Redefining the Good Life: a New Focus in the Social Sciences

Psychologists lead movement to shift scholars’ attention away from societal ills and toward studying what works

If you’ve taken a psychology course in the past 25 years, you know these stories: In a famous experiment, subjects obeyed instructions to deliver increasingly painful electric shocks to other people. In a real-life episode, 38 of Kitty Genovese’s neighbors in Queens, N.Y., watched from their windows as she was murdered, and no one even called the police. Depressing evidence that the grisly side of human nature will prevail.

What you probably haven’t heard are stories like the ones Jonathan D. Haidt’s subjects told him. Mr. Haidt, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, asked people how they felt when they saw evidence of “humanity’s better nature.” His subjects recounted seeing people helping someone poor, sick, or stranded. Many of them described a lightening in their chests, and the desire to be better people themselves. They said things like, “My spirit was lifted” and “I wanted to be more like her.”

Mr. Haidt calls the phenomenon “elevation,” and believes it’s hard-wired into us. “It’s amazing how much people cherish these experiences,” he says. “It’s proof that we’re not just selfish individualists.”

Studies such as Mr. Haidt’s are not part of psychology’s mainstream. But a growing number of psychologists believe it’s time for that to change. They call their endeavor “positive psychology.”

Spearheaded by Martin E.P. Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania and last year’s president of the American Psychological Association, those scholars want to shift the emphasis in the discipline from a disease model to a health model -- from fixing what’s wrong with people to developing what’s right. With the help of corporate funds, they are asking what kinds of experiences fulfill people, what human qualities enable them to flourish, and, ultimately, what kinds of social institutions support those experiences and qualities. In essence, they are asking a question that has intrigued philosophers for centuries: What is the good life?

Making that a central question in psychology would radically alter the field, but Mr. Seligman and a group of like-minded colleagues are striving for even more. Starting with a series of meetings, they hope to spur a similar shift across the social sciences, transforming economics, political science, communications, and sociology into disciplines focused on human well-being and the social systems that foster it. In January, Mr. Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- a psychologist at the University of Chicago whom Mr. Seligman calls his “chief co-conspirator” -- met in Akumal, Mexico, with 18 promising young psychologists to talk about establishing the new field. This week in the Cayman Islands, they will join a small group of eminent social scientists to develop a “taxonomy” of the good life. Two more meetings will follow, and Mr. Seligman is seeking funds to set up an interdisciplinary network of scholars.

A cynic might suggest that, with trips to Mexico and the Cayman Islands, positive psychologists are clearly taking “the good life” seriously. But the scholars say they use the term in its broader, classical sense of social and civic well-being. The good life may include the pursuit of a talent, community spirit, or lasting friendships, they say. With the conviction of evangelists, they talk of human virtues, such as generosity, perseverance, responsibility, and courage.

While many therapists have championed “positive thinking” and the inherent goodness of human nature, social scientists have been slow to adopt those ideas. Mr. Seligman and Mr. Csikszentmihalyi are among the few psychologists who have studied happiness formally. Mr. Seligman is best known for his work showing that people can learn to be more optimistic, by practicing cognitive skills that include internally disputing the negative messages they send themselves. He has used that work to argue that people must get beyond seeing themselves as victims -- an attitude he believes is epidemic in American society. Mr. Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” -- the deeply satisfying state achieved when a person engages in a challenging activity, be it mountain-climbing or mastering the violin -- has won him legions of admirers in popular psychology. But his ideas remain on the margins of academe.

“There were elements of positive psychology in earlier decades, but it never became a major motivating force in the field,” says Barbara Frederickson, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, who attended the Akumal meeting.

As it has recently developed, positive psychology has led researchers to challenge some of the discipline’s long-held convictions. Ms. Frederickson’s studies of the functions of joy and contentment, for example, persuaded her to discard the psychological truism that emotions evolved as a way to narrow a person’s attention and trigger specific physical actions in times of crisis.

That model worked well to explain the purpose of fear, or anger: When faced with a threat, our adrenalin surges, our hearts race, and we’re able to flee. But “I started wondering, ‘What good are positive emotions?’” Ms. Frederickson says. She suggests that they served the evolutionary function of “broadening and building": By opening our minds, they prompted us to think in new ways. Over time, they built our physical, intellectual, and social skills.

All the more reason to have academic conferences in exotic locales.

Lisa Aspinwall’s work on optimism and health also disputes psychology’s conventional wisdom. An assistant professor of psychology at the University of Maryland at College Park, Ms. Aspinwall says that the research of the past 20 years on decision making has been “incredibly biased.” For example, while psychologists have assumed that H.I.V.-positive people who believe they won’t get AIDS are simply -- and dangerously -- “in denial,” research she conducted at the University of California at Los Angeles with the psychologist Shelley E. Taylor and others showed that the optimists reported greater efforts to maintain their health through diet and exercise. She has also shown that when presented with information about health risks, optimists in general pay closer attention to it and remember it more clearly than do pessimists. “Optimism works exactly the opposite of denial,” Ms. Aspinwall says.

Other established ideas about decision making -- such as the belief that people behave irrationally, especially in crowds -- are equally flawed, says Joachim Krueger, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Brown University. He has shown, for example, that people who assume that their opinion is the majority opinion -- exhibiting what psychologists call the “false-consensus bias” -- may actually be making a logical assumption. “If you look at your own preferences and don’t know whether you belong to the majority or the minority, the statistical probability is that you belong to the majority,” Mr. Krueger explains. Behavior based on that assumption is therefore “adaptive and reasonable,” he says.

Psychology has been focused for decades on human failings -- after all, Freud documented neuroses and suggested that they motivated most human behavior. But the idea of attending to human strengths is not entirely new. “Depending on how one wants to understand it, positive psychology is very ancient,” says Daniel N. Robinson, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University and author of An Intellectual History of Psychology (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). “It’s a noble and venerable psychology that we lost sight of when the discipline extricated itself from philosophy and started lusting after scientific status” in the 19th century. The field really lost its bearings in the 1970s, he says, during the cognitive revolution. That approach still dominates. “We think we’ve rediscovered the mind, but what’s left out is life as it’s actually lived,” he says.

Mr. Seligman attributes the rise of the disease model to pragmatic concerns. “In 1946, the Veterans Administration was created, and practicing psychologists found they could make a living treating mental illness,” he wrote last year in the American Psychological Association Monitor. “In 1947, the National Institute of Mental Health was created, and academic psychologists discovered they could get grants for research on mental illness.” Two of psychology’s original missions -- nurturing greatness and making life fulfilling -- were lost, according to Mr. Seligman.

The Prozac era may seem an odd time to develop a psychology of happiness. After all, haven’t scientists determined that mental health is neurochemical, and that levels of happiness can be modified with the right medication? Ms. Frederickson thinks positive psychology may take off now precisely because it presents a stark contrast to the neurochemical approach. “There’s a sense that there is more to emotions than the biological substrates, that it might matter whether you’re feeling engaged with the world,” she says. Besides, says Mr. Seligman, “there are moral problems with drugging an entire generation.”

He thinks the time is ripe for a change. “When nations are troubled by famine or war, it is understandable that social science should be about defense and damage,” he says. “But I think that when nations are not in social turmoil, they turn their eyes to the best in life. Florence in the 15th century had the option of becoming the most important military power in Europe. They chose instead to invest money and energy in beauty. I’m suggesting we create not an artistic monument but a scientific monument.”

Maryland’s Ms. Aspinwall and others say the public hunger for self-improvement and information about wellness will help positive psychology catch on. But they insist that it is not just another brand of self-help. “The difference is that we’re doing empirical research and testing our theories,” she says. Adds Mr. Seligman, “This is not ‘happiology’ reinvented.”

In fact, the give-yourself-a-hug mantra of most popular self-help books doesn’t jibe with positive psychology’s civic-mindedness. Mr. Seligman has written that the field’s mission is not just to measure positive experience but “to build the human strengths and civic virtues.” He proposes to identify them by looking at “an array of paradigmatic ‘good lives’” -- such as those of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill -- against which psychologists might measure other experiences.

But critics balk at the notion of a psychologist’s “Book of Virtues.’' Howard Kendler, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says he is troubled by any science that sets itself up as a moral authority. “Psychology is a part of society and has its rules, but they’re going beyond that now by talking about the kind of good life we should have,” he says. “In a democracy, you have different moral principles,” and “good lives” that may not fit a model set by the likes of Thomas Jefferson.

Even some positive psychologists share those concerns. In Akumal, debate arose between people who were interested in sketching “the good person” and others who were wary of efforts to talk about character. “I have trouble with the attempt to maximize ‘goodness’ within individuals,” says Mr. Krueger, of Brown. “It can lead to narcissism, arrogance, and manipulation. The individual good and the common good can be in conflict.”

Ms. Frederickson acknowledges that “the term ‘the good life’ does have a lot of connotations,” but asks, “what’s the alternative? Not to care about what would make people thrive, do well, reach their goals? How could you not want to take all the skills of scientific psychology and use them to help people flourish?”

Says Mr. Haidt, of the University of Virginia, “It’s perfectly valid to have empirical psychology focus on and document facts about human well-being. Philosophers can’t do it alone. The firewall between philosophy and psychology must go.”

In Akumal, Edward Chang, an assistant professor of psychology at Northern Kentucky University, cautioned scholars that different cultures define “positive” differently. In Asian cultures, he said, pessimism is “actually associated with positive coping efforts,” such as problem solving.

Mr. Seligman says that although he recognizes standards may vary across cultures, he believes in universals. “We evolved biologically and created universal moral virtues.” Yet, he insists, “I would not pretend to say what they are.”

Still, at the Cayman Islands meeting this week, Mr. Seligman will work with a handful of leading scholars to develop what he calls a “taxonomy” of the good life. With Mr. Csikszentmihalyi, the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, the Penn neuroscientist Martha J. Farah, and others, he will come up with a set of questions that could be asked to measure how close people came to that life in different societies and at different times. That meeting and two follow-up conferences are being sponsored by the Gallup Corporation, which has spent years studying what makes people productive on the job, and plans to conduct studies based on the questions developed.

The meeting will be an opportunity for positive psychologists to build connections to other social scientists, many of whom agree that their fields, too, have been characterized by “negativity.”

“I think in sociology, anthropology, economics, even history, the view of human events that has established itself in the last 100 years is very deterministic, deconstructionist, and relativistic,” says Mr. Csikszentmihalyi. “There’s very little understanding of the possible positive strengths in human society.”

Corey Keyes, a sociologist at Emory University, agrees. He says sociologists have long assumed that “the essence of the world is revealed to us when things go wrong.” His colleagues study societal disorders much as psychologists study mental ones, he says, and attempts by sociologists in the 1970s to measure social well-being petered out. Although sociologists such as Robert N. Bellah and Robert Wuthnow have been at the forefront of the “civil society” movement, in the heartland of sociology the disease model still prevails, Mr. Keyes says. That model both casts people as victims and overlooks less-dramatic social problems.

“We have data that suggest roughly 20 per cent of the U.S. population say they have no good things going on in their life,” he explains. “You can think of them as lives of quiet despair. They’re not sick according to the medical model, but in fact, they aren’t doing well in life.” Sociologists need to spend more time studying these “normal” people -- in addition to the drug abusers and dispossessed who are sociology’s typical subjects -- and promoting “the good things in life,” says Mr. Keyes.

His own work is one recent effort to do that. Under the auspices of the MacArthur Foundation’s National Study of Successful Aging, Mr. Keyes found that quality of life and social well-being consisted of more than “the absence of anomie and alienation.” People also need to feel that they fit in, that what they do is valued, and that the world is improving for people like them, he says.

There are also stirrings of a more positive approach in economics, where the negative view of human nature is probably most famously entrenched. Robert H. Frank, a professor of economics, ethics, and public policy at Cornell University, has shown that more than selfishness motivates Homo economicus. “Selfish interest is a very important behavior, but there’s an enormous amount of behavior that can’t be explained by it,” he says, such as refusing to cheat when no one would be the wiser, or voting when one vote wouldn’t make a difference. Mr. Frank thinks the chances are good that in the long run, the positive model will have a major impact upon his field. Up-and-coming economists are more interested in positive motivations, he says. “I think you’ll see progress with every funeral.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the dean of Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, says a positive shift in her field could return it to its origins in Aristotelian rhetoric. “The criticism of communications is always that we’re teaching the Machiavellian method,” says Ms. Jamieson, who will participate in the Cayman Islands meeting. But Aristotle’s maxim that “the end of rhetoric is judgment” is “an extraordinarily powerful idea,” she says. “It could be used to reframe communications as a field that helps people build their communication skills, and enhances people’s ability to think, to judge, and to act.”

“Communication should not mean manipulation,” she says. “It’s not just a skill, but a byproduct of preparation that one makes throughout life to live as a fully formed individual.”

Mr. Haidt, of the University of Virginia, echoes that view: “I think that any picture of Homo sapiens that does not include our profound interest in and concern about morality is a defective picture of us.”

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