We saw the documentary “Three Identical Strangers.” A young man goes off to college and encounters students who welcome him back, even though he has never been there. Soon, they all learn that the young man has an identical twin about whom he had never known, and they meet.
Their story makes the newspapers. A reader notices how much the young men look like someone he knows. Before long, the triplets meet for the first time and begin a short period of sustained happiness in each other’s company.
Rent the movie if you are interested in knowing more. What comes out is an awful truth. The boys were intentionally separated at birth as part of a research project trying to determine whether “nature” or “nurture” was the more dominant factor in the arc of one’s life. Compounding the horror to our sensibilities is that these experiments began in the same decade as Nazi experiments on human subjects and were conducted by men and women whose families had been touched by the Holocaust.
In a recent edition of The Week, Adam Sternbergh details an actual course in the Psychology Department at Yale (Psych 157; Psychology and the Good Life) that has overflow enrollment because students view the course as lessons in how to be happy.
Professor Laurie Santos says she invented the course because “I think we really have a crisis writ large at colleges in how students are doing in terms of self-care and mental health.” Then she adds, “Sadly, I don’t think it’s just in colleges.”
In the course, Professor Santos shares the scholarship of a current University of California, Riverside professor, Sonja Lyubomirsky, who studies what factors affect happiness. Professor Lyubomirsky asserts, based on her experiments, that 50% of happiness is determined by our genes. 10% results from circumstance. The remaining “40% is determined by your thoughts, actions, and attitudes.”
So, if the professor is right, 50% is beyond your control and 40% is completely within your control. You might be in charge of the remaining 10% as well if it involves changing particular circumstances.
Imagine that! Another either-or proposition (nature versus nurture) might actually be a both-and one (nature and nurture). It might be tempting to say that the nature-nurture matter is neither black nor white but some shade of gray. I prefer a different mix, the one on Holstein cows, Dalmatian dogs, and leopards. Splotches and spots highlight the presence of more than one color without either losing its brilliance.
People of a Certain Age, when you reached that certain age, didn’t you already know that nature is not destiny? How many stories can you cite that tell about people whose lives far outdistance those of their progenitors? Likewise, how many stories are there about individuals born into awful circumstances who rise above those circumstances to accomplish significant things?
Or vice versa. How many children of smart people or affluent people crash and burn in their own lives?
Assume that Professor Lyubomirsky is right. Whether you are happy or not is 50% a function of your family’s genes. If your lineage is genetically gloomy, would you just stop trying to be happy? Perhaps, if being unhappy makes you, perversely, happy. I know a few people who seem delighted to be persistently negative, pessimistic, unhappy. I don’t spend much time in their company.
By avoiding pessimists, I have begun building support for either the 10% somewhat in my control (changing circumstances) or the 40% completely in my control.
Given that my life to this point suggests that my 50% factor was positive, building such support is expanding my happiness potential.
Does it matter whether nature or nurture is the more important factor in one’s life? In the middle of living an actual life, does anyone step back to ask that question?
If you are so inclined, you could look back in history to the writings of John Locke and other philosophers who theorized about such questions. The question has been around for hundreds of years, and the social sciences, when they formed in the 19th and 20th centuries, readily picked up questions like this for academic study.
I am a fan of academic study. I have studied, academically speaking. We have learned many things through the rigorous and disciplined processes of academic research. What Lyubormirsky has written intrigues me. Yet, I can imagine that a person working on a farm or in a factory from dawn until dusk doesn’t care a bit about what social science research says he or she should be thinking or feeling.
I think Professor Lyubomirsky would advise her readers that, while you inherit factors from your family, your life is influenced by your attitudes and actions. Any of us can be happy despite, or even because of, hard work required of us each day or the bumps we encounter in life.
Professor Santos’ class seems predicated on the understanding that actions and attitudes matter. I think she would be satisfied if her students left her class saying, “I choose to be happy.”
Happily, I don’t think I need to take that class.
Daniel E. White
October 16, 2018