged, such as Mill’s
peers, have often been straightjacketed by a thoroughly regimented and oppressive way of life.
65
For a good discussion of romanticizing tendencies, see Edgerton 1992. It is doubtful that anyone ever lived in
Eden, and some indigenous peoples lead patently unenviable lives (see, e.g., his discussion of the Siriono).
66
For a bracing illustration, see Michael Pollan, “The Modern Hunter-Gatherer,” The New York Times, March 26,
2006. See also Lee 2002, as well as the literature on Wilson’s “biophilia” hypothesis, which holds that we evolved
with a natural affinity for natural environments (e.g., Kellert and Wilson 1993).
67
Except that the Amish reported low levels of satisfaction with self, probably due to religious norms of modesty
and humility.

7/18/2007 28
So in a great many societies, most people have been confined to living in ways that do not suit
their natures. However, the fundamental problem may not be the amount of freedom they have to
shape their lives the way they want, but the kinds of options they have. Conversely, the advan-
tages of life in affluent Western societies may result more from how good people’s options are
than from their extensiveness. What I have been suggesting is that some social forms might serve
most people’s needs even while offering a relatively narrow range of options for living.
Earlier in this section I allowed that individuals with strong natures may tend to require
an option-rich environment to flourish. This is not obviously true. One question is how far op-
tion-rich environments make people needy, proliferating idiosyncratic desires in what is essen-
tially a reverse “sour grapes” phenomenon. (Think of the culinary fussiness of today’s children,
who give the impression that children must have starved in the old days.) Second, if the condi-
tions required for unbounded living weaken community bonds sufficiently, then some commu-
nity functions may be supplanted by bureaucratic procedures. The bureaucratization of commu-
nity, with the standardization it requires, may not be favorable to unusual personalities or the de-
velopment of individuality. Public schools in the United States today, for instance, do not obvi-
ously seem like friendly environments for children with strong natures given their tendency to-
ward highly depersonalized and standardized treatment. A third point is that more anonymous
social forms, where individuals are more often judged on the basis of superficial information,
may foster pressures for individuals to conform to one of some number of standardized personal-
ity types, or at least “appearance” types. Of course, tight-knit communities are notoriously capa-
ble of imposing strict social norms that can hinder individuality and disadvantage atypical per-
sonalities in obvious ways. But such communities vary tremendously in this regard, some being
more tolerant of difference than others, and can also provide individuals with a level of comfort
and personalized attention that affords broad scope for their eccentricities. The previously men-
tioned psychologist in Malaysia, for instance, was visiting another village where he noticed
someone darting about from one hiding place to another. When asked about this strange man, the
villagers replied, “Oh, that is our thief” (Wolff 1994, p. 187). He compulsively stole from others,
but things always ended up back where they belonged and no one seemed particularly to mind.
Obviously not quite sane, this person’s oddities were tolerated in a way that would be unlikely in
a large-scale bureaucratic society, where he would probably be institutionalized.
68
4.4 Why people may not want what they need
The objection we have been discussing rests on the common notion that people tend to
know their own needs well enough, even if they sometimes make mistakes. We have seen nu-
merous reasons to question this idea, but I want to raise a more general challenge to it: why
should we think that our needs would invariably advertise themselves to us? An obvious reply is
that we would be poorly designed creatures indeed if we were not generally motivated to seek
out what we require. Call this—the idea that human beings are normally motivated to pursue
what they need, in proportion to the degree of need—the “needs/motivation congruency thesis.”
68
A major study by the World Health Organization tracked outcomes of 3,300 schizophrenia patients in twelve
countries, starting in 1967 with follow-ups thirty years later. The consistent result, found initially and in later follow-
ups, was that patients in poor countries like India, Nigeria and Columbia had much higher rates of recovery, with
half to two-thirds becoming symptom-free, than those in wealthy countries like Denmark, England, and the United
States, where only a third recovered to this extent (Hopper, Harrison et al. 2007) [check]. When a reporter asked
Darrel Regier, the director of research for the American Psychiatric Association, whether schizophrenia patients
might be better off in Nigeria than in New York, he replied, “God, no!” It was not explained why he believed this
(see “Social Network's Healing Power Is Borne Out in Poorer Nations,” The Washington Post, June 27, 2005).

7/18/2007 29
There is good reason to doubt this thesis. The reason is that, in the Pleistocene environment in
which our present natures largely emerged, some of our needs would have been met either auto-
matically or otherwise independently of our efforts. There would be no point in having motives
to seek them, since it would make no difference to our enjoyment of them. To take a physiologi-
cal example, there is good reason to think that young children need exposure to various patho-
gens and allergens to get their immune systems “trained up”; modern children raised in relatively
sterile suburban and urban environments, lacking adequate exposure of this sort, thus tend to be
more vulnerable to allergies and asthma, among other things. There is no inherent motive for
children to seek what they need in this regard (at least as such!), probably because (at least in
part) there was no need for such motives in our evolutionary forbears: their world was plenty
dirty. Perhaps there are psychological counterparts to this phenomenon, such that our current en-
vironment tends to have, or lack, features that are important for happiness, but which we are not
motivated to seek, because there was no need for our ancestors to seek them. Or, alternatively,
that we are insufficiently motivated to seek, given their importance for our well-being. Thus, for
instance, we may be inordinately motivated to seek material wealth and social status compared
to, say, relationships, meaningful activity, or engagement with environments offering the com-
plexity and richness of stimulation of the natural world, because our ancestors might have tended
to get the latter automatically, while the former took considerable effort to achieve.
The point is a crucial one, because it indicates at least the possibility that important psy-
chological needs could generally go unmet without people being either aware of the deficit in
their lives or motivated to do anything about it. Or, at least, that people’s motivation to satisfy
those needs tends to be far too weak given the stakes, with the result that they systematically sac-
rifice their interests in the pursuit of more trivial goods. Conceivably, a people’s way of life
could be grossly unsuited to their natures, at great cost to their happiness, without them having
any idea what they might be missing.
5. Conclusion
It is difficult to find direct scientific evidence of the costs of imprudence, and indeed we
will probably never acquire much evidence of this sort. But there is abundant indirect evidence
that human beings tend to commit a wide variety of serious, predictable errors regarding their
well-being. While I cannot claim to have established the Systematic Imprudence thesis conclu-
sively, it is, I think, well-supported: systematic imprudence very likely makes a substantial dent
in the well-being of most people living in option-rich environments. In turn, the Aptitude thesis
looks increasingly dubious: perhaps it is true, but its truth certainly is not obvious. The idea that
human psychology is well-adapted to unbounded and unburdened living cannot be taken for
granted. Even if, on the whole, we are better off in option-rich environments than in bounded
societies, this may not be mainly through the prudent exercise of choice. Perhaps unbounded liv-
ing benefits us primarily because of its inherent qualities—e.g., the intrinsic value of self-
determination—or because of the collective benefits of many people pursuing their dreams. I will
address these possibilities on another occasion. At any rate, we clearly tend to make a variety of
predictable, often serious, errors in the conduct of our lives. This indicates that we may at least
benefit from some limited scheme of constraints or burdens on choice to help us avoid common
mistakes. (It is another question whether governments can effectively or permissibly impose
such a scheme, though offhand it is not implausible that they could accomplish something in this
regard without offending individuals’ rights.)
In this paper I have effectively been arguing against a certain picture of human nature,

7/18/2007 30
and in these last sections suggesting an alternative view. It is hard to argue for an account of hu-
man nature. For one thing, it is not entirely clear what an account of human nature is, except that
it is not the sort of thing that lends itself to demonstrative proof or decisive arguments. But it is
easier, and may seem wiser, to approach the question piecemeal, taking one piece of the puzzle
at a time: we may not be able to give compelling arguments for a view of human nature, but es-
tablishing the existence of a particular phenomenon like loss aversion can be done with a fair de-
gree of rigor. Why not stick with those more tractable questions?
The reason is that our basic decisions about how to live, and our views of the good soci-
ety and the sorts of policies that make sense for us, often depend on broad assumptions about
what we are like: an image or metaphor of the human animal that establishes various presump-
tions about the ways of proceeding that are liable to seem fitting for us. The liberal optimist’s
view of human nature, embodied most plainly in mainstream economic thought, has helped to
create a set of very strong and pervasive presumptions about the value of certain freedoms for
human welfare, and in turn about the kinds of policies and social forms that tend to promote
well-being. Even if you could point to a particular psychological quirk, like loss aversion, and
thus raise doubts about a certain policy, you would not have challenged the basic presumption
that put that policy on the table, and which made the job of challenging that policy very much an
uphill battle. So long as the broad picture of human nature remains in place, it will retain the
momentum and the decisions it favors will largely continue to get made. If that image is false or
misleading, then, we need to tackle it head-on; the piecemeal approach won’t work. We need to
look at the evidence on hand and try to assemble a more convincing picture, one that better fits
the observed facts. This will be a messy affair, with much uncertainty and few conclusive argu-
ments. But there is no reason to think we cannot mount arguments about such matters with any
rigor at all, or reasonably draw interesting conclusions about what a defensible view will have to
look like. The extravagant assumptions informing liberal optimism should not enjoy immunity
from challenge. I have been suggesting that these assumptions may in fact be wrong; we cannot
take them for granted.
Perhaps liberal optimism’s psychological assumptions will turn out not only to be wrong,
but really wrong. We may, in the fullness of time, conclude that our civilization is founded on a
fundamentally mistaken view of human nature and what we need flourish. As if a misguided zoo
established a habitat for lions with the idea that they were dealing with lizards. The correct re-
sponse to such a discovery would not, in the first instance, be to pore over our tax and regulatory
schemes in the hopes of correcting for this or that cognitive bias. We should want, rather, to
thoroughly rethink how it makes sense for creatures like us to live.
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