Dr. Laurie Santos

And a lot of the interventions I talk about with my students and maybe we'll even talk about today, there's a real question about which type of happiness we're building up.

And I think where the research falls is saying that like if we want to do this well, we should probably be going more for the eudaimonic stuff.

Like that's the stuff we don't get used to.

That's the stuff where we get kind of more bang for our buck in terms of interventions and time and so on.

But all too often when you look on the Internet, if you look at social media influencers, when they're talking about happiness, they usually mean the hedonic stuff.

And that's great.

I mean, it's great to have, you know, great sex and hot fudge sundaes.

But ultimately, you know, true happiness probably comes from what we do with others and building a broader good life.

Yeah.

So the way scientists study this is they do these classic studies with twins.

And the reason scientists are so obsessed with twins is that you get two kinds of twins.

You get identical twins who are genetic clones of one another.

And you also have fraternal twins who are as related as regular siblings, but they were in the same womb.

They probably grew up the same way and so on.

And so what scientists do is they say, well, if there's a genetic component to happiness, if something about the variance that we see in the population is controlled by our genes, then those identical twins should look more similar in terms of their happiness than the fraternal twins.

And like lots of studies have looked at this.

And what they generally find is that happiness is heritable.

In other words, that doesn't mean there's a gene for happiness or anything like that.

That means that some of the variants that we see in the population is due to the fact that somebody has one set of genetics versus another set of genetics.

The important thing to know about those heritability studies, though, is that the heritability factor is pretty low.