As a “good news junky” I must confess that I have realized that there are times when positive thinking is not good. Even worse: it may act like a thought virus that makes me think in a way that is less than my optimum version.
In the wave of good news about positive thinking, and some good research to back up the good news, it is not easy to see some of the less positives around positive thinking. Gabriele Oettingen writes of the “worship of positive thinking.” One finds the “must” of positive thinking in all spheres of human endeavour: personal, interpersonal and work life. Even the new religion of “financial predictions” subscribe to it: you want to be a millionaire, do what the other millionaires do – merely think about it; don’t worry too much about the miscalculations that led up to the 2007 world financial crash. I guess the financial gurus of the crash just had an off day in their positive thinking?
Where did the new wave of positive psychology in academia and everyday life go wrong? Firstly, in what was researched. Seligman, is considered to be the modern father of positive psychology. He is not the first who got thinking about what is positive about being human. Way back some of the Greek philosophers struggled with the answer to “what is the good life”, and offered answers about virtue and character and “right thinking”. In South Africa, in middle 1970’s, Prof. Deo Strumpfer started writing on fortigenesis, the strengths psychology, and extended it to organizational behaviour (pre-dating Luthans’ publications on positive organizational behaviour). The other competitor for the “fatherhood” was Donald O Clifton of Gallup fame. However, Seligman in his presidential address at APA in 1998 said the time has come to work on a positive psychology: enough about how human beings are broken. Seligman’s stated intention was to explore what is good and well-functioning about being human.
Very quickly this inquisitiveness led to narrow banding the answer about the good life, specifically, exploring happiness as the focus of subjective well-being. The price for this narrow banding about what is positive about being human was that the “Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification”, (the alternative to the psychiatric diagnostic bible, DSM3.) was nearly for gotten. Only much later did Ed Diener, Biswas-Diener and others start researching well-being in the wider context of quality of life, including financial- and career-quality of life, as well as in a variety of world communities. Haidt is writing profound ideas about the virtue of ethics and morality, and the disgust when it is not happening. Slowly the loop is coming back to what is positive about human nature, versus the vast data base of how people are broken
Secondly, the conclusions and applications that flowed from the research sometimes went wrong. Positive thinking is very seductive and addictive, given its applications. One cannot argue that mostly positive thinking is good: healthier, more resourceful, recommended for dating, and then the big “secret”: how easy it is. All you must do is think it, and it will happen. Now, this is not the spin put on by the serious researchers and proponents of the positive psychology movement. The internet is revealing an increasing number of studies where positive thinking is not effective (e.g. promoting health in breast cancer; how positive self-talk may lead to denial; how visualizing the ideal future may lead to no-get-up-and-go). What do people normally do about good news? They take it for granted in an amazingly short time! Do people who have won the lottery become happy and special human beings? No! the majority not only misspend the money, but emotionally speaking they are worse of in the end of their spending spree.
The good news is: the resistance is against the narrow banding rather than the goodness of positive psychology. Seligman, in his book “Flourishing” has expanded his thinking to 5 critical variants, for which he uses the acronym PERMA:
What is positive about positive psychology?
At the heart of the intention of positive psychology is to describe what people do in their hearts and minds in response to what happens to them, even if it is just “life as usual.” The emphasis is on what is good about being human, and what self-regulation strategies may and can people apply.
What Seligman, Diener, Gilbert, Lyubomirsky, Fredrickson and Haidt claim is that it is a way of thinking, a way of framing events so that one has an internal experience of well-being. Gilbert in his “Stumbling on Happiness” makes the case: be wary of all the myths and thought viruses about what will positively happen when you think positively and is on the receiving end of “gifts” like the lottery, or losing a limb.
Positive psychology describes people’s internal experience, rather than what they get from the world. From the research by Emmons on gratitude, and a smattering of work on awe, there are clear indications that what people do as a virtue, and showing character strength, is to give. Research is “pending” on the conditions of giving, i.e. generously, courageously, and appropriately. But then, at Schuitema, there is more than twenty years’ work to support the idea of giving.