Redefining Success in America: A New Theory of Happiness and Human Development

Redefining Success in America

Redefining Success in America

A New Theory of Happiness and Human Development

Michael B. Kaufman

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2018 by Michael B. Kaufman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2018

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55001-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55015-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-55029-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226550299.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kaufman, Michael B., 1964– author.

Title: Redefining success in America : a new theory of happiness and human development / Michael B. Kaufman.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017035754 | ISBN 9780226550015 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226550152 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226550299 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Success—United States—Longitudinal studies. | Well-being—United States—Longitudinal studies. | Harvard University—Alumni and alumnae—Longitudinal studies.

Classification: LCC BF637.S8 K3787 2018 | DDC 158—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017035754

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In Memory of Bert Cohler (1938–2012), Beloved Mentor and Friend

Contents

Preface

1  The Study of Success and Happiness

PART 1  Patterns in Lives

2  Brightness and Darkness

3  The Varieties of Experience

PART 2  Observations and Longitudinal Models

4  The Qualitative Assessment of Well-Being: An Innovation in Happiness Research

5  The Stability Model

6  Stability Tested Quantitatively

7  The Change Model

8  Beyond Success: The Relationship between Career and Happiness

PART 3  Comparison and Summary

9  A Conventional Measure of Happiness: A Reexamination

10  A Paradigm for Understanding Adult Life

11  The Forces Shaping Our Well-Being

Acknowledgments

Appendix 1: Primary Psychobiographical Sketches

Appendix 2: Sample Selection and Participation

Appendix 3: Roster of Interviews

Appendix 4: Study’s Methods of Analysis

Appendix 5: Variables and Measures

Appendix 6: Aspects of Remembered Early Life Appearing in Interviews

Appendix 7: The Creation of Remembered Early Life Affect Scale

Notes

References

Index

Preface

It was July 2000 when I first encountered the people whose lives would change mine. I sat in the secure reading room at the Henry A. Murray Research Center at Harvard, one of the leading archives in the country for longitudinal research in the field of human development. It houses seminal studies conducted in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that have shaped our basic knowledge about how people behave, think, and feel as they traverse the course of life. I was on an exploratory visit looking for a baseline data set that I might use in a follow-up study of how the most successful members of our society experience their lives, particularly their well-being. I wanted to know whether going to the best schools and having the most recognized and remunerated careers delivered the prize widely believed in America to result, namely, a good life. I needed longitudinal perspective to know whether competitive success results in a core feature of its promise: a significantly changed emotional experience.

A dumbwaiter raised from the temperature-controlled basement three archival boxes of folders labeled King and McArthur (McArthur & King, 1992). I opened the lid to one of the boxes and pulled out a file stamped with a four-digit participant ID. Fingering its pages with care, I was carried back to the early 1960s and the life of William Young as a freshman at Harvard College.

Young came from a rural part of the country, his family was poor, his father was a tradesman, and William had graduated near the top of his high school class. Making it to Harvard was not merely an achievement; it also served as an escape from his father’s explosive tantrums, suggestive of mental illness, and his family’s stifling Christian rigidity. A gifted artist and an accomplished intellectual, Young seemed determined to make his mark in the world as an artist, though he also betrayed deep concern about the prospect of failure. As I skimmed, Young struck me as a Horatio Alger story in the making with a complex psychology. William Young’s file, by the time of his graduation, was several inches thick and contained 493 pages of verbatim transcription of 20 in-person interviews and test sessions from the time he was seventeen until he was twenty-one. Young was in his late fifties as I was skimming his file.

It took me only a few moments to realize that Young’s file and the files of forty-eight other Harvard undergraduates much like it—packed with manually typed, crisp pages full of correction marks and faded-ribbon ink—constituted rare gems, only a few of their kind likely to exist anywhere in the world. Here before me was a record of a living man’s psychological past, more extensive and revealing than any I had encountered in the field of human development. Young and his classmates who had been exhaustively studied as undergraduates were now approaching sixty years old, their retirements, and the transition out of the middle adult period of life. As this central period of their adult lives was coming to a close, I wondered how things looked on the other side. The jury on their lives as successful competitors in the US world of education and careers would now largely be in. Did they still have the same goals? Had they changed as people? How did they feel about the way things had turned out?

I wondered: Had William Young realized his ambitions as an artist? Was his father still living and had their relationship changed? Did he have a family? Curiosity overtook me. I wanted to meet him.

And so it was that the fifteen-year investigation reported in this book was launched. I tracked down William Young, flew to his city, and spent more than ten hours with him during four interviews discussing his life. Forty other participants also granted me in-person interviews of similar depth and intensity. In all, I traveled to twenty-five cities in the United States to meet these men and find out how their lives had turned out. Along the way, I would serendipitously gain access to—and follow up—207 participants in a larger paper-and-pencil study from which Young and his classmates had been selected for intensive interviewing. This effort would result in a longitudinal study of human development spanning almost half a century.

I don’t think it would have deterred me at the time to know the vast time, devotion, and resources required to complete the undertaking. I was propelled by central questions that had arisen in my own life, which cut to the heart of fundamental American beliefs. I was in my thirties and was unclear why I was pursuing the competitive strivings at the heart of my career. I had gone from Amherst College to investment banking to high-tech start-ups and had also earned an MBA at Harvard. I made the decision to change course, first training as a clinician and then entering the academy, in pursuit of answers. The men whose lives I encountered at the Murray Center resonated with me and at the same time stood for something much larger. A generation older, many seemed propelled by strivings similar to those driving my own educational and professional trajectory. Graduates of an elite university and members of an elite professional class, these men were icons of an American ideal. I knew that their experiences in the competitive journey, now largely played out, had the potential to unravel a central unanswered question: Does the pursuit and realization of competitive success deliver on its promise of a good life? The question in my life was no less about a fundamental belief in America.

Most people assume that the social and economic opportunities afforded by competitive success translate into clear psychological benefits. In fact, a surprising number of people do not even consider the two notions separate; for them, competitive success is the equivalent of the psychological experience of well-being. For others, who perceive a cause-and-effect relationship, psychological benefits are seen to accrue from advantages in rearing and educating children, getting good health care, and pursuing rewarding work. Competitive success also affords pleasure and ease from material conveniences and luxuries such as comfortable homes, vacations, and transportation. And it often confers dignity, pride, and self-respect from realizing the American Dream.

But do these benefits translate into psychological benefits? What are the costs of competitive success, and what effect do they have? Is careerism in fact an American scourge, robbing people of their spirit and reducing opportunities: for relationships, creativity, self-expression, and self-realization? Might the endless anxiety of the pursuit define the experience, outweighing the benefits?

Men like my research participants devote decades of their lives to pursuing professional success. It is a deeply organizing commitment over the course of adulthood whose roots begin well before adulthood. These men, and women like them, are adherents of an intensifying form of American individualism. More now than when my participants grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, getting into a competitive college is seen as a necessary stepping-stone to professional success. Getting a son or daughter past the looming college admissions choke hold is treated by many parents as a critical race whose outcome will determine the professional and general success and well-being of the future adult.

No small number of parents are already concerned about their child’s future admission to a selective college well before the child enters school. It is not uncommon for kindergarten to be seen, especially in competitive urban centers, as a gateway to adult privilege. By the time high school hits, the frenzy of the race is in full swing.

Competition for admission to Harvard began to intensify almost a decade before my research participants matriculated. Other competitive institutions have, of course, moved in parallel. The U.S. News & World Report rankings of colleges and universities, established in the 1980s, have come to embody competitive success as a kind of tyrannical force drawing both colleges and universities and aspiring students into its orbit. Whether graduate or aspirant—or parent, partner, child, or sibling of graduate or aspirant—most of us will readily recognize the pressures of keeping up or getting ahead as our own.

It would seem imperative to know whether winning the competitive game translates into winning in the game of life, where happiness is the outcome and the stakes of succeeding could not be higher. Do the prizewinners’ advantages translate into a better life? If so, does someone need to go to a selective undergraduate institution, excel in a competitive professional career, and be worth at least millions to be fully happy?

If we don’t obtain a resounding answer in the affirmative that this quintessentially American credo of competitive success delivers on its promise, the revelation has the potential to open up a tremendous fault line in a foundation of American life. If it is not benefiting the individuals who benefit most, or if its benefits are modest, or its costs too high, the logic of living by such a credo would be fundamentally misinformed. This book, based on a longitudinal study of Harvard men, is dedicated to reevaluating this American promise. Its findings, I will argue, are applicable well beyond this cohort of men and graduates of an elite undergraduate institution.

When I first considered the research question, I assumed that the correlation between competitive success and well-being had been established by previous research. Many in my profession—academics studying human development and, more generally, social scientists—do. If the pursuit of competitive success is such an important part of the American way of life, then its salutary effects on individual well-being must have been thoroughly examined and established. Cause and effect along the success–well-being continuum must have been documented via close studies of the lives of people embodying this ideal. I was surprised not to find a cache of studies definitively answering this question.

Prior scholarship provides only a partial and insufficient answer. It comes from the field known as the scientific study of happiness and is a version of a common maxim: that money and success do not buy happiness, once basic needs are met. The income required to meet basic needs is well below that of privileged earners. Policy research in economics about the relation between material prosperity and national well-being adds a twist to this summary, but its findings remain relatively unimportant to individuals. The answer provided by the scientific study of happiness offers little insight into people and their experiences. It focuses on broad concepts of happiness and their correlates, which are hard to interpret.

To answer the question, one would need to conduct a psychological study of the life experiences of such individuals that would go beyond survey questionnaires or other summary methods of capturing internal states. Such a study would not only examine the role of educational and career success in the well-being of such individuals but would take a broader view of their lives. It would give a rich sense of how they had come to experience their lives and how centrally and in what ways competitive success versus other factors had figured in. It would reveal what mechanisms are at work in their well-being and what, if any, are the trade-offs of succeeding in the competitive journey. It would use a method of observation capable of explaining the nature and the origins of a person’s apprehension of his life and well-being.

Such an approach is centrally featured in this book, namely, a life history approach to the study of individual lives. The book applies this approach to an entire sample longitudinally. It describes the meaning and well-being of lives, seen from where subjects stand, gleaned from their life histories. It does this at different points in time, and it provides explanations for outcomes. The book shows its findings in particular and general forms. It profiles several protagonists in short biographical sketches over the course of the study and identifies statistical patterns in the sample, placing them in relation to other research on the US population. It presents a story of privileged lives and—drawing on other published research—shows how their patterns appear broadly in the lives of other groups of Americans. Given the novelty of its approach, the book also attends to how its story is generated.

While it reaches nominally a similar conclusion as happiness research—that success beyond the meeting of basic needs does not deliver happiness—the book delivers a substantively different explanation of what does shape happiness. It accounts for well-being by looking at what it is in the lives of individual people rather than the averages and abstract generalizations of survey-based research. Its paradigm—holistic, specific, and context-sensitive—is applicable to individual lives in a way that clinicians think about individuals. It explains the experiences of competitive prizewinners by locating them in a larger set of forces shaping the course of their lives. This account replaces an American myth of success and happiness with a carefully researched theory of human development. Readers who pick this book up out of scholarly interest may find its conclusion about the competitive journey resonant personally—in their own lives.

Core variable relationships observed in general research on demographically varied populations by class, sex, race, generation cohort, and so on resonate strongly with the central insights of this book. But the book deepens understanding of how these relationships solidify—not only in the Harvard sample but in other groups—into a unified picture of happiness, long-term development, and the experiencing human subject. I address how this paradigm translates to the experience of groups whose lives differ from those of the Harvard sample in the opportunities, resources, and norms shaping the social landscape on which their lives unfold.

As it turned out, it was not a single mystery but many in how lives unfold that the research reported in this book would unravel. The privileged view my participants afforded me of their lives over almost fifty years has revised my understanding of people and reshaped the view I have of my own life. It has also brought into sharper relief prior research weighing in on the success-happiness relationship and the opportunity for a more integrated, developmental, and humanistic understanding of how lives unfold.

Knowing what I know now, I would readily take this journey of discovery again. Whether you are a general social science reader, a clinician, or a researcher engaged with happiness, personality, study of lives, or human development, this book will, I hope, be a journey of discovery for you, as well. I invite you to join me as I retrace the steps, sharing the main findings and their far-reaching implications.

Chapter 1 surveys how the basic question of the book—How does competitive success affect well-being?—has been previously asked and answered. It also describes the origins of the study of Harvard graduates upon which the book’s answer is based. From there the book proceeds in three parts. Part 1 portrays participants’ lives from college to late midlife in psychobiographical sketches that illustrate a spectrum of well-being in the sample and trajectories of stability and change in well-being over time.

Part 2 presents the study’s innovations in well-being research: a qualitative method for capturing well-being, two models explaining well-being—one of stability and one of change—and key new understandings of the human subject’s experience of well-being linked to development. They lead to a novel, integrated, and rich paradigm of adult life grounded in qualitative evidence and retested using quantitative techniques. The qualitative method captures well-being in expansive clinical life history interviews carried out in college and then in late midlife. The longitudinal models—developed qualitatively, retested quantitatively—are sharpened and extended by mixed-methods integration. End-of-book and online (press.uchicago.edu/sites/kaufman/) appendixes document evidence and research tools supporting the book’s conclusions.

Participants come to college with a worldview and a central tendency of well-being or ill-being already formed in family, school, and community growing up. In the most common trajectory, stability, that worldview functions as a prism through which new experiences are understood, and it also leads participants to seek out similar experiences of validation or invalidation, particularly in adult family and relationships. In the second trajectory, applicable to a sizable minority of participants, fundamental change in worldview and well-being comes about due to internal and external disruptions to the processes in stability. Part 2 concludes with a decisive broadening of the book’s argument that becomes clear from the book’s new paradigm: not only is socioeconomic attainment unrelated to participant well-being, but even for these professionally successful men, family life is more important than career experience to well-being.

Part 3 significantly alters conventional understandings and explanations of well-being in lives beyond the Harvard sample. It shows personality and cultural influences that distort respondent reports of experience detected in this study’s method but undetected in a widely used survey approach. These distortions lead to the omission of key factors in explanations of well-being. Despite these differences, a surprising convergence exists between core variable patterns observed in this book and those found in happiness and personality research on general samples. Using the book’s understanding of well-being and development linked to the experiencing human subject, a decidedly different and richer paradigm of adult life grounded in qualitative evidence, part 3 helps to illumine lives in other groups. The book’s rare empirical underpinnings attest to a picture of adult life distinct from those offered by established theories in adult development and narrative personality psychology.

After the journey of steps developing a new approach to the study of happiness and a new paradigm for understanding adult life, the book spells out the implications for the cultural belief that a good life is rooted in competitive educational or career success. This careerist value system and its saturated discourse in American society are misinforming the public about what truly matters: the developmental forces shaping our well-being.

CHAPTER 1

The Study of Success and Happiness

* All study participants appear in this book under a pseudonym.

Not the first in his family to graduate from Harvard or work as an elite financier, Spencer Livingston* is responsible for managing billions of dollars of assets. He belongs to a private country club, owns a yacht, and vacations in an exclusive resort town. He gives generously to local charities.

Whipsawed up and down by movements in asset values, Livingston’s emotional well-being is tethered to the market. Highs are infused with the knowledge that he has lived up to his father’s example—to be honorable, intelligent, and respected for his acumen—and lows reproach him with a sickening feeling that he has harmed clients who count on him to protect and grow their assets. What is worse, he is tormented by the persistent belief that he has failed to be a good enough provider for his family, a role that his own father, who died when Spencer was young, was unable to fill.

Spencer Livingston is one of the 207 men in the Harvard Student Study whose lives I investigate in this book. As described in the preface, my discovery in the year 2000—when these men were in their late fifties and early sixties—of participants’ interview files from their college years led me to recognize an empirical treasure that could serve as a baseline for a follow-up study. The original study’s unusually rich examination of participant lives until the end of college, extended in an equally rich reexamination of their lives in late midlife, held the potential to reveal new insight into the relationship between competitive success and happiness. Livingston, along with most participants in the Harvard study, is a luminary on two parallel stages in American life: he holds the most elite undergraduate education available, and he stands at the pinnacle of the American occupational world in wealth and professional status. Livingston reports his household net worth in the top three-tenths of 1% of the US population. The group as a whole are multimillionaires with a household net worth ten to twenty times the national median. Whether lionized as American icons or scorned as the 1 percent, these business executives, doctors, lawyers, academics, and other successful professionals have what so many Americans regard as the good life.

But have these men truly won the ticket to the good life? If so, why has Spencer Livingston felt a grating and chronic sense of failure after the highest educational and occupational achievements? Why have other participants experienced their own kinds of long-term dissatisfaction? Urgently needed in our public reexamination of elite undergraduate admissions and wealth disparities in America, answers to these questions promise to shed new light on core assumptions we hold about the good life.

The Harvard Student Study’s meticulous examination of participant lives over half a century offered the prospect of answering these questions. It could identify how their lives unfolded, the meaningful experiences they had, and how competitive success figured into their journeys. Importantly, it could observe their happiness and its trajectory across the period of their education and career. It could identify the experiences in these areas and others that shape happiness.

Most prior scholarship examining the relationship between success and happiness has focused on discrete variable correlations gleaned from survey instruments rather than on lives. What this means practically is that, in pursuit of a general theory of happiness, this research has sought to map out what variables correlate with happiness in cross-sectional samples. It has not been concerned with what this book focuses on: a fuller understanding of how individuals experience their lives and an account of human development that explains it. The conventional approach yields a picture that is hard to relate to. What is really being tapped by survey questions asking respondents about an abstract concept of happiness? What does it mean that happiness correlates with a certain personality trait or behavior? Variable correlates describe samples and populations but do not tell us what happiness is or how variables interact with it in any single life and its trajectory.

Happiness Research

The hedonic tradition of happiness research has focused on the outcome of interest in my investigation, a life experienced well rather than a life that is good or virtuous for its enactment of certain values deemed important. Its flagship construct, subjective well-being, conceptualizes psychological experience as a hybrid structure made up of life satisfaction judgments and positive and negative affect (Diener, 1984; Haybron, 2011). By contrast, I do not make such prior assumptions about the components of a life experienced well; I rely heavily on clinical life history interviews to reveal the contours of well-being (and ill-being). While the concept of well-being that emerges in this approach shares features with conventional concepts such as subjective well-being, it is more integrative and it contextualizes a life experienced well within a rich understanding of the individual’s world and circumstances. In this book I use the terms well-being and happiness interchangeably to denote this fundamentally different concept of a life experienced well.

The scientific study of happiness, including the field known as positive psychology, has been principally concerned with determining the causes of and contributors to happiness and how happiness might be affected by interventions at both the individual and national policy level (Diener et al., 2017; Seligman, 2011; Lyubomirsky, 2007; Diener, 2009a; Lucas, 2008). While there are competing claims as to how best to define and observe happiness, my prior summary of this research—that money and success don’t buy happiness once basic needs are met—captures prior scholarship focused on a life experienced well.

My summary is a simplification of three lines of research salient to the questions I am asking about competitive success and happiness. These lines of research address the roles of (1) hedonic adaptation, (2) wealth and privilege, and (3) goals and values in happiness. Each has something to say about how competitive success affects happiness. A chart by Lyubomirsky (2007) (see figure 1.1) classifies three broad categories of factors in chronic happiness into which the main factors relevant to this book’s inquiry can be located, and it depicts the relative importance of these categories to chronic happiness:

•  Fifty percent of our chronic happiness is determined by genetic factors explaining hedonic adaptation (described by Set Point Theory);

•  Ten percent of our chronic happiness is determined by life circumstances, defined as whether we are rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, beautiful or plain, married or divorced, etc. (Lyubomirsky, 2007, p. 21);

•  Forty percent of our chronic happiness entails the effortful, intentional action of the individual—thoughts and actions such as practicing gratitude and positive thinking, investing in social connections, and managing stress and hardship.

Figure 1.1. What Determines Happiness? Reproduced from Lyubormirsky (2007), p. 20.

The first category refers to an influential concept in happiness research called Set Point Theory, the observation that people’s chronic levels of happiness remain relatively stable because of a powerful process of adaptation to life’s circumstances (Brickman & Campbell, 1971; Brickman et al., 1978; Diener et al., 1999; Lyubomirsky, 2007; Frederick & Lowenstein, 1999). Lottery winners and people who have suffered a spinal cord injury are often held out as exemplars; they were found to return to close to their previous homeostatic setpoint of happiness within a few months of the monumental change in their objective circumstances (Brickman et al., 1978). This theory helps to account for evidence of a strong genetic influence on happiness (Tellegen et al., 1988; Lykken & Tellegen, 1996; Lykken, 1999; Røysamb et al., 2002; Stubbe et al., 2005). At one time some scholars argued that genes determined 80% of chronic happiness levels (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996), but this strong version has been rejected recently in favor of a weaker version allowing for more change in an individual’s happiness (Diener et al., 2006; Lucas et al., 2003; Yap et al., 2014; Lucas & Diener, 2015). Lyubomirsky’s chart and work (2007) are part of recent efforts to allow for and facilitate more individual agency in well-being.

Set Point Theory has also been linked to the finding that traits in the five-factor model of personality (McCrae & Costa, 1987, 1997), particularly neuroticism and extraversion, are substantially related to subjective well-being (Pavot & Diener, 2011; Steel et al., 2008; Diener et al., 2003; Libran, 2006) and that these traits are relatively enduring in adulthood (Caspi & Roberts, 1999; Roberts, 2003). Traits are assumed to be associated with genetic factors in happiness (Diener et al., 1999; McCrae & Costa, 1999).

Whatever its degree of influence, Set Point Theory is the main answer to this book’s research question offered by prior research. According to this theory, happiness inheres in something other than educational and occupational attainment. Specifically, it inheres in the person. We would conclude from this research that Spencer Livingston’s happiness is determined largely by his genetic setpoint rather than by the career he has chosen, the degree of success he has realized or—from his point of view—at times has not realized, or even other personal circumstances, such as the early loss of his father.

A second relevant line of happiness research addresses the association of wealth and privilege with happiness. Lyubomirsky’s chart would classify these variables as life circumstances, a category that accounts for approximately 10% of chronic happiness. Most scholars summarize the effect on happiness of wealth and privilege, the subset of variables that interest me, as both relatively weak and mixed, once basic needs are met (Diener, 2009a; Diener et al., 2006; Pavot & Diener, 2013). They observe that advantaged groups, such as the wealthy, are slightly happier than others (Diener, 2009a) and yet that some advantaged groups, such as men and the highly educated, do not always report higher levels of well-being (Diener, 2009a). More than one-third of better-off individuals report below-average happiness (Pavot & Diener, 2013). Recent research focused specifically on undergraduate education moves in the same direction as these scholars’ synopses in finding no association between attending a selective undergraduate institution and