Modeling Human Happiness

During the first two years of the project, ModHap has worked to deepen our understanding of ancient concepts of happiness and their relevance to our modern eudaimonic understanding of happiness. We have also formulated new methods to test the Aristotelian concept of happiness and collected new data that shed light on the genetic, social and psychological aspects of happiness.

ModHap is an interdisciplinary project that integrates insights from ancient philosophy, philosophy of science and psychology in order to develop new empirically testable notions of happiness. Our main objective is to develop new scientific models of happiness, which will provide vital knowledge about the sources of happiness, generate novel metrics for empirically measuring happiness, and lay the groundwork for innovative interventions aimed at improving and sustaining happiness. Our core hypothesis is that an integration of ancient conceptions and contemporary scientific investigations will generate novel models and understandings of human happiness. An overly individualistic and subjectivist modern perspective limits contemporary happiness research, and groundbreaking conceptual and methodological changes in the science of happiness will be made possible by exploring four ancient theses about the nature of happiness: that it is best understood (i) as fundamentally interpersonal or social, (ii) as inherently value-laden, (iii) as grounded in human nature and (iv) as a temporally extended dynamic activity. We will explore each thesis on three integrated levels: historically, conceptually and empirically. Each work package will be dedicated to exploring one of the ancient theses in order to construct new conceptual models that can be tested empirically. Our three-pronged approach encompasses (1) the systematic study of ancient theories of happiness using philological methods of interpretation and philosophical methods of argument reconstruction and conceptual analysis; (2) the use of insights and tools from philosophy of science to develop empirically testable models of happiness based on the ancient conceptions and to explore the methodological foundations of the study of happiness; and (3) empirical studies employing the newly developed concepts.