It is All About Relationships
First, we need to ask if findings from the Harvard Study can be generalized to a broader population. After all, this study is limited to several populations in the Boston area (including a highly nonrepresentative population of late 1930s Harvard undergraduates).
Wide-Spread Confirmation
Waldinger and Schulz (2023, p. 21) are fully aware of this concern about representation, resulting in their brief review of other major studies conducted in many societies throughout the world. These studies represent “tens of thousands of people:”
“All of these studies, as well as our own Harvard Study, bear witness to the importance of human connections. They show that people who are more connected to family, to friends, and to community, are happier and physically healthier than people who are less well connected. People who are more isolated than they want to be find their health declining sooner than people who feel connected to others. Lonely people also live shorter lives. Sadly, this sense of disconnection from others is growing across the world. About one in four Americans report feeling lonely more than sixty million people. In China, loneliness among older adults has markedly increased in recent years, and Great Britain has appointed a minister of loneliness to address what has become a major public health challenge.”
If we can accept Waldinger and Schulz’s findings—with some justification—then we can turn to the potential reasons why interpersonal relationships are so important.
Evolution and Eudaimonia
For Waldinger and Schulz, the reasons for relationships being of central importance seems to reside in two factors: evolution and eudaimonia. I turn first to the matter of evolution. Here is what Waldinger and Schulz (2023, p. 28) have to say about the evolutionarily adaptive function served by interpersonal relationships:
“Prehistoric humans were threatened in ways we can hardly conceive of today. They had similar bodies, but primitive technology gave them only minimal protection from the environment and predatory animals, and virtually no remedies for injury or other health problems. A tooth-ache could end in death. They lived short, hard, and probably terrifying lives. And yet they survived. Why?
One important reason is a trait that early Homo sapiens shared with many other successful animal species: their bodies and brains had evolved to encourage cooperation.
They survived because they were social.”
At this point, Waldinger and Schulz directly relate these evolutionary biology studies to their findings at Harvard (Waldinger and Schulz (2023, p. 29):
“We are often asked to summarize the findings of the Harvard Study.
People want to know: What is the most important thing we’ve learned? Both of us are by nature resistant to simple answers so these conversations are often not as short as the questioners might like. But when we really think about the consistent signal that comes through after eighty four years of study and hundreds of research papers, it is that one simple message:
Positive relationships are essential to human well-being.”
There is a second factor involved in the important role played by interpersonal relationships. This factor is a bit more ephemeral that human survival. It concerns human happiness—the reason why we want to survive! This factor is Eudaimonia—a term and concept to be traced back to ancient times (Waldinger and Schulz, 2023, p. 18):
