My Positive Psychology Crisis

 

I have a confession to make: I am trapped in a positive psychology crisis. Right now, reading through journal after journal, I am getting increasingly aware of the replicability issues within the field, and I progressively question the soundness of the questionnaires used, the samples selected, and the methodologies applied.

In psychological science, there is a continuum of scientific precision that can be achieved. It concerns how behaviours, attitudes and emotions are measured. With all the best intentions and adherence to the scientific method, assessing positive emotions and introspective processes like subjective well-being and life satisfaction (in other terms, happiness), self-kindness, optimism, and flourishing is a difficult task. More often, these exploratory studies are done via cross-sectional samples with university populations. In other words, with WEIRD samples: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (Henrich et al., 2010). Experimental and longitudinal studies are rare and often result in mixed outcomes. It is not surprising as the state of positive feelings can be brief and fleeting. They are highly dependent on a participant's life events and daily stressors. Such influences can undoubtedly confound many studies.

Since results from positive psychology studies are fascinating and exciting, they quickly disseminate in people's blogs, websites, and newspapers, where they sell well but with an uncritical ethos. Robert Biswas-Diener, a well-known positive psychologist and creator of the 'Life Satisfaction' questionnaire, admits this issue in one of his blogs ("Should We Trust Positive Psychology?", 2021) and acknowledges being guilty of that undertaking himself. He illustrates the example of 'gratitude' and how different people have a very different affiliation and outcome with such a variable. Therefore, the question arises of how generalizable findings really are in cultural and socio-economic contexts.

Positive psychology is not the only scientific enterprise where studies produce misleading results that are not able to be reproduced with follow-up research. It happens just as much in other psychological science domains and in experimental economics and medicine as well, according to Anvari and Lakens (2018). Considering how vital public trust is in having confidence about the reliability and validity of scientific findings -- as it might impede funding of science -- they ran a study to measure public trust in psychological science, their field of expertise. Interestingly, public future trust was found to be significant, despite participants' exposure to questionable research practices and replication failures. People exposed to proposed reforms in science and methodologies, however, had less trust in science than the control group with no exposure to any issues in science. How puzzling is this outcome! It concerns me that despite all efforts to educate how the scientific process works, including that scientific debates and incongruences are part of the journey to finding the most approximate truth that we can have at a specific point in time in history, it might well be that the greater public has become lenient and overall disinterested in the trustworthiness of psychology. The consumerism mentality avoids confrontation with the dilemmas of scientists. Are people happy to be fed crumbs to digest as it suits; suggesting scientific reforms to improve the scientific process is asking too much? Thanks to the cooks, the cookie was delicious – but do not ask us to enter the kitchen and do your washing up.

Back to my positive psychology crisis: I cannot refute that it nevertheless is an important field of research. Arguably, it will become more rigorous and cohesive as time passes; the field is historically speaking young and fresh. Psychological science has long focused on the negative aspects of human existence. Mental health issues, neurological abnormalities and accidents have driven research over the last 200 years. Positive psychology can balance this perspective and weigh in on the facts that these pathologies are only countable with the opposite spectrum of 'what happens with people when things are going well'.

I get a very deep insight from such findings; they help me understand profoundly why I am feeling good, and they offer a few 'life-hacks' to prolong positive emotions and savour feel-good experiences. I have learned to be less self-critical. I meditate when my head is spinning in overload, and I care about my future because I want to flourish and achieve my goals without falling apart half-way. Likewise, I am aware that these findings are not general truths – however, there is no harm in trying, no harm at all. In fact, one day I can maintain a balanced time-perspective (Zimbardo & Boyd, 2008), another day I feel refreshed after a walk in the forest, some days I feel self-compassion (Leary et al., 2007; Neff, 2001), and on some days meditation entirely relaxes me. Other days, not so much. As for overall life satisfaction – I am too afraid to dwell on that for too long.

References
Farid Anvari & Daniël Lakens (2018) The replicability crisis and public trust in

psychological science, Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology, 3:3, 266-286. https://doi.org/10.1080/23743603.2019.1684822

Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? (RatSWD Working Paper Series, 139). Berlin: Rat für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsdaten (RatSWD). https://doi.org/10419/43616

Leary, M., Tate, E., Adams, C., Batts Allen, A., & Hancock, J. (2007). Self-compassion and reactions to unpleasant self-relevant events: The implications of treating oneself kindly. Journal Of Personality And Social Psychology, 92(5), 887-904. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.5.887

Neff, K. (2003). The Development and Validation of a Scale to Measure Self-Compassion. Self And Identity, 2(3), 223-250. https://doi.org/10.1080/15298860309027

Should We Trust Positive Psychology?. Greater Good. (2021). Retrieved 22 March 2021, from

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/should_we_trust_positive_psychology. Zimbardo, P. G., & Boyd, J. N. (2008). The Time Paradox. New York, NY: Free Press.