Lucas Richard - Happiness: a brief history

To our wives, Carol and Keya, who have been so helpful to us in our writing of the book, and to the Gallup Organization, for their encouragement and support.

With so many books about happiness on the market, why should you read this particular one? David Myers, psychologist and author of many books, including The Pursuit of Happiness, calls Ed Diener the "Jedi Master of Happiness Studies." He is referring to the fact that - over the course of a thirty-year career in psychology - Ed has pioneered the field of happiness studies, publishing more than two hundred scholarly papers and chapters on the topic. And Robert, labeled the Indiana Jones of Positive Psychology by one of the field's leaders, has pursued the secrets of psychological wealth in places such as India, Greenland, Kenya and in remote areas around the globe. Intrigued? Let me tell you a bit more about the authors, who happen to be my husband, Ed, and our son, Robert.

The road to being a world authority on happiness began for Ed on a farm in California. Ed grew up in the years after World War II, the youngest of six children. As his older siblings grew up and moved away, and his parents were busy with farming, Ed was often left to entertain himself. Of course, like many an unsupervised boy, he got into trouble. His curiosity led him to make a flame thrower, to throw bullets into an open fire, and to drive a car at age ten. By the time Ed was twelve, he drew up plans for a genetically modified monkey-dog (smart like a monkey but loyal like a dog!). Ed was intrigued by numbers and science. He filled his afternoons reading biographies of scientific luminaries such as Isaac Newton and the astronomer, Tycho Brahe, and attempted to recreate some of their classic studies at home. He discovered how to calculate the amount of water displacement of a brick and other objects by immersing them in the bathtub to determine their volume.

When he arrived at college, Ed focused his curiosity on human behavior. Why do people laugh and cry, why do people seek social situations, why do people do things that are bad for their health, and most importantly, what is happiness and how is it achieved? Ed suggested this last question as the topic of his research in college. Specifically, he proposed to study the happiness of farm workers. However, his professor would not approve the study, informing Ed that "it is impossible to study happiness ... it can never be measured." Besides, the professor opined, "I already know the answer. Farm workers cannot be happy." Discouraged, Ed wrote a paper on conformity instead.

After pursuing other research studies, Ed landed a faculty position at the highly ranked University of Illinois. When Ed earned tenure, we took a sabbatical to the Virgin Islands. There the idea of making a serious study of happiness returned. Ed spent much of his time reading the works of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Maslow, and other great thinkers. He mapped out an ambitious plan for the serious study of happiness which he termed "subjective well-being" to lend it an air of scientific legitimacy to a skeptical academic world. During this same year, we took our three children out of school for trips to Haiti and South America. We motored up remote tributaries of the Amazon and were virtually alone in the deep jungle, surrounded by river porpoises, wooly monkeys, macaws, and piranha. After hours of travel we arrived at a settlement of Yagua people. The Yagua, who lived in stick houses and wore almost no clothing, were as fascinated by us as we were with them. But no one was more intrigued by the interactions than Robert. The tribal children crowded around him to look at his Mickey Mouse watch, and they let him shoot their blow darts at tree trunks. A village elder tried to give Robert curare poison for use with his blow gun, which we sensibly declined. However, the impact of this trip on Robert was immense. The realization that there were people who lived so differently from our neighbors in the American Midwest was a revelation that had a great influence on his adult career.