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Two short pieces in The Guardian on 22 Feb, by David Harper, reader in clinical psychology at the University of East London, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/21/sad-truth-action-for-happiness-movement
The sad truth about the Action for Happiness movement
Being happy isn’t only down to the individual
and Peter Stratton, professor of family therapy at Leeds University (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/feb/22/comment.healthandwellbeing)
Wellbeing is not about the individual – it’s about relationships
We won’t cure anxiety and depression by ignoring people’s social connections
Both raise doubts about simple-minded ideas from positive psychology. Harper, criticising Lord Lyard’s Action for Happiness initiative (http://www.actionforhappiness.org/) suggests that there are problems with the idea that action for happiness should focus on the individual:
…the approach is based on two flawed assumptions: that the source of unhappiness lies inside people’s heads – in how they see the world, and that the solution lies in change at the level of the individual.
Surely being put in positions of threat, powerlessness, deprivation* is likely to cause unhappiness, he argues, which some people might be able to overcome, but it’s unreasonable to blame those who are made unhappy by such things as being lacking in ‘resilience’ and ‘well-being’.
A person’s ability to make changes in their lives depends not only on the individual but on their social context – whether they have supportive relationships, a reasonable income and so on. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to attribute a person’s behaviour to individual factors such as intelligence or moral strength, rather than their social context such as poverty or child abuse. This is such a common research finding that psychologists have a term for it: the fundamental attribution error.
Harper points out the well-known case made by Wilkinson & Pickett in The Spirit Level (http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resource/the-spirit-level) that “mental health problems are highest in those countries with the greatest gaps between rich and poor, and lowest in countries with smaller differences”. This doesn’t really contrast with the other well-known findings that national ‘happiness’ scores aren’t much related to national GDP (for instance Inglehart & Klingemann,2000) – at least beyond a GDP per capita of about $13,000 in 1995 – and that US happiness didn’t increase noticeably between 1950 and 2000, although average buying power tripled over the period (Myers, 2000)†. One of the parallels of recent growth in wealth in both the UK and the USA is a considerable increase in inequality: could maybe possible positive effects of increase in income beyond $13,000 have been cancelled out by increase in inequality.
Harper suggests that:
To increase happiness we need firm action on inequality, rather than this vague Action for Happiness.
Stratton is also criticising the individualistic focus of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, the NHS treatment of choice for depression. If there’s
a recognition that our problems of “social recession” are rooted in society’s undermining of our core human need for confirming and mutually supportive relationships….
[….] the things that matter are security, connectedness to others, authenticity and autonomy, and feeling competent. Can you imagine anyone achieving these without drawing strength and resources from family and other relationships? Can you draw from relationships without putting into them? Why, then, are we clinging to the notion that individually focused “cures” are what will turn us into a society of “happier” people?
Stratton quotes Madeleine Bunting in a 20 February Guardian article (February 20, 2012: not available online) Britain is at last waking up to the politics of wellbeing that our focus on the individual has left us with “an unpleasant cocktail of celebrity, cool, acquisitiveness and depression”.
Perhaps that means we should be thinking more about well-being as a collective social process: ‘positive sociology’ rather than ‘positive psychology’. This starts to sound dangerously like the ‘social engineering’ we’re all encouraged to be wary of ‡.
*For an extreme example, see the story posted by Marie Colvin from Syria this week – shortly before being killed herself in Homs: http://twitdoc.com/view.asp?id=38147&sid=TFN&ext=DOC&lcl=Marie-Colvin-Reports-from-Syria.doc&usr=hudduh&doc=82312204&key=key-11xljhgy50tppahiidp8 –and then wonder whether the stuff I’m talking about here really matters much.
† My well-being and happiness has definitely improved since I started working part-time and lost £20,000 or so in income, but I have the social support of the NTU choir (next performances 15 &16 April, Albert Hall, Nottingham and Birmingham Town Hall: tickets available from http://www.ntu.ac.uk/music/news_events/events/index.html) – and I still have enough money to go to see Toumani Diabaté http://www.myspace.com/toumanidiabate when he comes to the UK, so I’m in a privileged position.
‡ I’ve always been puzzled by the fear of social engineering. You wouldn’t cheer up airline passengers by saying ‘thank goodness, Boeing has avoided the temptation to apply aeronautical engineering to this 787 Dreamliner: I feel much safer now’ or decide that your new phone is rubbish because Nokia persist in building circuits which follow the principles of electronic engineering. If there is such a thing as society (and Thatcher was wrong), what’s wrong with trying to work out ways to make it go well? And aren’t cities, road numbering, schools (state and private), elections, and the rules of etiquette all forms of social engineering, anyway?
Refs:
Inglehart, Ronald & Klingemann, Hans-Deiter (2000) Genes, Culture, Democracy and Happiness in Ed Diener & Eunkook M. Suh (eds) Culture and Subjective Well-Being Cambridge: The MIT Press. Available at http://www2000.wzb.eu/alt/iw/pdf/genecult.pdf
Myers, David (2000) The Funds, Friends, and Faith of Happy People American Psychologist, 55 (1), 56-67
In this week’s lecture, I’ll present the case that the rise of cognitive psychology in the 50s and 60s, and then the development of computational models in psychology in the 80s, and cognitive neuroscience more recently, were heavily financed by the military, because they helped to provide the knowledge required to enable soldiers to operate increasingly complex weapons systems, and more recently to replace soldiers with smart weapons.
I admit that my view of the development of cognitive psychology may be biased because many years ago, as a hard-line pacifist, I refused to apply for an attractive post-doc research job (in visual search, the topic of my PhD thesis) because it was financed by the Navy – and maybe my career has been downhill ever since. I’m still a hard-line pacifist: show me a war and I’ll march against it (never seems to do much good)*.
But, every time I start thinking this is just an eccentric personal concern, something comes along which reminds me that psychological research is useful to the military, they do finance it, and it is something to be concerned about.
An example from 2008: ‘You really can smell fear, say scientists’ (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/dec/04/smell-fear-research-pheromone) an article in The Guardian by James Randerson. Great study involving parachutists’ armpits and brain scanners, looking for a ‘fear pheromone’ (psychologists know how to have fun). And the fourth paragraph reads:
The research was funded by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency – the Pentagon’s military research wing – raising speculation that it is a first step to isolating the fear pheromone for use in warfare, perhaps to induce terror in enemy troops. But DARPA denied that it had any military plans for fear pheromones or plans to fund further research into the field.
I was preparing this year’s lecture, and thinking that example was a bit dated, when along came (7 February 2012): Rise of the man-machines: how troops could plug their brains into weapons, by Ian Sample in The Guardian. That’s an over-sensationalist title: like most articles like that, the title should have a compulsory ‘sometime, maybe’ added at the end, but it’s a serious article about a just-released report by the (UK) Royal Society which “considers some of the potential military and law enforcement applications arising from key advances in neuroscience”. The intro to the report is at http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/brain-waves/conflict-security/, and the full report is at: http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/policy/projects/brain-waves/2012-02-06-BW3.pdf
From The Guardian article:
The authors argue that while hostile uses of neuroscience and related technologies are ever more likely, scientists remain almost oblivious to the dual uses of their research.
The article quotes Vince Clark, a US researcher who is using transcranial direct current stimulation to enable soldiers to spot targets more quickly, as saying:
As a scientist I dislike that someone might be hurt by my work. I want to reduce suffering, to make the world a better place†, but there are people in the world with different intentions, and I don’t know how to deal with that.
If I stop my work, the people who might be helped won’t be helped. Almost any technology has a defence application.
Clark’s work is also potentially useful for dementia sufferers, so I hope he makes a lot of progress in time for it to be useful to me, but still…. (Actually another article by Sample the same day: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/07/dementia-drugs-use-military points out “How dementia drugs could be used by the military”.)
Both the article and Royal Society report are fascinating reading, but I was struck that the Royal Society’s first recommendation for the scientific community is:
There needs to be fresh effort by the appropriate professional bodies to inculcate the awareness of the dual-use challenge (i.e., knowledge and technologies used for beneficial purposes can also be misused for harmful purposes) amongst neuroscientists at an early stage of their training.
So, that’s what I’m doing in my lecture (and here). All you early-stage neuroscientists, think about this. Just saying.
* Bring home our boys from Iran. I’d like to claim you read it here first, but Mad Magazine got there before me.
† Good luck with that, Vince. You, me, and most Miss World contestants, they say.
millerpsych 