'20/20' Friday: What Makes People Happy?

Jan. 8, 2007— -- The pursuit of happiness is a fundamental human endeavor — it seems as if human beings are hardwired to contemplate, chase and cherish this complex and often elusive emotion. Americans place tremendous value on this pursuit; after all, it's a primary feature of the U.S. Constitution.

America is the land of the happy hour, the Happy Meal, and the smiley face. Happiness committees are popping up across corporate America while positive psychology has become the most popular course on campus and a best-selling topic in bookstores.

But while the universal search is indisputable, actually defining the what, where, when and how of happiness is a far more complicated quest — one that has produced conflicting answers.

Can happiness be measured, studied and nurtured? After a decade of brain scans and global surveys, new science says yes, and shows that there are six fundamental theories about this important emotion.

According to Harvard professor and author of "Stumbling on Happiness," Daniel Gilbert, most of our attempts to predict future happiness are erroneous.

"There are two fundamental problems with predicting how you're going to feel in the future," Gilbert said. "First, imagination can fail you. It can play tricks. The future you imagine is not always the future in which you're going to find yourself. Second, society gives us some myths about sources of happiness. Everyone from our grandmother to our bartender to the taxi driver to Dear Abby has some prescription for the happy life. Turns out that if you submit these to scientific analysis, some of these prescriptions are right, but some of them are dead wrong."

Not only do society and our imagination confuse our pursuit, our genes also play a heavy role. Gilbert claims genes are particularly influential in proving the phrase "bundles of joy" to be a bit of a misnomer.

"Our genes tell us that if we procreate we'll be happy, and one of the ways they perpetuate themselves is by getting us to do their bidding. Now usually people won't do things unless they think those things are gonna make them somewhat happy, and so we had developed in our culture, like all cultures, a strong belief that children are a strong source of happiness," said Gilbert. "The data suggests otherwise. The data don't suggest that children make you miserable, but they suggest that, by in large, it's a wash. Children have very little effect, it appears, on their parents' day-to-day happiness."

Improv Everywhere whose Mission Statement is to "cause scenes of chaos and joy in public places." They are a New York based comedy troupe devoted to staging elaborate stunts, or what Todd likes to call "missions."

An annual Improv Everywhere Mission is their "No Pants Subway Ride" where every January several "agents" ride their subway in their underwear. They pretend not to know each other, and a few stops later, a man boards -- selling pants.

Other subway missions included a fake marriage proposal, where Todd and his co-conspirators recruited random strangers on the subway to help pop the question, a surprise birthday party, and an annual haunted Halloween train.

Improv Everywhere doesn't limit themselves to underground transit -- they use all of New York City as their stage; from taking over the window space in a large commercial building on Union Square Park to organizing a giant game of twister with 800 strangers on the lower Manhattan waterfront, Todd's troupe forces strangers to interact with themselves and their city in unexpected and comical ways.

"I just love that moment because something that is unusual might scare an individual, but when you commiserate with other people around and realize there are other people who are also experiencing this it becomes fun and funny."

It may seem silly or frivolous, but it represents the sixth and final fundamental, as summed up by Gilbert; "If you could only know one thing to understand human beings it would be this; human beings are social animals. Almost every one of our greatest sources of joy is a social source of joy, something about our interaction with or relationship with another person."