What Harvard’s Grant Study Reveals about Happiness and Life

In 1966, when he was 32, George Vaillant took over Harvard’s famous Grant Study. The task: track hundreds of Harvard men, from youth to death, and determine what predicts wellbeing. Nearly half a century later, Vaillant lays out his final findings, and discovers that his own maturation is inseparable from the lives he examines.

In the early 1940s, two Harvard sophomores named Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein were rejected for participation in a study. The study, known as the Grant Study, was funded by William T. Grant, owner of the nationwide chain of 25 cent stores that also bore his name. It was to become one of the foremost “longitudinal studies” of 20th century social science, tracking the physical and emotional health of a cohort of young Harvard men through the rest of their lives.

In his proposal to the university president, Arlen V. Bock, a Harvard doctor, argued that the time was ripe for such an experiment. He cited “the stress of modern pressures,” for which “the current generation of students had been left largely unprepared.” These students had been born into the aftermath of the first World War and would graduate into another; their births coincided with the advent of broadcast technology and the consumer culture it helped spawn; and they’d been raised in an era of shifting sexual mores, by parents who endured the Great Depression. As for why the study should take place at Harvard, it was thought that Harvard grads had a high likelihood of long life—a necessity for a study that sought to answer:

What is health?

Between 1939 and 1946, Bock’s team selected 268 sophomores. Alas, no record explains why Mailer and Bernstein were rejected. Back then, scientists believed that physical constitution and breeding—rather than, say, “emotional intelligence,” a happy childhood, or a capacity for love—were the best predictors of a successful life. Those men with masculine body builds—muscular mesomorphs (narrow hips, broad shoulders)—were favored over skinny ectomorphs and pudgy endomorphs. Volunteers were asked about masturbation and their thoughts on premarital sex, but not about their girlfriends or friendships. They were measured for organ function, brow ridge, moles, and the hanging length of their scrotum.

Grant withdrew his funding in 1947, and the study sputtered along for the next 20 years. In 1966, George E. Vaillant, a 32 year-old psychiatrist, was put in charge of the study, and it became his lifework. Vaillant, who was 10 to 15 years younger than the Grant members, had spent his early career studying recovery from heroin addiction. He’d become interested in how men used involuntary defenses, or coping mechanisms, to evolve and adapt incrementally to life’s setbacks. His new job, then, was a good fit. Following the Grant men through marriage, parenthood, divorce, career troubles, second (and third) marriages, bouts with alcoholism and other vices, parental death, and the golden years of grandchildren and physical lessening, would allow Vaillant to, as he put it, investigate the mysteries of incremental adaptation to his heart’s content.

“Some men came to Cambridge to be interviewed, but in most cases I went to them—to Hawaii, Canada, London, New Zealand,” writes the 82 year-old Vaillant in Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study, his final dispatch summing up nearly 50 years of work. “There were cultural differences, too. All the New Yorkers and most of the New Englanders met me in their offices, and few offered me a meal. Virtually all the Midwesterners saw me at home and invited me to dinner. The Californians were evenly divided. Several wives were openly suspicious of the whole enterprise. One spoke so stridently into the telephone that sitting across the desk from her husband I could hear her refuse to see ‘that shrink’ under any circumstances.”

Four members ran for the United States Senate and one became a governor. The Grant men also include John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee, the longtime editor of The Washington Post when it published the Pentagon Papers and broke Watergate. In a 2009 article about the Grant Study, The Atlantic reported that Kennedy’s Grant files had been withdrawn and sealed until 2040. For Bradlee’s part, he’s not mentioned in Triumphs of Experience. Though Vaillant did publish a profile of Bradlee in his earlier book about the study, Adaptation to Life (1977). In that book, Vaillant used Bradlee—who appears under pseudonym, as do all Grant men—as a shining example of sublimation, a “mature defense” that describes men who adapt to their anger by finding healthy ways to re-channel it as, for example, passion for their work.

In the new book, Vaillant returns bearing another three decades of data as well as his own lengthening perspective. To avid consumers of modern happiness literature, some of Vaillant’s conclusions will seem shopworn (“Happiness is love. Full stop.”), while other results of the Grant Study appear to confirm what social science has long posited—that a warm and stable childhood environment is a crucial ingredient of success; or that alcoholism is a strong predictor of divorce. But what’s unique about the Grant Study is the freedom it gives Vaillant to look past quick diagnosis, to focus on how patterns of growth can determine patterns of wellbeing.

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/07/what-harvard-s-grant-study-reveals-about-happiness-and-life.html