From the Chairman

Bright-Sided: What Does It Tell Us?

By Neal H. Mayerson
Chairman, VIA Institute on Character

Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-Sided is getting a lot of attention.  I have only read about her book and heard her interviewed about it, so my comments are not about her book as much as about the media coverage she is getting. 

As far as I can tell, this media attention speaks to many people’s inherent appreciation of the complexity of being human and a reaction against what they perceive as efforts to oversimplify and make things shallow.  People take offense at assertions that their struggles in life might be simply dealt with by practicing a few things such as gratitude, mindfulness, and managing their positivity ratios.  They know that their discontent with ineffective governments or selfish people is justified and they don’t want to be neutered by a community value to “be positive.”  They have a healthy suspicion about prescriptions to just focus on the positive and ignore the problems. 

Has positive psychology become known as the purveyor of an oversimplified, one-sided approach to life?  To some degree it has.  The public has expressed great interest in the topic of “happiness” as evidenced by media coverage and publishers’ choices of books and titles to promote.  They print things that will sell, and people have been buying “happiness”.   Of the original three legs of the positive psychology stool, positive personality traits (character) and positive organizations have received much less attention than positive affect.  We are seeing a backlash now from this relative imbalance as well as from the assertion by some that positive psychology is only concerned with the plus side of life. 

Positive psychology is the scientific study of what’s best about human beings and how we create our best lives.  Our lives are a series of ups and downs, and therefore, to live our best lives means to be our best in the various situations we experience in our lives.  Positive psychology is expanding the tools we have to live our lives.  These tools can be used to build our “dream homes” AND to repair things in our existing homes that have broken.  Martin Seligman, often called the “father of positive psychology,” has always said that positive psychology is meant to complement and NOT supplant the rest of psychology.  It is the other half of the loaf of bread, not the entire loaf. 

I suppose all of us involved in positive psychology can do a better job of providing a more holistic and balanced perspective when we are teaching, publishing, or being interviewed by the press.