HASSNERS Humanist Atheist Scientific Secularist Naturalistic Evolutionary Rationalist Sceptics

• 
• • Julian Baggini
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Sunday October 26 2008 14.00 GMT
  • Article history

"In these uncertain economic times, it is important to remember just how greatly friends can contribute to your general wellbeing and happiness." This earth-shattering conclusion has been reached by Dr Richard Tunney, a psychologist at the University of Nottingham two millennia after Aristotle declared, somewhat more pithily: "The happy man needs friends."

Tunney, however, has gone one further than Aristotle and worked out how many friends we should have. The great Greek advised having "as many as are enough for the purpose of living together".

Tunney avoids such obfuscation and says the optimal number of friends is 10.

Or more. To be precise, you have a 40% chance of being happy if you have five friends or fewer, rising to 50% if you have up to 10, while if you have more than that, you're chances of happiness stand at 55%.

However, it's counterproductive to try to have many more than this, because, as Aristotle again said "it would seem actually impossible to be a great friend to many people ... Those who have many friends and mix intimately with them all are thought to be no one's friend."

It was Aristotle who also said that the mark of the trained mind is not to expect more precision than the subject matter permits. Wise words. Because Tunney's study, and others like it, deal with averages, the numbers mean nothing to us as individuals. If I'm a solitary kind of person, trying to make more friends is likely to cause me distress, not cheer me up. The study is also vague in one area where Aristotle was more detailed: it says little about what kinds of friends make for the best ones.

Nevertheless, even as I dismiss this "latest research" (commissioned by the National Lottery) as shallow and uninformative, I hear echoes of Hamlet's complaint: "You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery. Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, you cannot play upon me."

We like to think we are deep, mysterious. Any study which threatens to penetrate this opacity is greeted with suspicion. Hence critiques by authors like Richard Schoch and Mark Vernon of "the new science of happiness".

There's certainly more to happiness and the good life than can be said by psychology alone. But the desire to preserve the heart of our mystery is often based more on pride and fear than good sense. Happiness cannot be reduced to a scientific formula, of course. But that doesn't mean that science can't shed some light on how it works. Like it or not, on average, there is no mystery about what makes us happy: health, solvency, rewarding work, friends and social networks. If that makes us seem more predictable and uninteresting, that's tough. There are plenty of real mysteries in human life: we don't need to worry about a few of them being solved.