Raspberry juice psychology

How optimism trumps logic in the positive psychology movement

by Michael Shermer

I am an optimist by nature. I almost always believe that things will work out for the best, and even if things go wrong I'm sure I can fix it. But my optimism has not always served me faithfully. Twice I crashed into cars while pedaling my bike, right into their windshields, all through my own fault, because of my cheerful tendency to think that street corners, which I had turned hundreds of times before, would not put a physical car in my path. Author Nasim Nicholas Taleb calls these high-impact, unexpected, and rare events "black swans." After enough time, no rising trendline is immune to a dramatic decline.

A bicycle accident as an example of a black swan is actually a suitable metaphor for what investigative journalist and born skeptic Barbara Ehrenreich believes happened to America as a result of the positive thinking movement. In her fascinating and carefully reasoned book Bright-Sided (Metropolitan Books, 2009), she shows how the positive psychology movement was born in the happy days of the 90s, when the economy boomed, housing prices skyrocketed, and the gurus of positive thinking took advantage of the motivation business. Academic psychologists, armed with the armor of scientific jargon, joined in the celebration.

The shallow style of the pioneers of this positive thinking, such as Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking, 1952) and Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich, 1937) or the quasi-religious sermons of the "prosperity gospel" from preacher-entrepreneurs such as Frederick "Father Ike" Eikernkötter, Robert H. Shuler and Joel Osteen are predictably data-poor and data-rich in practical stories. But one would have expected more from respected experimental psychologists like Martin A. P. Seligman, who almost single-handedly started the positive psychology movement in academia, which, according to the website of the Center for Positive Psychology (www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu), " The scientific study of the benefits and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive." Ehrenreich systematically dismantles, then completely collapses, the little science behind the positive psychology movement and the seemingly beneficial health effects of positive thinking. The evidence is scant. The statistical significance is low. The few solid findings often turn out to be unconfirmable or obscured in later research. And the correlations (for example, between happiness and health) are not causal. Ehrenreich shows Seligman and his colleagues drinking a pink raspberry potion of positive thinking, but she also provides a prescription for the antidote.

Take for example Seligman's "happiness equation" (the envy of physics is alive and well!): H=S+C+V (H, happiness = S, your constant level, plus C, the circumstances of your life, plus V, the factors under your control). And as Ehrenreich says, "If you're going to put all these things together in an equation, there has to be the same units [of measurement] for H (happy thoughts for the day?), for V, for S, and for C." When she presented this problem to Seligman in an interview, "he grimaced and told me that I didn't understand what 'beta weighting' was and that I should go home and look it up on Google." And she did so, to discover that "beta weighting" is the coefficients of the "free variables" in the regression equation used to find statistical correlations between variables. But Seligman presented his formula as a simple formula, like E=mc2, and not as an oversimplified regression analysis, thus exposing himself to unimaginative questions such as: How do we know that H is a simple sum of the other variables and not a more complex relationship, in which perhaps "Second order" effects like… C times V? We don't know, and the equation therefore becomes just a slogan embellished with mathematical formulation.

Isn't positive thinking better than negative thinking? All other factors being equal, there is no doubt about it, but the alternative to being an optimist or a pessimist is to be a realist. "Human intellectual development thus far stems from our long struggle to see things 'as they are', or in the most universal sense, to see things not as consequences of our own feelings," concludes Ehrenreich. "What we call enlightenment, and hold it delicately at the tips of our fingers, is the slowly dawning understanding that the world operates according to its own internal algorithms, of cause and effect, probability and chance, regardless of human feelings."
Emotions are important, no doubt, but the first principle of skepticism is not to deceive ourselves, and emotions, both positive and negative, too often tend to overrule reason. In the end, reality must overcome imagination, regardless of the emotion it causes us.

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and author of the book "The Mind of the Market".