attack, this individual difference reflects the degree to which African Americans believe that they can control all events in their lives solely through hard work and determination. Individuals who score high on the John Henryism measure but are low in socioeconomic status are apt to be hypertensive (James, Strogatz, Wing, & Ramsey, 1987). Constant striving for control over events without the resources to achieve it can take a toll on the individual who faces an objective limit to what can be attained regardless of how hard he or she works. If optimism is to survive as a social virtue, then the world must have a causal texture that allows this stance to produce rewards. If not, people will channel their efforts into unattainable goals and become exhausted, ill, and demoralized. Alternatively, people may rechannel their inherent optimism into other goals. Positive social science should not become so focused on optimism as a psychological characteristic that it ignores how it is influenced by external situations, including other people. This danger is easiest to see in the case of little optimism, where we can easily decide that a given belief is wrong. It is less easy to see in the case of big optimism, but even here we can use the broader vantage of history or aggregate data to realize that some widely shared big goals are just as unrealistic as the expectation that one will lead a life free of specific illnesses and injuries. The resolution is that people should be optimistic when the future can be changed by positive thinking but not otherwise, adopting what Seligman (1991) called a flexible or complex optimism, a psychological strategy to be exercised when appropriate as opposed to a reflex or habit over which we have no control: You can choose to use optimism when you judge that less depression, or more achievement, or better health is the issue. But you can also choose not to use it, when you judge that clear sight or owning up is called for. Learning optimism does not erode your sense of values or your judgment. Rather it frees you to ... achieve the goals you set .... Optimism's benefits are not unbounded. Pessimism has a role to play, both in society at large and in our own lives; we must have the courage to endure pessimism when its perspective is valuable (p. 292). I Particularly in the case of little optimism, people need to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of the belief in question. When there is room for doubt, people should fill the gap with hope. Big optimism can be more hopeful than little optimism, which has a greater press to be accurate. I assume big and little optimism are redundant for many people. Psychologists should think about how to help people disaggregate the two in a useful way, to teach them how to have dreams but not fantasies--illusions without delusions. The prior question, of course, is, what other psychological characteristics need to be in place for an individual to be flexible in the use of his or her optimism? The Cultivation of Optimism Despite the cautions just raised, there is abundant reason to believe that optimism--big, little, and in between--is useful to a person because positive expectations can be self-fulfilling. How can we set optimism in place for the young? Here the research by Seligman and his colleagues is instructive. Gillham, Reivich, Jaycox, and Seligrnan (1995) have begun an intervention program using strategies from the cognitive-behavioral therapy realm to teach grade school children to be more optimistic. Results to date suggest that optimism training of this sort makes subsequent episodes of depression less likely. I point out again that the absence of depression should not be the only outcome that interests positive social scientists. We also want to know if optimistic children end up happy and healthy, with rich social networks and rewarding pursuits. If big optimism is truly part of human nature, then we need Io be concerned with somewhat different matters. First, how can optimism be channeled in one direction rather than another? As will be discussed shortly, optimism in the United States has long been entwined with individualism. Is there any way to harness our inherent optimism to a concern with the commons? Can optimism about one's neighbor be made as satisfying as optimism about oneself? Religion can provide some answers. Indeed, Tiger (1979) argued that religions arose at least in part to tap the biologically given need of people to be optimistic. Religious thought lends itself particularly well to big optimism because of its certainty. Tiger observed, much as Freud (1928) did decades earlier, that religion is more amenable to optimism than is science, which is explicitly tentative and probabilistic in its pronouncements. Secular social scientists interested in optimism often ignore the close link between optimism and religion, with the exception of an investigation by Sethi and Seligman (1993) in which they studied the causal explanations contained in religious texts. Across Christian, Jewish, and Muslim texts, conservative tracts were more optimistic than were liberal ones. Can we generalize from this result, juxtapose it with research on the benefits of optimism, and conclude that fundamentalists are better off than their reformed colleagues? This possibility is worthy of investigation, and researchers have to be willing to follow the data wherever they might lead (Schumaker, 1992). Second, how can we prevent optimism from being thwarted,? Here there is no mystery. Stress and trauma of all sorts take their toll on optimism, and to the degree that people can lead less terrible lives, optimism should be served. We do not want to create a life without challenge, because perseverance can only be encouraged when people meet and surmount difficulties, but we do need to be sure that the difficulties can be eventually surmounled. Also contributing to optimism is social learning. I assume optimism can be acquired by modeling--vicariously, as it were--so we need to be attentive to the messages our children receive about the world and how it works. Explanatory styles of parents and children converge, and although part of the reason for this may be shared experiences or genetic predispositions, it could also reflect the wholesale transmittal of belief systems January 2000 • American Psychologist 51
by modeling (Seligman et al., 1984). Also consider messages from the popular media, which are as mixed vis-?a-vis optimism as they are on any other subject. Rags-to-riches stories--unrealistic parables suggesting that anything and everything wonderful is possible--are juxtaposed on the evening news with stories about the horrors that lurk around every corner (Levine, 1977). Third, what can we do to rekindle optimism that has been thwarted? We know from Seligman et at.'s (1988) research that cognitive therapy as developed by Aaron Beck effectively targets pessimistic explanatory style in such a way that depression is alleviated and its recurrence is prevented. Again, studies like this need to be enriched by additional outcome measures. Does cognitive therapy merely return the person to a nondepressed mode, or does it further enrich the individual? Does it affect big optimism as much as it does little optimism? The human potential movement began in the 1960s, when therapy techniques used for distressed people were used with the normal in an attempt to make them supernormal (Tomkins, 1976). Whether this succeeded is debatable, but is there some equivalent here with respect to optimism training? What happens when cognitive-behavioral therapy is used with nonpessimistic people? Do superoptimists result, and what are they like? Are they the epitome of well-being or caricatures of positive thinking like Dr. Pangloss and Pollyanna? Optimism and Society Do cultures or historical eras differ in their characteristic optimism? The answer is probably no insofar as our focus is on big optimism. Big optimism makes society possible, and a pessimistic civilization cannot survive for long. Indeed, societies make available to people countless ways of satisfying their needs to be optimistic about matters: One of the recurrent themes of human culture has to do with contests--with play which is given an effortful structure and in which some more or less entertaining activity takes place but with an uncertain outcome. Countless humans affiliate with teams, boxers, billiard players, gymnasts, skaters, racers, runners, divers and cheer for them to win and feel despondent when they lose .... Contests have a great deal to do with the matter of optimism and they may well be one of the commonest expressions of a way of behaving which ... is common anyway. Contests are usually optional .... Certainly no one is required to take the fan's role. (Tiger, 1979, p. 250) Of course, many us do take on this role, and even fans of the Chicago Cubs or the Boston Red Sox find a way to be optimistic about next season when, of course, "everything will be different." Virtually all societies have contests, but striking differences exist across societies in terms of most other ways of feeling and being optimistic. As noted, the goals considered desirable will vary from person to person, group to group, culture to culture. Other than a nebulous belief in progress and some human universals like contests, there is considerable variation across cultures in the content of optimism (e.g., Chang, 1996; Heine & Lehman, 1995; Lee & Seligman, 1997). Here is another fruitful topic for researchers and members of a given society to examine: What are the goals that a society holds up as most desirable, and how optimistic are members of that society vis- ~-vis those goals? In the United States, the biggest goals we have as a people include individual choices, individual rights, and individual fulfillment. Americans are greatly occupied with what they can and cannot accomplish in their everyday lives, in particular with what they can acquire. In a capitalist society, people's acquisition of material goods and their concomitant fascination with the money that allows them to do so represent a socially sanctioned way of satisfying the optimistic force that organizes the entire culture. The downside of optimism satisfied in this way is the encouragement of greed. Shallow materialism results. In the United States today, we even see people turning themselves into commodities. We want to be marketable, to keep our options open, and to cash in on what happens to us, especially misfortunes. "Because it will look good on my r6sum6" is a rationale I hear increasingly often from my students as an explanation for why they are pursuing some seemingly selfless and good activity. No wonder people are alienated, and no wonder depression is on the rise among young adults (Robins et al., 1984). However, only the crassness of this rationale is new. There has long been a tradition in the United States of "self-help" books promising people success if they only think positively (Starker, 1989). As emphasized, though, optimism need not be attached just to selfish concerns, and it need not pertain just to individual agency (Wallach & Wallach, 1983). Collective agency--collective optimism, if you will--would seem a desirable goal to add to those associated with individual optimism (cf. Snyder, Cheavens, & Sympson, 1997). A resurgence of traditional religion, volunteerism, or philanthropy would facilitate this change, so long as people do not ask what is in it for them (Seligman, 1988). In his book The Positive Thinkers, Donald Meyer (1988) traced the history of a uniquely American brand of optimism by discussing its influential proponents: Phineas Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, and Ronald Reagan, among others: The popular psychology of positive thinking.., flourished among people able, for reasons of culture and politics, to imagine that the only thing wrong with their lives was within themselves. If they could learn how to manage their own consciousness.., the world outside would prove positive in its response. Of course this world was always that of the United States, not of mankind, but the sense of God's abundance waiting only to be received ... had always taken for granted the greater readiness of Americans, and hence America, for such grace. (p. 382) What Meyer identified is a very big optimism, rich and fuzzy in its meaning. Numerous other -isms adhere to this politically laden form of American optimism, notably capitalism, materialism, and individualism, as discussed. 52 January 2000 ° American Psychologist
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The Funds, Friends, and Faith of Happy People David G. Myers Hope College New studies are revealing predictors of subjective wellbeing, often assessed as self-reported happiness and life satisfaction. Worldwide, most people report being at least moderately happy, regardless of age and gender. As part of their scientific pursuit of happiness, researchers have examined possible associations between happiness and (a) economic growth and personal income, (b) close relationships, and (c) religious faith. W ho is happy? Is happiness showered on those of a particular age, gender, or income level'? Does it come with certain genetically predisposed traits? With supportive close relationships? With a spiritual perspective? Such questions not only went unanswered during most of psychology's first century, they went largely unasked as psychologists focused on illness more than health, on fear more than courage, on aggression more than love. An electronic search of Psychological Abstracts since 1887 turned up 8,072 articles on anger, 57,800 on anxiety, and 70,856 on depression, while only 851 abstracts mentioned joy, 2,958 happiness, and 5,701 life satisfaction. In this sampling, negative emotions trounced positive emotions by a 14-to-1 ratio (even greater than the 7-to-1 margin by which treatment exceeded prevention). Although human suffering understandably focuses much of our attention on the understanding and alleviation of misery, one sees harbingers of a more positive dimension to psychology. For example, a new scientific pursuit of happiness and life satisfaction (together called subjective well-being) has begun with two simple questions: (a) How happy are people? and (b) who are the happy people--what characteristics, traits, and circumstances mark happy lives? How Happy Are People? A long tradition views life as tragedy, extending from Sophocles' observing (in Oedipus at Colonus) that "Not to be born is, past all prizing, best" to Woody Allen's disceming (in Annie Hall) of two kinds of lives: the horrible and the merely miserable. Albert Camus, Allen Drury, Tennessee Williams, and other novelists and playwrights similarly give us images of unhappy people. Many social observers concur. "Our pains greatly exceed our pleasures," it seemed to Rousseau, "so that, all things considered, human life is not at all a valuable gift." "We are not born for happiness," agreed Samuel Johnson. In his book The Conquest of Happiness, philosopher Bertrand Russell (1930/1985) echoed that most people are unhappy. Recent warm-hearted books for the would-be happy (often written by people who generalize from their counseling of the unhappy) concur. In Are You Happy? Dennis Wholey (1986) reported that experts he interviewed believed perhaps 20% of Americans are happy. 'Tin surprised!" responded psychologist Archibald Hart (1988) in his 15 Principles for Achieving Happiness. "I would have thought the proportion was much lower!" In Happiness is an Inside Job, Father John Powell (1989) agreed: "Onethird of all Americans wake up depressed every day. Professionals estimate that only 10 to 15 percent of Americans think of themselves as truly happy." Thomas Szasz (quoted in Winokur, 1987) spoke for many in surmising, "Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults." However, when asked about their happiness, people across the world paint a much rosier picture. For example, in periodic National Opinion Research Center surveys 3 in 10 Americans say they are "very happy." Only 1 in 10 say they are "not too happy." The remaining 6 in 10 describe themselves as "pretty happy." Yet, the idea that others are not so happy persists: More than two thirds of a representative sample of Minnesotans rate their "capacity for happiness" in the upper 35% "of other people of your age and sex" (Lykken, 1999). Most people are similarly upbeat about their satisfaction with life (inglehart, 1990; Myers, 1993). In western Europe and North America, 8 in 10 rate themselves as more satisfied than dissatisfied. Fewer than 1 in 10 rate themselves as more dissatisfied than satisfied. Likewise, some three fourths of people say yes, they have felt excited, proud, or pleased at some point during the past few weeks; no more than a third say they have felt lonely, bored, or depressed. Across languages, these self-reports seem to retain the same meaning. Whether they are German-, French-, or Italian-speaking, the Swiss report high levels of life satisfaction--higher than the levels of their German, French, and Italian neighbors (Inglehart, 1990). Ed Diener (Myers & Diener, 1996) has aggregated data from 916 surveys of 1.1 million people in 45 nations representing most of humanity. He recalibrated subjective well-being onto a 0-to-10 scale (where 0 is the low exMy thanks go to Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet for her helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David G. Myers, Hope College, P.O. Box 9000, Holland, MI 49422-9000. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected]. 56 January 2000 • American Psychologist Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/00/$5.00 Vol 55, No. 1, 56 67 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.55,1.56
David G. Myers treme, such as ve©, unhappy or completely dissatisfied with life, 5 is neutral, and 10 is the high extreme). As shown in Figure 1, the average response is 6.75. These bullish self-reports were vividly illustrated in a survey of Detroit area residents. Asked which of the faces in Figure 2 "comes closest to expressing how you feel about your life as a whole," more than 9 in 10 people picked one of the happy faces. A 1998 survey of 1,003 American adults by Opinion Research Corporation painted a similarly upbeat picture (Black & McCafferty, 1998). Asked "Who of the following people do you think is the happiest?" people responded "Oprah Winfrey" (23%), "Bill Gates" (7%), "the Pope" (12%), "Chelsea Clinton" (3%), and "yourselF' (49%), with the remaining 6% answering "don't know." These positive reports characterize all ages, both sexes, all races studied, and all strategies for assessing subjective well-being, including those that sample people's experiences by paging people to report their moods. (The few exceptions to these happiness statistics, noted Diener & Diener, 1996, include hospitalized alcoholics, newly incarcerated inmates, new therapy clients, South African blacks under apartheid, and students living under conditions of political suppression.) This positivity, noted Diener and Diener, contradicts the intuitions of psychology students, half of whom think the elderly are "mostly unhappy." Another third guess the same of African Americans; 9 in 10 students assume the same of unemployed men. Are these seemingly happy people merely in denial of their actual misery? By definition, the final judge of someone's subjective well-being is whomever lives inside that person's skin. "If you feel happy," noted Jonathan Freedman (1978), "you are happy--that's all we mean by the term." Although we presume happiness refers to something Figure 1 Subjective Well-Being 160 © Z 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1.50 2.50 2.00 3.00 6,50 7.50 8.50 7.00 8.00 3.50 4.50 5.50 4.00 5.00 6,00 Subjective Well-Being Note. As self-reported in 916 surveys of 1.1 million people in 45 nations (with answers calibrated on a 0 to 10 scale, with 5 being neutral and 10 being the high extreme). Figure by Ed Diener, from data collated by Ruut Veenhoven and reported in Myers & Diener, 1996 (i.e., from "The Pursuit of Happiness," by D. G. Myers & E. Diener, 1996, Scientific American, pp. 54-56. Copyright 1996 by E. Diener. Adapted with permission). Average subjective well-being was 6.75. deeper and more lasting than a momentary good mood, our working definition is simply whatever people mean when describing their lives as happy. Self-reports of happiness are, in fact, reasonably reliable over time, despite changing life circumstances (Dienet, 1994). Moreover, there is convergent validation for self-reported happiness. Those who report they are happy also seem so to their family members and close friends (Pavot, Diener, Colvin, & Sandvik, 1991; Sandvik, Diener, & Seidlitz. 1993). Their daily mood ratings reveal mostly positive emotions. Further, their self-reported happiness predicts other indicators of well-being. Compared with those who are depressed, happy people are less self-foI Figure 2 Faces Scale: "Which Face Comes Closest to Expressing How You Feel About Your Life as a Whole?" 20% 46% 27% 4% 2% 1% 0% Note. The scale and data are from Social Indicators of Well-Being: Ameri- cans' Perceptions of Life Quality {p. 207 and p. 306), by F. M. Andrews and S. B. Withey, 1976, New York, Plenum Copyright 1976 by Plenum. Reprinted with permission. January 2000 • American Psychologist 57
cused, less hostile and abusive, and less vulnerable to disease. They also are more loving, forgiving, trusting, energetic, decisive, creative, sociable, and helpful (Myers, 1993; Veenhoven, 1988). Yet, aren't depression rates on the rise? They are. Nevertheless, in one multinational assessment of psychiatric disorders, the lifetime rate of depression was only nine percent in the most vulnerable young adult age group (Cross-National Collaborative Group, 1992). At any time, only about two percent of people suffer major depression or bipolar disorder (National Advisory Mental Health Council, 1993). Ergo, the set point for mood seems slightly positive, and for good reason: Positive emotions are conducive to sociability, optimistic goal striving, even healthy immune systems (Weisse, 1992). They also define an emotional background against which negative emotions, in response to threats, gain signal value. When something goes awry, the stone in the emotional shoe alerts the organism to act to alleviate the negative mood. Who Is Happy? Although many people believe there are unhappy times of life--times of adolescent stress, midlife crisis, or old age decline--repeated surveys across the industrialized world reveal that no time of life is notably happiest and most satisfying (Myers & Diener, 1995). Emotionality changes with maturity, and the predictors of happiness change (later in life, satisfaction with social relations and health become more important). Yet, in every age group there are many happy and some unhappy people. Like age, gender gives little clue to happiness. Despite the well-known gender gaps in misery--men more often act antisocial or become alcoholic, women more often ruminate and get depressed or anxious--men and women are equally likely to declare themselves "very happy" and "satisfied" with their lives. This conclusion is grounded in surveys of 170,000 adults in 16 countries (Inglehart, 1990), in surveys of 18,000 university students in 39 countries (Michalos, 1991), and in a meta-analysis of 146 other studies (Haring, Stock, & Okun, 1984). Who are the relatively happy people? As Diener (2000, this issue) indicated, some cultures (especially affluent cultures marked by political freedom) are conducive to increased satisfaction with life, if not more positive emotions. Certain traits and temperaments also appear to predispose one to experience happiness. Some of these traits, notably extraversion, are known to be genetically influenced, which helps explain Lykken and Tellegen's (1996) finding that about 50% of the variation in current happiness is heritable. Like cholesterol levels, happiness is genetically influenced but not genetically fixed. What else might influence personal happiness? Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990, 1999) has observed increased quality of life when work and leisure engage one's skills. Between the anxiety of being overwhelmed and stressed and the apathy of being underwhelmed and bored lies a zone in which people experience what Csikszentmihalyi terms flow. When their experiences are sampled using electronic pagers, people report greatest enjoyment not when mindlessly passive but when unself-consciously absorbed in a mindful challenge. Additional research has focused on three other possible correlates of happiness. Even if money can't buy happiness, is there nevertheless an association between wealth and well-being? How important are supportive, close relationships for a sense of well-being? What connections, if any, exist between religiosity and happiness? Simply said, do funds, friends, or faith predict happiness? Wealth and Well-Being Could money buy you happiness? Most deny it. However, ask a different question--"Would a little more money make you a little happier?"--and many will smirk and nod yes. There is, we believe, some connection between wealth and well-being. Asked how satisfied they were with 13 aspects of their lives, including friends, house, and schooling, Americans expressed least satisfaction with "the amount of money you have to live on" (Roper Organization, 1984). What would improve their quality of life? "More money," was the most frequent response to a University of Michigan national survey (Campbell, 1981, p. 41), and the more the better. In one Gallup Poll (Gallup & Newport, 1990), one in two women, two in three men, and four in five people earning more than $75,000 reported they would like to be rich. Thus, the modern American dream seems to have become life, liberty, and the purchase of happiness. Although most realize that the seemingly happy lifestyle of the rich and famous is beyond their reach, they do imagine "the good life" that might become possible when they achieve greater wealth. The clearest evidence of this "greening of America" comes from the annual UCLA and American Council on Education survey of nearly a quarter million students entering college. Those agreeing that a "very important" reason for their going to college was "to make more money" rose from one in two in 1971 to three in four in 1998 (Astin, Green, & Korn, 1987; Sax, Astin, Korn, & Mahoney, 1998). The proportion who consider it "very important or essential" that they become "very well off financially" rose from 39% in 1970 to 74% in 1998 (Figure 3). Among 19 listed objectives, this was number one, outranking "developing a meaningful philosophy of life," "becoming an authority in my field," "helping others in difficulty," and "raising a family." For today's young Americans, money matters. Does being well off indeed produce--or at least correlate with--psychological well-being? Would people be happier if they could exchange a middle-class lifestyle for one with palatial surroundings, Aspen ski vacations, and executive class travel? Would they be happier if they won a publishers' sweepstakes and could choose from its suggested indulgences: a 40-foot yacht, deluxe motorhome, designer wardrobe, luxury car, and private housekeeper? "Whoever said money can't buy happiness isn't spending it right," proclaimed a Lexus ad. As Diener (2000, this issue) reported, there is some tendency for wealthy nations to have more satisfied people. 58 January 2000 ° American Psychologist
O 80% "- 70% ~ 60% ~ 50% ~ e ~ ~, 40% ~ ~ 30% e 20% e~ 10% 0"/. Figure 3 Changing Materialism 90% Develop a meaningful philosophy of life 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 Year Note. From annual surveys of more than 200,000 U.S. students entering college (total sample approximately 6.5 million students), Data from Dey, Astin, and Kern, 1991, and subsequent annual reports, including Sax et al., 1998. The Swiss and Scandinavians, for instance, are generally prosperous and satisfied. When people in poorer nations compare their lifestyles with the abundance of those in rich nations, they may become more aware of their relative poverty. However, among nations with a gross national product of more than $8,000 per person, the correlation between national wealth and well-being evaporates (Figure 4). Better (so far as happiness and life satisfaction go) to be Irish than Bulgarian. But whether one is Irish, Belgian, Norwegian, or American hardly matters. Indeed, the Irish during the 1980s reported consistently greater life satisfaction than did the doubly wealthy but less satisfied West Germans (Inglehart, 1990). Moreover, noted Diener, Diener, and Diener (1995), national wealth is entangled with civil rights, literacy, and the number of continuous years of democracy. For a clearer look at money and happiness, researchers have therefore asked whether, across individuals and over time, people's well-being rises with their wealth. Are Rich People Happier? In poor countries such as India, where low income threatens basic human needs more often, being relatively well off does predict greater well-being (Argyle, 1999). Psychologically as well as materially, it is better to be high caste than low. However, in affluent countries, where most can afford life's necessities, affluence matters surprisingly little. In the United States, Canada, and Europe, the correlation between income and personal happiness, noted Ronald Inglehart (1990), "is surprisingly weak (indeed, virtually negligible)" (p. 242). Happiness tends to be lower among the very poor. Once comfortable, however, more money provides diminishing returns on happiness. Summarizing his own studies of happiness, David Lykken (1999) observed that "People who go to work in their overalls and on the bus are just as happy, on the average, as those in suits who drive to work in their own Mercedes" (p. 17). Even very rich people--the Forbes 100 wealthiest Americans surveyed by Diener, Horwitz, and Emmons (1985)--are only slightly happier than the average American. Although they have more than enough money to buy many things they don't need and hardly care about, 4 in 5 of the 49 super-rich people responding to the survey agreed that "Money can increase OR decrease happiness, depending on how it is used." Some were indeed unhappy. One January 2000 ° American Psychologist 59
Figure 4 National Wealth and Well-Being gl X O "10 f03 ¢.. J~ i O 84 77 70 63 56 49 42 35 • Poland -- Argentina Chile • ~BBrazil •Mexico • Turkey --• China • N. Ireland • ireland • Spain • E. Germany S. Korea N Portugal • Britain Iceland Netherlands Sweden Denmark • Norway • Belgium • U.S. • Finland Canada W. Germany • • • France • Italy • Austria ;= °m ¢J ..Q (/) 28 --•India 21 -- 14-- 7-- --• Nigeria • Czechoslovakia • S. Africa • Hungary • Estonia Japan OLithuania • Latvia •Moscow Belarus O "-'] Bulgaria ••Russia le I I I I I I I 1 1 I I I I I I I I , , ~, z,, ~,q,, ~,~,, ~,,~. 4. ~,. q,,,, q,q,, q,~, q,,~, ~, GNP/Capita in 1991 Note. From World Bank data and the 1990-1991 World Values Survey. The subjective well-being index combines happiness and life satisfaction (average of percentage describing themselves as [a] "very happy" or "happy" minus percentage "not very happy" or "unhappy," and as [b] 7 or above minus 4 or below on Q l O-point life satisfaction scale). Figure from Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (p. 62), by R. Inglehart, 1997, Princeton, N J, Princeton Universily Press. Copyright 1997 by R. Inglehart. Reprinted with permission. fabulously wealthy man could never remember being happy. One woman reported that money could not undo misery caused by her children's problems. When sailing on the Titanic, even first class cannot get you where you want to go. Our human capacity for adaptation (Diener, 2000, this issue) helps explain a major conclusion of subjective wellbeing research, as expressed by the late Richard Kammann (1983): "Objective life circumstances have a negligible role to play in a theory of happiness." Good and bad events (e.g., a pay hike, being rejected for tenure) do temporarily influence our moods, and people will often seize on such short-run influences to explain their happiness. Yet, in less time than most people suppose, the emotional impact of significant events and circumstances dissipates (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998). In a society where everyone lived in 4,000-square-foot houses, people would likely be no happier than in a society in which everyone lived in 2,000-square-foot houses. Thanks to our capacity to adapt to ever greater fame and fortune, yesterday's luxuries can soon become today's necessities and tomorrow's relics. 60 January 2000 • American Psychologist
Does Economic Growth Improve Human Morale? Over time, does happiness rise with affluence? Will Frank and Shirley Mac Capaci be enduringly happier for having in 1998 won the $195 million Powerball lottery? Likely they will not be as happy as they initially supposed. Lottery winners typically gain only a temporary jolt of joy from their winnings (Argyle, 1986; Brickman, Coates, & JanoffBulman, 1978). Although they are delighted to have won, the euphoria eventually fades. Likewise, those whose incomes have increased over the previous decade are not happier than those whose income has not increased (Diener, Sandvik, Seidlitz, & Diener, 1993). As Richard Ryan (quoted by Kohn, 1999) noted, such satisfactions have "a short half-life." If not surrounded by wealth, the pain of simplification may also be short-lived. Economist Robert Frank (1996) experienced this: As a young man fresh out of college, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nepal. My one-room house had no electricity, no heat, no indoor toilet, no running water. The local diet offered little variety and virtually no meat .... Yet, although my living conditions in Nepal were a bit startling at first, the most salient feature of my experience was how quickly they came to seem normal. Within a matter of weeks, I lost all sense of impoverishment. Indeed, my $40 monthly stipend was more than most others had in my village, and with it I experienced a feeling of prosperity that I have recaptured only in recent years. If enduring personal happiness generally does not rise with personal affluence, does collective happiness float upward with a rising economic tide? Are Americans happier today than in 1940, when two out of five homes lacked a shower or bathtub, heat often meant feeding a furnace wood or coal, and 35% of homes had no toilet ("Tracking the American Dream," 1994)? Consider 1957, when economist John Galbraith was about to describe the United States as The Affluent Socie~. Americans' per person income, expressed in today's dollars, was about $9,000. Today, it is $20,000, thanks to increased real wages into the 1970s, increased nonwage income, and the doubling of married women's employment. Compared with 1957, today's Americans are therefore part of "the doubly affluent society," with double what money buys. Although income disparity has increased between rich and poor, the rising tide has lifted most boats. Americans today own twice as many cars per person, eat out more than twice as often, and often enjoy microwave ovens, big-screen color TVs, and home computers. From 1960 to 1997, the percentage of homes with dishwashers increased from 7% to 50%, clothes dryers increased from 20% to 71%, and air conditioning increased from 15% to 73% (U.S. Commerce Department, Bureau of the Census, 1979, Table 1383; 1998, Table 1223). So, believing that it is "very important" to be very well-off financially and having seen their affluence ratchet upward little by little over four decades, are Americans now happier? They are not. As Figure 5 indicates, the number of people reporting themselves "very happy" has, if anything, Figure 5 Has Economic Growth Advanced Human Morale? sso,ooo i o loo",. $18,000 9O% $16,000 l Personal lncom i 80 % $12,000 ,, 600/0 $10,000 5O% $8,000 - , Percentage Very Happy 40% $6,000 * ÷ * **~* ""*" .... *"*'~*'~ "w ""',* " 30% $4,00O 20% $2,000 10% $0 , , , , , 0% 1956 1963 1970 1977 1984 1991 1998 Note. While inflation-adjusted income has risen, self-reported happiness has not. Income data from the U.S. Commerce Department, Bureau of the Census (1975}, and Economic Indicators. Happiness data from General Social Surveys, National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago. See Footnote 1. declined slightly between 1957 and 1998, from 35% to 33%: We are twice as rich and no happier. Meanwhile, the divorce rate doubled. Teen suicide tripled. Reported violent crime nearly quadrupled. Depression rates have soared, especially among teens and young adults (Seligman, 1989; Klerman & Weissman, 1989; Cross-National Collaborative Group, 1992). Compared with their grandparents, today's young .adults have grown up with much more affluence, slightly less happiness, and much greater risk of depression and assorted social pathologies. I call this conjunction of material prosperity and social recession the American paradox (Myers, in press). The more people strive for extrinsic goals such as money, the more numerous their problems and the less robust their well-being (Kasser & Ryan, 1996). It is hard to avoid a startling conclusion: Our becoming much better off over the last four decades has not been accompanied by one iota of increased subjective wellbeing. The same is true of European countries and Japan, according to Richard Easterlin (1995). In Britain, for example, sharp increases in the percentages of households with cars, central heating, and telephones have not been accompanied by increased happiness. The conclusion is startling because it challenges modem materialism. So far as happiness goes, it is not "the economy, stupid." Economic growth in affluent countries has provided no apparent boost to human morale. Close Relationships and Well-Being One can easily imagine why the stress of close relationships might exacerbate illness and misery. "Hell is other January 2000 • American Psychologist 61
people," mused Jean-Paul Sartre. Thus, people may fret over dysfunctional relationships. Pop psychology books warn us against the yoke of codependent connections, marked by too much support and loyalty to a troubled partner at the cost of one's self-fulfillment. Recognizing how the "chains" of marriage and the "shackles" of commitment can put people in "bondage," modern individualism advises us to give priority to enhancing our own identity and self-expression. "The only question which matters," declared Carl Rogers (quoted in Wallach & Wallach, 1985), "is, 'Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?' " Need to Belong Without disputing the human quest for personal identity, social and evolutionary psychologists remind us that we are also, as Aristotle recognized, social animals. Social bonds boosted our ancestors' survival chances. Children kept close to their caregivers were protected from harm. Adults who formed attachments were more likely to come together to reproduce and conurture their offspring to maturity. Groups shared food, provided mates, and helped care for children. For hunting, six hands were better than two. Facing enemies, there was strength in numbers. As inheritors of this legacy, we therefore have a deep need to belong, contend Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary (1995). Because of our panhuman quest for close relationships, new social bonds are typically marked and cemented by celebration. When we marry, have a child, gain a new job, or join a fraternity, sorority, or religious community, we celebrate the event with food, ritual, or parties. Thrown together at school, at summer camp, or on a cruise, we often resist our newly formed group's dissolution. Hoping to maintain the relationships, we promise to call, to write, to come back for reunions. Seeking acceptance and belonging, we spend billions on clothes, cosmetics, and diet and fitness aids, especially in cultures where the absence of arranged marriages and the possibility of divorce make romantic attachment more dependent on attractiveness. To be sure, the need to belong feeds both deep attachments and menacing threats. Out of our need to define a "we" come loving families, faithful friendships, fraternal organizations, and team spirit, but also teen gangs, isolationist cults, ethnic hostilities, and fanatical nationalism. Because the fear of aloneness sometimes seems worse than the pain of emotional or physical abuse, attachments may also keep people in degrading relationships. When our social ties are threatened or broken, negative emotions may overwhelm us. Exile, imprisonment, and solitary confinement are progressively more severe forms of punishment. Recently bereaved people often find life empty and pointless. Those denied others' acceptance and inclusion may feel depressed. Anxiety, jealousy, loneliness, and guilt all involve disruptions to the human need to belong. The known toxicity of such negative emotions for human health and the healing power of confiding selfdisclosure (Pennebaker, 1990) help explain why epidemiologists, after following thousands of lives through time, have consistently found that close, intact relationships predict health. Compared with those having few social ties, people supported by close relationships with friends, family, or fellow members of church, work, or other support groups are less vulnerable to ill health and premature death (Cohen, 1988; House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988; Nelson, 1988). When afflicted with leukemia or heart disease, those who experience extensive social support have higher survival rates (Case, Moss, Case, McDermott, & Eberly, 1992; Colon, Callies, Popkin, & McGlave, 1991; Williams et al., 1992). When social ties break, with widowhood, divorce, or dismissal from a job, immune defenses weaken for a time, and rates of disease and death rise (Dohrenwend et al., 1982; Kaprio, Koskenvuo, & Rita, 1987; National Academy of Sciences, 1984). "Woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help," observed the writer of Ecclesiastes (4:10). Friendships and Well-Being Do the correlates of social support include psychological as well as physical well-being? Being attached to friends and partners with whom we can share intimate thoughts has two effects, believed Francis Bacon (1625): "It redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half." Three hundred and fifty years later, John Lennon and Paul McCartney (1967) sang the same idea: "I get by with a little help from my friends." Indeed, people report happier feelings when with others (Pavot, Diener, & Fujita, 1990). When asked by the National Opinion Research Center, "How many close friends would you say you have?" (excluding family members), 26% of those reporting fewer than five friends and 38% of those reporting five or more friends said they were "very happy. ''1 Other findings confirm the correlation between social support and well-being. For example, those who enjoy close relationships cope better with various stresses, including bereavement, rape, job loss, and illness (Abbey & Andrews, 1985; Perlman & Rook, 1987). Among 800 college alumni surveyed, those with "Yuppie values"-- those who preferred a high income and occupational success and prestige to having very close friends and a close marriage--were twice as likely as their former classmates to describe themselves as "fairly" or "very" unhappy (Perkins, 1991). Marriage and Well-Being For more than 9 in 10 people worldwide, reported the United Nations' Demographic Yearbook, one example of a close relationship is eventually marriage. Given our need to belong and the resulting links between friendship and wellbeing, does marriage predict greater well-being, or is happiness more often associated with independence? A mountain of data reveal that most people are happier when attached than when unattached. Repeated surveys in Europe and North America have produced a conAnalyses of National Opinion Research Center General Social Survey data for this article were conducted at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ gss/and at http://csa.berkeley.edu:7502/. 62 January 2000 ° American Psychologist
sistent result: Compared with those who never marry, and especially compared with those who have separated or divorced, married people report being happier and more satisfied with life. For example, among the 35,024 Americans surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center between 1972 and 1996, 40% of married adults declared themselves very happy--nearly double the 24% of nevermarried adults who said the same (Figure 6). Pooling data from national surveys of 20,800 people in 19 countries, Arne Mastekaasa (1994) confirmed the marriage-happiness correlation. Married people are also at decreased risk of depression (Figure 7). Even less happy than those unmarried or divorced are those in not-very-happy marriages, However, those reporting their marriage as "very happy" are among the happiest of people: 57% declared life as a whole to be very happy (compared with 10% of those whose marriage is "pretty happy" and 3% of those with a "not-too-happy" marriage). Henry Ward Beecher would not have been surprised: "Well-married a person is winged; ill-matched, shackled." As it happens, three in four married Americans say their spouse is their best friend, and four in five say they would marry the same person again (Glenn, 1996; Greeley, 1991). Is marriage, as is often supposed, more strongly linked with men's happiness than women's? Do "guys wed for better; wives for worse," as one newspaper headlined (Peterson, 1993)? Given women's greater contribution to household tasks, we might expect so. Domestic equity--an ideal not yet realized in most marriages--is a predictor of marital happiness (Feeney, Peterson, &Noller, 1994; Schafer & Keith, 1980). Nevertheless, the married versus notmarried happiness gap is similar for women and men. This is the consistent finding of national surveys in the United States (Figure 6), in Canada and Europe (Inglehart, 1990), and in a meta-analysis of 93 studies of gender, marriage, and well-being (Wood, Rhodes, & Whelan, 1989). Although there are some indications that a bad marriage may Figure 6 Marital Status and Happiness Note. Data from 35,024 participants in the General Social Survey, National Opinion Research Center, 1972 to 1996. See Footnote 1. be more depressing to a woman than to her husband, the myth that single women are generally happier than married women can be laid to rest. So, why are married people happier? Is marriage conducive to happiness, or is happiness conducive to marriage? The traffic between marriage and happiness appears to be two-way. First, happy people may be more appealing marriage partners. Because they are more good-natured, more outgoing, and more focused on others (Veenhoven, 1988), they generally are socially attractive. Unhappy people are more often socially rejected. Misery may love company, but research on the social consequences of depression reveals that company does not love misery. An unhappy (and therefore self-focused, irritable, and withdrawn) spouse or roommate is often not perceived as fun to be around (Gotlib, 1992; Segrin & Dillard, 1992). For such reasons, positive, happy people more readily form happy relationships. Yet, "the prevailing opinion of researchers," reported Mastekaasa (1995), is that the marriage-happiness correlation is "mainly due" to the beneficial effects of marriage. Consider: If the happiest people marry sooner and more often, then as people age (and progressively less happy people move into marriage), the average happiness of both married and never-married people should decline. (The older, less happy newlyweds would pull down the average happiness of married people, leaving the unhappiest people in the unmarried group.) However, the data do not support this prediction, which suggests that marital intimacy, commitment, and support do, for most people, pay emotional dividends. Marriage offers people new roles, providing new stresses but also additional rewards and sources of identity and self-esteem (Crosby, 1987). When marked by intimacy, marriage--friendship sealed by commitment-- reduces loneliness and offers a dependable lover and companion (Hendrick & Hendrick, 1997). Faith and Well-Being Is religion, as Freud (1928/1964, p. 71) surmised, corrosive to happiness--by creating an "obsessional neurosis" that entails guilt, repressed sexuality, and suppressed emotions-or is it more often associated with joy? Accumulating evidence reveals that some forms of religious experience correlate with prejudice and guilt, but that in general an active religiosity is associated with several mental health criteria. First, actively religious North Americans are much less likely than irreligious people to become delinquent, to abuse drugs and alcohol, to divorce, and to commit suicide (Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993; Colasanto & Shriver, 1989). Thanks in part to their lessened smoking and drinking, religiously active people even tend to be physically healthier and to live longer (Koenig, 1997; Matthews & Larson., 1997). Olher studies have probed the correlation between faith and coping with crises. Compared with religiously inactive widows, recently widowed women who worship regularly report more joy in their lives (Harvey, Barnes, & Greenwood, 1987; McGloshen & O'Bryant, 1988; Siegel January 2000 ° American Psychologist 63
Figure 7 Marital Status and Depression Rate 7% Note. tw,,~ 6% 5% 5.80% 4% ~a 3% 2% 1% ,< 0% Divorced Twice Data from Robins and Regier, 1991, p. 72. 5.10% Cohabit 4.10% Divorced Once 2.40% Never Married 1.50% I Married & Kuykendall, 1990). Among mothers of developmentally challenged children, those with a deep religious faith are less vulnerable to depression (Friedrich, Cohen, & Wilturner, 1988). People of faith also tend to retain or recover greater happiness after suffering divorce, unemployment, serious illness, or bereavement (Ellison, 1991; McIntosh, Silver, & Wortman, 1993). For people later in life, according to one meta-analysis, the two best predictors of life satisfaction have been health and religiousness (Okun & Stock, 1987). In surveys taken in various nations, religiously active people also report somewhat higher levels of happiness (Inglehart, 1990). Consider a U.S. Gallup Organization (1984) survey. Those responding with highest scores on a spiritual commitment scale (by agreeing, e.g., that "My religious faith is the most important influence in my life") were twice as likely as those lowest in spiritual commitment to declare themselves "very happy." National Opinion Research Center surveys reveal higher levels of "very happy" people among those who feel "extremely close to God" (41%) rather than "somewhat close" (29%) or not close or unbelieving (23%). Self-rated spirituality and happiness may both be socially desirable responses, however. Would the happiness correlation extend to a behavioral measure of religiosity? As Figure 8 indicates, it does. Seeking to explain these associations between faith and well-being, researchers have considered several possibilities. A partial explanation seems to be that faith communities provide social support (Ellison, Gay, & Glass, 1989). Religion is usually practiced communally, involving "the fellowship of kindred spirits," "the bearing of one another's burdens," "the ties of love that bind." This was the vision of John Winthrop (1630/1965), who, before leading one of the first groups of Puritans to shore, declared, "We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoyce together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body" (p. 92). Pennsylvania's old-order Amish, who are known for their agrarian, nonmaterialistic culture, their pacifism, and their selfsufficient communal life, suffer low rates of major depression (Egeland & Hostetter, 1983; Egeland, Hostetter, & Eshleman, 1983). Another possible explanation for the faith-well-being correlation is the sense of meaning and purpose that many people derive from their faith. Seligman (1988) has contended that a loss of meaning feeds today's high depression rate, and that finding meaning requires an attachment to something larger than the lonely self. To the extent that young people now find it hard to take seriously their relationship with God, to care about their relationship with the country or to be part of a large and abiding family, they will find it very difficult to find meaning in life. To put it another way, the sell" is a very. poor site tk~r finding meaning. (p. 55) For Rabbi Harold Kushner (1987), religion satisfies "the most fundamental human need of all. That is the need to know that somehow we matter, that our lives mean something, count as something more than just a momentary blip in the universe." Many religious worldviews not only propose answers to some of life's deepest questions; they also encourage hope when confronting what Sheldon Solomon, Jeffery Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski (1991) call "the terror resulting from our awareness of vulnerability and death." Aware as we are of the great enemies, suffering and death, 64 January 2000 • American Psychologist
Figure 8 Religious Attendance and Happiness 50% 47% ~, 40% ~t 3O% >. : 20% 10% 0% 31% 28% ..... 35% 39% Note. Less than Monthly+ Nearly Weekly Several Monthly Weekly Times Data from 34,706 participants in the General Social Survey, National Opinion Research Center, 1972 to 1996. See Footnote 1. religion offers a hope that in the end, the very end, "all shall be well, and all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well" (Julian of Norwich, 1373/1901). Conclusion The correlational evidence that marks this young enterprise leaves many fields for future researchers to plow as they explore the roots and fruits of happiness. However, this much we now know: Age, gender, and income (assuming people have enough to afford life's necessities) give little clue to someone's happiness. William Cowper's 1782 hunch appears correct: "Happiness depends, as Nature shows, Less on exterior things than most suppose." Better clues come from knowing people's traits and the quality of their work and leisure experiences (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999; Diener, 2000, this issue), knowing whether they enjoy a supportive network of close relationships, and knowing whether the person has a faith that encompasses social support, purpose, and hope. Research on subjective well-being complements society's emphases on physical and material well-being and psychology's historic preoccupation with negative emotions. By asking who is happy and why, those engaged in the scientific pursuit of happiness can help our culture rethink its priorities and envision a world that enhances human well-being. REFERENCES Abbey, A., & Andrews, F. M. (1985). Modeling the psychological determinants of life quality. Social Indicators Research, 16, 1-34. Andrews, F. M.. & Withey, S. B. (1976). Social indicators of well-being: Americans'perceptions of life quali~. New York: Plenum. Argyle, M. (1986). The psychology of happiness. London: Methuen. Argyle, M, (1999). Causes and correlates of happiness. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwartz (Eds.), Well-being: The .foundations oJ hedonic psychology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Astin, A. W_ Green, K. C., & Korn, W. S. (1987). The American //eshman: Twenty year trends. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Los Angeles. Bacon, F. (1625). Of friendship. Essays. Batson, C. D., Schoenrade, P. A., & Ventis, W. L. (1993). Religion and the individual: A social psyehological perspective. New York: Oxford University Press. Baumeisl:er, R. F.. & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachment as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497-529. Black, A. L., & McCafferty, D. (1998, July 3-5). The age of contentment. USA Weekend, pp. 4-6. Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. J. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: ls happiness relative? Journal of'Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 917-927. Campbell, A. (1981). The sense of well-being in America. New York: McGraw-Hill. Case, R. B., Moss, A. J., Case, N., McDermott, M., & Eberly, S. (1992). Living alone after myocardial infarction: Impact on prognosis. Journal of the American Medical Association, 267, 515-519. Cohen, S. (1988). Psychosocial models of the role of social support in the etiology of physical disease. Health Psychology, 7, 269-297. Colasanto, D., & Shriver, J. (1989, May). Mirror of America: Middle-aged face marital crisis. Gallup Report, No. 284, pp. 34-38. Colon, E. A., Callies, A. L., Popkin, M. K., & McGlave, P. B. (1991). Depressed mood and other variables related to bone marrow transplantation survival in acute leukemia. Psychosomatics, 32, 420-425. Crosby, F. J. (Ed.). (1987). Spouse, parent, worker: On gender and multiple roles. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cross-National Collaborative Group. (1992). The changing rate of major depression. Journal qf the American Medical Association, 268, 3098- 3105. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of" optimal experience. Ne'a York: Harper & Row. January 2000 • American Psychologist 65
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Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci University of Rochester Human beings can be proactive and engaged or, alternatively, passive and alienated, largely as a function of the social conditions in which they develop and function. Accordingly, research guided by self-determination theo~ has focused on the social-contextual conditions that facilitate versus forestall the natural processes of self-motivation and healthy psychological development. Specifically, factors have been examined that enhance versus undermine intrinsic motivation, self-regulation, and well-being. The findings have led to the postulate of three innate psychological needs--competence, autonomy, and relatedness-- which when satisfied yield enhanced self-motivation and mental health and when thwarted lead to diminished motivation and well-being. Also considered is the significance of these psychological needs and processes within domains such as health care, education, work, sport, religion, and psychotherapy. T he fullest representations of humanity show people to be curious, vital, and self-motivated. At their best, they are agentic and inspired, striving to learn; extend themselves; master new skills; and apply their talents responsibly. That most people show considerable effort, agency, and commitment in their lives appears, in fact, to be more normative than exceptional, suggesting some very positive and persistent features of human nature. Yet, it is also clear that the human spirit can be diminished or crushed and that individuals sometimes reject growth and responsibility. Regardless of social strata or cultural origin, examples of both children and adults who are apathetic, alienated, and irresponsible are abundant. Such non-optimal human functioning can be observed not only in our psychological clinics but also among the millions who, for hours a day, sit passively before their televisions, stare blankly from the back of their classrooms, or wait listlessly for the weekend as they go about their jobs. The persistent, proactive, and positive tendencies of human nature are clearly not invariantly apparent. The fact that human nature, phenotypically expressed, can be either active or passive, constructive or indolent, suggests more than mere dispositional differences and is a function of more than just biological endowments. It also bespeaks a wide range of reactions to social environments that is worthy of our most intense scientific investigation. Specifically, social contexts catalyze both within- and between-person differences in motivation and personal growth, resulting in people being more self-motivated, energized, and integrated in some situations, domains, and cultures than in others. Research on the conditions that foster versus undermine positive human potentials has both theoretical import and practical significance because it can contribute not only to formal knowledge of the causes of human behavior but also to the design of social environments that optimize people's development, performance, and well-being. Research guided by self-determination theory (SDT) has had an ongoing concern with precisely these issues (Deci & Ryan, 1985, 1991; Ryan, 1995). Self-Determination Theory SDT is an approach to human motivation and personality that uses traditional empirical methods while employing an organismic metatheory that highlights the importance of humans' evolved inner resources for personality development and behavioral self-regulation (Ryan, Kuhl, & Deci, 1997). Thus, its arena is the investigation of people's inherent growth tendencies and innate psychological needs that are the basis for their self-motivation and personality integration, as well as for the conditions that foster those positive processes. Inductively, using the empirical process, we have identified three such needs--the needs for competence (Harter, 1978; White, 1963), relatedness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Reis, 1994), and autonomy (deCharms, 1968; Deci, 1975)--that appear to be essential for facilitating optimal functioning of the natural propensities for growth and integration, as well as for constructive social development and personal well-being. This work was supported in part by research Grant MH-53385 from the National Institute of Mental Health. We thank all of the members of the Human Motivation Research Group at the University of Rochester who have contributed to these ideas and research, and to Jennifer LaGuardia, Charles Couchman, and Phyllis Joe for their specific help with this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to either Richard M. Ryan or Edward L. Deci, Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627. Electronic mail may be sent to either [email protected] or [email protected]. 68 January 2000 • American Psychologist Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/00/$5.00 Vol. 55, No. 1, 68-78 DOI: 10.1037110003-066X.55.1.68
Richard M. Ryan Photo by Joe Gawlowicz, University of Rochester Much of the research guided by SDT has also examined environmental factors that hinder or undermine selfmotivation, social functioning, and personal well-being. Although many specific deleterious effects have been explored, the research suggests that these detriments can be most parsimoniously described in terms of thwarting the three basic psychological needs. Thus, SDT is concerned not only with the specific nature of positive developmental tendencies, but it also examines social environments that are antagonistic toward these tendencies. The empirical methods used in much of the SDT research have been in the Baconian tradition, in that social contextual variables have been directly manipulated to examine their effects on both internal processes and behavioral manifestations. The use of experimental paradigms has allowed us to specify the conditions under which people's natural activity and constructiveness will flourish, as well as those that promote a lack of self-motivation and social integration. In this way, we have used experimental methods without accepting the mechanistic or efficient causal meta-theories that have typically been associated with those methods. In this article we review work guided by SDT, addressing its implications for three important outcomes. We begin with an examination of intrinsic motivation, the prototypic manifestation of the human tendency toward learning and creativity, and we consider research specifying conditions that facilitate versus forestall this special type of motivation. Second, we present an analysis of self-regulation, which concerns how people take in social values and extrinsic contingencies and progressively transform them into personal values and self-motivations. In that discussion, we outline different forms of internalized motivation, addressing their behavioral and experiential correlates and the conditions that ale likely to promote these different motivations. Third, we focus on studies that have directly examined the impact of psychological need fulfillment on health and well-being. The Nature of Motivation Motivation concerns energy, direction, persistence and equifinality--all aspects of activation and intention. Motivation has been a central and perennial issue in the field of psychology, for it is at the core of biological, cognitive, and social regulation. Perhaps more important, in the real world, motivation is highly valued because of its consequences: Motivation produces. It is therefore of preeminent concern to those in roles such as manager, teacher, religious leader, coach, health care provider, and parent that involve mobilizing others to act. Although motivation is often treated as a singular construct, even superficial reflection suggests that people are moved to act by very different types of factors, with highly varied experiences and consequences. People can be motivated because they value an activity or because there is strong external coercion. They can be urged into action by an abiding interest or by a bribe. They can behave from a sense of personal commitment to excel or from fear of being surveilled. These contrasts between cases of having internal motivation versus being externally pressured are surely familiar to everyone. The issue of whether people stand behind a behavior out of their interests and values, or do it for reasons external to the self, is a matter of significance in every culture (e.g., Johnson, 1993) and represents a basic dimension by which people make sense of their own and others' behavior (deCharms, 1968; Heider, 1958; Ryan & Connell, 1989). Comparisons between people whose motivation is authentic (literally, self-authored or endorsed) and those who are merely externally controlled for an action typically reveal that the former, relative to the latter, have more interest, excitement, and confidence, which in turn is manifest both as enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity (Deci & Ryan, 1991; Sheldon, Ryan, Rawsthorne, & Ilardi, 1997) and as heightened vitality (Nix, Ryan, Manly, & Deci, 1999), self-esteem (Deci & Ryan, 1995), and general well-being (Ryan, Deci, & Grolnick, 1995). This is so even when the people have the same level of perceived competence or self-efficacy for the activity. Because of the functional and experiential differences between self-motivation and external regulation, a major focus of SDT has been to supply a more differentiated approach to motivation, by asking what kind of motivation is being exhibited at any given time. By considering the perceived forces that move a person to act, SDT has been able to identify several distinct types of motivation, each of which has specifiable consequences for learning, performance, personal experience, and well-being. Also, by articulating a set of principles concerning how each type of motivation is developed and sustained, or forestalled and undermined, SDT at once recognizes a positive thrust to human nature and provides an account of passivity, alienation, and psychopathology. January 2000 • American Psychologist 69
Edward L. Deci Photo by Joe Gawlowicz, University of Rochester Intrinsic Motivation Perhaps no single phenomenon reflects the positive potential of human nature as much as intrinsic motivation, the inherent tendency to seek out novelty and challenges, to extend and exercise one's capacities, to explore, and to learn. Developmentalists acknowledge that from the time of birth, children, in their healthiest states, are active, inquisitive, curious, and playful, even in the absence of specific rewards (e.g., Harter, 1978). The construct of intrinsic motivation describes this natural inclination toward assimilation, mastery, spontaneous interest, and exploration that is so essential to cognitive and social development and that represents a principal source of enjoyment and vitality throughout life (Csikszentmihalyi & Rathunde, 1993; Ryan, 1995). Yet, despite the fact that humans are liberally endowed with intrinsic motivational tendencies, the evidence is now clear that the maintenance and enhancement of this inherent propensity requires supportive conditions, as it can be fairly readily disrupted by various nonsupportive conditions. Thus, our theory of intrinsic motivation does not concern what causes intrinsic motivation (which we view as an evolved propensity; Ryan et al., 1997); rather, it examines the conditions that elicit and sustain, versus subdue and diminish, this innate propensity. Cognitive evaluation theory (CET) was presented by Deci and Ryan (1985) as a subtheory within SDT that had the aim of specifying factors that explain variability in intrinsic motivation. CET is framed in terms of social and environmental factors that facilitate versus undermine intrinsic motivation, using language that reflects the assumption that intrinsic motivation, being inherent, will be catalyzed when individuals are in conditions that conduce toward its expression. In other words, it will flourish if circumstances permit. Put in this way, the study of conditions that facilitate versus undermine intrinsic motivation is an important first step in understanding sources of both alienation and liberation of the positive aspects of human nature. CET, which focuses on the fundamental needs for competence and autonomy, was formulated to integrate results from initial laboratory experiments on the effects of rewards, feedback, and other external events on intrinsic motivation, and was subsequently tested and extended by field studies in various settings. The theory argues, first, that social-contextual events (e.g., feedback, communications, rewards) that conduce toward feelings of competence during action can enhance intrinsic motivation for that action. Accordingly, optimal challenges, effectance-prorooting feedback, and freedom from demeaning evaluations were all found to facilitate intrinsic motivation. For example, early studies showed that positive performance feedback enhanced intrinsic motivation, whereas negative performance feedback diminished it (Deci, 1975), and research by Vallerand and Reid (1984) showed that these effects were mediated by perceived competence. CET further specifies, and studies have shown (Fisher, 1978; Ryan, 1982), that feelings of competence will not enhance intrinsic motivation unless accompanied by a sense of autonomy or, in attributional terms, by an internal perceived locus of causality (deCharms, 1968). Thus, according to CET, people must not only experience competence or efficacy, they must also experience their behavior as self-determined for intrinsic motivation to be in evidence. This requires either immediate contextual supports for autonomy and competence or abiding inner resources (Reeve, 1996) that are typically the result of prior developmental supports for perceived autonomy and competence. In fact, most of the research on the effects of environmental events in intrinsic motivation has focused on the issue of autonomy versus control rather than that of competence. Research on this issue has been considerably more controversial. It began with the repeated demonstration that extrinsic rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation. Deci (1975) interpreted these results in terms of rewards facilitating a more external perceived locus of causality (i.e., diminished autonomy). Although the issue of reward effects has been hotly debated, a recent, comprehensive meta-analysis (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999) confirmed, in spite of claims to the contrary by Eisenberger and Cameron (1996), that all expected tangible rewards made contingent on task performance do reliably undermine intrinsic motivation. Also, research revealed that not only tangible rewards but also threats, deadlines, directives, pressured evaluations, and imposed goals diminish intrinsic motivation because, like tangible rewards, they conduce toward an external perceived locus of causality. In contrast, choice, acknowledgment of feelings, and opportunities for selfdirection were found to enhance intrinsic motivation because they allow people a greater feeling of autonomy (Deci & Ryan, 1985). Field studies have further shown that 70 January 2000 • American Psychologist
teachers who are autonomy supportive (in contrast to controlling) catalyze in their students greater intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and desire for challenge (e.g., Deci, Nezlek, & Sheinman, 1981; Flink, Boggiano, & Barrett, 1990; Ryan & Grolnick, 1986). Students taught with a more controlling approach not only lose initiative but learn less effectively, especially when learning requires conceptual, creative processing (Amabile, 1996; Grolnick & Ryan, 1987; Utman, 1997). Similarly, studies showed that autonomy-supportive parents, relative to controlling parents, have children who are more intrinsically motivated (Grolnick, Deci, & Ryan, 1997). Such findings generalized to other domains such as sport and music in which supports for autonomy and competence by parents and mentors incite more intrinsic motivation (e.g., Frederick & Ryan, 1995). Although autonomy and competence supports are highly salient for producing variability in intrinsic motivation, a third factor, relatedness, also bears on its expression. In infancy, intrinsic motivation is readily observable as exploratory behavior and, as suggested by attachment theorists (e.g., Bowlby, 1979), it is more evident when the infant is securely attached to a parent. Studies of mothers and infants have, indeed, shown that both security and maternal autonomy support predict more exploratory behavior in the infants (e.g., Frodi, Bridges, & Grolnick, 1985). SDT hypothesizes that a similar dynamic occurs in interpersonal settings over the life span, with intrinsic motivation more likely to flourish in contexts characterized by a sense of security and relatedness. For example, Anderson, Manoogian, and Reznick (1976) found that when children worked on an interesting task in the presence of an adult stranger who ignored them and failed to respond to their initiations, a very low level of intrinsic motivation resulted, and Ryan and Grolnick (1986) observed lower intrinsic motivation in students who experienced their teachers as cold and uncaring. Of course, many intrinsically motivated behaviors are happily performed in isolation, suggesting that proximal relational supports may not be necessary for intrinsic motivation, but a secure relational base does seem to be important for the expression of intrinsic motivation to be in evidence. To summarize, the CET framework suggests that social environments can facilitate or forestall intrinsic motivation by supporting versus thwarting people's innate psychological needs. Strong links between intrinsic motivation and satisfaction of the needs for autonomy and competence have been clearly demonstrated, and some work suggests that satisfaction of the need for relatedness, at least in a distal sense, may also be important for intrinsic motivation. It is critical to remember, however, that people will be intrinsically motivated only for activities that hold intrinsic interest for them, activities that have the appeal of novelty, challenge, or aesthetic value. For activities that do not hold such appeal, the principles of CET do not apply, because the activities will not be experienced as intrinsically motivated to begin with. To understand the motivation for those activities, we need to look more deeply into the nature and dynamics of extrinsic motivation. Self-Regulation of Extrinsic Motivation Although intrinsic motivation is an important type of motivation, it is not the only type or even the only type of self-determined motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985). Indeed, much of what people do is not, strictly speaking, intrinsically motivated, especially after early childhood when the fi'eedom to be intrinsically motivated is increasingly curtailed by social pressures to do activities that are not interesting and to assume a variety of new responsibilities (Ryan & La Guardia, in press). The real question concerning nonintrinsically motivated practices is how individuals acquire the motivation to carry them out and how this motivation affects ongoing persistence, behavioral quality, and well-being. Whenever a person (be it a parent, teacher, boss, coach, or therapist) attempts to foster certain behaviors in others, the others' motivation for the behavior can range from amotivation or unwillingness, to passive compliance, to active personal commitment. According to SDT, these different motivations reflect differing degrees to which the value and regulation of the requested behavior have been internalized and integrated. Internalization refers to people's "taking in" a value or regulation, and integration refers to the further transformation of that regulation into their own so that, subsequently, it will emanate from their sense of self. Internalization and integration are clearly central issues in childhood socialization, but they are also continually re]evant for the regulation of behavior across the life span. In nearly every setting people enter, certain behaviors and va]ues are prescribed, behaviors that are not interesting and values that are not spontaneously adopted. Accordingly, SDT has addressed the issues of (a) the processes through which such nonintrinsically motivated behaviors can become truly self-determined, and (b) the ways in which the social environment influences those processes. The lerm extrinsic motivation refers to the performance of an activity in order to attain some separable outcome and, thus, contrasts with intrinsic motivation, which refers to doing an activity for the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself. Unlike some perspectives that view extrinsically motivated behavior as invariantly nonautonomous, SDT proposes that extrinsic motivation can vary greatly in its relative autonomy (Ryan & Connell, 1989; Vallerand, 1997). For example, students who do their homework because they personally grasp its value for their chosen career are extrinsically motivated, as are those who do the work only because they are adhering to their parents' control. Both examples involve instrumentalities rather than enjoyment of the work itself, yet the former case of extrinsic motivation entails personal endorsement and a feeling of choice, whereas the latter involves compliance with an external regulation. Both represent intentional behavior (Heider, 1958), but they vary in their relative autonomy. The former, of course, is the type of extrinsic motivation that is sought by astute socializing agents regardless o1: the applied domain. January 2000 ° American Psychologist 71
Figure 1 The Self-Determination Continuum Showing Types of Motivation With Their Regulatory Styles, Loci of Causality, and Corresponding Processes Behavior Nonself-Determined Self-Determined Motivation StylesRegulat°ry ~Regul~ E~ic Mot~ Perceived Locus of Causality Impersonal External Somewhat Somewhat Intemal Internal External Internal Relevant Nonintentional, Regulatory Nonvaluing, Processes Incompetence, Lack of Control Compliance, Self-control, Personal Congruence, Interest, External Ego-Involvement, Importance, Awareness, Enjoyment, Rewards and Internal Rewards Conscious Synthesis Inherent Punishments and Punishments Valuing With Self Satisfaction Within SDT, Deci and Ryan (1985) introduced a second subtheory, called organismic integration theory (OIT), to detail the different forms of extrinsic motivation and the contextual factors that either promote or hinder internalization and integration of the regulation for these behaviors. Figure 1 illustrates the OIT taxonomy of motivational types, arranged from left to fight in terms of the degree to which the motivations emanate from the self (i.e., are self-determined). At the far left of the self-determination continuum is amotivation, the state of lacking the intention to act. When amotivated, people either do not act at all or act without intent--they just go through the motions. Amotivation results from not valuing an activity (Ryan, 1995), not feeling competent to do it (Bandura, 1986), or not expecting it to yield a desired outcome (Seligman, 1975). To the right of amotivation in Figure 1 are five classifications of motivated behavior. Although many theorists have treated motivation as a unitary concept, each of the categories identified within OIT describes theoretically, experientially, and functionally distinct types of motivation. At the far right of the continuum is the classic state of intrinsic motivation, the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfactions. It is highly autonomous and represents the prototypic instance of self-determination. Extrinsically motivated behaviors, by contrast, cover the continuum between amotivation and intrinsic motivation, varying in the extent to which their regulation is autonomous. The extrinsically motivated behaviors that are least autonomous are referred to as externally regulated. Such behaviors are performed to satisfy an external demand or reward contingency. Individuals typically experience externally regulated behavior as controlled or alienated, and their actions have an external perceived locus of causality (deCharms, 1968). External regulation is the type of motivation focused on by operant theorists (e.g., Skinner, 1953), and it is external regulation that was typically contrasted with intrinsic motivation in early laboratory and field studies. A second type of extrinsic motivation is labeled introjected regulation. Introjection involves taking in a regulation but not fully accepting it as one's own. It is a relatively controlled form of regulation in which behaviors are performed to avoid guilt or anxiety or to attain ego enhancements such as pride. Put differently, introjection represents regulation by contingent self-esteem (Deci & Ryan, 1995). A classic form of introjection is ego involvement (deCharms, 1968; Nicholls, 1984; Ryan, 1982), in which people are motivated to demonstrate ability (or avoid failure) in order to maintain feelings of worth. Although internally driven, introjected behaviors still have an external perceived locus of causality and are not really experienced as part of the self. Thus, in some studies, external regulation (being interpersonally controlled) and introjected regulation (being intrapersonally controlled) have been combined to form a controlled motivation composite (e.g., Williams, Grow, Freedman, Ryan, & Deci, 1996). A more autonomous, or self-determined, form of extrinsic motivation is regulation through identification. Identification reflects a conscious valuing of a behavioral goal or regulation, such that the action is accepted or owned as personally important. Finally, the most autono72 January 2000 • American Psychologist
mous form of extrinsic motivation is integrated regulation. Integration occurs when identified regulations are fully assimilated to the self, which means they have been evaluated and brought into congruence with one's other values and needs. Actions characterized by integrated motivation share many qualities with intrinsic motivation, although they are still considered extrinsic because they are done to attain separable outcomes rather than for their inherent enjoyment. In some studies, identified, integrated, and intrinsic forms of regulation have been combined to form an autonomous motivation composite. As people internalize regulations and assimilate them to the self, they experience greater autonomy in action. This process may occur in stages, over time, but we are not suggesting that it is a developmental continuum in the sense that people must progress through each stage of internalization with respect to a particular regulation. Rather, they can relatively readily internalize a new behavioral regulation at any point along this continuum depending on both prior experiences and current situational factors (Ryan, 1995). Nonetheless, the range of behaviors that can be assimilated to the self increases over time with increased cognitive capacities and ego development (Loevinger & Blasi, 1991), and there is evidence that children's general regulatory style does tend to become more internalized or self-regulated over time (e.g., Chandler & Connell, 1987). Ryan and Connell (1989) tested the formulation that these different types of motivation, with their distinct properties, lie along a continuum of relative autonomy. They investigated achievement behaviors among school children and found that external, introjected, identified, and intrinsic regulatory styles were intercorrelated according to a quasisimplex pattern, thus providing evidence for an underlying continuum. Furthermore, differences in the type of extrinsic motivation were associated with different experiences and outcomes. For example, the more students were externally regulated the less they showed interest, value, and effort toward achievement and the more they tended to disown responsibility for negative outcomes, blaming others such as the teacher. Introjected regulation was positively related to expending more effort, but it was also related to feeling more anxiety and coping more poorly with failures. In contrast, identified regulation was associated with more interest and enjoyment of school and with more positive coping styles, as well as with expending more effort. Other studies in education extended these findings, showing that more autonomous extrinsic motivation was associated with more engagement (Connell & Wellborn, 1991), better performance (Miserandino, 1996), lower dropout (Vallerand & Bissonnette, 1992), higher quality learning (Grolnick & Ryan, 1987), and better teacher ratings (Hayamizu, 1997), among other outcomes. In the realm of health care, greater internalization has been associated with greater adherence to medications among people with chronic illnesses (Williams, Rodin, Ryan, Grolnick, & Deci, 1998), better long-term maintenance of weight loss among morbidly obese patients (Williams et al., 1996), improved glucose control among diabetics (Williams, Freedman, & Deci, 1998), and greater attendance and involvement in an addiction-treatment program (Ryan, Plant, & O'Malley, 1995). Demonstrations of positive outcomes being associated with more internalized motivation have also emerged in other diverse domains, including religion (Ryan, Rigby, & King, 1993), physical exercise (Chatzisarantis, Biddle, & Meek, 1997), political activity (Koestner, Losier, Vallerand, & Carducci, 1996), environmental activism (GreenDemers, Pelletier, & Menard, 1997), and intimate relationships (Blais, Sabourin, Boucher, & Vallerand, 1990), among others. The advantages of greater internalization appear, then, to be manifold (Ryan et al., 1997), including more behavioral effectiveness, greater volitional persistence, enhanced subjective well-being, and better assimilation of the individual within his or her social group. Facilitating Integration of Extrinsic Motivation Given the significance of internalization for personal experience and behavioral outcomes, the critical issue becomes how to promote autonomous regulation for extrinsically motiwtted behaviors. That is, what are the social conditions that nurture versus inhibit internalization and integration? Because extrinsically motivated behaviors are not typically interesting, the primary reason people initially perform such actions is because the behaviors are prompted, modeled, or valued by significant others to whom they feel (or want to feel) attached or related. This suggests that relatedness, the need to feel belongingess and connectedness with others, is centrally important for internalization. Thus, OIT proposes that internalization is more likely to be in evidence when there are ambient supports for feelings of relatedness. For example, Ryan, Stiller, and Lynch (1994) showed that the children who had more fully internalized the regulation for positive school-related behaviors were those who felt securely connected to, and cared for by, their parents and teachers. The relative internalization of extrinsically motivated activities is also a function of perceived competence. People are more likely to adopt activities that relevant social groups value when they feel efficacious with respect to those activities. As is the case with all intentional action, OIT suggests that supports for competence should facilitate intermdization (Vallerand, 1997). Thus, for example, children who are directed to perform behaviors before they are developmentally ready to master them or understand their rationale would be predicted, at best, only to partially intern~tlize the regulations, remaining either externally regulated or introjected. Finally, the experience of autonomy facilitates internalization and, in particular, is a critical element for a regulation to be integrated. Contexts can yield external regulation if there are salient rewards or threats and the person feels competent enough to comply; contexts can yield introjected regulation if a relevant reference group endorses the activity and the person feels competent and related; but contexts can yield autonomous regulation only January 2000 • American Psychologist 73
if they are autonomy supportive, thus allowing the person to feel competent, related, and autonomous. To integrate a regulation, people must grasp its meaning and synthesize that meaning with respect to their other goals and values. Such deep, holistic processing (Kuhl & Fuhrmann, 1998) is facilitated by a sense of choice, volition, and freedom from excessive external pressure toward behaving or thinking a certain way. In this sense, support lor autonomy allows individuals to actively transform values into their own. Again, research results have supported this reasoning. For example, Deci, Eghrari, Patrick, and Leone (1994) demonstrated in a laboratory experiment that providing a meaningful rationale for an uninteresting behavior, along with supports for autonomy and relatedness, promoted its internalization and integration. Controlling contexts yielded less overall internalization, and the internalization that did occur in those contexts tended to be only introjected. Using parent interviews, Grolnick and Ryan (1989) found greater internalization of school-related values among children whose parents were more supportive of autonomy and relatedness. Strahan (1995) found that parents who were more autonomy-supportive promoted greater religious identification, as opposed to introjection, in their offspring. Williams and Deci (1996), using a longitudinal design, demonstrated greater internalization of biopsychosocial values and practices among medical students whose instructors were more autonomy-supportive. These are but a few of the many findings suggesting that supports for relatedness and competence facilitate internalization and that supports for autonomy also facilitate integration of behavioral regulations. When that occurs, people feel not only competent and related but also autonomous as they carry out culturally valued activities. One further point needs to be made regarding the controversial issue of human autonomy. The concept of autonomy has often been portrayed as being antagonistic to relatedness or community, in fact, some theories equate autonomy with concepts such as individualism and independence (e.g., Steinberg & Silverberg, 1986), which do indeed imply low relatedness. But, within SDT, autonomy refers not to being independent, detached, or selfish but rather to the feeling of volition that can accompany any act, whether dependent or independent, collectivist or individualist, in fact, recent research in Korean and U.S. samples has found a more positive relation between autonomy and collectivistic attitudes than between autonomy and individualistic attitudes (Kim, Butzel, & Ryan, 1998). Furthermore, research has shown positive, rather than negative, links between relatedness to parents and autonomy in teenagers (Ryan & Lynch, 1989; Ryan et al., 1994). Clearly, then, we do not equate autonomy with independence or individualism. Alienation and Its Prevention SDT aims to specify factors that nurture the innate human potentials entailed in growth, integration, and well-being, and to explore the processes and conditions that foster the healthy development and effective functioning of individuals, groups, and communities. But a positive approach cannot ignore patholog2( or close its eyes to the alienation and inauthenticity that are prevalent in our society and in others. Accordingly, we investigate nonoptimal (as well as optimal) developmental trajectories, much as is done in the field of developmental psychopathology (e.g., Cicchetti, 1991). We now turn to a brief consideration of that issue. By definition, intrinsically motivated behaviors, the prototype of self-determined actions, stem from the self. They are unalienated and authentic in the fullest sense of those terms. But, as already noted, SDT recognizes that extrinsically motivated actions can also become self-determined as individuals identify with and fully assimilate their regulation. Thus, it is through internalization and integration that individuals can be extrinsically motivated and still be committed and authentic. Accumulated research now suggests that the commitment and authenticity reflected in intrinsic motivation and integrated extrinsic motivation are most likely to be evident when individuals experience supports for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. It is the flip side of this coin, however, that speaks directly to the issues of alienation and inauthenticity and is relevant to such questions as why employees show no initiative, why teenagers reject their schools' values, and why patients adhere so poorly to treatment. SDT understands such occurrences in terms of the undermining of intrinsic motivation and, perhaps even more typically, the failure of internalization. To explain the causes of such diminished functioning, SDT suggests turning first to individuals' immediate social contexts and then to their developmental environments to examine the degree to which their needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness are being or have been thwarted. We maintain that by failing to provide supports for competence, autonomy, and relatedness, not only of children but also of students, employees, patients, and athletes, socializing agents and organizations contribute to alienation and ill-being. The fact that psychological-need deprivation appears to be a principal source of human distress suggests that assessments and interventions would do well to target these primary foundations of mental health. Psychologic.a! Needs and Mental Health As we have seen, both the cognitive evaluation and organismic integration components of SDT have led us to posit a parsimonious list of three basic psychological needs as a means of organizing and interpreting a wide array of empirical results, results that seemed not to be readily and satisfactorily interpretable without the concept of needs. Much of our more recent work has used the concept of three basic psychological needs to address new phenomena and, more particularly, to evaluate the postulate that these three needs are innate, essential, and universal. By our definition, a basic need, whether it be a physiological need (Hull, 1943) or a psychological need, is an energizing state that, if satisfied, conduces toward health and well-being but, if not satisfied, contributes to pathology and ill-being. We have thus proposed that the basic needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness must be satis74 January 2000 • American Psychologist
fled across the life span for an individual to experience an ongoing sense of integrity and well-being or "eudaimonia" (Ryan & Frederick, 1997; Waterman, 1993). Accordingly, much of our research now focuses on the link between satisfaction of the basic psychological needs and the experience of well-being. Specifying psychological needs as essential nutriments implies that individuals cannot thrive without satisfying all of them, any more than people can thrive with water but not food. Thus, for example, a social environment that affords competence but fails to nurture relatedness is expected to result in some impoverishment of wellbeing. Worse yet, social contexts that engender conflicts between basic needs set up the conditions for alienation and psychopathology (Ryan et al., 1995), as when a child is required by parents to give up autonomy in order to feel loved. To suggest that the three needs are universal and developmentally persistent does not imply that their relative salience and their avenues for satisfaction are unchanging across the life span or that their modes of expression are the same in all cultures. The very fact that need satisfaction is facilitated by the internalization and integration of culturally endorsed values and behaviors suggests that individuals are likely to express their competence, autonomy, and relatedness differently within cultures that hold different values. Indeed, the mode and degree of people's psychological-need satisfaction is theorized to be influenced not only by their own competencies but, even more important, by the ambient demands, obstacles, and affordances in their sociocultural contexts. Thus, to posit universal psychological needs does not diminish the importance of variability in goals and orientations at different developmental epochs or in different cultures, but it does suggest similarities in underlying processes that lead to the development and expression of those differences. Our recent investigations of the importance of basic psychological needs have addressed three questions: Are the pursuit and attainment of all culturally congruent aspirations and life values associated with well-being? Do need-related processes operate similarly within different cultural circumstances? Is within-person variability in basic need satisfaction related to variability in well-being indicators? We briefly consider some of this work. First, we discuss the relation of personal goals to well-being. We have hypothesized that the pursuit and attainment of some life goals will provide relatively direct satisfaction of the basic needs, thus enhancing well-being (Ryan, Sheldon, Kasser, & Deci, 1996), whereas the pursuit and attainment of other goals does not contribute to and may even detract from basic need satisfactions, leading to ill-being. In accord with this reasoning, T. Kasser and Ryan (1993, 1996) examined individual differences in the emphasis people place on intrinsic aspirations (goals such as affiliation, personal growth, and community that directly satisfy basic needs) compared with extrinsic aspirations (goals such as wealth, fame, and image that at best indirectly satisfy the needs). They found, first, that placing strong relative importance on intrinsic aspirations was positively associated with well-being indicators such as selfesteem, self-actualization, and the inverse of depression and anxiety, whereas placing strong relative importance on extrinsic aspirations was negatively related to these well-being indicators. Ryan, Chirkov, Little, Sheldon, Timoshina, and Deci (1999) replicated these findings in a Russian sample, attesting to the potential generalizability of the findings across cultures. These findings go beyond goal importance per se. Both Ryan, Chirkov, et al. and T. Kasser and Ryan (in press) have found that whereas self-reported attainment of intrinsic aspirations was positively associated with wellbeing, attainment of extrinsic aspirations was not. Further, Sheldon and Kasser (1998) found in a longitudinal study that well-being was enhanced by attainment of intrinsic goals, 'whereas success at extrinsic goals provided little benefit. Together, these results suggest that even highly efficacious people may experience less than optimal wellbeing if they pursue and successfully attain goals that do not fulfill basic psychological needs. We hasten to add, however, that the meaning of specific goals is culturally influenced, so that how specific goals relate to well-being can vary across cultures, although the relation between underlying need satisfaction and well-being is theorized to be invariant. Clearly, there are many factors that lead people to emphasize certain life goals that may not be need fulfilling. For example, exposure to the commercial media can prompt a locus on materialism (Richins, 1987), which provides only fleeting satisfactions and could actually detract from basic need fulfillment and, thus, well-being. Prior deficits in need fulfillment (e.g., from poor caregiving) might also lead individuals to yearn for more extrinsic goals as a substitute or compensatory mechanism. In fact, T. Kasser, Ryan, Zax, and Sameroff (1995) found that teens who had been exposed to cold, controlling maternal care (as assessed with ratings by the teens, mothers, and observers) were more likely to develop materialistic orientations, compared with better nurtured teens who more strongly valued the intrinsic goals of personal growth, relationships, and community. In short, cultural and developmental influences produce variations in the importance of goals, the pursuit of which, in turn, yields different satisfaction of basic needs and different levels of well-being. In other research, we have examined the relations of people's reports of need satisfaction to indicators of wellbeing in various settings. For example, V. Kasser and Ryan (in press) found that supports for autonomy and relatedness predicted greater well-being among nursing home residents. Baard, Deci, and Ryan (1998) showed that employees' experiences of satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the workplace predicted their performance and well-being at work. Such research shows that within specific domains, especially those central to the lives of individuals, need satisfaction is correlated with improved well-being. A more compelling way of demonstrating the essential relations between need fulfillments and mental health has been the examination of role-to-role and day-to-day flucJanuary 2000 • American Psychologist 75
tuations in basic need satisfaction and their direct effects on variability in well-being, while controlling for individual differences and various confounding variables. For example, Sheldon et al. (1997) demonstrated that satisfaction in each of several life roles (e.g., student, employee, friend), relative to the individual's own mean satisfaction, was attributable to the degree to which that role supports authenticity and autonomous functioning. Similarly, in a study that examined daily variations in well-being, Sheldon, Reis, and Ryan (1996) used hierarchical linear modeling to show that within-person daily fluctuations in the satisfaction of autonomy and competence needs predicted within-person fluctuations in outcomes such as mood, vitality, physical symptoms, and self-esteem. In a more recent study, Reis, Sheldon, Gable, Roscoe, and Ryan (in press) found that variations in the fulfillment of each of the three needs (i.e., competence, autonomy, and relatedness) independently predicted variability in daily well-being. These studies support the view that basic psychological needs are determinative with regard to optimal experience and well-being in daily life. Conclusions Debates concerning the activity or passivity, responsibility or indolence, of human beings have been perennial (Kohn, 1990). As psychology has become more advanced, both in terms of our understanding of evolution and neurobiology and of social behavior and its causation, ample support for both perspectives could be garnered. SDT addresses this issue by attempting to account for both the activity and the passivity, the responsibility and the indolence. To do this, we have assumed that humans have an inclination toward activity and integration, but also have a vulnerability to passivity. Our focus, accordingly, has been to specify the conditions that tend to support people's natural activity versus elicit or exploit their vulnerability. Our early investigations focused on the social conditions that enhance versus diminish a very positive feature of human nature, namely, the natural activity and curiosity referred to as intrinsic motivation. We found that conditions supportive of autonomy and competence reliably facilitated this vital expression of the human growth tendency, whereas conditions that controlled behavior and hindered perceived effectance undermined its expression. Subsequently, we investigated the acquisition and regulation of nonintrinsically motivated behaviors and, here too, we found evidence of the dramatic power of social contexts to enhance or hinder the organismic tendency to integrate ambient social values and responsibilities. Contexts supportive of autonomy, competence, and relatedness were found to foster greater internalization and integration than contexts that thwart satisfaction of these needs. This latter finding, we argue, is of great significance for individuals who wish to motivate others in a way that engenders commitment, effort, and high-quality performance. Yet, our primary concern throughout this program of research has been the well-being of individuals, whether they are students in classrooms, patients in clinics, athletes on the playing field, or employees in the workplace. As formulated by SDT, if the social contexts in which such individuals are embedded are responsive to basic psychological needs, they provide the appropriate developmental lattice upon which an active, assimilative, and integrated nature can ascend. Excessive control, nonoptimal challenges, and lack of connectedness, on the other hand, disrupt the inherent actualizing and organizational tendencies endowed by nature, and thus such factors result not only in the lack of initiative and responsibility but also in distress and psychopathology. Knowledge concerning the nutriments essential for positive motivation and experience and, in turn, for enhanced performance and well-being has broad significance. It is relevant to parents and educators concerned with cognitive and personality development because it speaks to the conditions that promote the assimilation of both information and behavioral regulations. It is also relevant to managers who want to facilitate motivation and commitment on the job, and it is relevant to psychotherapists and health professionals because motivation is perhaps the critical variable in producing maintained change. 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Self-Determination The Tyranny of Freedom Barry Schwartz Swarthmore College Americans now live in a time and a place in which freedom and autonomy are valued above all else and in which expanded opportunities for self-determination are regarded as a sign of the psychological well-being of individuals and the moral well-being of the culture. This article argues that freedom, autonomy, and self-determination can become excessive, and that when that happens, freedom can be experienced as a kind of tyranny. The article further argues that unduly influenced by the ideology of economics and rational-choice theory, modern American society has created an excess of freedom, with resulting increases in people's dissatisfaction with their lives and in clinical depression. One significant task for a future psychology of optimal functioning is to deemphasize individual freedom and to determine which cultural constraints are necessary for people to live meaningful and satisfying lives. Security is more important than wealth. --Jacob von Uexkull (1938/1954, p. 26) L et me tell you about an experience I had almost 20 years ago. It happened at a softball game, and to understand it, you need to know a little bit about softball. Imagine a situation in which there is a runner at first base and one out. A ground ball is hit to the pitcher. The pitcher fields the ground ball and wheels around to second base. The idea is to try for a double play by throwing to second ahead of the runner arriving from first, and then having the throw relayed from second to first, in time to beat the batter. Typically, when a ball is hit up the middle of the diamond, the second baseman and the shortstop converge at second base. When the pitcher fields the ball and turns to throw, the proper play is to throw the ball to the shortstop. The shortstop is moving toward first base, while the second baseman is moving away from it. So the shortstop's momentum will carry him in the direction that the ball must be thrown, whereas the second baseman will have to stop, pivot, and then throw. The throw from second to first is much easier for the shortstop than for the second baseman. Now here is what happened. I had just begun a sabbatical, and I was playing in a relaxed coed softball game. Although winning at all costs was not the idea in this game, there was one thing about it that was notably more serious than anything else. The women in the game did not want to be patronized; they wanted to be treated by the men as full-fledged competitors. So I was pitching, and there was one out and a runner on first. A ground ball was hit to me. I fielded it cleanly and spun around to begin the try for a double play. Both the shortstop, a man, and the second baseman, a woman, were converging on second base to receive: my throw. I wound up to throw and then stopped in my tracks. Who should I throw to? I knew, as I just indicated, that the "right" play was to throw to the shortstop, but I hesitated. Would the woman understand that I was throwing to the shortstop (who happened to be a man) because it was the right play? Or would she think that I was excluding her and throwing to the man (who happened to be the shortstop) because I thought he was more likely to catch it and throw accurately on to first than she was? Would she think that I regarded her as an obstacle to be avoided rather than as a teammate? Would she think I was an enemy of one of the major social movements of our time? These questions flooded over me in what couldn't have been more than half a second, and I still haven't answered them. Why had I been so indecisive? What was the right play? Yes, I knew that the right play was to throw to the ,.~hortstop, but I came to realize that the rightness of that choice depended on what I thought the game was that we were playing. If we were merely playing softball, then the shortstop should have gotten the throw, but we were playing more than softball. We were also participating in a social movement, one that was struggling to eliminate certain well-established gender roles, and we were involved in a complex social interaction, in which the feelings and objectives of all participants were to be taken seriously. What's the right play in that kind of a game? When I finally threw the ball, I found an ingenious though unintended way out of my indecision. My agonized delay had forced me to rush my throw, so I "solved" my problem in deciding whether the second baseman or the shortstop should get the ball by throwing it to neither of them. I threw it three feet over both of their heads into centerfield. No double play. No single play. And that's no Barry Schwartz, Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College. Preparation of this article was supported by a faculty research grant from Swarthmore College. I thank Jane Gillham and Andrew Ward for many helpful discussions of the issues raised in this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Barry Schwartz, Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, PA 19081. Electronic mail may be sent to bschwarl @swarthmore.edu. January 2000 ° American Psychologist Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0003-066X/00/$5.00 Vol. 55, No. 1, 79-88 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X.55.1.79 79
Barry Schwartz Photo by John Brodsky way to play at all. I was confused about what to do, and I screwed up. This experience of mine on the softball field was trivial, but I think it is an example of problems faced by many of us that are not so trivial. Repeatedly, people are forced to ask themselves what kind of game they are playing, and what the fight play is in that kind of game. A lot more rides on the answers to the versions of these questions people face in real life than just the completion of a double play. What kind of game is being a student? Are the objectives of the student game to get the best grades possible? If so, a good student will find the easy courses, borrow (or buy or steal) other students' assignments, and ingratiate himself or herself in every way possible with the relevant teachers. Are the objectives of the student game to prepare for a career that will be financially rewarding? Are they to prepare for a career that will be intellectually rewarding? Are they to prepare for a career that will serve the public? In any of these cases, a good student will map out a program that provides appropriate training and then work hard to develop the skills necessary for success in that career. Possibly, the objectives of the student game have nothing to do with careers but instead involve becoming a knowledgeable, sensitive, compassionate, committed, ethical person who will be an informed and responsible citizen. The good student at this game will look very different from the good student at the other games. What kind of game is being a businessperson? Are there any limits to what a businessperson should do in the service of corporate interests? If so, who sets the limits, and what are they? Should businesspeople be concerned about ethics and fairness? Should they seek to provide a good or service that the world genuinely needs? Should they be honest with their customers and clients? Or should they make whatever people will buy, tell people whatever they think people will believe, and break any law if they think they can get away with it? What kind of game is being a spouse or a lover? To what extent are lovers supposed to submerge their own interests or desires to serve the interests or desires of their partners'? At what point does devotion turn into subjugation? At what point does self-actualization turn into selfishness? Most of us play in several of these games simultaneously and find ourselves trying to answer questions like these about each of them, because the world in which we "modern, enlightened, rational" people live is one in which the objectives and the rules of each of our games are very much up for grabs. Modernity has taught us not to accept a certain way of doing things just because things have always been done in that way. Nowadays, it is possible, maybe even necessary, for individuals to make up the rules of games as they go along. This modern flexibility in the construal and construction of the objectives and the rules of the "games" we play enhances our sense of self-determination, and it is selfdetermination that this article is about. The presumption in modern society is that self-determination is a good thing, both psychologically and morally. Freedom and autonomy are words that come to mind as rough synonyms. Before pursuing this presumption, it is worth thinking a little about what self-determination means. Does it mean determination by the self, or determination of the self, or both? Determination by the self, which I suspect is what most people mean by self-determination, leads to the further question, determination of what? The answer to this question is pretty much determination of everything. From trivial things like choices of ice cream flavors, television shows, clothing styles, and objectives in softball games to crucial things like choices of careers, places to live, friends, and lovers, there is simply no such thing as too much freedom. What about determination of the self? What does this mean? I think it means that people are free to determine what kind of self they will have, what kind of people they will be. People are free to be selfish or selfless, nasty or nice, serious or frivolous, and they are free to change the selves they have as they see fit. Selves are like shirts. One can discard old ones and invent new ones. At least one should be able to, in keeping with the goal of maximal self-determination as a desirable psychological and moral state. Thus, the fully self-determined self is one that is completely unconstrained--by habit, by social convention, or by biology. Operating without constraint, the self-determining self makes choices in the world to maximize his or her preferences, in keeping with the principles of rational choice (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944). It is the central argument of this article that this aspiration to self-determination, presumably through processes resembling those of rational choice, is a mistake, both as an empirical description of how people act and as a normative ideal. It is a mistake because when selfdetermination is carried to extremes, it leads not to freedom 80 January 2000 • American Psychologist
of choice but to tyranny of choice. A better (empirically more accurate and psychologically healthier) model of self-determination is, I think, akin to our understanding of human linguistic abilities. The capacity to use language is perhaps the single most liberating characteristic of human beings. It frees people in significant ways from the temporal and material limitations that afflict other organisms. People can say anything about anything, at any time, or in any place--even things, times, and places that have never existed--and they can be understood. Therefore, language is probably as vivid an embodiment of human freedom and self-determination as anything. But what decades of research on language ability have made clear is that the thing that makes the liberating features of language possible is that language is heavily constrained by rules. The reason people can say anything and be understood is that they can't say everything. It is linguistic constraint, in the form of these rules, that makes linguistic freedom possible. What I suggest in this article is that exactly the same thing may be true in connection with self-determination. Unconstrained freedom leads to paralysis and becomes a kind of self-defeating tyranny. It is self-determination within significant constraints--within rules of some sort--that leads to well-being, to optimal functioning. The task for a future psychology of optimal functioning is to identify which constraints on self-determination are the crucial ones. To make this argument, I begin by considering a few aspects of rational-choice theory in some detail. There are problems with rational-choice theory as an empirical description of how people choose, and many of these problems are a reflection of important constraints on freedom of choice that the theory of rational choice leaves out and that a positive theory of self-determination must include. What we see is that these constraints function not to impede truly rational choice but to enable it. Preference, Choice, and Decision Frames Based largely on economics, rational-choice theory has tried to explain human preference and choice by assuming that people are rational choosers. According to the choice theorist, human beings have well-ordered preferences-- preferences that are essentially impervious to variations in the ways the alternatives they face are described or the ways they are packaged or bundled. People go through life with all their options arrayed before them, as if on a buffet table. They have complete information about the costs and benefits associated with each option. They compare the options to one another on a single scale of preference, or value, or utility. After making the comparisons, people chose so as to maximize their preferences, or values, or utilities. Well-being is understood to involve maximizing the possibilities for choice, maximizing the number of available options. A self is just the bundle of preferences that happen to coexist inside a single skin, and self-determination is just the unfettered pursuit of those preferences. Rational-choice theory is largely silent about where preferences come from; preferences are frequently described as exogenous to the model of rational choice, meaning both that the model has nothing to say about them and that whatever the story on the origins of preferences may turn out to be, the power and validity of the model will be unaffected by it. Although the former claim may well be true, the latter is not (see Bowles, 1998). Human beings violate the principles of rational choice routinely (e.g., Kahneman & Tversky, 1979, 1984; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981; see Baron, 1994; Schwartz, 1986, 1994, for discussion), and the cause and character of many of these violations cannot be understood without understanding the nature and origins of preferences themselves (see McCauley, Rozin, & Schwartz, 1999). Making sense of people's choices requires knowledge of the cultural institutions that influence their lives. Indeed, how closely people approximate tile rational-choice theorist's portrait of preference and choice depends on the kind of culture they inhabit. Rational-choice theorists tell us that rational choosers should always be able to express preferences. What this means is not that one thing will always be preferred to another, but that questions about preference will always be intelligible. People will, for any A and B, be able to compare the choices and say that they prefer A to B, that they prefer B to A, or that they are indifferent between them. Is this claim accurate'? Imagine someone who has just been given a gift of $100. Should the person have a fine meal, buy a few shirts, take a friend to the theater, or buy several books? Afler some reflection, the person may well be able to rank these options, which is to say that he or she can express, preferences among them. However, these options do not exhaust the things that can be done with $100. It can be given to any of a number of charities, or it can be used to buy groceries, to have the house cleaned, to buy school books, for part of the plane fare to a vacation spot, for part of the cost of having the house painted, to have someone care for the lawn, or to look after lhe children. The list of things one could do with $100 is endless. Can people express preferences among all these different possibilities? Is a good meal preferred to having the house painted? Is child care preferred to a vacation? Everyone may be able intelligibly to express preferences among some of the things that can be done with $100, but no one can express preferences among all of the things that can be done with $100. Indeed, nowadays the range of choices we face--even among similar kinds of things--is overwhelming. We go to the grocery and stop in the cereal aisle. Should we buy hot or cold? Should we buy sugarcoated or (relatively) unsweetened'? Should we buy with or without bran? Should we buy all[ bran, oat bran, rice bran, corn bran, cracklin' bran, raisin bran, honey bran, or nut bran? We go to buy a car. Should we buy new or used? Foreign or domestic? Automatic or stick? Station wagon or sedan? Two-door or four-door? Six-cylinder or four-cylinder? The array of options we face is simply mind-numbing. Thus, even when we are faced with a choice among similar kinds of things, the task is daunting. When the possibilities include things with little or nothing in common, the problem is overwhelming. January 2000 • American Psychologist 81
A person would, of course, eventually do something with the $100 (and from the perspective of an idea in economics known as the theory of revealed preference-- the economist's version of behaviorism--what people finally do with that $100 is, by definition, what they prefer over all other possibilities). How would he or she decide to do something with it instead of sitting paralyzed with uncertainty while the $100 accumulates interest in a bank account? One way of thinking about just how people go about making choices is the idea that they organize the world of possibilities into a set of distinct categories, categories like household necessities, household maintenance, charity, one-night indulgences, longer term indulgences, personal appearance. Within each category, it may be relatively easy to express preferences. Between categories, however, expressing preferences is more problematic. According to this view, when faced with the problem of spending $100, one must first decide what category of thing to spend it on. Once that is decided, one can follow the dictates of preference within a category. This formulation raises several questions. How does one decide which categories to divide the world into? How does one decide which specific things go in which categories? And how does one decide which category to devote this $100 to? The choice theorist's story about preference and choice has nothing to say about the first two questions. There are many factors that might influence the way in which people categorize possibilities. Habit is one source of influence, though it is important to note that people will often be inarticulate, if not completely unaware, when asked about their reasons for doing things that they do out of habit (somewhat like a fish in water, never noticing that it is wet). Cultural norms are another source of influence. In our culture, clothing and hair care may both be considered as pertaining to matters of appearance. However, one could easily imagine a culture in which what people wear has deep social--even religious--significance, whereas how they keep their hair is a trivial detail. In that culture, a haircut and a new shirt would not be lumped together. What habits and cultural norms do is establish the effective categories within which alternative actions will be compared and ranked, and there is nothing about category formation and category boundaries that the notion of rational choice can speak to. As a result, knowing that people are a rational choosers reveals very little about their choices. It will not reveal which options they view (o1" should view) as comparable and which they view (or should view) as incomparable. All it can reveal is how people will choose from within a category given that they have already established the categories, and this is not very much to reveal. It is important to note that one of the triumphs of modernity that we celebrate as a culture is precisely the breakdown of categories like these. This is at least part of what self-determination means; people get to create their own categories. In this way, more of the self is open to self-determination than ever before. Exactly how choices such as these can be made rationally and whether people actually experience this freedom of choice as liberating are the questions. It was satisfying, 15 years ago, to be playing in a coed softball game--to be engaged in politics, socializing, and recreation at the same time--but this opportunity brought with it ambiguities that made the experience less than completely successful. To choose so that preferences are maximized, people must know what is possible, and so the theory of rational choice assumes that people choose with complete information. A metaphor for choice with complete information is the situation that people confront when eating at a Chinese restaurant. There, arrayed on the menu, are countless dishes along with their costs. In the closed universe of the Chinese restaurant, complete information is available. People can deliberate about the various possibilities, and when they finally make a selection, it can truly be said to be preference maximizing. However, perfect information is a myth, even in a Chinese restaurant. How many people really know what each of the dishes available is like? How often do people study the menu, awed and impressed at the variety available, only to order old favorites? Even in the closed and simple world of the Chinese restaurant, factors other than rational deliberation seem to govern choices. One of them, again, is habit. After agonizing over all the possibilities, people fall back, more often than not, on what they have done before. Another factor is tradition. People sit there trying to decide between novel shark's fin soup and familiar hot and sour soup, and finally they choose one of them, never considering the possibility that they could have both. One simply doesn't have two soups at a meal. If people fall back on habit and tradition even in a situation where rational deliberation with full information is possible, imagine how much more inclined they are to do so in the situations of everyday life that are full of open-ended uncertainty. Modern rational-choice theory has acknowledged that the assumption of complete information is extremely unrealistic. Rather than assuming that people possess all the relevant information for making choices, choice theorists treat information as itself a "good," something that has a price (in time or money) and is thus a candidate for consumption along with more traditional goods (see, e.g., Payne, 1982; Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1993). Treating information as a good makes the picture of rational choice more realistic, but a significant question remains: How much information is it rational to collect before actually making a consumption decision? Therefore, treating information as a good does not solve the problem of determining what is or is not a rational way to proceed. The message here is that just as there is a series of constraints that makes real linguistic freedom possible in the domain of language, in the domain of choice, there is also a series of constraints on theoretical rational choice that makes actual rational choice possible. Cultural institutions go a long way toward telling people where they can choose and where they cannot, and within the domains where choice is allowed, these institutions determine what the possibilities are. These constraints on choice help solve the information problem. They solve the problem of having 82 January 2000 ° American Psychologist
to compare things that are seemingly incomparable. In addition, and perhaps more significant, traditional constraints on choice may tell people in which domains of their lives the principles of rational choice are allowed to operate. They may protect patterns of behavior that are especially important to the functioning of the culture by removing them from the domain of choice altogether. Cultural traditions invest certain practices with a great deal of moral significance so that people will be discouraged from regarding them as matters of individual choice at all. Traditional morality serves as a kind of preventive medicine, protecting people from themselves (e.g., Shweder, 1990, 1991; Shweder & LeVine, 1984). These are a few of the ways in which the theory of rational choice presents an inaccurate or at least an incomplete picture of human preference and choice. The idea that people are rational choosers is on the one hand too rich, by giving people credit for more calculation and flexibility than they possess, and on the other hand too impoverished, by failing to appreciate a range of influences on decision making that are not themselves amenable to rational calculation. In recent years, investigators of preference and choice have come to see some of the limitations of the rational-choice framework and have tried to make it more realistic (see Baron, 1994, for a review). Central to these efforts is the work of Kahneman and Tversky (1979, 1984; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981) that highlights the significance to choice of the manner in which alternatives are framed. Consider being posed with this problem: Imagine that you have decided to see a play where admission is $20 a ticket. As you enter the theater you discover that you have lost a $20 bill. Would you still pay $20 for a ticket to the play? (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984, p. 347) Almost 90% of people asked this question said yes. In contrast, Imagine that you have decided to see a play and paid the admission price of $20 a ticket. As you enter the theater you discover that you have lost the ticket. The seat was not marked and the ticket can not be recovered. Would you pay $20 for another ticket? (Kahneman & Tversky, 1984, p. 347). Now, less than 50% of people said yes. What is the difference between the two cases? From one perspective, they seem the same; both involve seeing a play and being $40 poorer or not seeing it and being $20 poorer. Yet people don't seem to see them as the same. What Kahneman and Tversky have suggested is that the difference between the two cases has to do with the way in which people .frame their psychological accounts. Suppose that in a person's internal accounting system there is a cost-of-the-theater account. In the first case, the cost of the theater is $20; the lost $20 bill is not properly charged to that account. However, in the second case, the cost of the theater is $40 (two tickets), and for many people, $40 is too much to pay. On the other hand, suppose that the person's internal accounting system has a cost-of-a-day's-outing account. Now the two cases may well be equivalent in that the lost ticket and the lost $20 both add the same amount to the cost of the day. So some people keep narrow cost-of-the-theater accounts, whereas others keep broader cost-of-the-day accounts. Which of them is rational? What is the way in which rational decision makers should keep their accounts? The range of possible accounting systems people could use is enormous. For example, a journey to the theater could be just one entry in a much larger account-- say a getting-culture account, or a things-to-do-on-a-Friday-night account, or even a meeting-a-potential-spouse account--and how much this night at the theater is "worth" will depend on what account it is a part of. Forty dollars may be a lot to spend for getting culture, compared with awfilable alternatives, but not much to spend to find a spouse. The flexibility of the accounting systems people can use raises an important question. If there are no norms or standards of rationality to judge accounting systems by, and if the number of possible accounting systems really is indefinitely large, what is it that determines which accounting systems people actually use? In approaching this question, a look at the practices of professional accountants can be instructive. Professional accountants can also organize accounts in indefinitely many ways. What constrains the way they operate? There are three sources of constraints. One source is the legal system. There are tax and business regulations that impose a set of requirements on how the books must be kept. A second source is professional standards. The accounting profession establishes certain standards that guide how accounting is to be done. It maintains those standards in part by educating new accountants to do things in just that way. The final source is custom or habit. Accountants keep accounts in certain ways because they have always kept them in those ways or because the accountants who preceded them kept them in those ways. There is nothing especially privileged or rational about these constraints. Legal requirements could be different, as could professional standards, and habits are accidents of history. Yet, the constraints are there, and they serve to narrow and shape the way accountants do their work. Precisely the same things could be said about the ways people keep their psychological accounts. They are influenced by legal and social sanctions, by customs and traditions, and by old habits. These influences may also be unprivileged and unjustified. Nevertheless, people inherit them and their effects on the keeping of accounts. People don't include their income taxes or the cost of supporting their children in their charitable-giving account, though they could. They don't treat school taxes as child-care expenses. They don't treat the money they give to houses of worship as entertainment costs. People may have good reasons for not doing these things, but they are not reasons that can be understood from within the perspective of the theory of rational choice. These reasons stem from the influence of culture on what categories people establish and what items they put in each category. Psychological accounting practices in different cultures are quite different from ours, but they are no more or less reasonable. January 2000 • American Psychologist 83
An attempt to extend self-determination to everything would break down the habitual accounting practices people use. On the basis of the argument I have been sketching, this may make rational decision making impossible. The significant psychological consequence of this development could be that all the choices people make leave them with the dissatisfied feeling that they might have done better. Rational Choice and Cultural Constraint The plausibility of the theory of rational choice depends on the existence of markets and of money as a medium of exchange. This is what makes sensible the notion of human beings as perpetual choosers, with all options open and all possibilities comparable. To the extent that things can be priced (and the market is just the mechanism for the pricing of all things), they can be compared with one another, or so the theory of rational choice assumes. However, not all social activity, or even all economic activity, is organized around markets and exchange. Imagine a small farmer living prior to the industrial revolution, say 300 years ago. For the most part, this farmer's activity would not have involved exchange in the market because there were few markets, and what markets there were rarely reached very far afield given the limits on available transport at the time. The farmer might have been engaged in raising crops, keeping chickens for eggs and cows for milk, doing occasional hunting and fishing, skinning animals for clothes, spinning wool, keeping the farm buildings and machinery in repair, caring for the plow horses, and so on. Not an item of exchange in the lot. It might be tempting to argue that the preindustrial farmer was engaged in exchange. The farmer was exchanging labor time for goods instead of money, but it was a process of exchange nonetheless, no different in principle from the activity of the modern white collar worker. However, if we try to take this argument seriously and apply rational-choice concepts to the activity of the farmer, most of them don't make much sense. The amount of time that the farmer spent at various tasks cannot be treated as a measure of the value of their products to the farmer. Farming may take 10 times as much effort as hunting. From this, it does not follow that the farmer's crops were 10 times as valuable as meat. The farmer needed them both, and the time spent at these activities was dictated by the demands of the activities themselves and not by any calculation of value. The framework of rational choice is just the wrong framework for understanding what the farmer did. Certainly, there could have been better and worse farmers, rational and irrational ones, but rational farmers and rational choosers are not just two sides of the same coin. What largely eliminated many of the constraints on economic activity that characterized the preindustrial farmer was the industrial revolution that began in the 17th century (see Hobsbawm, 1964; Polanyi, 1944; Schwartz, Schuldenfrei, & Lacey, 1978). The industrial revolution took people away from the home and sent them into the factory (Marglin, 1976), making it difficult to engage in subsistence farming and production for exchange (wages) at the same time. Therefore, the notion that economic activity is exchange and the development of markets in which practically anything can be exchanged are very much products of the industrial revolution. This makes the rational chooser, as described by rational-choice theorists, a person who exists under only a rather restricted set of conditions that have been true only in the recent history of our species and then in only certain parts of the world. Thus, the market system is not made possible by rational choosers; rather, it makes rational choosers possible. The implications of this line of argument for an account of human self-determination are significant. In the eyes of rational-choice theorists, principles of rational choice are not mere descriptions of particular points in history. They are laws of human nature, fundamental truths--both empirical and normative--about the human condition. One way of thinking about laws in general is as constraints on human activities. The law of gravitation is one such constraint; it keeps people from flying about uncontrollably. The law that prohibits going through red lights is another such constraint; it keeps people from driving their cars in whatever way they like. But these two kinds of laws are obviously very different. The constraint imposed by gravity is not human made, not self-imposed, and it cannot be repealed no matter how much people want to repeal it. The constraint on going through red lights, in contrast, is self-imposed and easily repealed. Which of these kinds of constraints are described by the laws of rational choice? What l am suggesting is that the laws of rational choice are like traffic laws, not like gravity. We are almost certainly at the point in the history of our species (thus far) where rational choice with minimal constraints is most applicable to the human condition. However, this abundance of choice and explosion of markets-this liberation of the individual from traditional constraints--is experienced by only a minority of human beings. For most people in the world, individual choice is neither expected nor sought in many domains of activity (McCauley, et al., 1999; Shweder, Much, Mahapatra, & Park, 1997). The critical point here is that one has to be mindful of culture-specific constraints and opportunities in considering the operation of any particular model of choice (see Fiske, 1991). The constraints of culture affect not only what the preference hierarchy of individuals will be, but even how the individual--the self--is constituted. Markus and Kitayama (1991) have surveyed evidence indicating that the boundaries that separate the self from others are very much culture dependent. In cultures like that of the United States, the self is construed as an independent entity. The boundaries between the self and others are clear and distinct. Independence, autonomy, and self-determination are prized, and the values and preferences of each individual are given a status that is independent of the values and preferences of others. It is to explain the choices of a self like this that the theory of rational choice was constructed. However, in other cultures, even industrial cultures like Japan, the self is construed as an interdependent entity. Significant others form a part of the self, and their values 84 January 2000 • American Psychologist
and preferences are, in significant respects, one's own. In cultures like this, many of the conflicts Americans routinely face between doing the right thing and doing the self-interested thing evaporate. No doubt they are replaced by different conflicts, but these different conflicts are reflections of fundamentally different selves, with fundamentally different notions of preference and choice. Unless we understand how culture penetrates and defines the self, our investigation of the nature of human preferences and of self-determination can hardly be said to have begun. For many people in the world, the relevant unit for making decisions and experiencing their results is the family or the larger social group and not the individual. For people of these cultures, offering choices to individuals, rather than dictating them, may be experienced as burdensome rather than liberating (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999a). I believe that the dominance of rational-choice theory in the context of markets as a model for human autonomy has had a significant effect on Americans' aspirations with regard to self-determination. It is partly because we fit everything into a market framework that we expect to have choice and control in all domains of life (see Schwartz, 1997). The economist might say that this represents the triumph of industrial capitalism. Modem Americans refuse to have their behavior governed by tradition, and marketdriven affluence frees most of us from the dictates of necessity. As a result, everything is a matter of choice. This is the best of all possible worlds. Or is it? Tyranny of Freedom: The Evidence What I have done thus far is try to provide a plausibility argument that choice is constrained in the way that language is constrained, and that too much freedom from constraint is a bad thing. I want now to turn to some empirical evidence that I think supports this view. I begin with a discussion of depression. The theory of learned helplessness has taught us about the importance of control and autonomy to mental health (e.g., Abramson, Metalsky, & Alloy, 1989; Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Maier & Seligman, 1976; Peterson, Maier, & Seligman, 1993; Peterson & Seligman, 1984; Seligman, 1975). In particular, helplessness has taught us that a lack of control, coupled with a certain characteristic style of causal explanation, creates candidates for clinical depression. Given that having control over significant things in one's life is important to preventing clinical depression, we can ask ourselves what we might expect the incidence of depression to be like in modem American society. As I argued above, most of us now live in a world in which we experience control to a degree that people living in other times and places would think quite unimaginable. Extraordinary material wealth enables us to consume an astonishing quantity and variety of goods, and the magical mechanism of the market allows us an almost limitless array of choices. Further, this autonomy and control extend beyond the world of material goods. In careers, there is an enormous degree of mobility, both in career type and in geographical location. People are not constrained to do the work their parents did in the place where their parents did it, nor are people constrained to have only a single occupation for their entire working lives. Therefore, almost anything is possible. In personal life, religious, ethnic, racial, class, geographic, and even gender barriers to mate selection are rapidly disappearing. Moreover, one is free to choose whether to have kids or not, whether to have them early or late, whether to bear them or adopt them, whether to have them as part of a traditional marriage and family or as part of any of a host of nontraditional family arrangements. It is also increasingly easy to get out of marriages that have turned sour and, having done that, to arrange child custody in ways that suit the involved parties. In summary, I think it is only a slight exaggeration to say that for the first time in human history, in the contemporary United States large numbers of people can live exactly the kind of lives they want, unconstrained by material, economic, or cultural limitations. This fact coupled with the helplessness theory of depression might lead one to expect clinical depression in the United States to be going the way of polio. Instead, what we find is an explosive growth in the number of people with depression(e.g., Klerman et al., 1985; Robins et al., 1984). Some estimates are that depression is 10 times more likely to afflict someone now than at the turn of the century. Thus, we have a puzzle. The solution to this puzzle lies, I think, in several features of modem life that are the focus of this article. First, I think that increases in experienced control over the years have been accompanied, stride-for-stride, by increases in expectations about control. The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates in one domain of life after another, the more we expect to be. Education is expected to be stimulating and useful. Work is supposed to be exciting, socially valuable, and remunerative. Spouses are supposed to be sexually, emotionally, and intellectually stimulating and also loyal and comforting. Friends are supposed to be fun to be with and devoted. Children are supposed to be beautiful, smart, affectionate, obedient, and independent. Everything we buy is supposed to be the best of its kind. With all the choice available, people should never have to settle for things that are just good enough. In short, life is supposed to be perfect. Excessive emphasis on self-determination has, I believe, contributed to these unrealistic expectations. Second, American culture has become more individualistic than it ever was before. What this means, I think, is that not only do people expect perfection in all things, but they expect to produce this perfection themselves. When they (inevitably) fail, I believe that the culture of individualism biases them toward making causal attributions that focus on internal rather than external causal factors. That is, I believe that the culture has established a kind of officially acceptable style of causal explanation, and it is one that focuses on the individual. As Seligman's research (e.g., Peterson & Seligman, 1984) has led the way in demonstrating, this kind of causal attribution is just the kind to promote depression when people are faced with failure, and if my first point is correct, despite their increased control, January 2000 • American Psychologist 85
people will inevitably be faced with many occasions that by their own lights count as failure. Finally, the emphasis on individual autonomy and control may be undermining a crucial vaccine against depression: deep commitment and belonging to social groups and institutions--families, civic associations, faith communities, and the like. There is an inherent tension between being one' s own person, or determining one' s own self, and meaningful involvement in social groups. Doing the latter properly requires submerging one's self. Therefore, the more people focus on themselves--with respect both to goals and to the means of achieving those goals--the more their connections to others will be weakened. Robert Putnam (e.g., 1993, 1995, 1996) has recently attracted a great deal of attention to this deterioration of social connection in modem America, and in this context it is relevant to note a study by Egeland and Hostetter (1983) that showed an incidence of depression among the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, that was about half the national rate, whereas other forms of psychopathology were much closer to national averages. The Amish, of course, are an extremely cohesive, tightly knit, traditional community. Thus, the current literature on helplessness, control, and depression suggests that freedom of choice is not all it's cracked up to be, at least not with respect to psychological well-being. I think it is possible that a similar story can be told about body weight and diet. Despite the compelling evidence (summarized in Seligman, 1994) that people can do rather little about their body weight, the culture tells us that obesity is a matter of choice, personal control, and personal responsibility. It tells us that we should aspire to look perfect, and that if we don't, we have only ourselves to blame. How much of the modern epidemic of eating disorder stems from this particular mythology I do not know, but surely there would be less eating pathology if people understood the shapes of their bodies to be constraints rather than choices. Consistent with the evidence that choice is not an unmixed blessing, results have begun to appear in the literature on human decision making to indicate that adding options for people can make the choice situation less rather than more attractive--that indeed, sometimes people prefer it if others make the choices for them (Beattie, Baron, Hershey, & Spranca, 1994). In one series of studies (Iyengar & Lepper, 1999b) participants were more likely to purchase exotic jams or gourmet chocolates when they had 6 options from which to choose than when they had 30 options. In addition, those with fewer options expressed greater satisfaction with the choices they actually made. Further, college students were more likely to write an extra-credit essay and wrote better essays when they had 6 topics from which to choose than when they had 30 options. The authors suggested several possible factors that may underlie this effect. One is the avoidance of potential regret. The more options there are, the more likely it is one will make a nonoptimal choice, and this prospect undermines whatever pleasure one may get from one's actual choice. There is ample evidence that regret avoidance is a potent force in human decision making--perhaps even more potent than the loss avoidance that has been a significant feature of Kahneman and Tversky's (e.g., 1979) theory of decision making (Beattie et al., 1994; Bell, 1982, 1985; Loomis & Sugden, 1982; Simenson, 1992; Zeelenberg, Beattie, van der Pligt, & de Vries, 1996). This regret avoidance may be especially potent in people with low self-esteem (Josephs, Larrick, Steele, & Nisbett, 1992). For such people, every choice opportunity presents the possibility that they will gather more evidence than they already have that they do not know how to make good decisions. A second factor that may make increased choice options unattractive is that they create a seemingly intractable information problem. It is hard enough to gather the information and go through the deliberations needed to make the best choice among six options. To choose the best among 30 options is truly daunting. Therefore, rather than even try, people may disengage, choosing almost arbitrarily to get the process over with. As a result of this disengagement, many of the psychological processes that normally are recruited to enhance the attractiveness of the choices one makes may not be used (see Gilovich & Medvec, 1995, for an account of some of these processes in the context of a theory of regret). It should be noted that from the perspective of the norms of rational-choice theory, the demotivating effects of added options are truly paradoxical. If one already has a choice between Options A and B, how can adding Option C make one worse off? One can, after all, always ignore Option C and choose between A and B. Yet this demotivating effect is precisely what seems to occur, at least under some circumstances (see Redelmeier & Shafir, 1995). And the commercial world seems already to know what experimental psychologists are just now discovering. Several major manufacturers of a variety of consumer products have been streamlining the number of options they provide customers, in response to a modest consumer rebellion against excessive choice. Proctor and Gamble, for example, reduced the number of versions of its very popular Head and Shoulders shampoo from a staggering 26 to "only" 15, and they experienced a 10% increase in sales (Osnos, 1997). Conclusion This article has suggested two things. First, although we could live in a world in which everything was a matter of choice, we don't have to, and most people in the history of human society haven't. Second, were we to live in such a world, our mechanisms of rational choice would be overwhelmed rather than empowered. As I indicated at the outset, there is a degree of freedom that now exists in many of the most important domains of our lives that only a short time ago would have been unimaginable. Certainly, there are still strong vestiges of traditional constraint that remain in all of these domains, so that many freedoms that exist for everyone in theory can't be realized by everyone in practice, but there is no question of the direction in which things are moving. Every day it gets a little bit easier for 86 January 2000 • American Psychologist
individuals to do exactly what they want to do and to live exactly as they want to live. Obviously, all of this freedom from traditional constraint is cause for celebration, particularly for those for whom traditional constraint was experienced as painful and oppressive. Largely because traditions are authoritarian and inflexible, modern Americans have fled from traditional institutions and values. Americans have chafed at being told what to do, at being told what was good for them. Traditions did not merely offer order and structure to people's lives; they insisted on it. To this inflexible insistence many Americans have said good riddance. It is much better to make up the rules of the games you play as you go along than to be forced to play those games by other people's rules--rules that don't seem to serve you and make no sense to you. I have tried to suggest, however, that there is a dark side to all this freedom from constraint, to all this emphasis on individuals as the makers of their own worlds, their own destinies. It leaves people indecisive about what to do and why. Freedom of choice is a two-edged sword, for just on the other side of liberation sits chaos and paralysis. Thus, there is a price for freedom--danger. There is a price for enlightenment--uncertainty. There is a price for being able to change the rules of softball. You may not know what the new rules should be, and playing by new rules may damage what was good when you played by the old ones. Thus, in aspiring as a culture to offer individuals self-determination without constraint, we are not doing those individuals a favor. What has all this to do with the future development of a positive psychology that will nurture strength rather than repair damage? Until now, psychology has been a significant contributor to the ethic of individual self-determination. The task before psychology now, I believe, is to pull back from this stance--but not indiscriminately. Rather, what psychology must do is figure out the "grammar" of human life choices--the set of constraints that actually enables freedom rather than impeding it. When the great biologist Jacob yon Uexkull said that "security is more important than wealth" (1938/1954, p. 26), more than half a century ago, what he was talking about was how evolution seemed to shape organisms so that their sensory systems were exquisitely attuned to just those environmental inputs that were critical to their survival. The forest is a much less interesting place to a squirrel than it is to a human being. Much that goes on in that forest goes right by the squirrel. Its sensory experience is thus impoverished relative to ours, but it notices what it needs to notice. Biology seems to supply the needed constraints on choice for most organisms. For people, those constraints have to come from culture. The task for a future psychology is to figure out what those constraints should be. A final comment is necessary on the use of the word should in the previous sentence. Shoulds imply claims that are prescriptive rather than descriptive, and psychology, as a positive rather than a normative social science, has tried to steer away from shoulds. I believe that if psychologists are serious about turning psychology's power to developing a theory of optimal functioning, they can no longer avoid shoulds. I think that a richly developed positive psychology must do more than teach people how to do things--it must to do more than teach people effective techniques for getting what they want out of life. It must also tell them something about what they should be trying to get. That is, it must be informed by a vision of what a good human life contains. Thus, a positive psychology will have to be willing to tell people that, say, a good, meaningful, productive human life includes commitment to education, commitment to family and to other social groups, commitment to excellence in one's activities, commitment to virtues such as honesty, loyalty, courage, and justice in one's dealings with others, and so on. Notice how the very notion that psychology might articulate a vision of the good life contradicts the emphasis on freedom, autonomy, and choice that are the subject of this article. The: official ideology of modern America poses an enormous barrier to this kind of contentful positive psychology. The ideology of America is the ideology of liberal individualism--let people decide for themselves what is good. Modern liberal culture is extremely reluctant to tell people what to do, and social science has internalized that credo: Don't be judgmental; help people get what they want, but don't tell them what they should be wanting. It is one thing to encounter people in extreme psychological pain and to tell them, , gently, how to change the content of their lives to relieve that pain. Few people will object to psychologists who impose their values in this way to relieve suffering, but a positive psychology is a whole other story. A positive psychology will be indiscriminate in imposing its values; it will put its values in the community water supply, like fluoride. Is psychology prepared to be a science that promotes certain values instead of one that encourages self-actualization? If it is, will modern, liberal society stand for it? To summarize this final point, once clinical psychologists had patients. Over the years, the discipline grew concerned that patient implied illness, which in turn implied a conception of health, a conception of the goal of therapy that the field did not really have. Thus, patients became clients. Doctors have patients. The patients come in sick, and the doctors make them well. Restoring and maintaining physical health and alleviating suffering are the goals of medicine. Lawyers, in contrast, have clients. Lawyers don't have goals for clients the way doctors have goals for patients. Rather, lawyers are there to help the clients achieve their own goals. Clients define their goals in a way that patients do not. Therefore, in moving from patients to clients, psychology moved from having the practitioner define the goal to having the recipient define the goal. What will psychologists call the recipients of their services if and when a positive psychology comes to fruition? I don't think that either patients or clients does justice to the grand vision that informs these beginnings of a positive psychology. The right term, I think, is students. Are psychologists prepared to argue that it is future generations of psychologists who should be society's teachers? I think that unless January 2000 • American Psychologist 87
we are prepared to say yes to this question and to develop arguments about the content of a good human life, the potential achievements of a future positive psychology will always be limited. I also believe that the time to be thinking and talking about this very big and difficult issue is now, at the beginning, and not later, in the face of angry critics trying to put psychologists in their place. REFERENCES Abramson, L. Y., Metalsky, G. I., & Alloy, L. B. (1989). Hopelessness depression: A theory-based subtype of depression. Psychological Review, 96, 358-372. Abramson, L. Y., Seligman, M. E. P., & Teasdale, J. D. (1978). Learned helplessness in humans: Critique and reformulation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 87, 49-74. Baron, J. (1994). Thinking and deciding (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Beattie, J., Baron, J., Hershey, J. C., & Spranca, M. D. (1994). Psychological determinants of decision attitude. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 7, 129-144. Bell, D. E. 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Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 105, 3-46. Marglin, S. (1976). What do bosses do? In A. Gorz (Ed.), The division of labour (pp. 13-54). London: Harvester Press. Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224 -253. McCauley, C., Rozin, P., & Schwartz, B. (1999). On the origin andnature of preferences and values. Manuscript in preparation. Osnos, E. (1997, September 27). Too many choices? Firms cut back on new products. Philadelphia Inquirer, pp. DI, D7. Payne, J. W. (1982). Contingent decision behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 382-402. Payne. J. W., Bettman, J. R., & Johnson, E. J. (1993). The adaptive decision maker. New York: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, C., Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1993). Learned helplessness: A theory for the age of personal control. New York: Oxford University Press. Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1984). Causal explanations as a risk f~Lctor for depression: Theory and evidence. Psychological Review, 91, 347-374. Polanyi, K. (1944). The great transformation. New York: Rinehart. Putnam, R. D. (1993). The prosperous community. The American Prospect, 13, 34-40. Putnam, R. D. (1995). Bowling alone: America'a declining social capital. Journal of Democracy, 6, 65-78. Putnam, R. D. (1996). The strange disappearance of civic America. The American Prospect, 24, 34-48. Redelmeier, D. A., & Shafir, E. (1995). Medical decision making in situations that offer multiple alternatives. Journal of the American Medical Association, 273, 302-305. Robins, L. N., Helzer, J. E., Weissman, M. M., Orvaschel, H., Gruenberg, E., Burke, J. D., & Regier, D. A. (1984). Lifetime prevalence of specific psychiatric disorders in three sites. Archives of General Psychiat~, 41, 949-958. Schwartz, B. (1986). The battle fi)r human nature: Science, morality, and modern life. New York: Norton. Schwartz, B. (1994). The costs of living: How market freedom erodes the best things in lifo. New York: Norton. Schwartz, B. (1997). Psychology, "idea technology," and ideology. Psychological Science, 8, 21-27. Schwartz, B., Schuldenfrei, R., & Lacey, H. (1978). Operant psychology as factory psychology. Behaviorism, 6, 229 254. Seligman, M. E. P. (1975). Helplessness: On depression, development, and death. San Francisco: Freeman. Seligman, M. E. P. (1994). What you can change and what you can't. New York: Knopf. Shweder, R. A. (1990). Cultural psychology: What is it? In J. W. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, & G. Herdt (Eds.), Cultural psychology: Essays on comparative human development (pp. 1-46). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Shweder, R. A. (1991). Thinking through cultures. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sbweder, R. A., & LeVine, R. A. (Eds.). (1984). Culture theory: Essays on mind, se!/i and emotion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Shweder, R. A., Much, N. C., Mahapatra, M., & Park, L. (1997). The "big three" of morality (autonomy, community, divinity), and the "big three" explanations of suffering. In A. Brandt & P. Rozin (Eds.), Morality and health (pp. 119-169). New York: Routledge. Simenson, I. (1992). The influence of anticipating regret and responsibility on purchase decisions. Journal of Consumer Research, 19, 105-118. Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453-458. von Neumann, J., & Morgenstern, O. (1944). Theory of games and economic behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton. University Press. von Uexkull, J. (1954). A stroll through the worlds of animals and men. In C. H. Schiller (Ed.), blstinctive behavior (pp. 3-59). New York: International Universities Press. (Original work published 1938) Zeelenberg, M., Beattie, J., van der Pligt, J., & de Vries. N. K. (1996). Consequences of regret aversion: Effects of expected feedback on risky decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 65, 148-158. 88 January 2000 * American Psychologist
Adaptive Mental Mechanisms Their Role in a Positive Psychology George E. Vaillant Brigham and Women's Hospital Psychology needs a metric for positive mental health that would be analogous to the IQ tests that measure aboveaverage intelligence. The Defensive Function Scale of the DSM-IV offers a possible metric. In the present article the author links the transformational qualities of defenses at the mature end of the Defensive Function Scale---altruism, suppression, humor, anticipation, and sublimation--to positive psychology. First, the methodological problems involved in the reliable assessment of defenses are acknowledged. Next, the use of prospective longitudinal study to overcome such difficulties and to provide more reliable definition and measurement of defenses is outlined. Evidence is also offered that, unlike many psychological measures, the maturity of defenses is quite independent of social class, education, and IQ. Last, evidence is offered to illustrate the validity of mature defenses and their contribution to positive psychology. : the days of alchemy, humanity has been fas- .ted with how to turn lead into gold. People are gued by the real-life alchemy of the oyster transforming an irritating grain of sand into a pearl. Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold is a favorite fairy tale. In their laudable quest to relieve human suffering, however, both psychiatry and psychology have been less interested in positive transformations. Instead, they have been more concerned with how cold mothers and bad genes create disease and so turn gold to lead. In contrast to psychiatry, however, psychology has made at least some effort to measure the positive as well as the pathological. Intelligence tests are a good example. In contrast to intelligence, however, most facets of positive human behavior--for example, creativity, maturity, and empathy--are extraordinarily difficult to measure. This article discusses efforts to conceptualize the mature defenses (aka, involuntary coping mechanisms and "healthy denial"). I argue that such a schema comprises a facet of and a possible metric for a positive psychology. By way of introduction, there are three broad classes of coping mechanisms. First, there are the ways in which an individual elicits help from appropriate others: namely, seeking social support. Second, there are conscious cognitive strategies that people intentionally use to make the best of a bad situation (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Third, there are involuntary mental mechanisms that distort our perception of internal and external reality to reduce subjective distress. For semantic consistency, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) has labeled these mental mechanisms defenses and has organized them in a hierarchical Defensive Function Scale. Included within the "high adaptive level" of DSM-IV are the defenses of anticipation, altruism, humor, sublimation, and suppression. These adaptive mental mechanisms "maximize gratification and allow conscious awareness of feelings, ideas and their consequences" (American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 752). In many ways, the first two classes of coping are superior to the third. Most important, seeking social support and cognitive strategies are both under volitional control and can affect the real world. In three ways, however, the involuntary defenses or coping processes are superior to voluntary coping processes. First, as I demonstrate in this article, involuntary defenses are independent of education and social privilege. Second, they can regulate people's perceptions of those internal and external realities that they are powerless to change. Third, the adaptive defenses can turn lead into gold. By this I mean such processes can serve as transformative agents in the real world. Let me offer an analogy. If a person who cuts a small artery lacks the cognitive strategies (provided to health professionals through expensive education) to stop the hemorrhage and lacks the social supports of access to physicians (provided to the middle class through expensive health insurance), the person can still cope with the hemorrhage with inborn defenses. He or she can stop the bleeding through involuntary, transformative, and highly complex clotting mechanisms. Yet, such clotting mechanisms may be denied to royalty afflicted with hemophilia. In analogous fashion, when cognitive solutions and social supports are absent, the psychologically resilient from all walks of life--achieve similar homeostatic alchemy through involuntary mental defenses that alter perception of internal and external reality. George El. Vaillant, Division of Psychiatry, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital. This work was supported by the Division of Psychiatry, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital; by the Study of Adult Development, Harvard University Health Services; and by Research Grant MH 42248 from the National Institute of Mental Health. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to George E. Vaillant, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected]. January 2000 ° American Psychologist Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association, Inc, (X)O3-066X/00/$5.00 Vol. 55, No. 1. 89-98 DOI: 10.1037//0003-066X 55.1.89 89
George E. Vaillant For example, at age 3 l, a suicidal but only partially deaf musician had written of his loss of heating, "Oh, if I were rid of this affliction, 1 could embrace the world" (Forbes, 1969, p. 286). At 54, the utterly deaf but no longer suicidal musician immortalized Schiller's "Ode to Joy" ("Be embraced all ye millions with a kiss for all the world") in the lyrical, lifeaffirming chorus of his Ninth Symphony. But how can psychology differentiate the transformative denial that Beethoven deployed to overcome depression by writing a hymn to joy from the mental mechanisms of psychosis such as projection and psychotic denial? Clearly, the answer is important. As a start, mature mental health always involves affect recognition. Beethoven did not totally deny his real depression, nor was he overwhelmed by it. Thus, we have evidence that Beethoven's defensive behavior (aka, creative product) did not reflect complete denial of affect as do less adaptive defenses. Throughout his composition of the Ninth Symphony, he remained conscious of his pain. For example, on a draft version of one instrumental recitative he had scribbled, "No, this would remind us too much of our despair" (Forbes, 1969, p. 892). Equally important was Beethoven's defensive use of sublimation, which not only made him feel subjectively better, but also was of objective value to the real world. Adaptive defenses are essential to positive mental health. Defenses reduce conflict and cognitive dissonance during sudden changes in internal and external reality. If not modified, sudden changes result in anxiety and/or depression. First, defense mechanisms can restore psychological homeostasis by ignoring or deflecting sudden increases in affect and instinctual press. For example, when the Soviets liberated the first Nazi death camp, Maidenek, the New York Times denied its unbearable horror by reporting the news as a Soviet propaganda ploy. Second, defense mechanisms can provide a mental time out to mitigate changes in reality and self-image that cannot be immediately integrated--for example, after major surgery or promotion. Third, defenses transmute unresolvable conflict with important people, living or dead. Finally, defenses soften conflicts of conscience--for example, after putting a parent in a nursing home. In short, defenses shield people from sudden changes in affect, reality, relationships, or conscience. For many years, defense mechanisms have been deservedly unpopular in experimental psychology, because of difficulty in empirical verification. Over the past 20 years, the idea of involuntary adaptation has re-entered the literature of cognitive psychology under such rubrics as hardiness (Kobasa, Maddi, & Kahn, 1982), self-deception and emotional coping (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), and illusion (Taylor, 1989). Defense mechanisms are clearly as important in reducing anxiety from cognitive dissonance as they are in minimizing anxiety from conflict between conscience and impulse. In recent years, experimental strategies for studying defense mechanisms have improved (Cramer, 1991; Horowitz, 1988; Vaillant, 1992). Building on the work of Norma Haan (1963) at Berkeley and Elvin Semrad (1967) at Harvard, I have tried to operationalize defenses and to demonstrate their predictive validity (Vaillant, 1971, 1993). Over 30 years, such efforts have met with modest success, and the validity of an adaptive hierarchy of defenses appears clear (Vaillant, 1992). However, as Phoebe Cramer's (1991) encyclopedic review of the methodology for identifying and quantifying defenses has illustrated, no one has yet developed a method for assessing defenses that meets conventional standards for psychometric reliability. A second reason that defenses have fallen from favor in psychology is that there is no commonly accepted language. For example, within 50 miles of San Francisco, there were recently six competing, nonoverlapping nomenclatures for involuntary coping mechanisms. Each nomenclature was used by a distinguished investigator of stress (Block & Block, 1980; Haan, 1977; Horowitz, 1988; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Moos & Billings, 1982; Weinberger, Schwartz, & Davidson, 1979). Rarely, however, did any investigator cite the work of his or her neighbors. The result has been semantic chaos. Recently, the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association, 1994) has offered a terminology, a glossary, and a tentative diagnostic axis to provide a common language. Defenses, no matter how ingeniously assessed, reflect value judgments about mental process, as do process concepts in physics (e.g., forward motion and velocity). All three--velocity, forward motion, and defenses--depend on the vantage point of the observer and involve processes rather than static qualities like mass or intelligence. Nevertheless, if people wish to understand their own lives in time and space, these are judgments worth making. To overcome relativity, reliability of defense recognition requires longitudinal study. Before I can assert that the Ninth Symphony represents the sublimation of Beethoven's conflict over abusive father figures, I need objective longitudinal evidence. First, I need Beethoven's own contemporaneously written diary to document both his despair and his anger at father figures over decades. Second, for objec90 January 2000 • American Psychologist
tive assessment, I need behavioral evidence of his defense: a symphony (not just a pencil-and-paper response or a dream report). Finally, I need objective consensus that his creation was empathic art that others valued, not autistic lunacy that others mocked. Thus, the documented wild cheers of a contemporary, musically sophisticated, Viennese concert audience is more convincing than the value judgment of one 20th century, musically challenged American psychiatrist. Using such triangulation of real symptoms, autobiographical report, and contemporaneously assessed biographical fact to measure invisible mental process is analogous to surveyors using triangulation to assess the height of mountains they cannot climb. As a method to study defenses, I have used three diverse 50-year prospective studies of lives. Using consensus definitions from the literature (Vaillant, 1971), I selected five mechanisms-humor, altruism, sublimation, anticipation, and suppression--that, first by hypothesis and then by empirical study, appeared adaptive in the three samples. The term adaptive defense, and its synonym healthy denial, have two connotations: The first is transformative (turning lead into gold), and the second is making the best out of a bad situation. Whether such a healing response is viewed as miraculous or merely a patch-up job depends on whether optimal wound healing is viewed as a scar or as a result of a delicate ballet of blood clotting and fibroblast migration--neither too much nor too little. Each adaptive or healthy defense involves the ballet of keeping idea and affect, subject and object clearly in mind while simultaneously attenuating the conflict (cognitive dissonance). In nonconflictual situations, of course, the putative defense mechanisms of anticipation, altruism, and suppression seem quite conscious and voluntary. In highly emotionally charged situations, however, such deployment of these mechanisms can be seen as both transformative and making the best of a bad situation. A man with a criminal record for the first time "counting to ten" (suppression) while consciously examining his anger, rather than impulsively punching a policeman; a mother rehearsing affectively and realistically, rather than denying, the fact that her child is dying (anticipation); a survivor of child abuse, rather than abusing her own children, working in a shelter for survivors of abuse (altruism) are such examples. Such behaviors emerge with maturation as delicate transformative mental balancing acts and not as a result of good advice and self-help cognitive strategies. The Study of Adult Development The Study of Adult Development provided the three cohorts of individuals that were used as a prospective and empirical means of triangulating and validating defensive behaviors. Each cohort had been prospectively studied for over half a century: the "College" sample born about 1920 (Heath, 1945), the "Core City" sample of inner-city men born about 1930 (Glueck & Glueck, 1950), and the "Terman" sample of gifted women born about 1910 (Terman, 1925). For all three samples, the basic methodology of the Study of Adult Development was to keep raters of psychological health and prospective behavioral outcome unaware of defense assessment and to keep raters of defenses unaware of evidence of positive mental health and future adaptation. Taken individually, these three now elderly Caucasian samples can hardly be viewed as representative of the general population. However, the three samples have the virtues of being vastly different from each other and belonging to historical birth cohorts up to 20 years apart. Within each sample, there was considerable homogeneity. Thus, the between-group similarities and the within-group differences may be generalizable to some other samples. More important, prospective study permitted defensive altruism to be distinguished from simple kindness and defensive projection to be distinguished from the vigilant recognition of real persecution. The College Sample The Grant Study (Heath, 1945; Vaillant, 1977) began at the Harvard University Health Services in 1938. The study was underwritten by W. T. Grant because, "Large endowments have been given and schemes put into effect for the study of the ill, the mentally and physically handicapped .... Very few have thought it pertinent to make a systematic inquiry into the kinds of people who are well and do well" (Heath, 1945). Sixty years ago, then, the Grant Study anticipated the need for a positive psychology. In the selection process, about 40% of each Harvard class was arbitrarily excluded for academic reasons. The health service records of the remaining 60% of each class were then screened, and half were excluded because of evidence of physical or psychological disturbance. The college deans then selected one third of the remaining 300 men who they thought would do well. Between 1939 and 1942, 268 sophomores were selected for study. For half a century, all but 20 of the men have continued to participate in this study of positive psychology with remarkable loyalty. They have received questionnaires about every 2 years, physical examinations every 5 years, and interviews about every 15 years. Socioeconomically, the College sample men were drawn from a privileged group but not exclusively so. Although one third of the men's fathers had some professional training, one half of the men's parents never graduated from college. Although one half of the men had some private education, half of the men were on scholarship and/or had to work during the academic term to earn tuition. In adult life, the College sample enjoyed the income and social status of corporate managers, yet they drove the battered cars and pursued the hobbies, politics, and lifestyle of college professors. The Core City Sample These 456 men represent a very different cohort but one also chosen for relative mental health. In junior high school, they were selected as nondelinquent controls for a prospective study of juvenile delinquency. The study was conducted by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck at Harvard Law School and led to their landmark book Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency (Glueck & Glueck, 1950, 1968). Like the College men, the Core City men were studied originally by a multidisciplinary team of physicians, psychologists, psyJanuary 2000 • American Psychologist 91
chiatrists, social investigators, and physical anthropologists. The Core City men were interviewed at ages 14, 25, 32, and 47 (Vaillant, 1995). The Core City sample came from the 60% of Boston census tracts with the highest rates of juvenile delinquency. The boys' average IQ was 95, and 61% of their parents were foreign born. In childhood, half of the Core City men had lived in clearly blighted slum neighborhoods. Half came from families known to five or more social agencies, and more than two thirds of their families had recently been on welfare. Over the years, however, this group has experienced marked upward social mobility (Long & Vaillant, 1984). The Terman Women Sample Through the cooperation of Robert Sears and Albert Hastorf, I obtained access to a Stanford University (Terman women) cohort of gifted women studied since 1920. The 90 women that make up the current study sample are a representative subsample of the 672 women in Terman's original cohort of gifted California public school children (Holahan & Sears, 1995; Terman, 1925; Terman & Oden, 1959). The high intelligence of the Terman women--mean IQ of 151--was a social asset. Their mental health was demonstrably better than that of their California classmates. They showed significantly more humor, common sense, perseverance, leadership, and even popularity than their school peers. Up to the age of 78, the mortality of the Terman women has been only half of what would be expected for White American women in their birth cohort. Investigators followed the Terman sample by questionnaire every five years and by personal interview in 1940 and 1950. In 1987, Vaillant and Vaillant (1990a) selected a representative subsample. Of the 90 women selected, 29 had died and 21 of the surviving women refused to interview, some because of poor health. We reinterviewed the remaining 40 women. Adaptive or Mature Defenses Adaptive or mature defenses (altruism, sublimation, suppression, humor, anticipation) are common among the mentally healthy and become more salient as individuals mature from adolescence to midlife (Vaillant, 1977). In keeping with the conceptualization of positive psychology, the association of mature defenses with mental health remains whether health is measured by subjective happiness, psychosocial maturity, occupational success, richness and stability of relationships, or absence of psychopathology (Vaillant, 1992). Individuals with brain damage (e.g., alcohol dependence, schizophrenic relapse, multiple sclerosis) replace adaptive defenses with more maladaptive mechanisms, most notably projection. Table 1 schematizes the defenses discussed in this article within the adaptive levels suggested by DSM-1V. The table provides an oversimplified schema for the mutually exclusive definitions that contrast the five adaptive defenses listed above with less adaptive mechanisms. Each defense has been characterized by the extent to which it denies or distorts subject and object and idea and affect in the experience of and expression of impulse. For example, defense mechanisms can allow a person to ignore the affect (isolation, intellectualization), to ignore the cognitive representation of the affect (repression), to reverse the direction of an impulse (make the self the object; projection), or to make the object the self (suicide or passive aggression). Each defense has also been characterized by the way in which it modifies the four lodestars of conflict: affect, reality, conscience, and relationships. The high-adaptive-level defenses provide the most balanced response to such involuntary homeostatic distortions of inner and outer reality. To the beholder, adaptive mechanisms appear as convenient virtues, and there is rarely a therapeutic reason to alter them. Although closer to consciousness than mechanisms like projection and repression, mature mechanisms cannot be voluntarily deployed. No one is more transparent than someone trying to use humor or altruism; No one is more angry looking than someone consciously suppressing rage; and when depressed just try writing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on purpose. In keeping with positive psychology, adaptive defenses often appear as moral to the observer as maladaptive defenses appear immoral. The prejudice of projection and the tantrums of acting out appear to others as sins. In contrast, doing as one would be done by (altruism), a stiff upper lip (suppression), planning for the future (anticipation), the ability not to take one's self too seriously (humor), and "turning lemons into lemonade" (sublimation) are the very stuff of which a positive psychology should be concerned. Let me elaborate on the ~ansformative nature of each of five mature mental mechanisms schematically defined in Table 1. Altruism When used to transform conflict, altruism involves getting pleasure from giving to others what people would themselves like to receive. For example, victims of childhood sexual abuse often pathologically cut themselves (turning anger against the self), abuse children (acting out), or use "neurotic" compromises such as becoming frigid or joining convents (reaction formation). Alternatively, and transformatively, altruistic victims of child abuse might work in shelters for battered women and in support groups or hotfines for abuse victims. Often almaism is an adaptive outgrowth of the defense of reaction formation, a mechanism that can maladaptively make the person's desires all bad and the needs of others all good. Using reaction formation, an ex-drinker who suddenly declares drinking as a filthy habit annoys his friends. Using altruism, the ex-alcoholic who serves as a sponsor to a new Alcoholics Anonymous member achieves a transformative process enjoyed by giver and receiver. My wife, five months pregnant, was interviewing a couple from the Core City sample to whom our study offered no compensation. The greatest pain in their life was having lost six children through Rh incompatibility. As my wife got up to leave, the childless wife, whose grief and envy can only be imagined, gave my wife a handsome, handmade baby sweater. The lives of everyone in the room had been suddenly enriched. 92 January 2000 • American Psychologist
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Sublimation The sign of a successful defense is neither careful cost accounting nor shrewd compromise, but rather psychic alchemy. Upon an inanimate Attic vase John Keats discovered-and shared--an attenuated yet passionate sexuality. In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats conveyed a miraculous concept: "More happy, happy love! / Forever warm and still to be enjoyed. / Forever panting and forever young." With marvelous control of language Keats turned lust, perhaps even imminent rape--"What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?"--into more happy love. A less poetic member of the study wrote, "I have twice the sex drive of my wife. We adjust ourselves by varying our sex play to suit each other. We believe that lovemaking should be practiced as an art!" Thus, sublimation allows an indirect resolution of conflict with neither adverse consequences nor marked loss of pleasure. Unlike the autistic fantasy of the child and the schizophrenic, artists can peddle their most private dreams to others. In contrast, the mechanism of acting out--rape-- dissipates the torrent of our unmodulated affect on strangers, and reaction formation dams such affect expression completely. Finally, sublimation does more than make affect acceptable; it also makes ideas exciting. In terms of their Harvard grades and tested intellectual aptitudes, the men in the College sample with brilliant teaching careers at Stanford and Harvard were not more gifted than fellow study members teaching joylessly at mediocre institutions. Too often the less successful professors in the College sample used displacement and isolation so compulsively that their cognitive interests were stripped of affect and passion. In every facet of their lives-- not just their teaching and publishing--the successful professors were more comfortable in coloring their ideas with the pigment of emotion (Vaillant, 1977). Suppression Suppression (~toicism) is not as elegant as sublimation because suppression always sacrifices beauty for truth. Suppression has none of the humanity of altruism or humor, and suppression is often regarded by psychotherapists as a vice, not a virtue. When used effectively, however, suppression is analogous to a well-trimmed sail; every restriction is precisely calculated to exploit, not to hide, the winds of passion. Suppression involves the semiconscious decision to postpone paying attention to a conscious impulse and/or conflict. A critical difference between suppression and repression, between suppression and isolation, and between stoical suppression and Spartan reaction formation is the degree to which suppression allows all the components of conflict to exist at least partially in consciousness (cf. Table 1). The distinction between suppression and Pollyanna's dissociation or "neurotic denial" is more complex. Both the stoic person and the person behaving like Pollyanna note that clouds have silver linings, but Pollyanna leaves her umbrella at home. Evidence that suppression is not a conscious cognitive strategy as many believe is provided by the fact that jails would empty if delinquents could learn to just say no. As an example of suppression, the normal life tempo of one highly energetic College sample man was to work a 60-hour week as chief executive officer of two large corporations and then run for six miles on Sunday to relax. However, he described a navy diving accident that took place during World War II in the following manner: He was 40 feet underwater; his air valve was jammed; his radio did not work; and he knew that only eight minutes of air were left in his diving helmet. He recognized that there was nothing that he could do for himself. "I thought my end had come.., struggling would not have helped and used maybe three times as much air. I didn't pray. I merely sat, very much like an old cow, and waited for help--very unhappy." He knew his feelings, and he knew they would not help, so he suppressed them until he was rescued. The delicate mental balance involved in successful suppression is as voluntary and as involuntary as walking on a tightrope. Such balance seems easy for the accomplished, coordinated acrobat and seems utterly impossible and anxiety provoking for everyone else. Anticipation As with altruism, the use of anticipation is often voluntary and independent of conflict resolution. Rather, it is in cases of "hot cognition" that anticipation becomes an involuntary coping skill. If suppression reflects the capacity to keep current impulse in mind and control it, anticipation is the capacity to keep affective response to an unbearable future in mind. The defense of anticipation reflects the capacity to perceive future danger affectively as well as cognitively and by this means to master conflict in small steps. In the 1950s, as scientists began the deliberate study of healthy adaptation, Irving Janis (1958) discovered that moderate amounts of anxiety before surgery promoted adaptation. At the National Institute of Mental Health, David Hamburg and his colleagues (Friedman, Chodoff, Mason, & Hamburg, 1963) noted the value of anticipatory mourning in parents of children with leukemia. Psychiatrists responsible for preparing Peace Corps volunteers noted that volunteers' capacity to anticipate future affective difficulty better predicted subsequent adaptation than did their apparent emotional stability on psychological tests (Ezekiel, 1968). Anticipation differs in an important way from using isolation and intellectualization to make soothing "lists." Anticipation involves more than just the ideational work of cognitive planning. Anticipation involves both thinking and feeling about the future. For example, consider legendary aviators, like Charles Lindbergh and Chuck Yeager. They calmly survived exciting flying careers by dealing with stress as Mithradates did with poison--taking a little at a time. To have underestimated danger would have been fatal. To have exaggerated danger would have been emotionally incapacitating. Thus, they worried in advance, they made lists, and they practiced. Then, appreciating that they had prepared as well as they could, they relaxed. Like suppression and altruism, anticipation is so easy to prescribe but so difficult to do. 94 January 2000 • American Psychologist
Humor We all recognize that humor makes life easier. As S. Freud (1905/1960) suggested, "Humor can be regarded as the highest of these defensive processes," for humor "scorns to withdraw the ideational content bearing the distressing affect from conscious attention, as repression does, and thus surmounts the automatism of defense" (p. 233). Humor permits the expression of emotion without individual discomfort and without unpleasant effects on others. Humor, like anticipation and suppression, is such a sensible coping device that it ought to be conscious, but almost by definition, humor always surprises people. Like the other mature defenses, humor requires the same delicacy as building a house of cards--timing is everything. The safety of humor, like the safety of dreams during REM sleep, depends on cataplexy. People see all and feel much, but they do not act. Humor keeps both idea and affect in mind. Mature humor allows people to look directly at what is painful, whereas dissociation and slapstick distract people so that they look somewhere else. Much of humor is lost in the retelling. Thus, unlike Beethoven's sublimation, humor is difficult to illustrate. Humor, like a rainbow, is real but forever evades our grasp. Adaptive or Health-Promoting Defenses May Be Inde_pendent of Social Class and Gender The study assessed defenses of the Core City men and of the College men at age 47 and of the Terman women at age 77. Defenses were identified by behavioral vignette (Vaillant, 1992). Then, the ratio of adaptive level defenses to less adaptive defenses was calculated, and the ratio was converted to a 1-to-9 scale. Table 2 illustrates that such quantification of adaptiveness of defenses was relatively independent of years of education, IQ, and parental social class. Admittedly, within each cohort the range of socioeconomic status was truncated; nevertheless, within the Core City cohort both IQ and education predicted future occupational prestige and social class (p < .001)--just not the adaptiveness of defenses. Table 2 Correlation of Social Antecedents With Adaptiveness of Defenses Adaptiveness of defenses College Core City Terman Antecedent (n = 154 a) (n = 189 °) In = 40) Years of education .13 .10 .33* IQ .04 .14 .07 Parental social class .11 .00 .13 ° Sample size is reduced. To control confounders, men with IQs less than 86, depression, alcohol dependence, and schizophrenia were excluded. * p < .05. (Spearman rank correlation coefficient was used.) If the three samples are contrasted with each other, 34% of the Terman women, 25% of the privileged College men, and 22% of the less socially and intellectually privileged Core City men manifested defenses predominantly at the adaptive level. These differences were not significant and can be attributed to differences in the original rules for selection. Predictive Validity Longitudinal study not only facilitated rater reliability in the identification of defenses (Vaillant, 1992), but also facilitated the demonstration of predictive validity. Thus, roughly 20 years after the relative adaptiveness of defenses was rated, the physical health and the psychosocial adjustment of the study men was assessed by raters unaware of the conditions of the participants' lives before age 50. Separate ratings were obtained for evidence of subjective and objective mental and physical health. Table 3 illustrates the power of scaled adaptiveness of defenses to predict multiple facets of positive health. For contrast, Table 3 also presents the power of attained social class (measured by years of education) and the power of trait neuroticism measured contemporaneously at age 65 by the NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1985; McCrae & Costa, 1985) to predict the same variables. Because mental illness can lead both to maladaptive defenses and to poor future health, men with alcohol dependence, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, or IQs less than 85 were omitted from the tests of predictive validity in Table 3. Had mentally ill participants been included, the predictive power of defense choice would have been greater. As shown in Table 3, psychosocial adjustment (objective), social supports (objective), and marital satisfaction (subjective) were assessed by independent raters who integrated data from seven questionnaires from the College and Core City men and two questionnaires from the wives of the College men. Psychosocial adjustment from age 50 to age 65 was assessed by evidence of job promotions and enjoyment, marital stability, games with others, and no use of psychiatrists or tranquilizers (Vaillant, Meyer, Mukareal, & Soldz, 1998; Vaillant & Vaillant, 1990b). Social supports from ages 50 to 70 were assessed by evidence of close relations with wives, children, siblings, and social network, as well as by strength of religious affiliation, the presence or absence of a confidante, and games with friends (Vaillant et al., 1998). Joy in living (subjective) was quantified by summing each man's satisfaction over the past 20 years (on a 5-point scale) in four life areas (marriage, children, job, and friends) and by then adding his best score from one of four additional areas (hobbies, sports, community activities, or religion) (Vaillant, 1999). Physical functioning (subjective) for the College men from ages 70 to 75 and for the Core City men from ages 60 to 65 was assessed by repeatedly monitoring instrumental actMties of living (e.g., ability to climb stairs, walk two miles, carry suitcases, and drive at night; Vaillant, Orav, Meyer, McCullough, & Roston, 1996). Finally, Table 3 illustrates that adaptive defenses transform only the perception of reality, not reality itself. Thus, adaptive defenses predicted the absence of subjective January 2000 • American Psychologist 95
Table 3 Late Life Consequences of Adaptive Defenses at Ages 20-47 Core City (n = 137 °) College (n = 154 °} Years of Adaptiveness Years of Adaptiveness Evidence education of defenses Neuroticism education of defenses Neuroticism Objective evidence Income (midlife) .25** .25** -.08 Psychosocial ad ustment (ages 50-65) (Vai ant & Vai ant, 1990b) .16 .51 *** .08 Social supports b (Vaillant et al., 1998) .12 .44"** .00 Subjective evidence Joy in living b .14 .37 .... .18 Marital satisfaction (midlife) .01 .30 .... .16 Subjective physical functioning b .07 .32" * * .16 Objective physical health c Objective physical health decline .09 .14 -.09 .05 .28 .... .08 -.01 .34 .... .24** .13 .34*** -.15 .03 .35 .... .34*** .09 .18" -.04 .13 .23* -.28** .01 .04 -.13 Note. Neuroticism was measured with the NEe Personality Inventory. ° Sample size is reduced because men who died before age 65 are excluded, b Measured at age 65 for the Core City men and measured at age 75 for the College men. c 1 = well, 2 - minor irreversible illness, 3 = chronic illness, 4 = disabling illness, 5 = dead (Vaillant, 1979). Measured at age 60 for Core City men and at age 70 for College men. * p < .05. ** p < .01. *** p < .001. (Spearman rank correlation coefficient was used.) physical disability--up to 30 years later--but such defenses did not predict physical health decline (objective) assessed by an independent internist. The point of Table 3 is that the relative adaptiveness of defenses (measurement described in Vaillant, 1992, 1993, and schematized in the DSM-IV) may offer as good a metric for positive mental health (Vaillant & Schnurr, 1988) as there is. For two very socioeconomically diverse samples of men, income, objective psychosocial adjustment, social supports, marital satisfaction, subjective physical functioning, and joy in living were more highly correlated with adaptive defenses measured 20 years earlier than with either education or neuroticism. Specific Examples Psychology needs to know more not only about the measurement of positive mental health but also about how people exposed to severe risk factors maintain positive mental health. I address four major risk factors: childhood poverty, the physical limitations of old age, stressful life events, and severe combat. First, the 70 Core City men who manifested the most adaptive defenses were just as likely to have come from welfare families in Social Class V (Hollingshead & Redlich, 1958) as were the 73 men with the least adaptive defenses. In contrast, as adults only 1% of men with the most mature defenses but 21% of men with the least mature defenses were in Social Class V. In short, adaptive defenses may catalyze escape from poverty. Second, Figure 1 depicts the subjective physical functioning at age 65 of those Core City men who were still in good physical health at age 50. In other words, the figure includes only those men whose defense levels could not have been impaired by prior poor health. The more dominant their use of adaptive defenses between ages 20 and 47, the more likely they were at 65 to report being able to climb stairs, walk long distances, and engage in vigorous physical activities that they enjoyed. As Table 3 shows, however, their objective physical health was uncorrelated with defense level. Figure 1 Core City Men Without Disability at Age 50 Who Were Still Without Disability 15 Years After the Initial Study n=lO 100 95 ~. 90 2 85 -~ 80 75 • ~ 70 o • r-. " 65 6o 55 50 0-1 2 3 4 5 Use of Adaptive Defenses Note. The percentage of men with no significant disability was based on a subjective disability score of 10 through 14. This meant that the men had not given up any major activity and were still able to move heavy furniture and/or chop wood, walk two miles, and climb two flights of stairs without resting, albeit sometimes more slowly. Use of adaptive defenses was rated on a scale from 0 (unimportant or absent) to 5 (style dominant). 96 January 2000 ° American Psychologist
Figure 2 Likelihood of Depression Covaried With Total Life Stress and With Adaptiveness of Defenses 100 90 80 7O 60 ca Ca 50 ca 40 ttl ~, 30 20 10 I-O- Men with total life stress scores > 20 I n = 4 I --x- M___en with total life stress scores < 21 Ii ~) n=5 X )( X X n=15 n=14 n=15 n=7 n=3 n=2 5 4 3 2 1 0 Use of Adaptive Del?nses Note. Use of adaptive defenses was rated on a scale from 0 (unimportant or absen 0 to 5 [style dominant). Third, the number of stressful life events in the adult lives of the College men from ages 20 to 60 was studied prospectively (Cui & Vaillant, 1996). The number and severity of such life events both predicted-and resulted from--the occurrence of major depressive disorder. Figure 2 illustrates that major depressive disorder occurred only among men with high life stress scores. However, the men who deployed the most adaptive defenses could still experience multiple stressful life events without risk of major depression. Finally, adaptive defenses also mitigated the strong association between severe combat and later symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among the College sample. (In our study, symptoms of PTSD could be almost entirely explained by severity of World War II combat carefully quantified in 1946; Lee, Vaillant, Torrey, & Elder, 1995; Wells & Woods, 1946.) Of the 33 College men who experienced the most severe combat, the 16 men who deployed most adaptive defenses reported an average of 0.19 PTSD symptoms. The 17 men with less adaptive defenses who had had similarly high combat exposure reported an average of 1.70 PTSD symptoms, t(31) = 2.75, p = .0t, two-tailed. It is significant that prior to the war, the two groups of men did not differ in physical symptoms with stress, and in late middle life they did not differ in neuroticism. How Do Defenses Work? How do mature defenses work to promote a positive psychology (enhanced ability to work, love, and play) and at the same time to reduce conflict and cognitive dissonance? Table 1 presented a range of defenses rank ordered as in the DSM-IV. The DSM-1V suggests that the mechanisms at "the high adaptive level" not only maximize gratification but also "promote an optimum balance among conflicting motives" (American Psychiatric Association, 1994, p. 752). Again, whether one views such a response as making the best of a bad situation or as transformative depends on the vantage point of the observer. Thus, unlike less adaptive mechanisms, mature defenses synthesize and attenuate rather than deny and distort conflicting sources of human behavior like conscience, reality, interpersonal relations, and emotions. The best-of-a-bad-situation point of view would note that predominant use of adaptive defenses simply means that such individuals did not cope by using less balanced mechanisms like schizoid fantasy and projection, which are strongly predictive of poor outcomes. Unlike acting out. which denies conscience, or reaction formation, which denies emotion, or schizoid fantasy which denies real people, or projection, which denies the subject, or psychotic defenses, which deny objective reality, mature defenses elegantly balance and attenuate these multiple sources of conflict. Ballet dancing, Albert Rothenberg's "Janusian creativity," Beethoven producing a symphony fueled by despair and rage, people with physical disabilities deriving hope and self-esteem from helping others with disabilities all reflect the transformative nature of achieving psychic balance. Beyond the above suggestions, psychology really does not know how defenses work. Do adaptive defenses reflect inborn traits te.g., perfect pitch or a capacity for higher mathematics)? Or do adaptive defenses reflect traits that are acquired through education and maturation (e.g., good diction or a graceful backhand)? Should psychology view adaptive defenses as virtues (like empathy and creativity)? Or should psychology view such defenses as adaptive self-deceptions to resolve conflict as did Anna Freud when she quipped that altruism came not from the goodness "but from the badness of his heart" (Sandler & Freud, 1985, p. 176)? I believe that the correct answer to all four questions is yes, but more research is needed. As Table 2 shows, the etiology of adaptive defenses is as obscure as the etiology of creativity or athletic prowess. Although genes, social environment, and the absence of brain disease undoubtedly each play a role, the association of adaptive defenses with positive psychology is most pronounced among individuals from dysfunctional families (Vaillant, 1993). The best definition of creativity--or of an adaptive defense--is putting something of value in the world that was not there before. It is the transformative, creative quality that makes the adaptive defenses more than just healthy wound healing. Conclusion This article raises questions that must be solved if psychologists are to develop a science of positive psychology. First, how should psychology quantify positive mental health? At present, psychology has no metric except perhaps scores of greater than 85 on the DSM-1V's Axis V (Global Assessment of Functioning). If more reliable methJanuary 2000 ° American Psychologist 97
ods for assessing the relative maturity of defenses can be developed, psychology may gain a means of quantifying the theoretical formula for positive mental health that Marie Jahoda (1959) offered to psychology 40 years ago. She suggested the same synthesis between affective life and practical reality that is reflected in the conceptualization of adaptive-level defenses. Jahoda suggested that mentally healthy individuals should be oriented toward the future and efficient in problem solving. They should be resistant to stress and perceive reality without distortion. They should possess empathy and be able to love and to play as well as to work. They should remain in touch with their own feelings. In short, they should manifest anticipation, suppression, altruism, humor, and sublimation. In addition, psychology needs to understand how best to facilitate the transmutation of less adaptive defenses into more adaptive defenses. My own suggestions (Vaillant, 1995) have been first to increase social supports and interpersonal safety and second to facilitate the intactness of the central nervous system (e.g., rest, nutrition, and sobriety). However, the newer forms of integrative psychotherapies also can catalyze such change, and throughout this journal issue there are further clues. REFERENCES American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: Author. Block, J. H., & Block, J. (1980). The role of ego-control and egoresiliency. In W. A. Collins (Ed.), The Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology: Vol. 13. Development of cognitive, ~'ect and social relations (pp. 39-101). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1985). The NEO Personality Inventor' manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources. Cramer, P. (1991). The development of defense mechanisms. New York: Springer-Verlag. Cui, X., & Vaillant, G. E. (1996). 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Psychological Resources, Positive Illusions, and Health Shelley E. Taylor and Margaret E. Kemeny Geoffrey M. Reed Julienne E. Bower and Tara L. Gruenewald University of California, Los Angeles American Psychological Association University of California, Los Angeles Psychological beliefs such as optimism, personal control, and a sense of meaning are known to be protective of mental health. Are they protective of physical health as well? The authors" present a program of research that has tested the implications of cognitive adaptation theory, and research on positive illusions for the relation of positive beliefs to disease progression among men infected with HIV. The investigations have revealed that even unrealistically' optimistic beliefs about the future may be health protective. The abili~' to find meaning in the experience is also associated with a less rapid course of illness. Taken together, the research suggests" that psychological beliefs such as meaning, control, and optimism act as resources, which may not only preserve mental health in the context of traumatic or life-threatening events but be protective of physical health as well. O Ptimism, a sense of personal control, and the ability to find meaning in one s life experiences are valuable psychological resources long believed to be associated with mental health (Frankl, 1963; Seligman, 1998; Taylor, 1989). These psychosocial resources become especially important when people are faced with challenging or threatening events (Taylor, 1983). They may act as reserves, enabling people to cope more effectively with such events. In this article, we address a related question: Can the psychological resources of optimism, personal control, and meaning not only buffer people psychologically against adverse responses to illness but actually influence health in a beneficial direction? Our work on this issue began with the formulation of cognitive adaptation theory (Taylor, 1983), which evolved from an interview study with breast cancer patients (e.g., Taylor, Lichtman, & Wood, 1984). We were originally guided by an effort to identity those resources that would help women return to their previous level of functioning after going through a traumatic and potentially life-threatening event. The emotional and poignant interviews revealed that rather than getting back to normal, most of the women reported that their lives had changed, in some ways for the better. Some noted that they had a new sense of themselves as being strong and resilient. Others talked about their ability to reestablish priorities and to make time for the activities that were most important to them. Most noted that certain social relationships, such as those with their family and close friends, took on particular significance and became the activities to which they devoted most of their time and attention. A surprising, somewhat startling finding of the research was that some of the positive beliefs these women developed about their breast cancer experience were illusory (Taylor, 1983). Many women expressed the belief that they could personally control the cancer and keep it from coming back. Others insisted they had been cured, although their records showed them to have progressing illness. Despite the fact that these beliefs were inconsistent with objective medical evidence, they were associated with the criteria normally associated with mental health and not with psychological distress (Taylor, 1983; Taylor et al., 1984). Moreover, there was no evidence that when these beliefs were disconfirmed by subsequent illness progression, the women were left worse off for their overly positive perceptions. Since that time, we have uncovered similar findings in studies with people infected by HIV or with AIDS (Reed, Kemeny, Taylor, Wang, & Visscher, 1994) and with heart disease (Helgeson & Taylor, 1993); other researchers have also observed that life-threatening events often confer surprising advantages (Leedham, Meyerowitz, Muirhead, & Frist, 1995; Petrie, Buick, Weinman, & Booth, in press; Rose, Derry, & McLachlan, 1995; Shifren, 1996). The disconcerting illusory component of these beliefs, however, remained a mystery. There was little precedent in the mental health literature for understanding this finding, inasmuch as most theories of mental health consider contact with reality to be a critical aspect of positive mental Shelley E. Taylor, Margaret E. Kemeny, Julienne E. Bower, and Tara L. Gruenewald, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; Geoffrey M. Reed, Practice Directorate, American Psychological Association. The research described in this article was supported by National institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Grant MH 42918, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Grant N01-A1-72631, NIMH Research Scientist Development Award MH00820, Universitywide AIDS Research Program New Investigator Award K92LA013, NIMH Training Grant MH 15750, and funds from the MacArtbur Foundation's Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health. NIMH Grant MH 056880 provided support for the preparation of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Shelley E. Taylor, Department of Psychology, University of California, 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1563. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected]. January 2000 • American Psychologist Copyright 2000 by the American Psychological Association. inc. 0003-066X/00/$5.00 Vol. 55, No. I. 99-109 DOI: 10. I037//0003-066X.55.1.99 99
She!ley E. Taylor functioning (e.g., Jahoda, 1958). The social cognition literature, however, provided considerable evidence that normal human perception is marked by three mild and robust positive illusions, that is, beliefs that represent mild positive distortions of reality (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Selfenhancement, unrealistic optimism, and an exaggerated perception of personal control often characterize normal thought (Taylor & Brown, 1988). Positive illusions appear to have protective psychological effects generally that may become especially important in the context of severely threatening events. Our more recent empirical efforts have focused on the implications that positive illusions may have for physical health, especially for course of disease. Psychological Resources and Course of Disease There are several reasons to believe that positive beliefs, such as those that form the core of positive illusions, might influence the course of physical disease. For example, positive beliefs may have an impact on emotional states, which may affect the physiology and neuroendocrine underpinnings of disease states. Although few studies have investigated the relation of positive mental states to disease course, a number of negative emotional states have been tied directly to physiological changes prognostic for illness and to the development of several chronic diseases (Cohen & Herbert, 1996; Frasure-Smith, Lesperance, & Talajic, 1995; Friedman & Booth-Kewley, 1987; Herbert & Cohen, 1993). Such psychological states as depression and anxiety, for example, have a variety of physiological concomitants and have been related to altered immune processes (Herbert & Cohen, 1993) and to the development and course of coronary heart disease (Booth-Kewley & Friedman, 1987; Frasure-Smith et al., 1995). In both cross-sectional and longitudinal research, chronic dysphoric emotion has predicted vulnerability to a broad array of illnesses, as well as a risk of early mortality (Friedman & Booth-Kewley, 1987; Peterson, Seligman, & Vaillant, 1988). Although positive and negative affective states are not polar opposites, often being only modestly correlated in these investigations, there is independent evidence that positive emotional states are linked to positive physiological changes in both experimental studies (Futterman, Kemeny, Shapiro, & Fahey, 1994) and longitudinal studies (Stone, Cox, Valdimarsdottir, Jandorf, & Neale, 1987). Perhaps, then, positive beliefs are tied to physiological changes by positive affect. This pathway gains credence from a study by Segerstrom, Taylor, Kemeny, and Fahey (1998), who found that an association between optimism and higher numbers of CD4 (helper) T cells in stressed law school students was mediated partially by the positive mood associated with optimism. Positive beliefs also may be connected to physical disease by promoting better health behaviors. People who have a positive sense of self-worth, belief in their own control, and optimism about the future may be more likely to practice conscientious health habits and to use services appropriately. Taylor, Kemeny, Aspinwall, Schneider, Rodriguez, and Herbert (1992), for example, found that men who were unrealistically optimistic about their ability to stave off the progression of the AIDS virus nonetheless practiced better health habits than did their more pessimistic counterparts. A third basis for predicting a relationship between positive beliefs and course of illness is based on the fact that positive emotional states are believed to be associated with good social relationships (Taylor & Brown, 1988). Optimistic, self-confident people with a sense of personal control may have more social support or be more effective at mobilizing it during times of stress (Taylor & Brown, 1994; but see Colvin, Block, & Funder, 1995, for an alternative view). Finally, major stressors such as illness often produce additional stressors, such as job loss, financial concerns, caregiving responsibilities for others, or loss of social support, that may, in turn, exacerbate the course of illness; such co-occurring stressors may be better managed by people with well-developed psychosocial resources. For example, optimism, a sense of personal control, and selfesteem have been tied to active coping efforts (Aspinwall & Taylor, 1997; Taylor et al., 1992), which enable people to guard against or offset stressful events before their full implications may be felt. Such abilities to cope actively and proactively with respect to health may minimize adverse physiological effects of stress. H IV as a Disease Model for Studying the Effects of Psychosocial Resources on Health Kemeny's research program in psychoneuroimmunology provided a venue for examining these important issues. Much of Kemeny's research has used HIV infection as a disease model for understanding psychosocial influences 100 January 2000 • American Psychologist