First it will help me get the structure of the talk down. When I lecture and give conference papers I prefer to work without notes, but that does mean I need various strategies to help me.
Second a number of people aren't able to come to the seminar and have expressed regret, so this format will give them an opportunity to see what I had to say.
Finally some might prefer this as a forum for raising arguments and objections rather than doing that face to face.
Positive Psychology as a form of Cultural Apologetics
Positive Psychology is the movement within psychology, whose manifesto was laid out by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000).
As a scientific movement Positive Psychology has three pillars, subjective experience, character strengths and virtues and the creation of positive institutions in society.
In the historical sketch that they give psychology had come to focus too much on dealing with mental health issues and suffering, and had thus lost sight of two missions which they claim the academic discipline had before World War Two, making the lives of all people more productive and fulfilling and identifying and nurturing high talent.
With positive psychology, they claim, it will be possible to re-discover these historical missions of psychology, and we will be saved from a negative and misanthropic discipline, that views people as victims and only tries to relieve suffering without trying to build talent.
In 1997 writing in his book about how psychological language has been culturally created Kurt Danziger uses the example of motivation. As a term it has a short history,first used in the current psychological sense in 1904, gaining popularity as a term in that sense from the 1920s on. Originally used to mean having some biological need an attempt was made in the 1930s to create a none biological list of human needs. Of this effort, coordinated by Henry Murray in 1938 Danziger says:
Elevating one set of historically contingent conventions to the status of universal human needs not only emphasized their importance for the society in which they originated but provided a rationale for proselytizing efforts elsewhere. (Danziger, 1997 p123).
So the focus of this effort is whether or not the Character Strengths and Virtues identified within Positive Psychology are truly ubiquitous, and are mere descriptions of a universal human nature; or if they are historically contingent conventions. If they are historically contingent conventions then the claims they are universal act as a call for people to act in certain ways, and thus are prescriptive rather than descriptive. Interventions based upon Positive Psychology become about individual change in order to conform with a particular model of humanity, rather than being about helping or inspiring people. The hopes that Peterson and Seligman expressed that the CSV becomes as important to psychology as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual become a little more sinister if the implicit purpose is to turn us all into happy members of the American middle classes who confirm to a 21st Century notion of what is to be human while believing it is the only possible way to be people.
Evidence for Ubiquity
Virtues
There are two lines of evidence about the commonality of virtues and character strengths. One is about virtues and based on the questions:
Would the virtue catalogs of early thinkers converge?
Would certain virtues, regardless of tradition or culture, be widely valued?
Dhaalsgard, Peterson and Seligman (2005, p204)
The second is about character strengths and based on cross national comparisons of people who have filled in the appropriate character strength survey, available from for example Seligman's website.
I will start by showing the results for the literature based empirical work.
Dhaalsgard, Peterson and Seligman (2005, p204)
Dhaalsgard, Peterson and Seligman (2005, p207)
There are a variety of textual analysis techniques available, unfortunately the technique used in not explicitly named in the paper and I am not convinced that even if they had used some systematic method to come to a set of results that there would be much point to the exercise.
This is, however what their method consisted of, from the published paper. They chose Smart's (1999) survey of World Philosophies as a starting point. From that they chose the traditions he talks about with the most readily accessible texts. From those texts they chose the ones that including a 'virtue catalog'. Following a review of those texts they came up with their six Virtues, and then went through the texts looking for what was said about that virtue within it, sometimes with the virtue only being apparent at a 'suitable level of abstraction'.
It might be worth saying that Smart asserted it was possible to study empirically some aspects of religions and other world views, these include the ritual, experiential and institutional aspects. With aspects like the doctrinal, mythological and ethical needed participation and dialogue to understand them.
Even if they had attempted a more hermeneutic understanding of their chosen texts I still doubt that it is what they claim it to be. The claim is that this is a description of the virtues, rather than a prescription. It is, at best, a description of prescriptions.
That is might be someway towards cultural apologetics can be evidenced from the Wiki entry on virtues, which include this paragraph. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue, accessed 10/2/2012).
After three years of study, 24 traits (classified into six broad areas of virtue) were identified, having "a surprising amount of similarity across cultures and strongly indicat[ing] a historical and cross-cultural convergence." These six categories of virtue are courage, justice, humanity, temperance, transcendence, and wisdom
This assertion might be on its way to becoming cultural common sense.
Character Strengths and Cross National Comparisons
As far as I can tell no similar exercise was used to provide a justification for the character strengths. So for claims that these are universal the empirical evidence is based on survey work.
The survey work was initially conducted via the web. Two of the things they say about this struck me. The statement that the results of these surveys may reveal something universal about human nature. That, while acknowledging that it was a self selecting sample (people with internet access, who are interested enough in 'authentic happiness' to go to the website, register, and fill in one or more scales) the sample was at least as good as a clinical sample or a sample of undergraduates. The statistical tool they used was a correlation of the rank orders of which virtues were highest to lowest.
That statement: "Our results may reveal something about universal human nature" based on an obviously biased sample and inadequate statistics perhaps reveals better than anything else why we should regard Positive Psychology as an explicit attempt at trying to promote one set of culturally contingent beliefs about human nature as if they were universal.
Consequences
In their 'history of psychology' Seligman and co-authors claim that for the second half of the twentieth century psychology has been too focused on mental health, and positive psychology provides the solution to this problem. I doubt that the problem has ever existed. Of course were I, like Seligman, to ignore areas of psychology like occupational and sports psychology I might believe that.
Were I to ignore community psychology, with its attempt to work within comunities to provide a resource of psychological skills and knowledge to people to create positive outcomes I might even be able to delude myself into thinking that positive psychology is something new. It is however stunningly more successful in terms of being media friendly and essentially unchallenging than community psychology.
There is also the consequence that scientifically literate, philosophically literature and theologically literature, if they delve into the evidence behind claims for universality might regard psychology with (even) less merit than they did before.
It does however act as a good propogandising tool, and there are already those re-casting their particular interests as 'positive psychology' to try to get some benefit from the brand recognition that positive psychology will give them.
As far as I can tell no similar exercise was used to provide a justification for the character strengths. So for claims that these are universal the empirical evidence is based on survey work.
The survey work was initially conducted via the web. Two of the things they say about this struck me. The statement that the results of these surveys may reveal something universal about human nature. That, while acknowledging that it was a self selecting sample (people with internet access, who are interested enough in 'authentic happiness' to go to the website, register, and fill in one or more scales) the sample was at least as good as a clinical sample or a sample of undergraduates. The statistical tool they used was a correlation of the rank orders of which virtues were highest to lowest.
That statement: "Our results may reveal something about universal human nature" based on an obviously biased sample and inadequate statistics perhaps reveals better than anything else why we should regard Positive Psychology as an explicit attempt at trying to promote one set of culturally contingent beliefs about human nature as if they were universal.
Consequences
In their 'history of psychology' Seligman and co-authors claim that for the second half of the twentieth century psychology has been too focused on mental health, and positive psychology provides the solution to this problem. I doubt that the problem has ever existed. Of course were I, like Seligman, to ignore areas of psychology like occupational and sports psychology I might believe that.
Were I to ignore community psychology, with its attempt to work within comunities to provide a resource of psychological skills and knowledge to people to create positive outcomes I might even be able to delude myself into thinking that positive psychology is something new. It is however stunningly more successful in terms of being media friendly and essentially unchallenging than community psychology.
There is also the consequence that scientifically literate, philosophically literature and theologically literature, if they delve into the evidence behind claims for universality might regard psychology with (even) less merit than they did before.
It does however act as a good propogandising tool, and there are already those re-casting their particular interests as 'positive psychology' to try to get some benefit from the brand recognition that positive psychology will give them.
References
Danziger, K. (1997). Naming the mind: How psychology found its language. London: Sage.
Peterson, C. & Seligman, M.E.P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues A Handbook and Classification. Washington, D.C.: APA Press and Oxford University Press.
Seligman, M. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5-14. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.5
Seligman, M. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5), 410-421. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.5.410
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