Is positive psychology bullshit?
Someone asked me this the other day - gently - so the question deserves a thoughtful answer, and not the ones that immediately came to my mind.
As I noted in my very first blog entry here, positive psychology is an umbrella term that organizes the work of those of us who have heeded the recommendation to study scientifically what makes life worth living. Specific examples of positive psychology theory, research, and practice can be good or bad or ugly, just like anything else. The umbrella cannot be bullshit - that's a category mistake of the first order.
But what about the person holding the umbrella - e.g., me - and whatever it is that that the umbrella is covering - i.e., the body of basic and applied work done by positive psychologists?
Harry Frankfurt's well-known essay "On Bullshit" provides a perspective for understanding what BS is as well as what it is not. Frankfurt defines bullshit not as a lie but as an indifference to truth.
By this definition, the science of positive psychology does not qualify, not when the research on which it is based is published in peer-reviewed journals, not when these papers contain appropriate qualifications and caveats, and not when other researchers weigh in with their own data that support different conclusions. The truth - at least the way that social scientists try to grasp it - is always of prime concern.
However, also by this definition, a self-identified positive psychologist could qualify. If someone presents himself as a positive psychologist and then proceeds to say things that are indifferent to what has been learned from research, then that is BS, even if it happens to be true, and especially if it is not.
Examples certainly exist. Anyone who promises the secret to happiness or six easy steps to bliss should trigger a BS detector, assuming one is legal in your state. Positive psychologists have identified many of the determinants of happiness, but they're hardly a secret - they're described in scientific books and journals readily found in any college library. And anyone who says that happiness is easy is not reading any of the journals where the research has been published.
By the way, I give a pass to positive psychology book authors and science writers when their book subtitles and headlines qualify - which they often do - because these are typically not written by them. Readers should be forewarned that they should not judge a book by the nonsense on its cover or a newspaper story by the nonsense in its headline.
Anyway, the positive psychologists I know and respect are not glib, To be sure, they elaborate, extrapolate, and conjecture - as do I - but they all acknowledge what they are doing - as I also do, I hope. That's not BS, even if the riffs are wrong. That's good clean intellectual fun and what makes positive psychology so interesting to so many people.
When I give a talk about positive psychology, I am always struck by the curiosity of the general public about what the data actually show. By far the most common questions I am asked are about the specific studies I have mentioned, as well as those I have not. People do not want my uninformed opinions - an invitation to ignore the truth to which it would be easy to succumb. Rather, they want more details, from which they can and do draw their own conclusions. That keeps my head in the game of truth, and I do not think I am a special member of the positive psychology posse.
Then again, why should you believe me? The answer is that you should not, until you check out the truth for yourself and think about it. Positive psychology is fertile, but it is not fertilizer.
