Modest systems psychology: A neutral complement to positive psychological thinking

Abstract

Publication InformationHogan, M. J (2008) The positive psychology movement has recently reconfigured the thinking of psychologists by bringing to the forefront of enquiry a scientific focus on positive emotions, character strengths, and human virtue, the ultimate aim of which is to further our understanding of human nature and optimize our potential for a good life.This paper proposes a modest systems psychology as a neutral complement to positive psychological thinking in an effort to facilitate a systems view on action optimization. Modest Systems Psychology 3The challenge of modesty to joy "Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word 'yes' forever. But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate.Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable.Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some 'no! no!' must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power. The range of individual differences in this respect is enormous; but whatever the mixture of yeses and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in the right proportion for him. This, he feels, is my 1 A reviewer has asked me to substantiate the claim that William James was in fact a modest psychologist. A reading of his private correspondence suggests to me that he was (James & James, 1920). Other modest psychologists might wish to contest this claim.Modest Systems Psychology 4 proper vocation, this is the optimum, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I find the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship without which my soul's energy expire".(James, 1902, p 299, original italics).Ultimately, William James is talking about the range of individual differences in human personality associated with optimization of positive experiences, and his own sentiment and experience leads him to believe that the laws describing the optimization of positive experiences will be different for everyone.Our vigorous pursuit after truth, our desire to understand the 'harmony' of the universe has spurred many thinkers on to discover and do great things 2 . For example, one byproduct of scientific discovery has been an exponential growth in novel technological developments (Pettersson, 1996) --and without sufficient interindividual variation no new niches would be carved and technology development at a population level would stagnate (Basalla, 1988;Odling-Smee, Laland, & Feldman, 2003).However, much like William James assumed, the mathematics describing human functioning -and the functioning of living systems generally -has turned out to be less orderly and harmonious, more dynamic, variable, and complex than are the mathematics describing concrete physical systems (Bertalanffy, 1968;Fischer & Bidell, 2006 Certainly, when it comes to behaving like a scientist, sentiment and formal logic are inextricably bou...