chp 12
PHENOMENOLOGY: AWARENESS IS EVERYTHING
From a phenomenological viewpoint, the only place and time in which you exist is in your consciousness, right here, right now. The past, the future, other people, and other places are no more than ideas and, in a sense, illusions.
The central insight of humanistic psychology is that one’s conscious experience of the world, also called a person’s phenomenology, is psychologically more important than the world itself. And that summary may be an understatement. Proponents of phenomenological approaches to psychology sometimes assume that immediate, conscious experience is all that matters. Everything that has happened to you in the past, everything that is true about you now, and anything that might happen in the future can influence you only by affecting your thoughts and feelings at this moment. Indeed, from a phenomenological viewpoint, the only place and time in which you exist is in your consciousness, right here, right now. The past, the future, other people, and other places are no more than ideas and, in a sense, illusions. The sense is this: A broader reality might exist, but only the part of it that you perceive—or invent—matters or ever will matter to you. Your hand might be on fire, but the trick, as G. Gordon Liddy observed, is not to care. More importantly, the realization that only your present experience matters is the basis of free will. The past is gone and the future is not here yet. You are here now and can choose what to think, feel, and do.
This may all sound rather New Age, but phenomenological analysis is not a recent idea. The Talmud says, “We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.” Epictetus, a Greek Stoic philosopher who lived 2,000 years ago, said, “It is not things in themselves that trouble us, but our opinions of things.” Likewise, Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor and general who seems to have been one of G. Gordon Liddy’s role models, wrote, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” More recently, but still more than half a century ago, Carl Rogers (1951, p. 484) wrote, “I do not react to some absolute reality, but to my perception of this reality. It is this perception which for me is reality” (see McAdams, 1990).
Your particular experience of the world is called your construal. Your construal, which might be different from anybody else’s, forms the basis of how you live your life, including the goals you pursue and the obstacles and opportunities you perceive. How would you view a chance to travel? It would open exciting possibilities and might, at the same time, raise significant risks. How about starting a new relationship? This could be the first step toward an emotionally fulfilling life or, viewed another way, a possible path toward rejection and despair. Research shows that situational construals are related to both personality and gender (Sherman, Nave, & Funder, 2013). Narcissists (see Chapter 6) are relatively likely to construe the situations they experience as putting them at the focus of attention, and people high in openness to experience (also see Chapter 6) are especially likely to construe situations as including intellectual and artistic stimulation. Men are more likely than women to perceive a potential for threat or blame; women are more likely to perceive the need for people to be supportive but also are more likely to perceive a need to be assertive.
While these relations with personality and gender appear to be reliable, the correlations with situational construal are not large, and there is still plenty of room for other influences including, possibly, free choice. Indeed, humanist psychologists believe, it is by choosing your construal of the world—deciding how to interpret your experience—that you can achieve free will (Boss, 1963). And it is by leaving this choice to other people or to society that you lose your autonomy and, in a sense, your soul. (I will say more about this later.)
These observations imply that psychology has a special duty to study how people perceive, understand, and experience reality. In 19th-century Leipzig, Germany, Wilhelm Wundt founded one of the first psychological laboratories. The primary method he followed was introspection, in which his research assistants tried to observe their own perceptions and thought processes (Wundt, 1894). But the roots of psychology’s interest in phenomenology go back even further, to the existential philosophers.
Glossary
phenomenology
The study of conscious experience. Often, conscious experience itself is referred to as an individual’s phenomenology.
construal
An individual’s particular experience of the world or way of interpreting reality.
introspection
The task of observing one’s own mental processes.
EXISTENTIALISM
Existentialism is a broad philosophical movement that began in Europe in the mid-1800s. Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish theologian, was one of its early proponents, as were Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and more recently Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Existentialism arose as a reaction against European rationalism, science, and the Industrial Revolution. The existentialists thought that by the late 19th century, rationality had gone too far in its attempt to account for everything. In particular, they thought science, technology, and rational philosophy had lost touch with human experience. This point of view began to catch on among European philosophers after World War II, which through its previously unimaginable carnage seemed to have disproved much of what they previously had assumed was true about progress, civilization, human nature, and even the meaning of life. The purpose of existential philosophy was to regain contact with the basic experiences of being alive and aware.
Existential analysis begins with the concrete and specific experience of a human being existing at a particular moment in time and space. An excellent example is you, right now. (I mean, then, back when you read the words “right now,” although that is already past, so maybe we should concentrate on right now, instead. Oops, too late.) The point is, your experience of existence happens one infinitesimally small moment at a time, which is then gone and followed by another.
The key existential questions are: What is the nature of existence? How does it feel? And what does it mean?
The Three Parts of Experience
According to existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger, if you look deeply into your own mind, you will find that the conscious experience of being alive has three components (Binswanger, 1958).
The first component is biological experience, or Umwelt, which consists of the sensations you feel by virtue of being a biological organism. Umwelt includes pleasure, pain, heat, cold, and all the bodily sensations. Poke your finger with a pin: The experience is Umwelt.
The second component is social experience, or Mitwelt, which consists of what you think and feel as a social being. Your emotions and thoughts about other people and the emotions and thoughts directed at you make up Mitwelt. Think about someone you love, fear, or admire. The experience is Mitwelt.
The third component is inner, psychological experience, or Eigenwelt. In a sense, this is the experience of experience itself. It consists of how you feel and think when you try to understand yourself, your own mind, and your own existence. Eigenwelt includes introspection (and we can presume that Binswanger himself felt it strongly when trying to figure out the components of experience). Try to watch your own mind having the experience of a pinprick, or the experience of love, or even the experience of thinking about this paragraph. It’s a little bewildering, isn’t it? When you observe your own mind and feelings in this way, the (often confusing) experience is Eigenwelt.
“Thrown-ness” and Angst
An important basis of your experience is your thrown-ness—Heidegger used the German word Geworfenheit. This term refers to the time, place, and circumstances into which you happened to be born (Heidegger, 1927/1962). Your experience obviously is affected by whether you were “thrown” into a medieval slave society, or a 17th-century Native American society, or an early 21st-century industrialized society.
From an existential perspective, this last way of being thrown—yours—is particularly difficult. Existence in modern society is difficult because the world seems to have no overarching meaning or purpose. Religion plays a relatively small role compared with the past. Its modern substitutes—science, art, and philosophy—have failed to provide an alternative worldview that can tell you the two things you most need to know:
Why am I here?
What should I be doing?
According to existential philosophy, there are no answers to these two concerns beyond those you invent for yourself.
Difficulty in answering these questions leads to anxiety about the meaning of life and whether you are spending yours the right way. After all, life is short, and you get only one—waste it, and you waste everything. The unpleasant feelings caused by contemplating these concerns is called existential anxiety, or Angst. According to Sartre (1965), Angst can be analyzed into three separate sensations: anguish, forlornness, and despair.
Every conscious human feels anguish because choices, though inevitable, are never perfect. A choice to do good in one way can lead to bad outcomes in other ways. For example, deciding to aid one person may leave others to suffer. Such trade-offs are inescapable, according to Sartre, so the resulting anguish is inescapable, too.
Furthermore, nothing and no one—no god, no unquestionable set of rules or values—can guide your choices or let you off the hook for what you have decided. Your choices are yours alone. (Sartre also says that even if there is a god who tells you what to do, you still must decide whether to do what God says—so you remain alone in your choice.) Furthermore, there is no escape from this existential solitude: So there you are, forlorn, alone with your choices.
Finally, any aware person realizes that many outcomes are beyond control, including some of the most important elements of life. If you acknowledge this momentous and regrettable fact, you also will feel despair at your inability to change crucial aspects of the world. This inability, according to Sartre, only redoubles your responsibility to affect those aspects of the world that you can influence.
Bad Faith
What should you do about Angst and all of these other unpleasant-sounding experiences? According to existentialists such as Sartre, you must face them directly. It is a moral imperative, they believe, to face your own mortality and the apparent meaninglessness of life, and to seek purpose for your existence nonetheless. This is your existential responsibility, which requires existential courage, or what Sartre called optimistic toughness (1965, p. 49).
Of course, there is a way out, at least temporarily, that requires neither courage nor toughness: avoid the problem altogether. Quit worrying about what life means, get a good job, buy a big car, and advance your social status. Do as you are told by society, convention, your peer group, political propaganda, religious dogma, and advertising. Lead the unexamined life. Existentialists call this head-in-the-sand approach living in bad faith. Although ignoring existential issues in this way is very common, the existentialists point out that it has three problems.
The first problem, they say, is that to ignore the troubling facts of existence is to live a cowardly lie; it is immoral and amounts to selling your soul for comfort. You only get one short life, and you are giving up its very meaning if you refuse to examine the substance of your experience. Existentially speaking, you might as well be a rock.
In his novel Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut (1963) proposed that a human being is really no more than a pile of lucky mud. (After all, the human body is chemically not much different from the dirt it walks on, except that it is about 70 percent water). The only difference, says Vonnegut, is that this mass of person-shaped mud is up and walking around. More important, it has awareness, so it can look around and experience the world. The other mud, that stuff underfoot, does not get to do that. It just lies there, ignorant of all the interesting things happening above.
And that is Vonnegut’s good news. The bad news is that this luck cannot last. Sooner or later (at death), the chemicals that make up the body begin to break down and turn back into earth. The Bible says people come from the earth and return to it; that is Vonnegut’s point as well.
Therefore, it is imperative not to waste this brief period of lucky awareness. As long as you are alive-and-aware mud, and not just regular mud, you must experience as much of the world as possible, as vividly as possible. In particular, you need to be aware of your luck and know it won’t last—this is your only chance. The tragedy, from an existential perspective, is that many people never do this. They lead unexamined lives, never realizing how fortunate they are to be alive and aware, and they eventually lose their awareness forever without realizing how special it was.
A second, more pragmatic problem with living in bad faith is that, even if you manage to ignore troubling existential issues by surrounding yourself with material comforts, you still will not be happy. Indeed, research shows that most people would rather live a meaningful life than be wealthy (L. A. King & Napa, 1998), and that experiences promote happiness more than possessions do (Van Boven, 2005).
The person who chooses the material path, therefore, might occasionally suffer a tantalizing, frustrating glimpse of the more satisfying life that could have been if she had made different choices. These dark moments of the soul may pass quickly, but until one owns up to existential responsibility and thinks seriously about what is really important, such moments will continue to sneak up.
The third problem with the ostrich approach to existential issues is that it is impossible, because choosing not to worry about the meaning of life and surrendering your choices to external authorities is still a choice. As Sartre (1965) put it, “What is not possible is not to choose . . . If I do not choose, I am still choosing” (p. 54). Thus, there is no exit from the existential dilemma, even if you can fool yourself into thinking that there is.Authentic Existence
The existentialists’ preferred alternative to bad faith is to courageously come to terms with the facts: You are mortal, your life is short, and you are master of your own destiny within those limits. This approach, called authentic existence (Binswanger, 1963) entails being honest, insightful, and morally correct.
Authentic existence will not relieve you from loneliness and unhappiness; a courageous examination of conscious experience reveals the awful truth that every person is alone and doomed. Life has no meaning beyond what you give it, which means that any apparent meaning it might seem to have is an illusion. The essence of human experience is this discovery: The human being is the only animal that understands it must die This is pretty stern stuff. Psychologists have noted that the terror inspired by the prospect of death can cause people to distort reality in many different ways in order to feel better (Pyszczynski et al., 1997), and may be the basis of culture itself as “humans must balance a propensity for life with an awareness of the inevitability of death” (Matsumoto, 2006, pp. 35–36). In other words, existentialism is not for wimps (McAdams, 1990). It takes moral courage to cast aside defense mechanisms and the veneer of culture, and peer into the void of mortality and meaninglessness. When existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche did this, he decided the most honorable response was to rise above it all and become a superman. Nietzsche’s superman did not wear a cape and tights, however. Instead, his ideal person sought to triumph over the apparent meaninglessness of life by developing the existential strength to face what must be faced. It turns out this is easier said than done. Nietszche never managed to become a superman himself; he went insane and died in an asylum.
Jean-Paul Sartre tried to be both more realistic and a little more optimistic. He sometimes expressed annoyance with people who considered existentialism gloomy, although one wonders what else he could expect, given his claim that the basic elements of existence are anguish, forlornness, and despair. Sartre lightened this load a little with his claim that only through existential analysis can people regain awareness of their freedom. He wrote that existential theory “is the only one which gives man dignity, the only one which does not reduce him to an object” (Sartre, 1965, p. 51). He believed that the existential challenge is to do all you can to better the human condition, even in the face of life’s uncertainties.
A similar lesson was offered by existential philosopher Viktor Frankl (1959/1992), who advised that you can become stronger in the face of difficult circumstances if, instead of asking, “What do I want from life?” you can move to asking, “What does life want from me?” Frankl’s advice has some empirical support. One study found that people who endorsed such statements as “I strive to make this world a better place” and “I accept my limitations” felt more hope and less depression over the following two months (Mascaro & Rosen, 2005). They also were more likely to report that they had “found a really significant meaning for leading my life.” This finding offers a place where philosophy, psychology, and the teachings of many religious traditions come together: Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is to do something for somebody else.
The Eastern Alternative
The core view of the existentialists summarized so far in this chapter seems rather gloomy, given the way it harps on individual isolation, mortality, and the difficulty of finding meaning in life. Whatever you think of this philosophy, notice that it is fundamentally European, Western, and focused on the individual. We will consider other cultural differences between Eastern and Western points of view in Chapter 13, but for now just notice how existentialism begins with the experience of the single individual at a single moment in time. All else, it claims, is illusion. The fundamental reality is your own experience at this moment—the past, the future, and the experiences of other people are forever closed off.
René Descartes believed that the existence of his own singular self was the one thing he could be sure of; Buddhism teaches that he was overconfident.
From the perspective of the Eastern religions that influence most of the people on earth (such as in China, India, and Japan) and that are often associated with collectivist cultures, this analysis has everything backwards. Consider Zen Buddhism (see Mosig, 1989, 1999; Rahula, 1974). The key idea of Buddhism is anatta, or “nonself,” the idea that the independent, singular self you sense inside your mind is merely an illusion. French philosopher René Descartes believed that the existence of his own singular self was the one thing he could be sure of; Buddhism teaches that he was overconfident. What feels like your “self” is merely a temporary composite of many things—including your physiology, environment, social setting, and society—all of which are constantly changing. There is no unchanging soul at the center of all this, just a momentary coming together of all these influences that, in the next moment, is gone, only to be replaced by another. The writer Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland, California, “There’s no there there.”4 That’s what the Buddha says about the self.
Furthermore, Buddhism teaches that this illusion of having a separate and independent self is harmful. The illusion leads to feelings of isolation—such as tormented the existentialists—and an excessive concern with “me” and that which is “mine.” The true nature of reality is that everything and everyone are interconnected now, and not only in this moment but also across time. It is not true, according to Buddhism, that all you have is your own experience, now. Rather, there is nothing special about your experience or about the moment labeled “the present.” All consciousness and all of time have equal claim to existence and are equally important, and time flows not from past to present to future, but from present to present to present (Yozan Mosig, personal communication, November 6, 2000). In a similar fashion, a single person is just one of many. Your existence is no more or less real or important than anyone else’s. The more important fact is that all people are interconnected.
This viewpoint might seem to diminish the importance of the self, but, in a way, it enhances it. The Buddhist view implies that instead of being forever alone and powerless, you are an integral and interconnected part of the universe and it is part of you, just as the present moment is made of equal parts past and future. Moreover, you are immortal in the sense that you are part of something larger than yourself that will last forever.
If you can begin to grasp these ideas, your selfish thoughts and fears about the future will fall away. You will understand the idea of anicca, that all things must pass and it is best to accept this fact instead of repressing or fighting it. The current moment is not particularly important; all moments in the past and future have equal status. The well-being of others matters just as much as your own, because the boundaries between you and them are illusory. These ideas are difficult to grasp, especially for persons raised in Western cultures, and true understanding can be the work of a lifetime. If you do achieve it, you are said to be enlightened. Enlightenment is manifested by caring for others the same as for yourself, which leads to universal compassion; according to Buddhism, this is the essence of wisdom and leads to a serene, selfless state called nirvana. This definitely sounds better than anguish, forlornness, and despair.
Glossary
existentialism
The approach to philosophy that focuses on conscious experience (phenomenology), free will, the meaning of life, and other basic questions of existence.
Umwelt
In Binswanger’s phenomenological analysis, biological experience such as the sensations a person feels of being a live animal.
Mitwelt
In Binswanger’s phenomenological analysis, social experience such as feelings and thoughts about others and oneself in relation to them.
Eigenwelt
In Binswanger’s phenomenological analysis, the experience of experience itself; the result of introspection.
thrown-ness
In Heidegger’s existential analysis, the era, location, and situation into which a person happens to be born.
Angst
In existential philosophy, the anxiety that stems from doubts about the meaning and purpose of life; also called existential anxiety.
anatta
In Zen Buddhism, the fundamental idea of “nonself”—that the single, isolated self is an illusion.
anicca
In Zen Buddhism, the recognition that all things are temporary and, therefore, it is best to avoid attachments to them.
nirvana
In Zen Buddhism, the serene state of selfless being that is the result of having achieved enlightenment.
OPTIMISTIC HUMANISM: ROGERS AND MASLOW
America has a reputation—partially deserved—of being a cultural melting pot. So, perhaps it was only natural that two American psychologists would mix European existential philosophy, the less isolated Eastern view of the self, and a stereotypically American can-do attitude to yield an optimistic philosophy of life. Beginning in the early 1940s, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow developed related approaches to humanistic psychology. They began with the standard existential assumptions that phenomenology is central and that people have free will, and then added another crucial idea—that people are basically good: They seek to relate closely with one another, and they have an innate need to improve themselves and the world. It is important to bear in mind that this optimistic view is an added assumption; Rogers, Maslow, and other humanists believe it but can offer no proof. What kind of evidence would be relevant? All theories begin with assumptions, though, and this one is not particularly extreme. So let us take a closer look at humanistic psychology and see where it leads.
Self-Actualization: Rogers
Carl Rogers changed the tone and much of the message of the classic existential and phenomenological analysis when he proposed that “the organism [by which he means any person] has one basic tendency and striving—to actualize, maintain, and enhance the experiencing organism [itself]” (Rogers, 1951, p. 487). According to Rogers’s theory, a person can be understood only from the perspective of her phenomenal field, which is the entire panorama of conscious experience. This is where everything comes together—unconscious conflicts, environmental influences, memories, hopes, and so on. These contents of the mind combine in different ways at every moment, and the combinations give rise to ongoing conscious experience. So far, this resembles the standard phenomenological fare we considered earlier.
Rogers added a new aspect, however, when he posited that people have a basic need to actualize, that is, to maintain and enhance life. (This need has much in common with Freud’s notion of libido as it was interpreted in Chapter 10.) The goal of existence is to satisfy this need. This assumption led Rogers to differ sharply with traditional existentialists who believed that existence has no intrinsic goal.
The Hierarchy of Needs: Maslow
Abraham Maslow developed his theory (1943, 1987) about the same time as Rogers and ended up being almost as influential. Maslow’s theory of humanistic psychology begins with the same basic assumption as Rogers’s: A person’s ultimate need or motive is to self-actualize. However, Maslow claimed that this motive becomes active only if the person’s more basic needs are met first. According to Maslow, human motivation is characterized by a hierarchy of needs (see Figure 12.1). First, a person requires food, water, safety, and the other essentials of survival. When those are in hand, the person then seeks sex, meaningful relationships, prestige, and money. Only when those desires are satisfied does the person turn to the quest for self-actualization. In other words, someone starving to death is not particularly concerned with the higher aspects of existence. In this belief, Maslow is also at odds with traditional existentialists, who would insist that even an individual who is starving has free choice in what to concern himself with.
Maslow’s theory is surprisingly practical because it is relevant to topics such as career choice and employee motivation. Consider your own ambitions: What kind of career are you seeking? My parents grew up during the Great Depression of the 1930s and remained acutely aware of the dangers of being unemployed, homeless, and even starving—not that any of this ever happened to them, but they had lived through an era during which these outcomes were a real possibility for an unusually large number of Americans. As a result, like others of their generation, they put a premium on finding a career path that was, above everything else, safe. Making a lot of money was not the issue; rather, choosing a field where “you can always get a job,” as they repeatedly said, was the way to ensure survival and stability. My father dreamed of being an architect. For most of his career, he worked as an accountant.
You can imagine their reaction when I declared a psychology major!5 But the reason I felt free to do this was precisely because of my parents’ success: The issues of homelessness and survival they faced never seemed quite real to me. I took that level of security for granted, which, in Maslow’s terms, freed me to move up the hierarchy of needs and choose a field based on its possibilities for self-expression.
At the university where I teach, a large number of students are children of first- or second-generation immigrants; many are from Asia or Latin America. Their situation is not so different from mine at their age. Their parents took risks to come to America in search of opportunity and financial security. And, like my parents, many of my students’ parents do not quite understand why their children would choose a major as seemingly impractical as psychology. But again, when a child of immigrant parents chooses a career because of its opportunities for self-expression rather than financial security, this is evidence that her parents have succeeded. She takes security for granted and is therefore willing to take risks to accomplish more.
Maslow’s theory is also relevant to employee motivation (see also Chapter 16). The most expensive part of any organization’s budget is its payroll. So it is crucial that employees apply their initiative and imagination to the organization’s goals. Smart managers understand two things: (a) Employees will not show initiative and imagination unless they feel secure, and (b) employees who feel secure want something besides more money—they want to express themselves through their work by identifying with the organization’s goals and contributing to them. At this writing, one of the most successful companies in the United States is Southwest Airlines (and it is one of very few airlines that has not at some point flirted with bankruptcy). It has never laid off an employee. And while it does not pay as much as some of its competitors, it goes to extraordinary lengths to make each employee feel like a valuable part of the organization, with everything from regular company parties to open meetings with management where employees at any level can make suggestions to the boss.
The hierarchy of needs can also be used to explain how people in different cultures may have different bases of happiness. According to one study of 39 nations (including more than 54,000 survey participants), people in poorer nations were happier when they had more money, whereas people in richer nations were happier when their home life was going well (Oishi, Diener, Lucas, & Suh, 1999). To be exact, according to a meta-analysis that summarized many different studies, in poorer countries the average correlation (see Chapter 3) between well-being and economic status was r = .28, and in richer countries the average was only r = .10 (Howell & Howell, 2008). These findings demonstrate one of Maslow’s key points: Money is most important when you have very little. After a certain point, it becomes less important to happiness (though we often seek it anyway); our emotional needs and, in particular, our relationships with others grow to matter more.
An update to Maslow’s 70-year-old theory comes from the direction of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychologist Douglas Kenrick and his colleagues proposed a revised hierarchy of human motives (Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, & Schaller, 2010; see Figure 12.2). As I hope you recall from Chapter 9, the ultimate evolutionary imperative of every organism, including people, is to reproduce and keep the species going. In Kenrick’s pyramid, this is the ultimate goal, on the top, but a person has to get there in stages, just as in Maslow’s. First, one has to fulfill immediate physiological needs for survival, then protect oneself, find allies and friends, seek status, find a mate, keep a mate, and raise children—in that order. All of these activities continue throughout life, of course, but first things do The Fully Functioning Person
Maslow and Rogers believed that the best way to live is to become more clearly aware of reality and of yourself. If you can perceive the world accurately and without neurotic distortion, and if you take responsibility for your choices, then you become what Rogers called a fully functioning person, who lives what the existentialists would call an authentic existence—except that the fully functioning person is happy. A fully functioning person faces the world without fear, self-doubt, or neurotic defenses. Doing this becomes possible only if you have experienced unconditional positive regard from the important people in your life, especially during childhood. Maslow disagreed slightly; he believed that anybody from any background could become a fully functioning person. However, if you feel that other people value you only if you are smart, successful, attractive, or good, then according to Rogers, you will develop conditions of worth.
Conditions of worth are the idea that we are taught, almost from the cradle, that we are good and valuable people only if we fulfill certain criteria. In current society, these criteria include being young, healthy, good-looking, and prosperous. Now look through the photographs that adorn just about any college textbook. Who is usually portrayed in these photos? People who are young, healthy, good-looking, and prosperous. Posed in attractive settings, most of them look like professional models, probably because they are professional models. One could call this genre of pictures—and it is a genre in its own right—“Happy Laughing Undergraduates” (see Figure 12.3). How do pictures like these affect people who don’t fit this ideal—which is, by the way, just about all of us? If nothing else, they advertise the usual conditions of worth and, in most cases, serve as subtle reminders that we don’t quite measure up.
Conditions of worth limit your freedom to act and think. If you believe you are valuable only if certain things about you are true, then you may distort your perception of reality so you can believe them even if they are not true. If you think you are valuable only if your behavior conforms to certain rules and expectations, you may lose your ability to choose what to do. Both of these limitations violate the existential imperatives to see the world as it is, choose freely, and take complete responsibility for all of your actions.
A person who has experienced unconditional positive regard from parents and other important people, and has managed to avoid being overly influenced by media portrayals of unrealistic perfection, does not develop such conditions of worth. This achievement can lead to a life free from existential anxiety, because the person will be confident of her value. She will not need to follow rules, because her sense of innate goodness leads her to make the right choices. A fully functioning person lives a life rich in emotion and self-discovery, and is reflective, spontaneous, flexible, adaptable, confident, trusting, creative, self-reliant, ethical, open-minded—you get the idea. She is also “more understanding of others and more accepting of others as separate individuals” (Rogers, 1951, p. 520).
Psychotherapy
The goal of Rogerian psychotherapy, and humanistic psychotherapy in general, is to help the client become a fully functioning person. To achieve this goal, the therapist develops a genuine and caring relationship with the client and provides unconditional positive regard (Levine, 2006). This technique is sometimes caricatured: The patient says something like, “I would really like to kill you with a knife,” and the therapist—reluctant to impose conditions of worth—replies, “You feel you want to kill me with a knife. Uh-huh.”
This portrayal is probably unfair—Rogers once stated he would stop a murderer—but it captures the basic idea that, in his view, the therapist’s job is (1) to help the client perceive his own thoughts and feelings without the therapist seeking to change them in any way, and (2) to make the client feel appreciated no matter what he thinks, says, or does. This process allows insight and the removal of conditions of worth, the theory goes, and helps the client become a fully functioning person.
Rogerian psychotherapy requires enormous amounts of time and, from the therapist, the patience (and perhaps the courage) of a saint. What is the result of this kind of therapy? Although research on the effects of psychotherapy is extraordinarily difficult to conduct, Rogers and his followers tried to document some of them.
In a typical study, each individual in a group of people about to begin psychotherapy and in a group of people uninterested in therapy was asked to describe first himself and then the ideal person he would like to be. (Often these descriptions were rendered using the Q-sort technique described in Chapter 6.) The results showed that these two descriptions diverged more among people who felt they needed therapy. When the therapy group repeated this procedure after completing a program of Rogerian treatment, their real and ideal selves aligned more closely—although still not as closely as those of the people who never sought therapy (Butler & Haigh, 1954).
Results like these—and they have been reported frequently over the years—show that Rogerian psychotherapy makes people feel they are becoming more like their ideal selves, and this result seems to be about equally due to changes in clients’ ideal views as to changes in their self-views. That is, the clients not only change what they think they themselves are like, but also change how they wish to be (Rudikoff, 1954). This may or may not be a good thing, depending.
On the up side, the ideal self that one is trying to live up to be might be a malevolent product of one’s conditions of worth. If you feel miserable because you are not living in accord with society’s prescriptions for financial success, sexual orientation, or physical attractiveness, for example, then changing your ideal self so you can better accept who you really are is surely a good thing. The former NFL player David Kopay, who came out as gay after leaving football, wrote eloquently about his struggle with the huge gap between who he was and who his traditional, conservative upbringing had taught him that he should be (Kopay, 1977). Through self-reflection and therapy, he was finally able to accept his real self and arrive in a much better place.
Describing oneself as highly similar to one’s idea of a perfect person is not always a good measure of psychological adjustment. . . . Paranoid schizophrenics consider themselves close to ideal and narcissists seem pretty pleased with themselves.
On the down side, although Kopay’s story is compelling, describing oneself as highly similar to one’s idea of a perfect person is not always a good measure of psychological adjustment. One study found that people afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia considered themselves close to ideal, and concluded that to employ a high correlation between the self and ideal-self conceptions “as a sole criterion of adjustment” would lead to the inappropriate categorization of many people, particularly those afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia, as well adjusted (I. Friedman, 1955, p. 614). There is more to mental health than believing you are the way you would most like to be (Wylie, 1974). Narcissists seem pretty pleased with themselves, after all (see Chapter 6).
Despite this ambiguity about the outcome, Rogerian psychotherapy has contributed the influential idea that any psychotherapist’s first job is to listen to the client. Although not all therapists would respond “uh-huh” to statements like those mentioned earlier, the Rogerian example has influenced many therapists to be more patient in listening and more hesitant to impose their own values.
PERSONAL CONSTRUCTS: KELLY
Another important phenomenological psychologist, George Kelly, also thought that a person’s individual experience of the world was the most important part of her psychology. As we have seen, individual construals can be general (for example, Bob sees the world as an evil place) or specific (Maria sees parties as boring, or even, Maria saw last Saturday’s party as boring). Kelly’s unique contribution was to emphasize how one’s cognitive (thinking) system assembles one’s various construals of the world into individually held theories called personal constructs. These constructs, in turn, then help determine how new experiences are construed. Accordingly, Kelly’s theory (1955) of personality is called personal construct theory.
Sources of Constructs
Kelly viewed constructs as bipolar dimensions (scales ranging between one concept and its opposite, such as “good-bad”) along which people or objects can be arranged. These constructs can include paired opposites of all sorts: for example, the idea of good versus bad (as just mentioned), large versus small, weak versus strong, or conservative versus liberal. If weak versus strong is one of your constructs, you might tend to see everything and everybody in terms of individual strength. Each person’s cognitive system is made of a unique set of constructs.
An individual’s personal construct system can be assessed in many ways, but Kelly favored a method called the Role Construct Repertory Test, or the Rep test for short. The Rep test asks you to identify three people who are or have been important in your life. Then it asks you to describe how any two of them seem similar to each other and different from the third. Then you follow the same process with three important ideas, three traits you admire, and so on. In each case, the question is the same: How are two of these similar to each other and different from the third?
Kelly believed that the ways you discriminate among these objects, people, and ideas reveal the constructs through which you view the world. For example, if you frequently state that two of the objects are strong whereas the third is weak (or vice versa), then strong versus weak is probably one of your personal constructs.
Research by those publishing after Kelly has shown that particular constructs are more readily brought to mind in certain individuals. These have been called chronically accessible constructs (Bargh, Lombardi, & Higgins, 1988). For example, the idea of devastating failure might be chronically accessible to one person, so that, in everything he undertakes or even considers undertaking, the idea that it will all turn into a catastrophe is never far from his mind. For another person, the idea of interpersonal power might be chronically accessible, so that every relationship she observes or enters brings up the question, “Who is in charge here?” which frames her view of these relationships.
No matter what has happened to you, you could have chosen to draw different conclusions about what it means. In fact, you still can.
Where do these constructs come from? Kelly believed that they come from—but are not determined by—past experience. What does that mean? Kelly relied heavily on the metaphor that every person is, in a sense, a scientist: someone who obtains data and devises a theory to explain the data. But data never determine the scientist’s theory; any pattern of data could fit at least two, and perhaps an infinite number, of alternative theories. (This observation comes from elementary philosophy of science.) Therefore, the scientist always chooses which theory to use. To be sure, science has developed rules, such as the principle of parsimony (also known as “Occam’s razor”): The idea that all other things being equal, the simplest theory is the best. But these canons do not ensure the right choice—sometimes a more complex theory is accurate. To choose which theory to believe, the scientist makes a judgment call from among those that fit the data.
Kelly believed that the data you use to develop an interpretation, or theory, of what the world is like comes from the sum of your experiences and perceptions. The theory is your personal construct system, which becomes the framework for your perceptions and thoughts about the world. This system is determined not by your past experience but by your—freely chosen—interpretation of past experience. No matter what has happened to you, you could have chosen to draw different conclusions about what it means. In fact, you still can.
For example, suppose you had a miserable childhood; perhaps you were even abused. You could draw from this history a personal construct system that tells you the world is unalterably evil and abusive. That conclusion would fit the data of your life experience. Alternatively, you could conclude that no matter what life throws at you, you will survive. That conclusion—since you did survive—also fits the data. Therefore, your conclusion and your worldview are up to you. To pick another example, suppose you are about to go on a job interview. This situation could be viewed in several different ways, all of which are, to some degree, accurate: an opportunity to show off your talents, a normal conversation, an exhausting ordeal, or a terrifying risk of utter humiliation and career destruction. Which construal will you pick? Your performance at the interview may depend on it.
A corollary of personal construct theory, which Kelly called the sociality corollary, holds that understanding another person means understanding her personal construct system; you must be able to look at the world through that person’s eyes. Actions that appear incomprehensible or even evil can make sense, Kelly believed, if you can see them from the point of view of the person who chose them. In addition, he believed that the primary duty of a psychotherapist is to lead the client to self-understanding, and he designed the Rep test as a tool to help psychotherapists do that.
Constructs and Reality
The basic lesson of Kelly’s theory is that, depending on one’s personal constructs, any pattern of experience can lead to numerous—perhaps infinite—construals. That means you choose the construals you use; they are not forced on you, since others are equally possible. Kelly called this view constructive alternativism.
The implications are far-reaching. Kelly’s theory draws on a part of the philosophy of science that scientists themselves sometimes forget. Scientific paradigms are frameworks for construing the meaning of data. The basic approaches to personality considered in this book are paradigms in that sense. Each is sensible, I believe, and each is consistent with the data it regards as important, but each also represents a choice by the researcher to focus on some aspects of human psychology and ignore others. The trait paradigm, combined with the biological approach, dominates current research in personality psychology, is the one within which I do my own research, and (naturally) is my personal favorite. But I think it is important that this book also includes treatments of the psychoanalytic, humanistic and behavioral approaches to personality because there are certain topics that only they address. And who knows, one of them might take over the dominant position someday.6
The same lessons apply to many other systems of constructs, or paradigms. Almost everybody—scientist and layperson alike—has developed systems of belief that drive how they understand politics, morality, economics, and many other matters. These belief systems are useful and necessary, but a narrow-minded devotion to just one can make a person forget (or worse, deny) that other ways of constructing reality—other belief systems—are equally plausible.
Let me tell you about one of my favorite examples. According to common sense, the cost of something is the amount of resources required to get it or make it. A different view is taught in business schools: The cost of something is the difference between what it brings you and what you could have gained by spending your resources on something else. The difference between these two amounts is not your ordinary cost, but your opportunity cost.
These two definitions of cost derive from different construals of the goal of economic life. The first construes the goal as doing what you want as long as you can pay for it. This is sometimes called a satisficing goal. The second maintains that you must maximize your gain, and that unless you make as much money as possible, you have failed. This is an optimizing goal. Both goals are reasonable, and neither is intrinsically right or wrong. Yet, business schools often teach that the second goal is sophisticated and correct, whereas the first is hopelessly naïve or just plain wrong.
The consequences can be real and concrete. A few years ago, the Boston Globe published an article about a mom-and-pop grocery store located on the ground floor of a building in Boston’s Beacon Hill area, which had developed into a fashionable neighborhood. The grocer, who had been running the store for decades, was being evicted. The longtime owner of the building discovered that he could command higher rent from a clothing boutique. When neighbors protested, the landlord replied, apparently with a straight face, “I couldn’t afford to keep that grocery store there any longer with property values so high.”
He may have believed what he said, but from another point of view the landlord’s statement was absurd: As long as he could afford to keep the building, he could afford to keep the store. He never claimed the grocer paid him less than the owner needed in order to pay for the building or to live well himself. Rather, he focused on the fact that by evicting the grocer he could make more money, and thought of the difference between what he was making and what he could make as a “cost” that he could not “afford.”
This viewpoint is the inverse of a silly commercial that ran on television a few years ago. The theme of the commercial was, “What will you do with all the money you save (by buying our car)?” In one ad, a happy woman declared that with the money she saved, she was “going to Hawaii!” I have news for this person: Nobody ever went to Hawaii with the money they saved by buying a car. The news for the Boston landlord is that nobody ever went broke from opportunity costs. You can choose to think about situations this way, but you are kidding yourself if you think you are getting rich by spending less money than you could, or becoming poor by not collecting as much money as possible.
The Boston landlord and the car buyer in the commercial each absorbed a particular construct about money—and thought of that construct as real. But from
the perspective of another construct system, the landlord’s behavior was immoral,7 and the car buyer’s was simply ridiculous. The choice of how to think about issues like these can have far-reaching psychological consequences. One study contrasted maximizers, the people who believe one should always seek to get as much as one possibly can, with satisficers, the ones who believe that some outcomes, short of the maximum, are “good enough.” Compared with maximizers, satisficers enjoy more happiness, optimism, and life satisfaction, while maximizers are prone to perfectionism, depression, and regret (B. Schwartz et al., 2002).
The moral of this story is that you should probably question the construals of reality taught in business school, in science classes, or anywhere else, including in this book. Other construals are always possible, and you have the ability, the right, and (Sartre would say) perhaps the duty to choose your own. How you choose to see the world will affect everything in your life.
Early in his career, Kelly learned something else fascinating about construals. He started out as a psychoanalyst practicing in Kansas when he began to doubt some of the exotic Freudian interpretations he was offering to his plainspoken patients. As a little experiment, Kelly began offering deliberately random or odd interpretations just to see how his patients would react. To his astonishment, Kelly reported that even these purposely bizarre interpretations seemed to be helpful! He concluded that the important aspect of psychotherapy was not the content of the intervention, but the therapist’s role in getting the patient to think about reality in a different way (Kelly, 1969). Once the patient can do this, he can choose which construals work best and make the most sense, and then be on the way to recovery.
Glossary
sociality corollary
In Kelly’s personal construct theory, the principle that understanding another person requires understanding that person’s unique view of reality.
POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Abraham Maslow is often quoted as having said that health means more than simply the absence of disease (Simonton & Baumeister, 2005). This idea, along with humanistic psychology’s traditional emphasis on growth, development, and the achievement of one’s potential (Levine, 2006), has enjoyed a 21st century resurgence with the advent of the positive psychology movement (Gable & Haidt, 2005). The aim of this field of theorizing and research is to correct what its proponents see as a long-standing overemphasis within psychology on psychopathology and malfunction. Instead, positive psychology focuses on phenomena such as “positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions” in order to “improve quality of life and prevent the pathologies that arise when life is barren and meaningless” (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 5). Sound familiar? It should: It’s the theme of just about every humanistic theory reviewed in this chapter so far.
The reemergence of this theme signals a remarkable turning point in the history of psychology. For a period of several decades—from about the 1970s until just after the turn of the 21st century—humanistic psychology seemed to be dying, though a few lonely voices continued to argue for its importance (e.g., Rychlak, 1988). Their pleas have finally been answered, though perhaps not in the way they would have expected—or wanted.
Positive psychology is the rebirth of humanistic psychology. As we have seen in this chapter, the humanists consistently maintained that traditional psychology, because it treats people almost as inanimate objects of study, tends to ignore uniquely human capacities for creativity, love, wisdom, and free will. Perhaps most crucial, traditional psychology ignores the meaning of life. Positive psychologists place this issue front and center (Baumeister & Vohs, 2002), arguing that a satisfying and meaningful life involves happiness and that true happiness comes from overcoming important challenges (Ryff & Singer, 2003). This idea is not unlike Sartre’s conception of optimistic toughness and Deci and Ryan’s idea of eudaimonic happiness.
However, positive psychology does more than just revive old-fashioned humanism or put a positive spin on existential philosophy. Positive psychologists also investigate the traits, processes, and social institutions that promote a happy and meaningful life and have found that—Sartre notwithstanding—most people do find their lives meaningful (Heintzelman & King, 2014).
Virtues
A central distinctive feature of positive psychology is its focus on human strengths instead of faults. Recall from Chapters 10 and 11 how Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic viewpoint emphasized psychological conflict and the neuroses it produces. More generally, it would be fair to say that psychology focuses more on preventing or curing bad outcomes, such as mental illness, than on promoting good outcomes, such as optimal achievement and health. Positive psychology aims to fix that by identifying and promoting character strengths. A very thick book, published by the American Psychological Association, catalogs and analyzes a long list of “virtues” (C. Peterson & Seligman, 2004).
This topic raises a sticky question, though: What are virtues? After all, one person’s virtue might be another person’s vice; you may recall that the author of an earlier Book of Virtues decided that gambling was OK, apparently just because he enjoyed it (see Chapter 10). Determining how people should behave seems to involve making value judgments that go beyond science. One way that researchers have approached this problem is by trying to discern which attributes have been viewed as virtues in all cultures, at all times. A particularly ambitious project surveyed the key writings of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, ancient Greek philosophy, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam8 (Dahlsgaard, Peterson, & Seligman, 2005). The authors identified six core virtues: courage, justice, humanity (compassion), temperance, wisdom, and transcendence (see Table 12.2). Of these, the most clearly universal appeared to be justice and humanity, because these values were explicitly mentioned as important in all eight of the cultural traditions examined (see Table 12.3). Temperance, wisdom, and transcendence were implied to be good in the writings of those cultures that did not explicitly identify them as virtues. The only virtue that showed a notable lack of consensus was courage, which was not viewed as particularly important by Confucianism, Taoism, or Buddhism.What makes these attributes virtues? The authors of this study speculate that their universality suggests they are evolutionarily based (see Chapter 9), because “each allows a crucial survival problem to be solved” (Dahlsgaard et al., 2005, p. 212). Specifically, each virtue counteracts a tendency that could threaten the survival of individuals and cultures. Justice prevents anarchy and chaos; humanity prevents cruelty; wisdom prevents stupidity. And, as the authors note, “We would not need to posit the virtue of courage if people were not (sometimes) swayed from doing the right thing by fear or the virtue of temperance if people were not sometimes reckless” (Dahlsgaard et al., 2005, p. 212). This point is important, because if everybody had these virtues, there would be no need to teach them, or even to label them. The key virtues identify six ways in which people try to make themselves better. Some individuals succeed more than others, and probably nobody ever quite manages to achieve all six virtues perfectly.
Positive Experience: Mindfulness, Flow, and Awe
The heart of the phenomenological approach is the conscious awareness of being alive. From this point of view, your moment-to-moment experience is what really matters; the main question is how to make the most of it. Research identified with positive psychology has come up with two answers to this question. And they are nearly opposite! One is to be mindful as much as possible, to be explicitly aware of and in control of every moment of your experience. And the other is to experience flow, a state of consciousness where you lose track of time and self by becoming completely absorbed in what you are doing. There is definitely something to be said for each recommendation, but let’s briefly consider mindfulness first.
MINDFULNESS It is possible, and probably common, to pass through life without paying much attention to what is going on around you. But when you are in a state of mindfulness, you are alert and aware of your every thought, every sensation, and every experience. The idea of mindfulness has a long history, with its origins in Buddhist philosophy. Modern enthusiasts who study mindfulness—and some psychologists are indeed enthusiastic about its benefits—claim that it can be helpful in reducing stress, enhancing creativity, improving memory, and freeing oneself from disturbing, recurring thoughts (see Hoffman et al., 2010; Siegel, 2007; Jha, 2010; Chambers et al., 2008). One study reported that people who are mindful can avoid overreacting to bad events in their lives and thereby avoid becoming excessively angry or depressed (Feltman, Robinson, & Ode, 2009; see Try for Yourself 12.1).
All of this sounds very good, and no doubt it sometimes is, but it is also impossible to be mindful all the time. Indeed, it seems like it would be exhausting! The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote long ago that
Operations of thought [by which he meant mindfulness] are like cavalry charges in a battle. They are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. (Whitehead, 1911, p. 61)
Like just about anything else in life, therefore, mindfulness can be overdone, but the evidence is persuasive that it can sometimes be useful, especially for interrupting harmful, habitual habits of thought (Davis & Hayes, 2011). “Mindfulness meditation,” in particular, can help people who are suffering from depression and anxiety to accept themselves as they are and break habits of negative thinking that hold them back.
FLOW While theorizing about mindfulness addresses the benefits of paying close attention to everything, there also seem to be advantages, at least sometimes, to letting momentary experience drop away. The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi9 investigated the experiences of artists, athletes, and writers as they did what they enjoyed most. He concluded that the best way a person can spend time is in autotelic activities, those that are enjoyable for their own sake. The subjective experience of an autotelic activity—the enjoyment itself—is what Csikszentmihalyi calls flow.
Flow is characterized by tremendous concentration, total lack of distractibility, and thoughts concerning only the activity at hand. One’s mood is elevated slightly (although not to the point of anything like ecstasy), and time seems to pass very quickly. This is what is experienced—when all goes well—by a writer writing, a painter painting, a gardener gardening, or a baseball player waiting for the next pitch. Flow has been reported by surgeons, dancers, and chess players in the midst of intense matches. Computers induce flow in many people. Perhaps you have seen an individual playing video games far into the night, seemingly oblivious to any distraction or to the passage of time itself. That person is likely experiencing flow. I often experience flow when lecturing to a class and sometimes while writing. To me, a 50-minute class feels as if it ends about a minute and a half after it begins. (I know it does not feel this way to my students.) Losing track of time is one sign of experiencing flow.
According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow arises when the challenges an activity presents are well matched with your skills. If an activity is too difficult or too confusing, you will experience anxiety, worry, and frustration. If the activity is too easy, you will experience boredom and (again) anxiety. But when skills and challenges are balanced, you experience flow. Achieving flow also entails staying away from television. Csikszentmihalyi found that watching television disrupts and prevents flow for long periods of time. Some people find that spending time on the Internet can induce flow, but it depends on what you do there. Certain immersive games may put a person in flow, as was mentioned above, but the typical experience in online shopping does not. Online shopping is usually not challenging enough to induce flow, which suggests that if web marketers were clever enough to turn the shopping experience into an immersive game, they could increase their sales immensely (Hoffman & Novak, 2009).
Csikszentmihalyi thinks that the secret for enhancing your quality of life is to spend as much time in flow as possible. Achieving flow entails becoming good at something you find worthwhile and enjoyable. This seems like a decent prescription for happiness, come to think of it, whether you are a phenomenologist or not.
On the other hand, flow does not work for everybody. According to one study, only people high in locus of control, who believe they can control their own life outcomes, benefit from activities meant to promote flow (J. Keller & Blomann, 2008). Even in the best of circumstances, flow seems to describe a rather solitary kind of happiness. In that respect Csikszentmihalyi is a true existentialist, perhaps not dwelling on forlornness like Sartre, but still regarding experience as something that happens alone. (Csikszentmihalyi does describe flow as it can occur during sex, but even here he emphasizes the experience of one individual.) The drawback with flow is that somebody experiencing it can be difficult to interact with; she may not hear you, may seem distracted, and in general may be poor company. Interrupt somebody engrossed in a novel or a video game, and you will see what I mean.
Another potential problem with flow is precisely the same as its main advantage: When in this state, a person loses track of what is going on around him or her and gives up conscious control of thoughts and activities. In other words, it is close to the opposite of mindfulness. So, which is it? Should you try to be mindful all the time, or in flow as much as possible? All I can suggest is a wishy-washy compromise. Be mindful about when you are in flow. Enjoy it, but take back conscious control once in a while to make sure you are doing what you really want to do, thinking about what you really want to think about, and not simply following the paths of habit.AWE A particular experience that might have beneficial effects, according to recent research, is feelings of awe. According to the researchers’ definition, awe arises when “individuals encounter an entity that is vast and challenges their worldview” (Stellar et al., 2018, p. 258). People who are prone to experience awe are rated by their friends as more humble, and experiments that attempt to induce awe find that it leads to a more balanced view of one’s strengths and weaknesses, and makes a person more humble overall. Awe has the potential to be the antidote to troublesome traits such as entitlement, arrogance and narcissism, so it does sound like something we could use more of. Religions seem to have known this for a long time. Have you ever visited a medieval European cathedral? Many of them have high ceilings, brilliant stain-glass windows and tall towers that are surely meant to be, and often are, awe-inspiring.
Glossary
mindful(ness)
In positive psychology, the idea that one should be consciously aware of and in control of every moment of your subjective experience.
flow
The totally absorbing experience of engaging in an activity that is valuable for its own sake. In flow, mood is slightly elevated and time seems to pass quickly.
HAPPINESS
Everyone, except perhaps the most hard-core existentialist, wants to be happy, and a key purpose of the positive psychology movement summarized above is to help people achieve this desirable state.
Defining Happiness
The first step is to be clear about what happiness is. According to prominent researchers, it has three components: (1) overall satisfaction with life, (2) satisfaction with how things are going in particular life domains (e.g., relationships, career), and (3) generally high levels of positive emotion and low levels of negative emotion (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). While these three components seem straightforward, the meaning of happiness may change with age. A study of more than 12 million personal blogs found that younger writers—teenagers and people in their twenties—tended to associate reports of happy feelings with words that expressed excited emotions, such as “ecstatic” and “giddy.” Older writers, in their forties or fifties, were more likely to report feeling happy at the same time they also used words that expressed peaceful emotions such as “content,” “satisfied,” and “relaxed” (Mogilner, Kamvar, & Aaker, 2011).
Another way that the definition of happiness can vary comes from the difference between hedonic well-being (pleasure seeking) and eudaimonic well-being (seeking a meaningful life). According to the modern humanistic psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, this distinction is crucial (see Ryan & Deci, 2000; Ryan, Huta, & Deci, 2008). In particular, their Self-determination Theory (sometimes abbreviated as SDT) states that the more one seeks hedonically to maximize pleasure and minimize pain to the exclusion of other goals, the more one risks living a life “bereft of depth, meaning and community” based on “selfishness, materialism, objectified sexuality and ecological destructiveness” (Ryan et al., 2008, p. 141). Eudaimonia, by contrast, entails finding and seeking goals that are valuable in their own right (intrinsic goals) rather than being means to an end (extrinsic goals). John-Paul Sartre would probably agree.
But maybe happiness is just happiness. A study that specifically looked for differences between people high in hedonic and eudaimonic well-being found very few, probably because people high in one tend to be high in the other (Nave, Sherman, & Funder, 2008). On reflection, this conclusion is not so surprising. All other things being equal, shouldn’t living a meaningful life make a person feel good?
Sources of Happiness
Current research suggests that overall happiness has three primary sources (see Figure 12.5). To a (perhaps) surprisingly large extent, one’s happiness is determined by an individual set point, and so it is moderately stable over time (Fujita & Diener, 2005). This set point appears to be genetically influenced (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996) and based, in part, on the heritable traits of extraversion (which is good for happiness) and neuroticism (which is bad for it) (E. Diener & Lucas, 1999). Recent research suggests that some people have a tendency to react more strongly to stressful events that is caused by a certain pattern of connections between parts of the amygdala and parts of the prefrontal cortex (see Chapter 9), with the result that they feel a “tonically elevated, indiscriminate negative affect” (Schackman et al., 2016, p. 1275). In other words, they feel bad almost all the time. One study found that even day-to-day mood is remarkably stable over a period of two years (Hudson, Lucas, & Donnellan, 2017). Don’t you know people who seem to stay cheerful, and others who seem to be almost always gloomy, regardless of what is actually going on in their lives? It really might be, at least in part, because of the way their brains are wired.
Figure 12.5 Sources of Happiness The three main contributors to happiness, according to current research. The exact percentages should not be taken too seriously; the point of this chart, sometimes called the “happiness pie,” is that all three sources are important.
Source: Adapted from Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade (2005), p. 115.
Another, though apparently smaller, influence on happiness is objective life circumstances. One of these is age. According to a study of online blogs, the expression (and presumably feeling) of happiness increases steadily after age 13, peaking between about ages 50 and 60, and declining fairly rapidly thereafter (Dodds & Danforth, 2010; see Figure 12.6). In addition, having more education, being married, and earning more money are all associated with happiness. Other people will tend to infer that we are happy to the extent that we are healthy and successful in our family life and academic activities, and they will usually be right (Schneider & Schimmack, 2010). But we have to be careful how we interpret findings like these. One study found that while richer people are generally happier, this did not seem to be because more wealth causes more happiness, but rather because the same stable personality traits associated with wealth are also associated with being happy (Luhman, Schimmack, & Eid, 2011). The same may be true about education, marriage, and other circumstances associated with happiness—they may tend to go together, but not necessarily because one causes the other.
Figure 12.6 Age and Happiness in Online Blogs The average happiness (positive valence) of the words people use in their online blogs increases with age until it peaks between about ages 50 and 60, and declines thereafter.
Source: Dodds & Danforth (2010), p. 451.
In any event, if we put these two influences—genetics and life circumstances—together, nearly half of the variability in individual happiness still remains unexplained (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996; Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, et al., 2005). The implication of this finding is that a third factor is important: An individual’s happiness is significantly influenced by what he does, such as “looking on the bright side,” “making time for things that matter,” and, “working on an important life goal” (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, et al., 2005, p. 123; see also Carstensen & Mikels, 2005). It also helps to look upon life as being “long and easy” rather than “short and hard.”
Not surprisingly, people who hold the latter attitude are not very happy (Norton, Anik, Aknin, & Dunn, 2011). But here’s an alarming finding: One study looked at the relationship between children’s happiness and the amount of fast food and soft drinks they consumed (Chang & Nayga, 2010). It turned out that consuming fast food and sodas made the children happier, even though it also caused them to be more obese!10 No wonder well-intentioned programs to get children to eat healthier food have such a hard time making an impact.
Another way to improve your happiness is by spending your money on experiences rather than things (Howell & Hill, 2009). Experiences, such as a vacation taken with a loved one or a movie enjoyed with a friend, improve not only your own individual happiness but also the happiness of the other people involved and the quality of your long-term relationship with them. Things, on the other hand, are just things. So in the long run, according to research, experiences are a better investment. They are also more fun to anticipate than are material purchases. Looking forward to a concert or a trip is more fun, one study found, than looking forward to buying a new computer (Kumar, Killingsworth, & Gilovich, 2014).
Another, rather surprising way to seek happiness is through political ideology. According to one study, thinking like a political conservative can lead a person to experience negative emotions less, whereas thinking like a liberal can lead a person to experience positive emotions more (Choma, Busseri, & Sadava, 2009). I don’t have to reveal any bias here because you can take your pick—both approaches, apparently, will make you happier in the end. People also seek happiness by protecting their health, working hard for occupational success, and building successful relationships.
Some studies have tested various interventions to increase happiness, with moderate success. For example, listing things that you are thankful for (also known as “counting your blessings”), expressing gratitude to someone who has had a beneficial influence on your life, and doing kind acts for others can all, under some circumstances, make you happier (Lyubomirsky & Layous, 2013). But be careful. Even seemingly benign activities like these sometimes backfire (Fritz & Lyubomirsky, 2017). If you try to think of things to be thankful for but can’t really come up with anything, or you do so many favors for someone that you end up feeling exploited, or even if you just try too hard to be happy, the result can be less happiness, not more. In the end, attempts to be happier should be tailored to specific circumstances and the needs and attitudes of the individual.
Consequences of Happiness
According to one intriguing analysis, happiness may not be just a result of good health, occupational success, and supportive relationships, but a cause of all of these outcomes (Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). The adaptive function of positive affect—happiness—is to signal to the individual “that life is going well, the person’s goals are being met, and resources are adequate” (p. 804). According to psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues, the results of feeling this way include becoming more confident, optimistic, likeable, sociable, and energetic.
Is there such a thing as too much happiness? Psychologist June Gruber and her colleagues suggest four potential dark sides (Gruber, Mauss, & Tamir, 2011). First, happiness that is too intense can lead to a failure to recognize risky situations or to pouring excessive energy into unproductive pursuits. Second, happiness that is felt at the wrong time—such as when things really are going badly—can short-circuit efforts to make things better. Third, directly “trying to be happy” can be counterproductive, if one then becomes disappointed that one has failed to become happy enough. It is better, these authors argue, to pursue activities and accomplishments that will yield results that will make you happy in the long run, even if not necessarily right now. Finally, there are types of happiness that cause problems for the person or those around them, such as the hubristic or arrogant kind of happiness that might be felt by narcissists (Chapter 6). This kind of happiness may feel good in the moment, but can be harmful to others and lead to the individual’s downfall in the end.
So it apparently is good to be unhappy sometimes. College students who experience occasional bouts of unhappiness actually seem to have better academic success than those who are happy almost all the time. Why do you think this is? My own guess is that students need to buckle down and study once in a while, which isn’t necessarily the immediate route to happiness, but which leads to greater success in the not-very-long run (Barker, Howard, Galambos & Wrosch, 2016).
Still, if not taken to extreme, happiness is associated with effectiveness in a broad range of domains. Happier people make better decisions, have higher levels of professional accomplishment, and even solve anagrams better (Kesebir & Diener, 2008). Resident advisors in dormitories who felt more positive emotions were rated by their residents as being more effective (DeLuga & Mason, 2000), and cricket players who were happier had higher batting averages (Totterdell, 2000)!
Happy employees give better customer service (George, 1995), and happier farmers in Malaysia make more money (Howell, Howell, & Schwabe, 2006). Happy people have more friends they can rely on (G. R. Lee & Ishii-Kuntz, 1987) and enjoy more social support (Pinquart & Sörenson, 2000). Not surprisingly, happiness is associated with less drug use.
Happiness is not just an outcome. It’s an opportunity.
The analysis of all these findings is complex because, as has already been noted, the causal arrow runs in both directions. The psychologist Chris Soto conducted a remarkable longitudinal study of 16,367 Australians and found that higher levels of happiness were associated with higher levels of the traits of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, which is not surprising, but his study also found that people who became happier also increased, later, in all of these traits (Soto, 2015). You can see how this might work. An extravert might have more friends, which would make her happy. And, over time, having more friends could make her even more extraverted. Overall, analyses by Lyubomirsky, Soto, and others convincingly show that happiness promotes behaviors and problem-solving skills that in themselves can lead to good outcomes, which means that happiness can become a self-perpetuating, virtuous cycle. The analysis also implies that happy times can be useful occasions to “broaden and build” (Fredrickson, 2001). To unhappy people, something seems to be wrong, so they are motivated to undo the damage and protect themselves. Happy people, by contrast, can use their well-being as the foundation for creating and maintaining better life circumstances for themselves and others. In this light, happiness is not just an outcome. It’s an opportunity.
Glossary
hedonia
Seeking happiness through the pursuit of pleasure and comfort.
eudaimonia
Seeking happiness through developing one’s full potential, helping others, and building community. HUMANISTIC AND POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY IN THE 21ST CENTURY
Positive psychology seems inherently optimistic (notice its name), which seems to have caused some grumpy old-school humanistic psychologists to resent its popularity. One recently wrote that positive psychology falls short because “trial and despair appear to be as integral to well-being as optimism and positive self-appraisals” (Schneider, 2014, p. 92). Which raises an interesting question: Should we try to always expect the best? Perhaps not surprisingly, optimistic individuals are less fearful, more willing to take risks, and are usually relatively happy (C. Peterson & Steen, 2002). On the other hand, optimism may lead one to take foolish risks or fail to anticipate problems before they arise. For that reason, psychologist Julie Norem has made the interesting argument that the study of pessimism should also be considered a part of positive psychology (Norem & Chang, 2002).
Despite the recent flurry of empirical and theoretical activity, the rebirth of humanism remains incomplete. Positive psychology has not yet had much to say about existential anxiety, for example, nor does it address the difficult dilemmas that arise from free will. It usually addresses experience in the form of “subjective well-being,” which is basically the degree to which one “feels good”—a limited phenomenological analysis compared with the earlier work of existentialists and humanists—and is just beginning to focus on the difference between hedonic and eudaimonic sources of well-being.
But let’s be fair. Positive psychology, by that name, is still new—its most important articles and books have all appeared since the year 2000. As Sartre mordantly observed, the dilemmas of free will and mortality cannot be wished away, even if we try to ignore them, so positive psychology likely will address these issues before long. In the meantime, it offers a powerful corrective to psychology’s emphasis on the negative side of mental life.
The Mystery of Experience
At the root of the existential and humanistic approach to psychology is phenomenology, the moment-to-moment experience of every aware person. This emphasis on phenomenology allows humanistic analysis to make three unique contributions. It reminds us of the mystery of experience, it teaches that the only way to truly understand another person is to comprehend that person’s unique view of reality, and it focuses attention on the nature of optimal experience and happiness.
Conscious experience is both an obvious fact and a basic mystery.
The essential fact that phenomenologists going back to Wundt have always grasped, which all other basic paradigms neglect, is that conscious experience is both an obvious fact and a basic mystery. It cannot be explained by science or even described very well in words. Though we cannot quite describe what it is to be aware and alive, every one of us knows what it is.
Science and psychology usually choose not to address how something so familiar can be so difficult to understand; they just ignore it, which is fine, to a point. The point is reached when science and psychology seem to assume that conscious awareness is not important or even proceed as if it does not exist. Nearly as bad, psychology sometimes treats conscious experience as simply an interesting form of information processing, no different from the kind done by a computer (Rychlak, 1988). Some theories proposed by cognitive psychologists claim that consciousness is a higher-order cognitive process that organizes thoughts and allows flexible decision making. These theories hold that beyond these functions, consciousness is just a feeling (Dennett, 1994; Dennett & Weiner, 1991; Ornstein, 1977).
Of course, to say consciousness is “just a feeling” bypasses the main question: What does it mean to be able to consciously experience feeling? In fact, conscious awareness is not in the least similar to the kind of information processing computers perform, even if it fulfills some of the same functions. Awareness is a human experience, and science can neither credibly deny its existence nor explain just what it is or where it comes from. It is only natural, therefore, that phenomenological analysis sometimes expands into speculations that are not only philosophical but also religious and spiritual.
Understanding Others
A corollary of the phenomenological view at the heart of humanistic psychology is that to understand another person, you must understand that person’s construals (Kelly, 1955). You can only comprehend someone’s mind to the extent that you can imagine life from her perspective. The adage “Do not judge me until you have walked a mile in my shoes” expresses the general idea.
This principle discourages judgmental attitudes about other people. It implies that if you could see the world through their eyes, you would realize that their actions and attitudes are the natural consequences of their understanding of reality. Furthermore, there is no way to prove your view of reality right and the views of others wrong. Thus, it is a mistake to assume that others interpret the world the same way you do, or that there is only one correct perspective. Others’ opinions, no matter how strange, must be considered as valid as your own.11
One direct consequence of this phenomenological principle is a far-reaching cultural and even moral relativism. You cannot judge the actions and beliefs of other people through your own moral code. For, when all is said and done, there is no objective reality—or, if there is, there is no way for anyone to know it. Furthermore, it is generally misguided to judge the values and practices of other cultures from the perspective of your own. Although there may be widespread agreement about a handful of core virtues, separate cultures still see the world very differently, and to understand other cultures, just as to understand other individuals, we must seek to understand the world from an alternative point of view. The attempt to apply personality psychology across different cultures is the topic of the next chapter.
SUMMARY
Humanistic psychology concentrates on the ways that studying humans differs from studying objects or animals, including such issues as experience, awareness, and free will.
Although recent research shows that the way people construe the situations they experience is related to personality and gender, humanistic psychologists emphasize the degree to which every situation has good and bad elements and the freedom of people to choose which ones to emphasize in their construals.
Phenomenology: Awareness Is Everything
The phenomenological perspective implies that the present moment of experience is all that matters, which means that individuals have free will and that the only way to understand another person is to understand that person’s construal, or experience of the world.
Existentialism
The philosophical school called existentialism breaks experience into three types: experience of the external world, social experience, and introspective experience-of-experiencing. Existentialism also claims that existence has no meaning beyond what each person gives it.
Existential philosophers such as Sartre concluded that a failure to face life’s lack of inherent meaning constitutes living in bad faith.
Optimistic Humanism: Rogers and Maslow
Modern humanist psychologists added to this existential analysis the assumption that people are basically good and inherently motivated to self-actualize.
Rogers and Maslow asserted that a person who faces experience directly can become a fully functioning person. Rogers believed this outcome could only occur for individuals who had received unconditional positive regard from the important people in their lives. Maslow believed that higher needs such as self-actualization could come to the fore only after more basic needs related to survival and security became satisfied. A new version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been derived from evolutionary theory, placing parenthood at the top.
Personal Constructs: Kelly
Kelly’s personal construct theory says that each person’s experience of the world is organized by a unique set of personal constructs. These personal constructs, which stem from, and help determine, one’s construals of experience, resemble scientific paradigms.
Positive Psychology
Positive psychology represents a rebirth of humanistic psychology, focusing on the traits and psychological processes that promote well-being and give life meaning.
An important contribution of positive psychology is its attempt to catalog universal human virtues, which research suggests include justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, and transcendence. A sixth core virtue, courage, appears to be somewhat less universal.
Research in positive psychology has examined and advocated for mindfulness, the state of being fully and consciously aware of one’s environment and experiences. Mindfulness has been shown to have beneficial effects, particularly in stress reduction.
In contrast, Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow says that the best state of experience is when one loses awareness of the moment because challenges and capabilities are balanced, attention is focused, and time passes quickly.
Happiness
Happiness can be defined as the achievement of hedonic means (seeking pleasure and comfort) or eudaimonic means (seeking to fulfill one’s potential). Research suggests that while these two kinds of happiness are theoretically different, within people they tend to occur together.
Happiness is determined by genetics, life circumstances, and intentional activities.
Activities to increase happiness include counting one’s blessings, expressing gratitude, and doing good deeds for others. However, these activities should be tailored to circumstances and the preferences of the individual.
Happiness has positive effects on health, occupational success, and supportive relationships, and these outcomes in turn affect happiness. But it is possible to be too happy.
Humanistic and Positive Psychology in the 21st Century
The two main and lasting contributions of humanistic psychology’s phenomenological approach are the attempt to address the mystery of human experience and its emphasis on nonjudgmental understanding of individuals and cultures.