Bright-Sided (23 page)

Templeton might have been attracted to positive psychology’s claim that positive emotions can influence physical health—a “mind over matter” proposition that can be found in just about
any form of American spiritualism since the nineteenth century. But there is another, more intriguing connection. Templeton was an acolyte of Norman Vincent Peale and a minor positive-thinking guru himself. According to the Templeton Foundation’s 2004 “Capabilities Report,” he “credits Norman Vincent Peale’s book,
The Power of Positive Thinking
, read 70 years ago, with making him realize that ‘what I had become in my short lifetime was mainly dependent on my mental attitudes—a mental attitude of looking for the good will bring good to you; a mental attitude of giving love will bring love to you.’ ”
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Templeton wrote a number of books in the self-help genre, some of them conveniently published by his foundation, including
The Templeton Plan: 21 Steps to Personal Success and Real Happiness, Worldwide Laws of Life: 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles
, and
Discovering the Laws of Life.
The last one came with an endorsement from Robert Schuller and an introduction by Norman Vincent Peale himself, who described Templeton as “the greatest layman of the Christian church in our time.” Surely, the possibility that positive psychology might eventually provide scientific undergirding for positive thinking was not lost on Templeton.

But Templeton was not just another positive-thinking businessman. He was something of a political ideologue, as is, to an even greater degree, his son and, since 1995, successor at the foundation. John Templeton Jr. is a major Republican donor and activist, having helped fund a group called Let Freedom Ring, which worked to get out the evangelical vote for George Bush in 2004. In 2007, he contributed to Freedom’s Watch, which paid for television commercials supporting the war in Iraq, often by conflating Iraq with al Qaeda. More recently, he supported the Romney and then the McCain campaigns for the presidency and was the second-largest individual donor to the campaign for California’s Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage.
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The foundation itself is, of course, nonpartisan but is strongly biased in favor of “free enterprise.” Over the years, it has given cash awards to a number of conservative scholars, including Milton Friedman and Gertrude Himmelfarb, and grants to a long list of conservative organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Jesse Helms Center Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the National Association of Scholars, which is best known for its battle against “political correctness” and academic liberalism.
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Another recipient, the Association of Private Enterprise Education, states on its Web site that “the danger is very real that demagogues, while reviling ‘the rich,’ will loot the private wealth that is society’s seed corn. The defense against demagogues is understanding and commitment to the principles of private enterprise. These are abstract principles and are not readily obvious.” In its 2006 report, we learn that the Templeton Foundation “supports a wide range of programs and research initiatives to study the benefits of competition, specifically how free enterprise and other principles of capitalism can, and do, benefit the poor.”
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The words “and do” suggest a foregone conclusion, although the report goes on to raise the plaintive question “
Why should half the world’s population live in circumstances of relative squalor when it has been demonstrated that the principles of the market and free enterprise can lead to sustained economic development?
”(italics in orginal).

This is not to suggest that positive psychology, or positive anything, is part of a right-wing conspiracy. Pop positive thinking has a mixed political lineage: Norman Vincent Peale was an outspoken conservative, at least until his attacks on a Catholic candidate, John F. Kennedy, resulted in charges of bigotry. On the other hand, perhaps the most famous contemporary promoter of positive thinking is Oprah Winfrey, whom we normally think of as a liberal. As for positive psychology, Seligman himself certainly
leans to the right. He is famously impatient with “victims” and “victimology,” saying, for example, in a 2000 interview: “In general when things go wrong we now have a culture which supports the belief that this was done to you by some larger force, as opposed to, you brought it on yourself by your character or your decisions.”
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It also turns out that he has spoken about his “learned helplessness” experiments with dogs at one of the military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) schools, which were originally designed to help U.S. troops survive capture but changed their mission, post-9/11, to devising new forms of torture for suspected terrorists.
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(Seligman denies he was contributing to torture, writing in a 2008 e-mail that “I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.”) As for rank-and-file positive psychologists, a rising star in the positive psychology firmament, Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia, insisted to me that most positive psychologists are probably liberal in their personal outlooks. Certainly many of them see themselves as rebels against a hidebound establishment of psychologists still obsessed with “negative” subjects such as depression, neurosis, and suffering.

But positive psychology seems to have exhausted its rebellious spirit in the battle against “negative psychology” and today offers much to warm the most conservative hearts, including its finding that married and highly religious people—preferably fundamentalists—are happier than other people, as are political conservatives.
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Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one’s life—a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice. Strangely though, the arrival of children—which one would expect to result from fundamentalist marriages—actually decreases the happiness of the parents,
and, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, “the only known symptom of ‘empty nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.”
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The real conservativism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists’ tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are. Consider the widely used “Satisfaction with Life Scale” developed by Diener and others, which asks the respondent to agree or disagree with the following propositions:

In most ways my life is close to my ideal.

The conditions of my life are excellent.

I am satisfied with my life.

So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.

If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.
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One could imagine positive psychology, or a more liberal version thereof, spawning a movement to alter social arrangements in the direction of greater happiness—by advocating more democratically organized workplaces, to suggest just one example. Instead, positive psychology seems to have weighed in on the side of the employers, with Seligman collaborator Chris Peterson telling the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
in 2008 that business executives are particularly enthused about the new happiness science: “Hard-headed corporate culture is becoming interested in how to get more work out of fewer workers. They’re realizing that if their workers are happy, they will work harder and more productively. So they’re leading the charge.”
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As for social action against societal injustice, the American Psychological Association’s
Monitor
reported in 1998: “Seligman asserts that . . . those who reproach others and side with the underdog may feel better in the short
term, . . . but such good feelings are transient.”
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Why social activism should produce only fleeting good feelings—compared with performing other virtuous deeds, viewing Monets, or reading Richard Russo—is not explained.

Like pop positive thinking, positive psychology attends almost solely to the changes a person can make internally by adjusting his or her own outlook. Seligman himself explicitly rejects social change, writing of the role of “circumstances” in determining human happiness: “The good news about circumstances is that some do change happiness for the better. The bad news is that changing these circumstances is usually impractical and expensive.”
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This argument—“impractical and expensive”—has of course been used against almost every progressive reform from the abolition of slavery to pay equity for women.

Positive psychologists’ more important contribution to the defense of the status quo has been to assert or “find” that circumstances play only a minor role in determining a person’s happiness. In their misbegotten equation—H = S + C + V—“C,” for circumstances, is generally judged to make a small contribution to the total, only around 8 to 15 percent.
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A variety of studies are usually cited in support of the inconsequence of C, finding, for example, that people who lose their jobs or who are rendered paraplegic by severe spinal-cord injuries quickly revert to their original levels of happiness. When I interviewed Seligman, he said that new evidence shows that paraplegics and the unemployed “do not go back to where they were,” and he estimated that C could be as high as 25 percent, adding that “there is a lot of controversy over the size of C, since it brings up the question of whether policy matters.”

Indeed, if circumstances play only a small role—even 25 percent—in human happiness, then policy is a marginal exercise.
Why advocate for better jobs and schools, safer neighborhoods, universal health insurance, or any other liberal desideratum if these measures will do little to make people happy? Social reformers, political activists, and change-oriented elected officials can all take a much-needed rest. And since no one is talking about using gene therapy to raise “S,” a person’s happiness “set point,” that leaves only “V,” one’s voluntary efforts, to tinker with. In the great centuries-long quest for a better world, the baton has passed to the practitioners of “optimism training,” the positive psychologists, and the purveyors of pop positive thinking.

The next time I met Martin Seligman he was unexpectedly friendly and welcoming. The setting was the Sixth International Positive Psychology Summit, held in the majestic Gallup Organization building in downtown D.C. He invited me to sit down next to him and asked whether I had enjoyed the morning session’s “energy break.” This had been a five-minute interval embedded in a presentation on teaching positive psychology at the graduate level, led by some female graduate students. The audience was instructed to stand, do a few shoulder rolls and neck stretches, shake their bodies, and then utter a big collective “Aaaah.” When we were loosened up, we were treated to the pounding beat of Ricky Martin’s “Cup of Life,” and the women on stage began to dance along in an awkward, choreographed way, while some in the audience boogied freestyle and a few of the older men stamped around as if putting out fires. I told Seligman I had liked the energy break well enough, not bothering to mention how closely it resembled the audience exercises undertaken by motivational speakers at the National Speakers Association.

At the time of the “summit” meeting, in October 2007, positive psychology had a lot to celebrate. It was gaining ground at all levels
in academia, with more than two hundred colleges and graduate schools offering courses in positive psychology, sometimes dubbed “Happiness 101,” in which students reflected on their happier moments and engaged in exercises like writing “gratitude letters” to people in their lives. At Harvard, the introductory positive psychology course had drawn 855 students in 2006, making it the most popular course on campus, surpassing even economics, and a similar undergraduate course at George Mason University was the subject of a
New York Times Magazine
article in early 2007.
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Graduate-level courses, like those required for the master of applied positive psychology degree at the University of Pennsylvania, were popping up all over the world. According to one summit speaker, Ilona Boniwell of the University of East London, “rapid growth” of postgrad programs could be expected in Argentina, Australia, India, Israel, Mexico, Spain, and Singapore.

Moreover, attractive careers seemed to await those who earned higher degrees in positive psychology. The University of Pennsylvania program claims as one of its alums a coauthor of the business self-help book
How Full Is Your Bucket?
and two other alums have founded a consulting group to bring positive psychology into the public schools, through workshops on such topics as “measuring and nurturing character strengths and virtues” and “learning tools for building optimism and resilience.”
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Another alum, David J. Pollay, is a business consultant and columnist for the Happy News Web site. Mostly, the opportunities seemed to lie in applying positive psychology to organizations and businesses, through consulting and coaching. In a breakout session so packed that many attendees had to sit on the floor, a British consultant who said that he helps clients like Wells Fargo and Microsoft create “strength-based organizations” offered a PowerPoint presentation listing the terms “natural and authentic,” “energizing,” “engaging,”
“learning and developing,” “high performing,” and “well-being and fulfillment.” Similar lists, maddeningly nonparallel combinations of adjectives and nouns, pass for “theory” in most pop positive-thinking books directed at business audiences, making me wonder what distinguishes an academically trained positive psychology coach from the thousands of self-appointed coaches and motivators who feed off the business world.

Yet even at this self-congratulatory “summit,” there was some anxiety about the scientific foundations of positive psychology. In her description of the “challenges” facing the master’s program in positive psychology at her London university, Ilona Boniwell had included “healthy British skepticism.” This struck me as odd: Wouldn’t a physics or sociology professor be delighted to have skeptical, questioning students? When I put this query to her during a break in the proceedings, she told me: “A lot of results [in positive psychology] are presented as stronger than they are; for example, they’re correlational, not causative. The science of positive psychology has not necessarily caught up with the promise of positive psychology.” The “promise” was lucrative careers in business coaching, and the science would apparently just have to catch up.