But the results that go out to the public through the media tend to be spun toward the positive effects of positive emotions on health. Partly, this represents a long-standing media bias away from “null results”: a study finding, for example, that there is no sex difference in the ability to sprint or solve quadratic equations is likely to be judged less newsworthy than a study reporting that one sex left the other in the dust. In the case of positive psychology, a 2002 New York Times article cited two studies linking optimism to longevity—and four studies tracing longevity to such other traits as “conscientiousness,” calmness, pessimism, and even cantankerousness. Yet the article was headlined “Power of Positive Thinking Extends, It Seems, to Aging.” 34 Some positive psychologists acknowledge the pressure to feed the media positive-sounding results, with the editors of the Handbook of Positive Psychology warning that:
In the excitement that may be associated with this new and invigorating approach [positive psychology], it may be tempting to overextrapolate so as to convey a sense of the progress that is being made. This can be even more possible when a person from the news media is almost putting words in our mouths about the supposed discoveries and advances that already have occurred. 35
The positive spin on positive psychology cannot be blamed entirely on overeager reporters. Consider a 2005 review article entitled “Does Positive Affect Influence Health?,” the summary of which says in its entirety:
This review highlights consistent patterns in the literature associating positive affect (PA) and physical health. However, it also raises serious conceptual and methodological reservations. Evidence suggests an association of trait PA and lower morbidity and of state and trait PA and decreased symptoms and pain. Trait PA is also associated with increased longevity among older community-dwelling individuals. The literature on PA and surviving serious illness is inconsistent. Experimentally inducing intense bouts of activated state PA triggers short-term rises in physiological arousal and associated (potentially harmful) effects on immune, cardiovascular, and pulmonary function. However, arousing effects of state PA are not generally found in naturalistic ambulatory studies in which bouts of PA are typically less intense and often associated with health protective responses. A theoretical framework to guide further study is proposed. 36
Yet when asked in an interview to “summarize the significance of your paper in layman’s terms,” the authors set aside all their “reservations” and concerns about “inconsistent” literature and “potentially harmful” effects to respond cheerily that “the paper provides preliminary evidence that persons who more often experience positive emotions such as happiness, enthusiasm, and calmness, are less likely to develop a range of diseases, live longer, and experience fewer symptoms and less pain.” 37
Another case of positive self-spinning is provided by Suzanne Segerstrom, a researcher at the University of Kentucky, who won the 2002 Templeton Foundation Award for Positive Psychology for her work on what may be the holy grail of positive psychology—the possible link between positive emotions and the immune system. Although the immune system plays no clear role in cancer, it is definitely important in fighting off colds and other infectious illnesses. Whether there is a link between positive emotions and the immune system is another matter. Martin Seligman asserts such a link, writing that “happy people” have “feistier immune systems than less happy people.” In a 1998 paper, Segerstrom reported that optimism was correlated with greater immune competence, as measured by levels of key immune cell types. But in a second study, published three years later, she found that “some contradictory findings have emerged” and that, in some circumstances, more optimistic people “fare worse immunologically” than pessimists. 38
You would not know, however, that her results were negative or at best “mixed” from reading her newspaper accounts of her work. In a 2002 interview with the New York Daily News, she stated that the health benefits of optimism are “significant” and that not only do “optimists almost always have better emotional adjustments,” but “most optimists show higher immune responses to illness.” 39 When I interviewed Segerstrom by phone in 2007, she insisted that she had been under no pressure from the media, or anyone else, to downplay her negative results. But when I brought up her award a little later on in our talk, she told me, “To get the Templeton award . . . You don’t get anything for a null result.”
The Templeton Connection
The Templeton Foundation, which contributed $2.2 million to Seligman’s Positive Psychology Center in the first decade of the twenty-first century, as well as about $1.3 million to miscellaneous positive-psychology research projects on such matters as gratitude, humility, and connectedness, is probably best known for its efforts to put religion on an equal intellectual footing with science. Founded by billionaire investor Sir John Templeton in 1972, the foundation gives out an annual Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, which was designed to fill a gap left by the Nobel prizes and pointedly pays more than they do. (In 2002, perhaps reflecting a certain lack of progress in religion, it was renamed the Templeton Prize for Progress toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities.) The foundation’s campaign to bring scientific legitimacy to religion has led to some dubious ventures, including funding in 1999 for a conference on intelligent design as an alternative to evolution. More cautiously, in recent years, the foundation has backed away from intelligent design and expressed its “spiritual” orientation through funding for research into the efficacy of prayer—another null result—as well as various abstract qualities like “character” and “humility.” Until his death in 2008, Sir John Templeton was fond of bringing scientists and theologians together with the aim of finding common ground in luxurious tropical resorts.
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.’ ” 40 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. 41
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 org
anizations, 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. 42 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.” 43 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.” 44 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. 45 (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. 46 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.” 47
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. 48
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.” 49 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.” 50 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.” 51 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. 52 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. T
he 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. 53 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.