Dr. James Pawelski is the director of education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, which supports the University’s newest masters program, the Master of Applied Positive Psychology. Before coming to Philadelphia to teach at Penn, Pawelski served as an assistant professor of human and organizational development and religious studies at Vanderbilt University. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Penn State University and B.S. in mathematics. Pawelski’s main interests lie in the application of Positive Psychology in academic, professional and personal settings.
Pawelski recently invited students from Drexel University’s Philosophy Club into his office at Penn to talk about philosophy, Positive Psychology and his lecture at Drexel, entitled “Is the Glass Half Full, or Half Empty? Beyond Optimism and Pessimism.”
: To start, say what you want us to know about yourself, do a little background.
James Pawelski: I was actually a math major as an undergraduate and minored in physics along with philosophy and a couple other things. I just had a lot of broad interests and I decided that I would go into philosophy as a graduate. I liked philosophy because you can study anything. You just have to put ‘philosophy of’ in front of it, and then you can study it: philosophy of math, philosophy of literature, history, anything you want. I figured I wouldn’t have to narrow it down too much. I went to Penn State, got my Ph.D. in 1997, and I wrote my dissertation on William James. He’s at the crossroads of philosophy and psychology – the first great American psychologist and one of the founders of pragmatism, I would say.
One of the outlooks of pragmatism is a critique of intellectualism and seeing philosophy as something that ought to be out in the world and solving or working towards a solution, not just a philosopher’s problems, but a real human problem. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there’s a really important point here. Pragmatism means a lot of things, but one of the things it means is a method: a method of looking to the solutions of problems, not just sort of trying to find out where they may have arisen or to try to find some platonic ideals, but really to try to understand, “What do we want? Where are we headed? What are the consequences of our beliefs?” I started thinking, “Wow, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a course in pragmatism that wasn’t just about the formulas but also was about the buildup?” So I began to develop a course I called applied pragmatism. It sounds a little redundant. We worked on reading and understanding pragmatism, not just out of the text, but in terms of our own experience – how can we modify, shape, our experience? Think about habits that we have, and think about which ones are good habits and reinforce those. Which are not-so-good habits? By “habit,” I don’t simply mean biting one’s fingernails or smoking; I also mean habits of feeling, habits of thought, as well as habits of behavior.
: As described by James in his article, “Habit”?
JP: Exactly. The problem is that, in psychology, habit has been narrowed down largely to talking about things that rats do in mazes; whereas for James and for Aristotle, the notion of habit or disposition is a much bigger problem. If you think of character in terms of habit, then character development can be seen along the lines of understanding habit formation – how we can, as William James says, “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.” Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at Penn, had just started a positive psychology center, and he called me up one day and said, “I’m looking to start a master’s program in positive psychology, and if that gets off the ground, I’d like you to come and do it.” That was a year ago. I came to Philadelphia, and I’ve been working on the positive psychology masters program. My official title here is director of education and senior scholar.
: To clarify, how would you define positive psychology?
JP: If you think about mainstream psychology, at least within the area particularly of clinical psychology, it typically focuses on mental illness and how to cure it, or at least to treat it. It’s a very important thing to do and it’s great that people are doing that. In 1998, Seligman was the President of the American Psychological Association; and, in his presidential address that year, he said to his colleagues, “But there’s another side to psychology, potentially. What about not just identifying and curing mental illness, but what about identifying and cultivating mental strength? So what about using the empirical methods of psychology on the plus side of the equation, not just the emulative side?”
It’s interesting that William James, in 1906, was president of the American Philosophical Association and gave an address that was subsequently published under the title “The Energies of Men.” He was saying that we typically don’t access our deepest levels of energy, and so we’re typically trying to get through the day as opposed to other times when we’re just totally on and can do amazing things. So his question was, “How can we access more of that energy? How can we perform more at the level of our peak more often?” He was saying we really need to have a branch of empirical psychology to study this, and so, about 100 years later, we’re finally coming around to it. But that’s not atypical for a philosopher to have an idea that’s about 100 years too early, right?
: Depends, I think we still haven’t gotten around to Aristotle.
JP: Right. That’s a good point. Maybe a couple thousand years too early in some respects. Now in the eight years since Seligman was the president of the American Psychological Association, there has been an enormous amount of research in positive psychology. Folks across the United States, around the world, are taking up various aspects of it, and now we’re in the initial stages of educational endeavors to try to disseminate some of that research.
: Is this the first program in positive psychology?
JP: It is the first program in positive psychology. It’s our first year as well. What we’ve got is a Master of Applied Positive Psychology, or MAPP, and the basic idea is to bring in people. It’s a professional degree. It’s a one-year, calendar year. Most of the students already have their professional credentials. They’re out in the workplace. They’re successful, and they just want to immerse themselves in positive psychology so they can take it back into their workplace. We’ve got people from medicine, law, business. Our program is arranged so that, basically, folks come to campus once a month, and, in the intervening weeks, there is distance learning that takes place. Some of our students live in or near Philadelphia, but most of them live across the United States. We’ve got a couple of students who actually come in every month from Europe. It’s kind of a long commute, but it’s only once a month. A couple of Asian students actually moved to Philadelphia from Asia. So, most of the students have their professional degrees, but some are younger, just out of school, and want to immerse themselves in positive psychology before they get their professional degrees. Maybe they want to go on and get a PhD in clinical psychology or something like that, so they do this along the way.
: What first got you into William James in particular as opposed to any other pragmatist?
JP: For me, William James was important. My father’s a minister, and so my parents are educators, religious educators. I actually grew up in Mexico and spent my early childhood there because my parents were missionaries, so I have a very strong religious background and, as you know, William James wrote about religion. “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” in particular, was just a very powerful text for me because he explored some of the types of experiences that folks in my church have had, but he did it from a scholarly perspective that was very respectful of those experiences. He’s not dismissive of religion like some scientists tend to be. On the other hand, he came at it from a scholarly standpoint -- trying to understand it. So his being in between, kind of a dismissive, skeptical, “scientific” stance on the one hand, or a kind of true-believer-ism, out to convert the world, kind of uncritical, perhaps, stance on the other side, was a really powerful combination for me. I think that was a large reason why I became interested in James.
: Many people in philosophy attack any hints of ‘psychologism’ in philosophical writing. In the case of someone like William James, however, psychology and philosophy often seem inextricably intertwined, and indeed, he held a professorship in both during his career. What are your thoughts on the standard separation of these two disciplines and why do you think that James is still referenced by philosophers and psychologists alike?
JP: If you read ‘The Principles of Psychology,’ William James is explicit about trying to get psychology off as a science. Psychology was just getting started then as an empirical discipline, and James was very much for that process. To my mind, James is a great model of the importance of being clear when we’re talking about science and that it’s important not to allow our scientific discourse to grow so huge that nothing can lie outside of it. James is very critical of when scientists thought that science was the ultimate judicator of what was legitimate belief and what wasn’t. In part, James says, “Look, science itself grows.” There is a territory outside of science, so we can’t simply try to live our lives within the boundaries of scientific theories or scientific facts, and so on.
He’s very strong, both at identifying the importance of science and at identifying the limitations of science and at acknowledging the value of what lies outside of science or, perhaps, what science doesn’t yet know how to study. I think that may be a reason why he’s of interest to both psychologists and philosophers, because psychologists are interested in the scientific. “The Principles of Psychology” is just an amazing book in the field. Some would even say it’s probably the best introduction to psychology around. On the other hand, James was very respectful of the importance of religion and philosophical points that may lie outside of science, narrowly conceived.
: What do you hope to do with positive psychology? You said earlier that it helps people make their lives better.
JP: I think positive psychology and pragmatism both really emphasize the importance of experience. I think that both pragmatism and positive psychology can be very helpful allies in showing that an emphasis on experience isn’t just enthusiasm or dangerous or extreme. I think there’s a lot of suspicion in academic circles about getting too excited about something, like “That’s the domain of religion,” or “That’s the domain of politics.” Well, okay, but we’re human beings, after all. More and more research is indicating that human beings who aren’t emotionally intelligent aren’t rationally intelligent either.
: You do have a physics background so maybe you are somewhat more familiar with this: What do you feel advances in things like neuro-engineering and such varied engineering science, chemistry-oriented type approaches to psychology will have on the field of psychology in general?
JP: Huge, clearly. Psychology ranges from understanding the brain and how it functions neurologically all the way to more experiential kinds of things. When there’s a breakthrough in one area, it’s likely to have broad effects on other areas as well. Clearly, the kinds of things that are going on with the technological advances – the interdisciplinary work that’s going on at the neurological level is fascinating, wonderful – and it’s exciting because it’s a way of simply understanding the brain better, and because it’s a way of measuring neurophysiological effects of psychological interventions. One of the positive psychology interventions is to say the three blessings, or the three good things. Every night before you go to bed, you write down three good things that happened to you that day and why they happened. Does this intervention work? Does it make people happier? What’s going on here? Can you measure changes in the brain? At the moment, a large part of the evidence that those things actually do work is self-report. So, wouldn’t it be really interesting to be able to complement those kinds of measurements with more neurophysiological measurements?
: Sort of develop the tools to make it into more of a hard science?
JP: Correct, or at least to make the measurement more in terms of a hard science. That, I think, will help in a number of ways. More, it will help positive psychologists to know which interventions are effective for which persons. It would also, I think, help the broader population to know to what extent positive psychology interventions are effective.
: What do you think about the effect of things like artificial intelligence and cognitive neuroscience’s impact on philosophy or psychology or positive psychology? Some proponents of positive psychology reject cultural relativism and make the claim that a set of universal values can lead to happier lives for all cultures and societies. What are your thoughts on cultural relativism?
JP: That’s a really good question and I think that what positive psychology, as a science, wants to try to do is to try to be descriptive. What are different strategies that people use to try to achieve human flourishing and to what degree are those successful or not? So, is what we’re doing something that works pretty well, in the northeastern United States, with people who are basically privileged, academically gifted, or whatever, or is it something that really applies to everyone in the world? I think that, from the beginning, positive psychologists were very much concerned that this not be something merely for 21st century American intellectuals. In other words, there are a lot of positive psychologists who have done a lot of things or who were researching these certain lines before it was called positive psychology. But the biggest project that has been undertaken qua positive psychology is the publication of, the development of what’s called Values in Action Classification of Strengths and Virtues. You may be familiar with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, which is this book that’s got lists of hundreds of ways in which the human mind can go bad. Positive psychologists looked through that and said, “Okay, great, but where’s the good news? So where are the strengths?” There may be some, but there aren’t that many in there.
The Handbook of Character Strengths and Virtues, then, is an attempt to say, “What are the psychological strengths?” So, looking at Plato, looking at Aristotle, looking at Eastern thinkers, looking at Christian thinkers, I think one researcher even took a look at the values of the Klingon empire, just to make sure they had covered all the bases and really try to see what virtues kept coming up over and over again. The claim is not that these are absolute and only the virtues that are valued by human beings, but the claim is, “You know what? These are the ones that keep coming up over and over again, across time and across culture.” So the problem with a universal claim is the anthropological detail. A core that doesn’t claim to be absolute, that doesn’t claim to be absolutely universal, but what it argues is that it’s more than, just say, incidental. Why is it that in cultures so disparate, so divided in terms of geography and time and cultural perspectives and so on, why does there seem to be such a core of things that are commonly valued. Is it biological? Is it something innate in human beings in some ways? The common ground, I think, is that the claim is, “Look, these are ubiquitous or pervasive strengths and virtues that are valued across time, across culture, and, boy, isn’t it interesting that there is so much overlap and what can we learn by studying this overlap?”
One of the interesting things, too, about positive psychology empirical research is that there’s a strengths test that you can take online for free. There’s a website, www.authentichappiness.org, where you can go and take a test, and it’s the Strength Survey, and it will tell you which of these lists of strengths and virtues you happen to be particularly good at. And what’s interesting is that now people have taken this test from many different countries. In fact, from more countries than the number of countries that there are in the U.N. -- lots of people from lots of different places. And it’s interesting that the correlation, in terms of which strengths come up in the top five, is very strong across countries. Interestingly, the country that Americans are most different from is France. I’ll leave that to your interpretation. There’s a lot of similarity, but American adults are more similar to French adults and certainly to Chinese adults and Argentinean adults, than they are to American adolescents. So it seems there may be a sort of adolescent perspective on the world, adolescent strengths. So, in the empirical realm of the administration of this questionnaire, similarities continue to be present.
: Would you like to give us a brief introduction to what you’re going to be talking about when you come to Drexel?
JP: I’ll be talking about this question again of optimism and pessimism, and I’ll talk a little bit about some of the differences between optimism in psychology versus optimism in philosophy. The constructs in psychology are different from philosophy. In philosophy, the term optimism was coined to talk about Leibniz, Leibniz’s views and those are a little different from what are typically investigated in empirical psychology these days. We’ll have a bit of a discussion about optimism and pessimism -- what it means in philosophical discourse -- and then, again, try to see how adequate that is and do we need another way of seeing things, perhaps?
And meliorism, which was actually coined in the nineteenth century and taken up by William James and others, what does meliorism mean? How can that provide a different view, a different perspective, and one that involves an agentive perspective? What happens if you think in terms of actually being able to make a difference in the world? We’ll talk about the philosophical points here, and then we’ll also have some case studies to talk about.
I’ll talk in a little more detail about positive psychology and, again, I’ll take a political example to try to make the case as well for these two kinds of meliorism that I think are important. I’m going to be traveling the week before I’ll be at Drexel. I’ll be in San Antonio at a meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy where I’ll be presenting a paper based on this information, so we’ll see at that point what I’ve found out from my colleagues, whether they think this is a good idea or not. I’ll have some revisions to do before the talk at Drexel, so we’ll see.