TED

I went to MAPP and all I got was this…

Schwartz…deck of cards! No, that´s not true obviously.

Today has been the first day of MAPP´s second onsite learning period – and actually, every student did in fact get a deck of cards as a gift from Barry Schwartz, who is this weekend´s guest lecturer. It was created by Brooke Allen and is supposed to help us to create a “robust Philosophy of Life” by answering 54 questions on life, meaning, and sense of purpose. I have yet to try them out – but I will let you know how it all worked out.

Card Game

As before, I do feel I´m not yet ready to write on what we´ve learned today. I´m still in the process of digesting everything that has been said. Instead, I´m going to build on a recent article that summarizes the most important ideas from Schwartz´s book ‘The Paradox of Choice’. In that post, I described why Schwartz believes that having too many choices can make us miserable.

The question is: is that really true? After all, we live in a free market economy and that´s supposed to make us happier than experiencing lots of constraints, e.g., like it used to be in most (former) communist countries. A powerful piece of evidence comes from the Amish people, a religious community with German heritage of about 250.000 people that pursue a simple, non-materialistic lifestyle – basically they ignore all kinds of modern comforts like cars, telephones, and electricity in general. While this may sound not too inviting there may be some interesting upsides this kind of lifestyle. Notably, the depression rate of the Amish is only a fraction of the overall U.S.  population. One explanation for this might be the very close social ties that the Amish are embedded in. But yet another hypothesis can be drawn from the work of Schwartz: the Amish only have to make a fraction of the choices that we have to make in our lives. They do not have to worry about which clothes to wear because basically there is a rule. The do not have to worry about which car to buy because it is simply not allowed to own a car. In most orders, it´s not allowed to maintain a website – and so on.

At the end of the day, that may not seem very attractive to most ‘modern’ people. Good news is: we do not have to copy them. But we should be aware of the principle behind those actions: choosing not choose can be a potent way of improving our lives. Setting rules, standards, and default modes is be a powerful trajectory towards increased mental health.

How does this relate to your life?

Does unlimited choice make us miserable?

The answer just might be: yes! I´m really looking forward to the next onsite meeting with my 2013/14 fellow MAPP students. One of the guest lecturers will be Barry Schwartz, author of Paradox of Choice. While it is true that having no choice at all makes us impassive and miserable, the other end of the continuum might just be as harmful. In his book, Schwartz argues that having to choose from seemingly unlimited options (think of the variety of cereals in a typical supermarket, or sujects to study, or partners to date) could account for the sharp increase in cases of clinical depression in the western world (especially the U.S.). The explanation:

  • Choosing from more options requires more ‘mental energy’.
  • More options typically also means there are more attractive options, but with different features. Having to make trade-offs makes us unhappy.
  • More options lead to higher opportunity costs after having chosen something in the end.
  • More options lead to higher levels of regret – when the choice has turned out to be wrong.
  • There even exists pre-decision regret – a kind of prospection on how it might feel to have made a wrong choice.
  • More attractive options lead to having higher standards – which in turn leads to liking our choices to a lesser extent.
  • Unlimited choice cultivates a culture of personal responsibility which in turn promotes blaming ourselves for the results.

All this may not be very healthy after all. No time for reading? Just watch Barry´s TED Talk.

A Pain in the Ass: What Teachers and Speakers could learn from Colonoscopy

A couple of days ago, James Pawelski, the MAPP´s director, sent us a comprehensive reading list. It also contains Authentic Happiness, one of Martin Seligman´s earlier popular science books on Positive Psychology. Right at the beginning, Seligman describes an experiment that was carried out by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and colleagues.

Before I go into detail: Since you can read this text, I assume you went to school for a couple of years. Consequently, you´ve experienced being taught by a lot of different teachers – with their teaching skills representing a kind of bell curve: most were more or less o.k., a few were superduper, and some were the proverbial pain in the ass. Basically, it´s the same with (keynote) speakers. I attend a lot of conferences and conventions. Once again, most speakers are okish, a few rock, and some, unfortunately, just waste your time.

Now obviously, not everybody can be a master of rhetoric like, e.g., Barack Obama. But even if – for whatever reason – you suck big time by objective criteria, you can still manage to make a lasting, somewhat positive impression on your audience by adhering to a simple rule:

Save the best for last!

Try to give a first-class conclusion! Thanks to the so called recency effect, most people will tend to forget your overall performance. Instead, their evaluation will be by and large based on the final minutes of your performance.

For scientific proof, let´s go back to Kahneman – and a real pain in the ass. For a study, he and his colleagues surveyed several hundred people that had to undergo a colonoscopy. By random assignment, half the patients had a minute added to the end of their procedure during which the tip of the colonoscope remained in the rectum – but without moving, which is considerably less painful than any movement. The results in a nutshell: even though they experienced more pain all in all, patients who underwent the prolonged procedure rated the entire experience as significantly less unpleasant. Additionally, rates of returning for a repeat colonoscopy were slightly higher.

Thank God, speaking skills can be improved easily – beyond just giving a nice conclusion. For inspiration, you might want check out this blog post listing 15 TED Talks on happiness, motivation, and more.

Pennsylvania, here I come…

The final potential stumbling block has been removed. Today, I have obtained my student visa for the U.S. Even though Germany is typically not considered to be a member of some axis of evil, getting my doctoral degree was a piece of cake compared to this procedure – at least subjectively.

So now I´m all set to board an airplane which will take me to Philadelphia on September 3, The next morning, it´ll be the first day of “immersion week” for the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program 2013/201 at University of Pennsylvania. I´m really grateful I have been chosen as one of only 30 individuals who, for ten months, will take a deep dive into Positive Psychology in all of its wonderful facets – guided by some of the most exceptional scholars in the field.

Flagge Pennsylvania

With a little help from…?

Even though I oppose to new age thinking as conveyed by “phenomena” like The Secret etc., sometimes it really does feel like magic when a supposedly unreachable goal suddenly becomes attainable. I learned about the MAPP about a year ago when I read Martin Seligman´s newest book Flourish, where he describes the program and its goals in one of the chapters. I was momentarily intrigued – because back then I was close to finalizing the writing process for my own book “Lizenz zur Zufriedenheit” (License for Satisfaction), which is also by and large based on Positive Psychology. The book contains some 300 references to research papers and popular science books. When I visited the MAPP homepage, I discovered that several of the scholars that I´ve cited most often are actually teaching in that program. I thought to myself: “If I ever go back to university to get another degree, it will have to this one!”

Penn_Logo

Yet, the University of Pennsylvania belongs to the Ivy League – meaning the graduate programs are not exactly a bargain buy. Having several jobs and a family in Germany also meant I would have to fly to Philadelphia at least ten times and stay in a hotel for a minimum of 40 nights – all in all adding up to a considerable amount money, which, frankly speaking, I could not find anywhere on my savings account back then. But, without going into detail, at the end of 2012, I made an arrangement with my boss at Bertelsmann, Dr. Hays Steilberg, making it all possible. Thank you very much, Hays! I won´t forget.

And just in case the “Law of Attraction” – against all odds – really does work, I would also like to express my gratitude for the inscrutable mechanics of the universe.

California Pennsylvania, here I come…

P.S.
If you would like to get a short introduction to Positive Psychology, you might want to watch this humorous and insightful TED Talk by “Mr. Positive Psychology” himself, Martin Seligman.