Jarden, A. (2012). Positive Psychologists on Positive Psychology: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, International

Journal of Wellbeing, 2(2), 136–139. doi:10.5502/ijw.v2i2.14

Aaron Jarden

Open Polytechnic of New Zealand

aaron.jarden@openpolytechnic.ac.nz

www.internationaljournalofwellbeing.org

136

EXPERT INSIGHT

Positive Psychologists on Positive Psychology:

Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi

Interview by

Aaron Jarden

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University, and

Director of the Quality of Life Research Center. He is noted for his work in the study

of happiness and creativity, and the immensely popular book Flow. Martin Seligman has

described Mihaly as ‚the world’s leading researcher on positive psychology‛.

In general terms and in your mind, what are some of the distinctive features of positive

psychology?

The distinctive feature is that it allows me to interact with people whom otherwise I would

have had a hard time finding. I’ve been in this field for 35 or 40 years and I’ve always felt

marginalized and now suddenly, there are all kinds of interesting people that we can deal with,

interact with and stimulate each other ideas. That’s the field aspect of positive psychology. The

question could refer to the content and ideas, or to positive psychology as a social endeavor (I

hate the word movement), so I’ll give you the explanation in terms of the joint endeavor. In

terms of the content, it is a very varied assortment of different things. It’s hard to find an exact

common element of positive psychology, except in terms of the fact that everybody is trying to

understand how to leverage and increase positive aspects of human experience and human life.

That can vary from physical wellbeing to alternate meanings of life, and the subjective aspects.

I’m mostly interested in the subjective quality of experience, as you probably know.

Are there any key events that changed the course of your career into moving towards

positive psychology?

I never moved towards it, I always did it since I wrote my dissertation in 1965, which is now

about a half century ago. That was essentially about one aspect of positive psychology that I’m

stilled involved with, namely creativity, which I think is an important aspect. Back then there

was no positive psychology to turn towards. We just started it with Martin Seligman in Hawaii

in the late 1990s, when we met accidently there and we kind of decided we should have a more

visible group studying the aspects of human behavior that had been neglected by psychology

for half a century. This involved all of the things that people are now pursuing and calling

positive psychology. But to us, as we started the whole thing, we had no idea where it would

go. I was just hoping to be able to connect with some colleagues across the US and elsewhere

who had the same interest that I had. I envisioned a little special interest group of 50 or 60

people who were interested in this issue; but at the recent World Congress on Positive

Psychology in Philadelphia there were 1,600 people from all over and that’s almost scary,

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because I think good ideas are probably more often killed by premature promises than they are

killed by opposition. Suddenly we have a huge response from everyone who was kind of

frustrated and stymied by psychology previously. I saw the field growing so quickly and so

exponentially into the future, and that’s why I started this positive development PhD

programme here at Clermont University. I thought, ‘hey, we should begin to train people to act

as kind of gatekeepers or at least supports to this developing field’ so that it’s not all kind of

superficial enthusiasm, but it’s grounded in critical, reflective, even skeptical, research as

science should be.

What do you think are the best things that positive psychology has achieved to date?

It has suddenly broken across the whole globe, and connected people who would not have

known each other before. I mean there you are in New Zealand and we are talking about these

issues and we could turn and talk to South Africa, Korea, Germany, and know that there are

people there who are also concerned with the improvement of human life and true

psychological understanding. Just to create this network has been sensational in such a short

period. People are now beginning to really take seriously these things that before were so

marginal to people’s interests, like gratitude, or forgiveness, or courage, all things that people

thought were kind of really minor or uninteresting areas of studying psychology. Students now

can really get PhDs done by writing a good research plan to study these issues at the human

level. So there are two things. One is empowering people to feel that what they are doing is not

flying in the wilderness, but there is an echo coming back from all over—that’s very important.

The other one is that the subject matter of positive human activity is being taken seriously and

researched and is entering the vocabulary of psychology.

What are the current issues of concern for the field of positive psychology?

The ones that I sense are really important are to maintain a healthy balance between the basic

research, and application and discrimination, because it’s very easy to get excited by the ideas

and then say, ‘Ok, I read a book and now I can be a life coach’ or something. If too many people

take it at that level, positive psychology will have a very short life because it’s not so easy to

change things. If we promise and come across as knowing all the answers and being able to

apply them, and then they don’t work, then the public will say, ‘It’s just another fad, forget

about it’, and positive psychology will get a bad name. So we need both, we need to take

seriously the issues. One of the things that positive psychology is now doing, kind of routinely,

is that so many people are using so-called interventions. Interventions last for a few weeks of

doing something, like writing letters to people who you are grateful for, or another interventio n

may be to think about what you are grateful about and so forth; and then thinking that these

types of interventions can be spread around to everyone to make life better. Now, those

interventions are really important to understanding the mechanisms of gratitude, but as

solutions to the human condition I don’t think that’s where it’s at. The real interventions in our

life are family, school, jobs, and the political systems in which we live: these interventions don’t

last two weeks, they last all our lives. I mean, if you go to school, it’s thirteen years of sitting at

a bench, and that’s an intervention and it’s much more powerful in many ways than what we

can come up with. Positive psychology needs to inform schools and change their pedagogy so

that the intervention of education is going to be more growth-producing for humans. And the

same thing for jobs, the same thing for families, and so on. I think eventually we have to realize

that if we want to be successful, we have to address the kinds of institutional context in which

we live, which are the ones intervening in our lives in a substantive way. The kind of

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interventions which we can do is to learn what works and how it works, and it may be a good

adjunct to therapy in some ways, but we can’t stop there and believe that we will solve the

problems of human kind by doing those things. That’s why I’m worried about prematurely

institutionalizing positive psychology so that we have a canon—this is what positive

psychology is, this is how you apply it. If we do this now, we are going to paint ourselves into a

very narrow corner of reality. We have to keep being open and growing conceptually and as

practitioners; both our practice and our knowledge have to stay open and grow.

Which discipline can positive psychology learn from most, moving forward?

Other disciplines outside of psychology that are the closest in some ways to our field are

biology on the one side, and sociology on the other. Both of those are quite relevant to add to

our knowledge base. But then you could also jump and say, ‘Well how about spirituality?’.

That’s one of the most attractive fields that our students respond to, meditation and various

forms of Buddhism practice and so forth, and again, I think those are very valuable and we

should by all means understand them better and integrate them in what we do, but I don’t

think they have the final answer. Because of my original work in creativity and my interest in

evolution, I really believe that for these new idea systems to really become influential and

paradigm shifting, they have to grow, they have to be open, they have to keep refining their

objectives and their purpose as they go, rather than say, ‘Ok, this is it’.

Who do you look up to in the field? Or who do you think is going to lead the field forward

over the next 10 years?

I don’t want to single out any person because there are so many, but I know that when we

started positive psychology with Martin Seligman, we started it with the Akumal conference in

Mexico. When we decided to start, I insisted that what we really needed to influence is the new

generation. So we developed this method, which was to write to fifty of the most influential

psychologists in the US; and Martin knew them because he was just elected president of the

APA (American Psychological Association). We asked each one of these fifty people if they

knew of a former student or psychologist under 30 who would be interested in working on

these issues that we wrote in a couple of sentences, defining positive psychology. We were after

people who were interested in these issues and who, at age 50, were likely to become

chairperson of a psychology department. So that was our idea. All of these fifty people

answered and sent us names, and then we wrote to these fifty nominees and we asked them to

send us their CVs and statements. Then we selected 20 out of them, and invited them for a

week, all expenses paid, to a fishing village in Mexico called Akumal. All twenty candidates

accepted and we had this week in which we were always, 24 hours a day, in swimming trunks

and flip flops and talking, just very informally, about what we saw was missing in psychology

and what we could do to make it right. Of the twenty people, since then half of them have

written books and the other half have written influential articles. For example, Barbara

Fredrickson was there, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Tim Kasser, and John Haidt—all of those people. So

this method kind of worked, because it represented something that I believe in, which is that

we have to appeal to the imagination of the minds of young people because whatever we do, it

is not going to be carried over by us, meaning Martin or myself. We just started it out and we

hoped to leave it in good shape, but the real responsibility is in the hands of that generation.

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Are there any positive psychology projects going on that excite you, or that you are involved

with that you are excited about?

Well, it’s not directly positive psychology but it’s because of the kind of work in positive

psychology that I’ve been doing, even before positive psychology started; so, for instance, there

is a new academy in China which is trying to be a kind of intellectual spark plug for the

country. They built a huge campus, a beautiful elegant campus, and they invited masters from

other places to go and start studios where people from the government and business can go

and sit around and talk about how to apply, for instance, flow and creativity. I didn’t need to

go there and start a studio. I want to go and find out what’s going on, but I don’t plan to move

and learn Chinese from scratch at my age. That’s one interesting thing that is going on.

Otherwise I continue to do research with my students on the same kinds of things that I did

before, namely flow. There are a couple of new articles on flow in chess which I think are very

interesting, and potentially kind of paradigm shifting. Also work on creativity: I just came back

from the European creativity conference in Portugal, where people are using some of my ideas

to do research and I collaborate with some of those people. A lot of my energy is directed to

making this PhD programme at Claremont work, because it’s not easy to start something from

scratch and make it work. So that’s one thing I’m working on.

What’s one piece of advice for individuals looking to help and contribute to grow the field

of positive psychology?

If they want to contribute, the only advice I can give is that they should do good work. They

should take it seriously, they should not assume that they know what it is, but they should try

to push the envelope and try to understand better what humans need for the next step in

evolution and try to make it work. That’s what they should be focusing on. It needs to be

something that they decide. The important thing is not to take it lightly and not to take it

dogmatically: there are two extremes.

Author

Aaron Jarden

Open Polytechnic of New Zealand

aaron.jarden@openpolytechnic.ac.nz