The Meaning in Life

How Deep is the Divide between Therapy and Science?

Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:46:22 +0000

Is there a Mackenzie Phillips-sized family secret lurking in the heart of psychology?

In an inflammatory new opinion piece for Newsweek, Sharon Begley says, 'Hell yeah!' - "It's a good thing couches are too heavy to throw, because the fight brewing among therapists is getting ugly. For years, psychologists who conduct research have lamented what they see as an antiscience bias among clinicians, who treat patients. But now the gloves have come off."

I for one have begun pumping iron to improve my couch-hurling abilities in preparation for the upcoming sofa melee!

(I made that picture myself!)

Ms. Begley is talking about a new article, set to appear in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, in which Timothy Baker, Richard McFall, and Varda Shoham argue that too many practicing clinical and counseling psychologists ignore the huge amount of research identifying successful and effective ways to do therapy. This debate has been around for a while, and raises hackles on both sides. I think it's a matter of values, and as is the case in most battles over values, there is probably not an easy solution. At the same time, this debate is absolutely critical for the health of the field and the economic and psychological health our populace!

Here is how Baker and colleagues begin their article (currently available only in an 'in press' form here): "The principal goals of clinical psychology are to generate knowledge based on scientifically valid evidence and to apply this knowledge to the optimal improvement of mental and behavioral health." This highlights the first values conflict:

♦ Is the goal of clinical and counseling psychology to create knowledge through research and translate that into helping people? OR is the goal to try to help people and later use research to understand how (or indeed whether) that therapy works?

People whose values lie in the first question say, given that we can verify that several empirically effective treatment options exist, why choose an untested product?

People whose values lie in the second half of that question say, given that the therapies that are being tested were generally drawn from the experience and experimentation of clinicians in the first place, why should we wait for research to ratify each and every approach (when it gets around to it)?

There is a second value at work as well:

♦ Can therapy be dismantled, with critical elements isolated, delivered in calibrated doses, with effects reliably measured against meaningful comparisons with other approaches, then reconstructed and implemented by clinicians? OR is the interplay of myriad client and therapists characteristics and behaviors across countless discrete interactions in attempts to address multiple, co-existing disorders and concerns too dynamic and complex to be replicated within a laboratory setting?

Simply put, some people think that empirical approaches to testing therapy can inform us about what works best, and some people don't.

Why do I think this is a values issue? Well, in addition to using war metaphors (fight brewing, gloves come off), it is common to see people tackle this issue by creating "straw men," or absurd and extreme examples of their opponents, to attack. For example, Ms. Begley insinuates that millions of psychologists use ridiculous-sounding approaches like dolphin-assisted therapy with their clients. As awesome as that sounds, it is absurdly untrue (where am I going to get a dolphin in Fort Collins, Colorado?). On the other side of the "battle" I frequently hear people assert that researchers are trying to turn therapy into a cookbook-driven series of tricks that a monkey, robot, or child could perform. This is obviously absurd as well.

All of the rhetorical histrionics that this issue attracts distract from the real issue: How can we show that we give our clients effective services? Following closely on the heels of this question is: How can our clients and consumers assure themselves that they are getting effective services?

This reminds me of a fascinating Malcolm Gladwell article, in which he describes "The Quarterback Problem." Indulge me if you would, in a football sidebar (after all, my 2009 Minnesota Vikings team is clearly the greatest team since the 1972 Dolphins!). Essentially the quarterback problem is that it is insanely hard to figure out which college quarterback will be a great NFL quarterback. Scouts, coaches, personnel directors, managers, and media figures spend thousands of hours poring over statistics, videotapes, and game performances on practically every eligible college quarterback. The result of their mind-boggling time investment is that no one has any idea who will be an NFL MVP and who will be a pitiable bust. As Mr. Gladwell frames it, the rub lies in the incredible increase in complexity and speed of the pro game compared to the college game. Although they're both playing football, it's not really the same game.

In some ways, although scientists are "doing" therapy in their research, it's not necessarily the same game that practitioners are playing with their clients.

Some people take this notion and run with it, maintaining that research can't tell us which therapies are effective and which are not. That's ridiculous of course. Even the worst scout for the worst NFL team doesn't tell the team to draft a punter, offensive tackle, or unicorn. They're pretty good at ruling out awful, and even mediocre talent. Occasionally, an undrafted QB makes a big splash (Kurt Warner and Tony Romo come to mind), but the system - as riddled as it is with disconnects between the performance it's assessing and the performance it's trying to predict - does a brutally good job of getting rid of junk.

You can add to the quarterback problem another complicating factor. When researchers compare bona fide therapies - in other words therapies most professionals would expect to work - it is fairly uncommon to find notable differences in the outcomes clients achieve. That is to say, that the large majority of people report that therapy helps reduce their distress, and research often enough finds that specific approaches to therapy yield similarly good results (typically better than medications). Researchers like Bruce Wampold argue that this is explained by factors that are common to successful therapy ("common factors"), like establishing a good working relationship and the degree to which clients are actively engaged in their own healing.

Unfortunately, for too many practitioners, the values of help-first-research-later and it's-too-complex combine with research showing a good degree of equivalence among therapy approaches to provide an excuse to simply do whatever they feel like doing. I think it's a pretty small number of people, not really the "unconscionable embarrassment" Walter Michel labels it. After all, in contrast to the silly assertion that Ms. Begley makes about clinical psychologists not being exposed to science training, current accreditation standards for clinical and counseling psychologists require significant training. There are some reasons to wonder whether developing a new accrediting board, as Baker and colleagues promote, as opposed to pressuring existing ones to more rigorously support scientific training, would be the most efficient way to develop better therapists (see one opinion on this here). Although the criteria they lay out are appealing to me, personally, many programs do an excellent job within the existing system already.

For example, in our counseling psychology program at Colorado State University, students are required to complete multiple research methods and statistics courses, conduct empirical thesis and dissertation research projects among other additional grounding courses and experiences in the science of psychology.

I teach a course to every one of our doctoral students specifically focused on empirically supported treatments and evidence based practice. All of our students learn what works, the basics of how to implement those approaches, and how to critically consume and integrate findings from emerging research.

However, all these great things come with some boulders of salt.

First, it is far too rare for psychotherapists to evaluate their own effectiveness as therapists. No matter what one's values or how persuaded one is by the common factors debate, there really is no excuse for not using the tools of science to evaluate whether one's clients are getting better!

Second, I think it is clear by now that we have amassed a convincing amount of empirical evidence that does, in fact, support using some specific therapies. Training-to-competency in these already identified approaches should be mandatory, in my mind. I am not convinced that the evidence is solid enough that today's list contains the only therapies psychologists should be allowed to use - after all, that list is ever-growing, and contains significant gaps in what we know about treating people with certain specific disorders, multiple disorders, some potentially important cultural or level-of-functioning differences, and serving people across the lifespan. Psychologists striving to treat difficult cases often need to improvise and innovate based on their expertise and experience, and often the results benefit us as a field.

Advancing the effectiveness of psychotherapy is absolutely critical, and central to researchers, clinicians, and the people they serve. Doing the therapy that comes most easily, regardless of whether there's any evidence that it works, can do real harm. Regarding anyone who sees some ambiguity or gaps in what we know as being and angry, irrational Luddite can do real harm, too. Both sides need to consider who receives this harm, though. It's not us psychologists, it's the people we serve.

Parenthood and the Intentional Life

Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:50:38 +0000

True Wisdom, according to Socrates, comes from embracing the realization that there is much we don't know, and that we will always need to seek knowledge of the most important of these.

My kids show me this all the time. From my failure to grasp the complex social world of Bionicles to my Vulgarian lack of appreciation for the whimsical artfulness of 'Yo Gabba Gabba,' my bottomless ignorance is a source of constant amazement to my kids. Parenting is one of those commonly acknowledged "meaningful things" we do. Yet, it's also a huge challenge, and is pretty regularly linked to lower levels of subjective well-being. Like many of life's most important things, the rewards of parenthood seem directly related to the value we place on it, and our struggle to surmount its challenges. And, it's frequently humbling.

So, I readily acknowledge my ignorance. But, for some reason, I still maintain that I am a generally rational person, capable of making well-planned decisions that move me along the path lit by my purpose and passions in life. My kids are helping me see that this, too, is a delusion. If it isn't obvious by now, I want to make it clear that my children are much, MUCH better human beings than I am, but none of us are perfect.

Case in point: After a full, last-day-of-summer, kid-a-palooza-fest filled to the brim with cutting and gluing paper airplanes, bike rides, staging fierce battles between Transformers and mermaid princesses, prancing around in blanket-capes, dancing at make-believe balls, putting puzzles together, and more social activity than I typically achieve in a month, I was pooped and pressed for time to make dinner. After a paying lip service to the appeal of quiet activities like reading, my kids revealed their actual plan was to argue, stomp around, and fiercely compete in the who-can-yell-loudest-and-gallop-around-the-kitchen-most-erratically Olympics.

I tried to intervene in the typical way. You know, start intoning a reasonable sentence about playing quietly, please no yelling, please vacate the kitchen - then observe that there is no audience for my discourse and ramp up quickly to the Wrath of Poseiden, bellowing GO TO YOUR ROOMS AND PLAY QUIETLY!!!!

Thus having already lost my personal, daily battle not to be a reactive, emotional, loudmouthed moron, I should have been able to take some consolation - perhaps even pride - in the stolid, dignified demeanor of my little ones as they looked at me, said OK, and trotted up to their rooms in an instant. Look how far they'd come since the days when any such "redirection" would have elicited whines and moans of injustice! At least that's what I should have been thinking.

Instead, I was put out by their apparent lack of gravitas for the situation. Didn't they realize they'd been banished? So, realizing the stupidity even as I uttered it, I added a Dickensian "...while I think about whether I'll send you to bed without any supper!"

Ugh.

So, what went wrong? I had a plan, had previous experience rationally doling out appropriate consequences, had successfully navigated rational behavior modification with these kids before. Yet, there I was, Ahab howling absurd threats to the whale's maw!

If something like this has ever happened to you, here are three strategies for getting through the little behavioral bumps in the road of parenthood.

Fight fire with fire. This has been said before...don't we all know this? Yet, there I was threatening starvation for being noisy. That is not my first priority, so it shouldn't warrant 'the big guns.' In fact, the way that I try to deal with noisiness, particularly when I'm bumbling about dinner is by getting down on their level and *calmly* explaining that they are being noisy, and that it affects me negatively. Usually, just this simple conversations triggers their empathy and they motivate themselves to create a solution. If what I want is calm, empathic behavior, I find it works really well to be, well, calm and empathic.
Have a plan. Really. I know my story doesn't equate to a ringing endorsement of my plan not to be a bellowing moron, but I do way better than I would if I was left to my own devices. The key is to identify what behaviors you want to change, and spend some time working on your intervention strategy. If you are parenting with a partner, then getting on the same page is critical.
Practice makes perfect. That's right, practice being a parent. Kind of how none of us understands (or even reads) the reams of documents regulating our single most expensive purchase (our homes, typically), we also tend to kind of just hope that we'll come naturally to one of our most important jobs. The real problem with my 'bad parenting' story wasn't that I didn't have a plan, or know that I was overreacting, it was that I was out of practice. Kind of like Bret Favre re-re-un-un-un-retiring, I'd been coasting a bit this summer. I paid the price (actually, my kids did, kind of like we perpetually beleaguered Vikings fans will be paying the price 'round about November). I need to get back to practicing my rational, thought-out responses to the very predictable eruptions of kidly energy and ebulliance I'll face in the future. I also need to practice responding to my own, internal reactions to these eruptions. Tons of research on emotional regulation and emotional intelligence demonstrates the value of recognizing and remediating unhelpful emotional reactions. But, as with anything important, it takes practice to do it well.

I'd suggest two other things, but I fear they are unique to my situation. First, have kids with the kind of person I'm partnered with. Between the two of us, we equal two parents, but I only count about a half a parent. Second, write a column about how awful of a parent you are - it's super motivating!

I'd love to hear questions, reactions, and tips from parents and kids out there, so please leave a comment!

What the Health?!?

Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 15:10:11 +0000

My wife and I were watching news coverage of recent Presidential talks and "town hall meetings" on health care reform. I started off finding all the hysteria over this issue pretty, well, hysterical. It reminded me of exploding cell phones or Manbearpig, all topics that are pretty darn absurd, and - at least from the outside - amazingly bizarre things to get so worked up over.

Then the guns started showing up. People are bringing loaded guns to Presidential appearances! And we're at an Orange level of terrorism alert! (I'm not really sure what that means, but we've been at an Orange level of risk for all of my children's lives). Remember the kid who got suspended because he wore a Coke shirt to Pepsi day? He should have shown up with bazooka I guess. It seems insane that a country with a history of presidential assassinations would allow this sort of thing, but health care insurance plans are apparently menacing enough to allow it.

Two days ago, our local newspaper featured an opinion column by a local man who claimed to have been the one to break President Obama's true identity as a committed Marxist (Harvard Law School must be so proud!). Yesterday, it featured a column by a local woman entitled - and I am not making this up - "We all have reasons to be afraid." Like many others, it portends a vague but imminent doom threatening the very fabric of our great nation. I don't get it.

There is such a bewildering storm of enraged invective, phantasmogorical phrases, and dire predictions being hollered into the airspace that I'm not sure whether it's 1880 and we should be fearing the galloping of Jesse James' bandidos, 1902 and we should be on the lookout for anarchists, or 1919 and we should nervously await the rat-a-tat-tat of Dillinger's Tommy gun! I guess I could have said I can't tell if it's 1957 and we're supposed to quiver in fear over "the Red Menace," but that seemed too obvious. But this isn't a raving band of murderers, deranged assassins, or gangsters threatening the fate of our great nation, it's a bunch of people trying to figure out how to get health care expenses under control.

Why can't we actually talk about this? Why are people so livid about even the mention of a Medicare-style governmental system? Would it be OK to require everyone who wants to trot around with their loaded assault rifles or assert the threat of "death panels" to decline any and all governmental assistance with their health?

Maybe a better question would be to ask, does death make every word scary? I mean, "panels" are not particularly menacing are they? What about Death Tape Dispensers? Hello Death Kitty?

We know that people get very worked up around the topic of death. There's a fascinating theory of motivation that focuses on how the awareness of death instigates people to work to bolster their worldviews (see a great interview with Sheldon Solomon on this topic here). In a previous post, I talked about some of the ways in which our desire to protect our worldviews may intersect with some of the strong feelings on display in our political situation since the 2008 election. Research evidence continues to accumulate showing that most people seem to engage in politics on an emotional level, and it's obvious that the debate on health care stirs people's emotions.

But, people were bezerk about this stuff back when the word "Hillarycare" was coined in the early 1990's, and we weren't subjected to deranged, spittle-filled proclamations about 'death panels' back then. What if it doesn't take an explicit focus on death to trigger our desperate adherence to our worldview? What if it only took some reminder that we are, after all, mortal animals, filled with yucky fluids, yucky desires, and the regrettable need to make smacking sounds when we chew?

Believe it or not, there's a word for this: "Creatureliness." I know, it's about as elegant as passing gas, but it gets to the point. The researcher I most closely associate with creatureliness is Jamie Goldenberg. For a decade, she's looked at how all manner of creaturely prompts (sex, attraction, pregnancy, breast exams) conform to the predictions at the heart of terror management theory. Recently, she published a paper proposing that these ideas hold important implications for health promotion (you can read the abstract here). It's interesting stuff, and perhaps the reason we struggle as a nation to debate health care in a productive way is that there's something in our worldview that resists it.

Assuming we can't change our implicit national worldview, maybe we can go back to the days when talking about health care was a mind-numbing recitation of numbers, charts, acronyms, and actuarial tables. I'm willing to risk the boredom. This too important a topic to allow hysteria to derail it, and regardless of which side of the issue we're on, we need to promote more reasonable discourse on this most critical issue.

In the meantime, I've got to load up my machine gun, I heard that Manbearpig is trying to force everyone over the age of 3 to use exploding cell phones.

Are We Ourselves?

Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:50:06 +0000

Let me start by admitting a persistent befuddlement in the face of many of life's presumably easily answered questions. The one that has mystified me the longest is - why, if we're constantly replacing the cells in our bodies, do we retain scars? Get wrinkles as we age? Shrink and limp our ways to the grave?

I am sure a quick PubMed literature search would reveal that this "mystery" is easily explicable by the vagaries of environmentally-caused cell mutations, or some nasty aging gene, but I'll leave that science to the biologists and geneticists for now. I'm more interested in the science fiction of it all, and what it means for our sense of self.

The face that I saw in the mirror when I was 10 feels like me when I imagine my way back to that time, just as my 20 and 30 year old faces do, and my 40 and 80 year old faces will. Of course, every cell is different, lines are different, whiskers are different, hair color is different (right now, I'm transitioning to my third natural color...blonde, brown...yes, now, grey). But it's still me somehow. I think this is an awesome mystery. Everything about us changes, yet we are still us!

Or are we?!? Creepy research seems to percolate into my consciousness are fairly regular intervals concerning the influences of microbes on our poor, frail species. My first creep-out moment was coming across the periodical news releases arising from a cellular census of the human body. One National Public Radio story had this lead-in: "The human body contains 20 times more microbes than it does cells. In fact, a visitor from outer space might think the human race is just one big chain of microbe hotels." Another story puts the number at more like 10 microbe cells for every human cell, but still!! Researchers always like to point to the pleasant symbiosis that allows us to digest food, extract more energy from nutrients, and so on, but it still distresses me to think that perhaps people are just pudgy planets for a few thousand generations of microbial civilzations.

What if they do to US what we do to OUR PLANET?

What, indeed? Well, perhaps just pesky little inconveniences like infectious throat bacteria giving us Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder or bird flu giving us Parkinson's Disease! I know what you'll say...none of these things has been proven yet. On the other hand, it's not like I have to try very hard to think of examples where wimpy microbes suddenly morphed into flesh-eating plagues (although some might argue that strep throat isn't that wimpy).

But the last straw was an uber-creepy story about a fungus (!) that infects a type of ant and somehow makes the ant crawl to a particularly fungi-friendly place under a leaf on a particular side of a particular tree, latch on with its mandibles, and...DIE! Granted, an ant's brain is probably only half as complex as the brain of the average Jackass stuntman-wannabe, but STILL! Zombie ants under fungal control!

Does this remind anyone of a certain, prescient Star Trek vignette? Poor Chekov was minding his own business when a slimy parasite crawled in his ear and took over his brain. You might think that's far-fetched, but Star Trek was pretty visionary - I mean, they predicted the Bluetooth earphone!

So what if all of my cells, including a few trillion foreign, microbial invaders, parasites, and hangers-on, have all died and regenerated their way through a few thousand generations? So what if - physically - the me who's typing this won't exist on a cellular level, and is mostly not "me" at all? Why should that be a problem?

To me the amazing thing is that it ISN'T a problem. Here I am, semi-panicked, yet highly fascinated by the thought of billions of little bacterial buddies bouncing around in my fingertips as I type, trying to imagine the collective annoyance that my microbial amigos will feel when I die ('Crap!' they'll grouse, 'now who can we live in?').

But it's still me. Our brains (at least the human part of our brains) just can't seem to help themselves when it comes to weaving together the moments of our lives into a consistent narrative. In my research, I refer to this as the comprehension, sense-making function of meaning in life. It is a fundamental human adaptation. We exist, we bring in sensory information by the boatload, and we assort it all into one mostly seamless movie, which we then live for decades. The heart of my research and practice is trying to make this process intentional, and work toward out flourishing rather than our deterioration. We get to shape our stories as we live. Take a moment to reacquaint yourself with the values you want to drive your life, and work them into your story at every opportunity.

It's a practice I will continue to strive for every day.

At least until the zombie fungus takes over my brain!

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Lego sculpture by Nathan Sawaya

Living Longer. And Better.

Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:16:39 +0000

The famous mystery writer, Agatha Christie, once said something about later life that remains true today:

"I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find - at the age of fifty, say - that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about...It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you."

Of course, Agatha Christie only lived to be 86, so what does she know?!?

So often, getting to triple digits, living longer, and being the oldest kid on the block seems to be our obsession. We like thinking about how long we want to live, rather than how well we want to live. Is there a way to do both - live well, and live long?

What I like about Agatha Christie's quote is that it captures something I've often argued is essential to living a deep, good life - the restless and curious quest to ask more of life, dig deeper, and find an ever-evolving sense of purpose.

Recent research suggests she may have been onto something. Researchers from the Rush University Medical Center followed a large group of older people (1,238 60-70 year old pepople to be exact) over five years, asking a very simple question: who was more likely to die? More than 12% of the people died, allowing researchers a look at what variables predicted living versus dying.

It wasn't surprising to see that the following "usual suspects" were associated with dying: being older, being male, being depressed, having a greater degree of physical disability, and having that cluster of sour personality traits known as neuroticism. Being a minority also predicted dying, a sadly common finding that suggests we may not be distributing health evenly in America.

However, the real surprise in this study was this: People who felt most strongly that their lives were meaningful were roughly 40% less likely to die than people who felt most strongly that their lives were meaningless. Regardless of whether people were younger or older (within the range examined in this study), male or female, depressed or not, disabled or in full physical health, high or low income, white or any other race, well-educated or not, living a meaningful, purposeful life was associated with living longer.

As with any research of this type, it is important to recognize caveats and limitations. Although this study controlled for many of the factors we know are related to mortality (e.g., age, race, sex, income, depression, disability and illness), no single study can control for all of them. Also, there wasn't any effort to intervene with people to give them meaning or take it away, so causality here is only suggested by the fact that having meaning (or not) came before dying (or not) in time. These are important limitations, and along with a few others, like limits on how well any single sample can represent all people in a population, they should make us cautious about going too far in interpreting the results. That being said, the general message that meaningful living is desirable seems fairly innocuous and pretty defensible.

In my previous blog posts, I've talked about the value and pursuit of meaning in our lives (here, here, and here) and work (here). The case for the importance of meaning in our lives is strong and clear, but, really, it doesn't get much clearer than living or dying, does it?

One part of the appeal of a long life, I think, is that a long line-up of tomorrows seems to offer us so many more chances to account for the mistakes we make today, to do the things we neglected to do. In short, a long life seems to hold out the promise that we'll have the chance - someday - to live a more meaningful life.

Why not start today?

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Reference

Boyle, P. A., Barnes, L. L., Buchman, A. S., & Bennett, D. A. (2009). Purpose in life is associated with mortality among community-dwelling older persons. Psychosomatic Medicine, 71, 574-579.

Sucker-phobia: The fear of being taken

Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:58:06 +0000

So, I drank the Kool-Aid, jumped the shark, sold my first-born for a tulip. However you put it, I joined the ranks and now engage in behavior that is difficult to describe with any dignity. In times gone by, saying what I do out loud was likely to get your shins rapped with a cane, your ear yanked from its socket, and your teeth flossed with a redolent bar of Glenn's Sulphur Soap. Let's be frank and cut to the chase. I tweet.

I suppose I could say that I twitter, but that probably doesn't help me.

I joined Twitter, and I blame Psychology Today! Specifically Pamela Rutledge and Moses Ma, who recently reported on their experiences with Twitter.

Now, I am the social media equivalent of the guy at the party who keeps trying to talk about serious things while other people are trying to concentrate on their next beer pong shot or figure out whether to cue up the Taylor Hicks playlist or the Taylor Swift playlist (I have been assured that they are different people). I don't really understand the appeal of Facebook or Myspace. I can't explain why I love emailing my friends, but I am not at all into messaging people through Facebook. The whole thing feels like a colonoscopy to me. Why are people telling me about how long it's taking to find coconut milk at the grocery store, and why are they always challenging me to test my IQ or virtually write on a Supreme Court nominee's digital cast? Next, they'll be goading me to see what I'd look like if I was whatever species of thing Yoda is (which I would totally do).

I think developmental psychologists call this the "Andy Rooney Pivot" where I release my youth into the mists of history and embrace my remaining decades of cranky perplexety.

Anyway, that's just a really roundabout way of setting the scene, which is me tweeting things on Twitter. Because I vainly cling to a few last vestiges of dignity, I like to call the things I write "posts" not "tweets." I suppose it's splitting hairs to defend tweeting versus using Facebook to "update" the world about baby bowel movements, the song you're listening to, or messed up coffee orders. But I don't like to tweet or update those things. I tweet nerdy things. The posts I like to make are links to cool research in psychology and brain sciences, leadership and management, and prudent doses of art, architecture, and the eternal misery and humiliation that come with being a Minnesota Vikings fan (TEST: Can you believe the Vikings are pursuing Brett Favre? If you're a Vikings fan, you're simply relieved they're not pursuing Brett Michaels [or Andy Rooney]).

Recently I tweeted, err posted, a link to an article that received double-to-quadruple the attention of a normal post. The nature of the post - and the way in which it was passed along - reveals something that suddenly seemed fundamentally paradoxical about human nature.

Here's the text of my post: "Here's a shocker! Humans prefer cockiness to expertise - New Scientist" and a link followed that. I just added the here's a shocker part to be ironic, but you probably guessed that. The article it links to describes research by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in which research subjects were rewarded for guessing people's weight from their photos, with one twist: they were required to buy advice from one of the other volunteers. Confident guessers were hired more often, and seemed to become more decisive in their advice. Even though people learned to avoid some chronically wrong guessers, guesser confidence still predicted where most of the money went.

I think this is interesting in its own right, as a demonstration of the human thirst to be certain (and maybe wrong) rather than uncertain (and maybe right). For example, self-verification theory says that we work to confirm our view of ourselves, resisting information that contradicts that view - even if the information suggests we're better than we think (e.g., Swann, Wenzlaff, Krull, & Pelham, 1992). Certainty and consistency are our stock and trade in a sense. From a meaningful living point of view, building a sense of comprehension about life provides us with a sense of predictability and consistency (assuming our comprehension is at least somewhat accurate!), and is probably a part of our ability to weave our experiences into a narrative story of our lives.

As I watched people pass the link on and add their own comments to it (e.g., "I knew it, the carnival barkers are in charge!"), I saw another layer of the appeal. We all think we're about to be taken! There's a sucker born every minute, PT Barnum said, and we're worried it was us! The problem for us all is that there are two kinds of experts: the folks who are very, very confident about what they know - and the folks who are very, very aware of the limits of what they know. A football running back is a confident expert - hit the hole, hit it fast, hit it hard. Even the Minnesita Vikings recognize this. A scientist is usually a tentative expert - see the data, see the limits in the data, present the highly qualified possibilities of what the data might mean if we can get more data that look a lot like the data we just reported.

Running back-style experts say things like - DRINK TWO GLASSES OF RED WINE A DAY!!!!!

Scientist-style experts say things like - There is some evidence, by no means unequivocal, that in certain epidemiological studies and even in a small number of experimental trials, controlling for many of the variables that are also related to undesirable health outcomes, moderate consumption of alcohol, generally defined as between one and three servings of alcohol for women, two and five servings of alcohol for men, where a serving is defined as one ounce of "hard" alcohol, five ounces of wine, or twelve ounces of beer and are you still reading this, if you are, why are you still reading this???

The stuff the Running back-style expert says is a lot easier to understand and remember, and it all sounds so certain and confident. Even if it's wrong.

How are we to know? We can't all pore through the data on everything we might eat, drink, or invest in, can we? After all, if we can barely stand to listen to an expert striving for the full accuracy of what is known on a topic, we sure as heck won't bulldoze our way through a stack of technical reports. Heck if the Federal Reserve couldn't figure out what collateralized debt obligations meant for the market, how could I?

We have to take someone's word for it at some point. So, how do we decide who to listen to? As our technological world spins out complicated gadget one after the other, a typical person's ability to understand all those miniature circuits and tiny buttons is going to feel more and more frayed. If some 15 year old kid told me I needed to pour Red Bull in my SDRAMM slot on my laptop NOW before something bad happened, I'd probably say, "Yes, sir! How many of those tiny cans, sir?"

I guess the real lesson here is that experts need to be confident in reporting what they know, including confidently describing the limits to that knowledge, without becoming paralyzed in qualifications. Heck, even doctors can't say absolutely that a cut-and-dried procedure like amputation will stop pain (as phantom limb syndrome proves).

Consumers, as humans, are wary of complicated stuff - they want to make a clear choice, act decisively, and never look back. But they have to learn how to penetrate the web of probabalistic statements that enshroud knowledge and expertise. Confidence of the source is no substitute for actually being right.

The meaning we create of our lives can't be some rigid mummy, withered, dessicated, and brittle in the face of rough handling. We need to develop meanings in our lives that help us overcome our aversion to uncertainty, and tackle it head on.

Reference

Swann, W. B., Wenzlaff, R. M., Krull, D. S., & Pelham, B. W. (1992). Allure of negative feedback: Self-verification strivings among depressed persons. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 101, 293-306.

Meaningful Work

Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:29:12 +0000

A well-known story relates the following encounter (adapted from Ryan, 1977):

Three men are found smashing boulders with iron hammers. When asked what they are doing, the first man says, "Breaking big rocks into little rocks." The second man says, "Feeding my family." The third man says, "Building a cathedral."

Today's column focuses on the third man, the one who saw each hammer blow as contributing to the construction of a cathedral, a home for human dreams and sacred aspirations. To many of us who study and consult in occupational and organizational contexts, we would call what this third man does meaningful work.

There are many perspectives on meaningful work, ranging from Marxist ideas about work that resists the dehumanizing influences of the Industrial Revolution to religious ideas about being called by a transcendent spirit to do Good Work in the world -- with everything in between. I have come to see meaningful work as consisting of three, central components. First, the work we do must make sense; we must know what's being asked of us and be able to identify the personal or organizational resources we need to do our job. Second, the work we do must have a point; we must be able to see how the little tasks we engage in build, brick-by-brick if you will, into an important part of the purpose of our company. Finally, the work that we do must benefit some greater good; we must be able to see how our toil helps others, whether that's saving the planet, saving a life, or making our co-workers' jobs easier so that they can go home and really be available for their families and friends. A growing body of evidence shows that meaningful workers are happy workers, more committed workers, and, in some tantalizing ways, better workers.

The cornerstone for the famous Cathedral Notre Dame de Paris was laid in 1163, and work finally wrapped up in 1345. For those of you keeping score, that's 182 years. Not bad, considering that's how long I think it will be before my Minnesota Vikings win a Super Bowl. But, as far as I can tell, most folks seemed to live only until somewhere between age 30 and 50 (record were pretty crummy back then, infant mortality was very high, and bothersome annoyances like the Black Death mucked with the figures). That means that it would have taken between four and six generations of laborers working to construct Notre Dame. If you were in Generation 1, your job, literally, could have been breaking big rocks into little rocks. But you also would have been building a great cathedral. A cathedral that your grandchildren's grandchildren would enjoy going into for the first time. Viewing the work in this way holds the hope of transforming our working lives into an important way in which we live better, richer, more meaningful lives.

Some have characterized the United States' efforts to pull out of the recession or rebuild our energy and transportation infrastructure as being like medieval cathedral-building efforts. We work now for a benefit we might not live to see - but that our children will. This is an enormously appealing way to look at a daunting challenge from a meaningful work standpoint because it ties in what we need to do (making sense) with why we need to do it (having a purpose) and how it will benefit future generations (serving a greater good).

In a previous column, I wrote about how a little coffeeshop set out to build a community in the suburban wilderness of Fort Collins. This story of how the community this coffeeshop set out to create eventually saved it and sustained it in the face of the recession has been my most popular column here. I think this is because so many of us crave work that can be more than the sum of the tasks we perform. We want our work to express ourselves, and we want it to matter to the world beyond our skin. It may be that our ideas about meaningful work prevent us from finding it. Many of us have stereotypes about the kinds of work that can be meaningful -- take a moment to come up with your own list.

Building sacred spaces and saving the planet might stand alongside nurses, EMTs, soldiers, police, priests, pastors, teachers, counselors and the other, typical, helping or saving professions. But meaningful work isn't restricted to these kinds of professions. Here's a testimonial drawn from research I am conducting at the moment:

"I am a production analyst. The part of my job that is most meaningful to me is that I take large - confusing amounts of data and produce reports that allow my co-workers to make sound business decisions. I like that I help make sense of what we are doing."

I'm going to hazard a guess that you didn't put data analyst on your list of meaningful jobs, but this worker sees how tasks are more than their simple mechanical description. Other people might take the same job and find it dehumanizing. It's easy to imagine a cynical, harried drone from the movie Office Space snarkily describing his or her job as "Turning big numbers into little numbers." The point is that what work comes to mean to you is a matter of perspective.

Not everyone is engaged in meaningful work, but maybe everyone can be. Part of making this happen is helping companies, leaders, managers, and executives learn how to create meaningful workplaces, and part of making this happen is helping workers see what they can do to make more of their job. In a time when it's not so easy to walk away from a paying job, finding a way to make the work one does have more meaningful is a way to make it a better job. In a time when it's tough to squeeze anything else from a smaller, often demoralized workforce, making work more meaningful is a way to keep and inspire your best employees.

In tough times, meaningful work seems more than ever to demand attention.

We continue to study what workers, leaders, and organizations can do to make work meaningful, and whether all jobs can be transformed into meaningful work. If you'd like to share your stories about meaning in work and in life, please consider participating in this research.

References:

Ryan, J. J. (1977). Humanistic work: Its philosophical and cultural implications. In W. J. Heisler & J. W. Houck (Eds.) A matter of dignity: Inquiries into the humanization of work (pp. 11-22). Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Definitely Sweat the Small Stuff!! (and it's mostly small stuff)

Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:53:56 +0000

When I talk to people about meaning in their lives, in their work, or in their love lives, the conversation invariably reaches a point where I can see the gears of their mind start to work furiously. This is the point in our chat where I've asked them what makes their lives feel meaningful and they start to feel like their answer isn't fancy enough. I guess it doesn't seem like enough to create strong and mutually nurturing relationships, parent a child, feel spiritualy inspired, venture forth into the world to find your niche in the vast global economy, or wrest occasional moments or serenity from the pinging, flashing pinball machine of life!

(The fact that my curiosity about what fills people's lives with meaning often provokes these kinds of responses is the leading bummer of being a meaning in life researcher!)

Right before my eyes, I can see their perspective on such things as being an inspired parent, generous lover, conscientious worker, or tranquil contemplator shift, and color them as run-of-the-mill, tenuous, amorphous, insufficient....BORING!

Some aspects of these run-of-the-mill meanings get celebrated by our culture. Finding one's true love is all over in the movies (even if movies typically neglect the careful work of being an open, responsive, invested partner over the long haul). Movies like Lorenzo's Oil and Mr. Holland's Opus show us the depths of the parenting experience (even if these movies accidentally foster the idea that all parents of kids with developmental or physical challenges need to be heroes and the rest of us are interchangably unremarkable). Movies that celebrate working hard and working well typically focus on monomaniacal artists (Pollock; The Agony and the Ecstacy) iconoclastic innovators (Tucker: The Man and His Dream). Far fewer are the stories about people who invest the most important aspects of their lives with their focused attention, interest, commitment, creativity, and love.

More often than not our culture gives us stories about deranged, damaged, vain, childish, neglectful, and rivalrous parents, and tedious, mindless, soul-crushing, hostile, treacherous workplaces. Better yet if they're lethal or cannibalistic!

Let's not even mention the stories about parents and work that we get from the evening news.

In most of these stories, people suffer and suffer until The Big Thing comes along and saves them. The iconic image of my generation might just be John Cusack standing in front of an old Buick with his coat sleeves rolled up to his elbows (was there any other way to wear coats in the late 80s?!) holding a boombox (remember those?) and vicariously serenading Ione Sky with Peter Gabriel's high-school-dance-favorite, "In Your Eyes."

The Flash of Insight, The Grand Gesture, The Rousing Speech, The Last Straw. All of these are doppelgangers of The Big Thing, which too many of us wait for to come along and change our lives. The secret is, of course, that it's not coming. Worse, by waiting for The Big Thing, you could let the little things that make life rich, and accumulate into the foundation of your life, slip away. One day, you might rouse yourself - like a patient in a waiting room who suddenly realizes that she forgot to sign in and grab a number - and see that while you hopelessly waited for some Big Thing to make your life matter, you neglected to invest in the little things, the little moments, the little pieces of experience that make life meaningful.

A number of citizens of Finland in their mid-80s were asked to draw a "life-line," indicating the most strongly positive and negative moments of their lives, year by year. This group of people was born between the World Wars for the most part. In World War II, Finland lost and regained territory to German and Russian forces several times, and most of the men called war and military service the most important event of their lives. Beyond that, though, life was made up of working, moving, promotions, school, the ebb and flow of chronic illness, retirement, marriage, and the deaths that every 80 year old must endure. Even with enemy troops at your doorstep, life isn't made up The Big Thing - at least not for women, and it wasn't the only thing for men, either. Also, life kept getting better. It didn't peak with the defeat of Germany and Russia, it didn't peak at the wedding day, it kept getting better. Because of the little things that, like the stitches of a tapestry, sew our lives into a meaningful story.

Don't let the little things slip away, or you could come to someday with a nasty surprise barreling down at you

Reference:

Takkinen, S. & Suutama, T. (2004). Life-lines of Finnish people aged 83-87. International Journal of Aging and Human Development, 59, 339-362.

Coffee, Community, and the Quest for Meaning

Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 22:47:43 +0000

One Friday evening in January, I went to the lone, independently owned coffeeshop on my side of town to do a few hours of work. I liked this coffeeshop and had gotten to know the owners and a couple of the baristas. The place appealed to me because it was passionately focused on community (like hosting "stitch 'n' bitch" meetings, support groups for new mothers, and incorporating a children's play area). It didn't hurt that it serves an interesting selection of good craft-brewed beers from Fort Collins, Colorado (where I live) and around the world. Let's just say I like flexibility in my beverage options!

On this particular winter evening, I was looking forward to having a nice cup of coffee, then sampling a local stout that had been aged in a used bourbon barrel from a distillery near Frankfort, KY. When I got there, though, I found out that the coffeeshop was going out of business. Even though I had stopped in only once every couple of weeks, I'd grown really attached to both the place itself and also to the notion that a place like that could exist, serving coffee and serving its community.

What happened next was an inspiring blend of old-fashioned community building and new-fangled social media use. Along the way, I realized I was participating one of the key elements of meaningful living - the power of connecting with something larger than yourself.

When I saw the sign, I asked the owner about what was going on, and expressed my regret that this unique business was another victim of the recession. She said that business had bottomed out over the winter holiday break and that they were under water with debt obligations. She told me she simply wanted to let people know as soon as possible, and hoped that she could stay open long enough to be able to pay off what she owed her suppliers (who were almost exclusively small, locally owned businesses, too).

We commiserated for a bit, and I upgraded from my usual, regular-old dark roast coffee to something mocha-y, and made the ultimate sacrifice by staying long enough to have two beers. I went home and shared the news with my partner. we resolved to enjoy our dying haunt as much as possible, and to funnel our paltry discretionary dollars to this fallen champion for local businesspeople.

Then an amazing thing happened.

Within hours of the going-out-of-business notice going up, calls to arms raced across facebook, myspace, and twitter. People began to rally. When I brought the kiddos and my wife to the coffeeshop for breakfast burritos and a cuppa joe, the place was packed. What was going on?!? The rats weren't fleeing the sinking ship - but was this a case of the vultures circling, like the booming business Circuit City did as it died?

Surprisingly, no! Instead, the coffeeshop was full of people offering up items for a silent auction, angel investors poring over the books to see where things went awry, and employees not only willing to forego searching for other jobs, but willing to auction off their boxers, tighty-whities, and lacy thongs for a few dollars more! (who said panty raids were anachronistic!)

I found myself recruiting buddies and colleagues to have "meetings" at this moribund coffeeshop, shrugging off my suspicions that I was a Hari Krishna in prof's clothing. I spent three months of my coffee budget in the "final" week of this place, happily standing around reading articles while throngs of supporters flocked to the tables (don't ask why I need a coffee budget).

And, in the end, this community resource was saved.

It was a rush. Everyone was exhausted from the exhilaration. The coffeeshop recuperated and reorganized for a few days. Ultimately, the business model wasn't working, and a new one was developed incorporating some structural changes and the involvement some of the angel investors. One thing didn't need changing at all. Every employee came back.

I used to see a few of them around town, working second jobs at other places - they had options. Yet, they all worked long hours, uncertain about whether their job would be there in a week - much less a month. They stayed. It was clear to me that this minimum wage job was more than a paycheck to these folks. Their work had meaning, they felt a part of something bigger than themselves, they felt their labor mattered.

And, ultimately, their toil mattered! Inspired by their leader's passionate vision, their amazing attitudes pulled this one, small coffeeshop through its greatest challenge.

The desire of this coffeeshop to create a sense of community in this fairly sterile corner of town created a community. We all felt it; we were all ready to fight for this place.

When we devote our energy to sustaining and advancing something that is bigger than ourselves, we stretch the boundaries of our identities, we achieve some degree of self-transcendence. The value of embracing the causes of things beyond our own skin has been declared from Old Testament times through to Martin Seligman's call for a 'positive psychology.' Research has consistently supported these ideas - the power of connecting to and caring about something greater than ourselves.

How can we claim our lives have meaning unless they touch the lives of others, unless they bring in stray threads of someone's experience? The most amazing thing to me was that I saw the dry and dusty stacks of institutionally bound research articles suddenly spring to life! I "knew" that expanding my sense of self to give home to the worries, dreams, and aspirations of far-flung people made me a better person, and would deepen my life's meaning - but seeing it happen was another thing altogether.

So, here I sit at this coffeeshop - a place resurrected by the hopes of a community of people who refused to let their watering hole 'go gently into that good night' - mulling over the extraordinary unfolding of our desire for meaning...right before my very eyes.

Searching for Godot: Fulfillment Won't Necessarily Come Find You

Michael F. Steger, Ph.D. — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:40:22 +0000

In Samuel Beckett's masterpiece "Waiting for Godot," two characters wait for a man they both claim to know but whom neither would be able to recognize. As they wait, the characters attempt to distract and divert themselves from a terrible silence poised to devour them in their anxious, confused state. This is not a cheery play, really, as hinted at by the following summation of human existence:

"They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."

As I've talked about before, when psychologists study meaning in life, they do not assume that there is a meaning to life, the universe, and everything. We have observed, however, that any individual life can be made meaningful. Too often, however, it seems like people behave like Beckett's characters, passively waiting for some meaning they might not even recognize to poke them in the chest and shout, "I am here!" Whether or not you believe that there is a meaning waiting out there for you, and a purpose behind our lives and universe, there is great value in being the active author of your life's story. Perhaps your fulfillment lies in searching for - not waiting for - your meaning in life.

Of course, you still might choose to wait around, so I've put together a partial list of the things that might come looking for you, the things you can wait for:

termites! (although they may look cuddly, they like to eat houses, and have even been blamed for some of the devastating dike failures caused by Hurricane Katrina)
catalogues! (who doesn't like three or four hundred pounds of glossy, environmentally irresponsible direct mail every week!)
tantalizing leads on incredible male enhancement products!
upper respiratory infections!
people who have a lot to get off their chests during a trans-pacific flight!

Sounds awesome! Of course, you might think this list misses some cool things. Won't true love come find me? Doesn't my destiny lie in wait for me like a flasher in Central Park? I'd hazzard to guess that you've seen too many 1980s movies about the quiet loner who - through the sheer persistence of his or her hermit-like affection for isolation - takes the hottest boy or girl to prom. This life doesn't seem to reward passive, clingy tactics. Social people are happier, people who feel confident they can accomplish important goals are happier, and when you are motivated to pursue good things - versus avoid bad things - you're happier, too.

Viktor Frankl, inspirational figurehead for many of us psychologists, encouraged us all to go out into the world and seek the purpose that awaits us. Despite this charge, and all the evidence that activity is better than passivity, I've found in study after study that - at least in America - the search for meaning seems to be a pretty anxious, miserable activity for most people. How can this be?

In a previous post, I talked about how people seem to need stable, reliable ways to understand the world around them. We crave certainty, and we freak out when we lose that uncertainty and find ourselves confronting a chaotic mess, void of meaning. Sadly, it appears we'd rather be SURE than RIGHT!

The thing is, though, we don't have to feel this way about meaning. My research shows two trends. First, people who are open-minded and active in their approach to life seem to search for meaning in their lives in a positive and healthy way.1 Second, people who already feel their lives are rich in meaning and who are seeking deeper meaning are more satisfied with their lives.2 To me, this research suggests that having an open, curious, inquisitive thirst for discovering deeper, richer meaning in your lifecan help you build the life you want.

The best things in life often require us to take risks. When we take the risk of loving someone, we make ourselves vulnerable to loss and hurt. Yet, without that risk, we lose out on the fulfillment that comes from joining another person in a shared journey. It's no different with finding a meaningful career or calling, discovering a way you can help make the world a better place, or learning how to become a better person. Transform the uncertainty and confusion into curiosity, and you can actively find meaning all around you.

Don't wait for meaning, search for it.

1 Steger, Kashdan, Sullivan, & Lorentz, 2008; Kashdan & Steger, 2007

2 Steger, Oishi, & Kesibir, in press

(You can download many of my research articles on meaning in life - and participate in research - by going to my website)