Can 5 Questions Explain Positive Psychology?

Could it be that the best way to define a field is to ask not about its biggest findings, but instead about its biggest questions? Warren Berger has me wondering. Ever since starting his insightful new book, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas, I can’t help but find great questions lurking behind every interesting article I read, each intriguing idea I hear, and even the very work that I do.

Berger defines beautiful questions as those that are “ambitious yet actionable…that can begin to shift the way we perceive or think about something – and that might serve as a catalyst to bring about change.” The book’s title is borrowed from an E.E. Cummings line, “Always the beautiful answer / who asks a more beautiful question.”

It reminds me of something James Pawelski, Education Director of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania, once said. To paraphrase: “The best answers lead to even better questions.” In the spirit of both Berger’s book and Pawelski’s comment, I started wondering what beautiful questions might have led to the big breakthroughs in positive psychology so far? And what beautiful questions will define the next phase in our future?

Below are five of my favorite questions from positive psychology’s past. Later this week, I will share five more for our field’s future.

BQ1: “What are the characteristics of a positive life, and how can they be measured and taught?”

It might be three questions rolled into one, but this single line from Martin Seligman’s 1998 APA presidential address comes pretty close to capturing the essence of an entire field in only 16 words. It wan’t the first time any of these questions had been asked – or answered. Ed Diener’s “Satisfaction with Life Scale” had long ago been tested and validated, and the Penn Resiliency Project was already through its first rounds of evaluation. Yet here Seligman captured the basic interrogative grammar of positive psychology research: Can [insert subject] contribute to a [positive / good / successful / flourishing] life? How can [subject] be measured? How can [subject] be taught or developed through interventions?

BQ2: “What sources of strength were these people drawing on?”

After the APA presidential address, perhaps the next most defining document for the field is the 2000 American Psychologist article “Positive Psychology: An Introduction,” by Seligman and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. In that seminal publication, Csikszentmihalyi offers the following reflection:

“As a child, I witnessed the dissolution of the smug world in which I had been comfortably ensconced. I noticed with surprise how many of the adults I had known as successful and self-confident became helpless and dispirited once the war removed their social supports. Without jobs, money, or status, they were reduced to empty shells. Yet there were a few who kept their integrity and purpose despite the surrounding chaos. Their serenity was a beacon that kept others from losing hope. And these were not the men and women one would have expected to emerge unscathed: They were not necessarily the most respected, better educated, or more skilled individuals. This experience set me thinking: What sources of strength were these people drawing on?”

From its early days, questions about human strengths and virtues have been central to much of the positive psychology discourse. Chris Peterson and Seligman introduced their “manual of the sanities” in 2004, and there have been countless studies in the decade since on the constructs within and the application of the VIA Classification of Strengths. Other complementary strengths assessments have been developed as well, and independent studies of hope, resilience, and even post-traumatic growth have contributed to our understanding of human capacity.

BQ3: “What good are positive emotions?”

Although Alice Isen and others had already begun to establish the beneficial effects of positive affect, it still took an answer to this question posed by Barbara Fredrickson in a 1998 Review of General Psychology article to really put positive emotions on the academic map. Her “broaden-and-build theory” fittingly helped broaden the scientific conversation about emotions, from one that focused particularly on experiences of anger, anxiety, and the like, to one that made more room for studies of serenity, contentment, joy, and so on.

BQ4: “Why do some individuals accomplish more than others of equal intelligence?”

Inspired by a question first posed by William James almost exactly a century earlier, Angela Duckworth and her colleagues picked up this line of inquiry in their 2007 article introducing the construct of grit. Put another way, Duckworth and her fellow researchers were wondering whether there might be better predictors of success than IQ. Since that impressive first slate of studies, not only has grit become a part of the education policy discussion, but so have self-control, conscientiousness, and other non-cognitive factors that contribute to our capacity for achievement.

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BQ5: “When you see someone do a really good deed, do you feel something? What exactly? Where in your body do you feel it? Does it make you want to do anything?”

Along with Paul Rozin and Clark McCauley, Jonathan Haidt had intuited from his studies of disgust that human social experience was defined not just by closeness and hierarchy, but also by a third dimension they called divinity – a distinctly moral dimension. But as he relates in chapter 10 of The Happiness Hypothesis, he then became curious about the flip side of disgust, or those experiences that would lift people up the moral dimension. He began to pester his family, friends, and students with these questions, and in doing so advanced the serious study of awe, transcendence, and elevation.

To be sure, these five questions fall well short of forming an exhaustive list of the important questions from positive psychology to date. Most of them are also far from being definitively answered. Together, though, I think they offer a representative sample of the kinds of questions people who work in positive psychology tend to ask. Whether we do research or practice, and whether we consider positive psychology a professional home or a fun field to visit, it seems to me that many of us working in this area are hoping to answer these and/or related questions for ourselves, and for others. What do you think?