About as Happy as We Ought to Be An Evolutionary Perspective on the Pursuit of Happiness

Abstract

To date, the study of subjective well-being has been almost exclusively devoted to delineating the components of happiness and how these components work. However, notably absent from this impressive body of work have been efforts to address ultimate explanations for happiness—the question of why happiness exists in the first place. In recent years, this gap in the research is beginning to be addressed by a relatively new field known as evolutionary psychology, which studies the mind and human behavior as a complex assembly of adaptations that evolved as solutions to specific problems repeatedly encountered by our ancestors in the distant past (Confer et al., 2010). Synthesizing the logic and methods of modern evolutionary biology and modern psychology (Buss, 2008; Pinker, 2009), this approach has been utilized to examine the nature and function of happiness, identify domains of critical importance to happiness, and generate novel hypotheses about happiness not produced by other psychological perspectives (Hill & Buss, 2008). The purpose of this paper is to briefly review the literature on subjective well-being from an evolutionary psychological point of view and highlight some of the unique contributions of this approach to the topic.