25 Module 25: A Positive Outlook

Throughout its history, the “helping” side of psychology has focused on relieving suffering. For example, researchers and therapists in clinical psychology have made great progress at identifying the causes and characteristics of and treatments for psychological disorders, such as depression, schizophrenia, and anxiety disorders (Modules 28, 29, 30). The removal of disordered patterns of behavior certainly relieves people’s suffering. It allows them to function in society and in some cases, literally, to live. It does not necessarily lead them to happiness and fulfillment, however; the absence of bad does not equal good. For example, you can be non-depressed and not particularly happy at the same time. So psychology can improve people’s lives not just by alleviating negative emotions and disorders but by helping them to increase their positive emotions, such as happiness and fulfillment. These are the goals of humanistic and positive psychology, psychological perspectives on topics within personality, social, and clinical psychology that emphasize positive emotions and behaviors.

Humanistic psychology originally arose in the 1950’s as a reaction against both behaviorism and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic approach (Mischel & Morf, 2003). Humanistic psychologists believe that human beings have a natural orientation to develop and reach their full potential, that they are basically good (Rogers, 1951). Humanistic psychologists essentially asserted the opposite of what Freud had believed. They contended that people do not need to be restrained because of their negative and unacceptable impulses but that they are already too restrained. Behaviorists believed that people are inherently neither good nor bad but that good and bad behaviors arise as the natural consequences of reward and punishment. Humanistic psychologists, on the other hand, emphasize the role of people’s free will in determining their own behavior.

The two most important humanistic psychologists were Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. Maslow proposed that people are motivated by a hierarchy of needs (Module 20). According to Maslow, human beings’ ultimate goal is to become self-actualized, to reach their full potential. A self-actualized person is one who actually is what he or she has the potential to be. As Maslow put it, “What a man can be, he must be” (Maslow, 1943, p. 383). Carl Rogers similarly emphasized that human beings have a deep-seated need to develop or grow (Rogers, 1980). Both Maslow and Rogers recognized that aspects of our environments often interfere with our natural need to grow.

As humanistic psychology developed and gained followers, it began to stress that a human being must be considered as a whole person, rather than as a collection of individual mental processes, and that we are conscious and have free will. We are driven to achieve goals and to seek meaning, value, and creativity in our lives (Bugental, 1964). It was the idea that human beings are whole persons that brought humanistic psychology into its most serious conflict with mainstream scientific psychology. Psychologists throughout the academic world have built their careers on a “divide and conquer” strategy (Module 18) examining individual mental processes, an approach that humanistic psychologists rejected. As researchers made great strides in identifying those processes throughout the 1960’s, 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s, and humanistic psychology became alienated from research, humanistic psychology’s influence among mainstream scientific psychologists waned.

Positive psychology—the subject of the bulk of this module—is a newer approach that has adopted many of the core beliefs of humanistic psychology, including the idea that human beings need and want to grow and achieve their own goals, combined with a respect for and reliance on research. Although humanistic psychology still exists, it has declined in influence in recent years and positive psychology has grown more popular among psychologists. The primary focus of positive psychology is research related to positive emotions and feelings, such as happiness, contentment, optimism, and life satisfaction.

25.1 Causes and consequences of happiness and optimism

25.2 Prosocial behavior

25.3 Self-concept and self-esteem

READING WITH A PURPOSE

Remember and Understand

By reading and studying Module 25, you should be able to remember and describe:

• Goals, characteristics, and methods of humanistic and positive psychology (25 intro)
• How we can predict our own happiness (25.1)
• Relationships between life situations and happiness: hedonic adaptation (25.1)
• What predicts happiness (25.1)
• Benefits of pleasant emotions, for self and others (25.2)
• “Bad” pleasant emotions: schadenfreude, contempt, hubris (25.2)
• Dangers of happiness and optimism (25.2)
• Contents of self-concept (25.3)
• Benefits and dangers of high self-esteem (25.3)
• Self-enhancement and self-serving biases: defensive pessimism, self-handicapping (25.3)

Apply

By reading and thinking about how the concepts in Module 25 apply to real life, you should be able to:

• Generate examples of hedonic adaptation (25.1)
• Describe good and bad consequences of your own pleasant emotions (25.1)

Analyze, Evaluate, and Create

By reading and thinking about Module 25, participating in classroom activities, and completing out-of-class assignments, you should be able to:

• Explain how your behaviors, such as choice of major, are consistent or inconsistent with your beliefs about the role of money in happiness (25.1)
• Describe the importance of possible selves for your own self-concept and motivation. (25.3)
• Identify self-enhancement or self-serving biases in yourself (25.3)

25.1 Causes and Consequences of Happiness and Optimism

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

-The Declaration of Independence

I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness.  That is clear.  Whether one believes in religion or not, whether one believes in this religion or that religion, we all are seeking something better in life.  So, I think the very motion of our life is toward happiness.

-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Suppose that you are healthy, financially secure, and living in relative comfort and safety. But somehow, something does not quite feel right. It is not that there is anything wrong, really, it just feels like something is missing. You would probably start thinking about how to have a more positive outlook on life, how to be happier, how to feel more comfortable with who you are and what you are doing with your life. You might try to find a solution by meditating or praying or talking to people you trust. Maybe you would read a self-improvement book. You might not be thinking about consulting a psychotherapist, a helping psychologist. Again, it is not that there is anything wrong, so it might not seem that psychology has anything to offer you. You are thinking about only one side of the helping part of psychology, however. If you turn to the findings of positive psychology, you just might find the answers you are seeking. Positive psychology marries a desire to promote positive emotions, including happiness, satisfaction, and optimism, with a scientific approach to acquiring psychological knowledge. What positive psychologists have discovered about happiness, optimism, and self-esteem might surprise you. More importantly, it just might help you.

Predicting Our Own Happiness

More than anything, positive psychologists are interested in what makes people happy. Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “Why would I need a psychologist to tell me how to be happy? I know what makes me happy!” But perhaps the most significant observation about happiness is that we often make serious errors when predicting what will make us happy. More generally, we refer to this process as affective forecasting, predicting our future emotions, usually in response to some present or possible future event (Kurtz, 2018). And, similar to what we saw about human reasoning, this process is prone to errors. This is bad enough if we just consider getting the prediction wrong. When we plan future events on the basis of these incorrect predictions, the problem gets much worse.

Of course, much of the time, we do not make these errors. For example, you might choose to go running because you predict it will put you in a good mood. Many people eat chocolate, or some other favorite food, for the same reason. An individual might predict that if she has an argument with her husband, she will be in a bad mood for the rest of the evening. Very commonly, predictions such as these are exactly right (Lowenstein & Schkade, 1999). Problems often occur when we think more long-term and large scale, however. We have a tendency to be pretty bad at predicting how changes in our major life situations will or will not impact our long-term well-being. The two essential errors we make are called impact bias and durability bias. So we are not saying you are going to be completely wrong in most cases. We are saying that people have a tendency to overestimate the intensity of our future emotions (impact bias) and how long the effects will last (durability bias).

Consider careers. Suppose you are fired from a position that you liked a great deal and had hoped to keep for many years. How would that influence your happiness over the next few years? If you are at all like a group of college professors who had a similar experience, the answer is, “not as much as you might think.” Let us explain a bit. When professors begin their careers, they are essentially “on probation” for a number of years and are known as assistant professors. At the end of the probationary period, perhaps 3 to 6 years, if the assistant professor is granted tenure, he or she gets to keep the position and is promoted to associate professor (and later, to full professor). If tenure is not granted, the assistant professor is essentially fired. Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues (1998) asked 97 assistant professors to predict how much the eventual decision about their tenure would affect their long-term life satisfaction. They predicted that they would be significantly happier if they received tenure and that the feeling would last for five years. The research team compared these predictions to the actual life satisfaction of 123 former assistant professors, some of whom had received tenure and some of whom had not. Contrary to what the current assistant professors predicted, the tenure decision had had virtually no impact on overall life satisfaction, even in the first few years after the decision, an example of both impact and durability biases.

Gilbert’s research team repeated this kind of comparison for being selected or rejected for a job, breaking up with a romantic partner, seeing a preferred candidate win an election, discovering from a personality test that one has an undesirable personality, and reading about the death of a child in a newspaper article. For all of the situations, the respondents overestimated the long-term impact of these events on overall life satisfaction or happiness.

Because people do not realize that many life changes and situations have a relatively small role in happiness, they make important decisions and plan their lives based on faulty predictions. For example, many people select locations to live based on climate; in essence, they believe that a particular climate will make them happy. Indeed, students attending colleges in California are more satisfied with the climate than those attending colleges in the Midwest; but the two groups of students do not differ at all in overall happiness (Schkade & Kahneman, 1998). Other research has shown that people mispredict the impact on future emotions of personal and environmental changes, such as weight gain or increases in air pollution, major job changes, and major health changes (Loewenstein & Frederick, 1997; Wiggins et al., 1992). For example, one study found that people incorrectly predicted their emotional response to positive or negative HIV tests; people who received positive results were less distressed and those who received negative results were less happy than they had predicted (Sieff et al., 1999).

What Does Not Predict Happiness Very Well?

It turns out that many major differences in people’s life situations—or at least the ones that have been researched—have only small relationships with happiness. Consider, for example, what may be the most common belief, that money makes people happy.

Money and Happiness

Even if people do not come right out and state that money buys happiness, many live and make important decisions as if they believe it to be true (Seligman, 2003). The belief is strong, and it has been getting stronger. For example, the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA has been surveying college freshmen throughout the US every year since 1967. The desire to be “very well off financially” has been the number one rated value for several years in a row, with 84% of students rating it is essential or very important in 2019 (Stolzenberg et al., 2020).

So nearly 85% of college freshmen believe that it is very important or essential to be very well off financially. Are they correct? Not really. There is almost certainly a positive relationship between money and happiness, but as we have been hinting, the relationship is weaker than many people believe. The research is quite consistent. Among the very poor, an increase in income is likely to lead to an increase in happiness. Once you reach a level at which your basic needs are met, however, more money has a smaller impact on your happiness (Diener & Diener, 1995; Diener & Seligman, 2004; Helliwell, 2003; Schyns, 2003). As Daniel Gilbert, one of the key researchers in this area has put it, there is more difference in happiness between earners of $15,000 and $40,000 per year than between earners of $100,000 and $1,000,000 per year.

Overall, income explains about 9% of the variability in happiness ratings. Although this is a low overall amount, it does reveal that there can be substantial differences between people at the top and bottom of the income scale (Luhmann & Intelesiano, 2018), so again, we are not saying there is no relationship. We are saying that it may not be not worth it to choose a $60,000 job you hate over a $50,000 job you love.

Interestingly, researchers have also discovered what they call the  “dark side” of the American Dream, although by now, the research has been conducted in other areas of the world, too. Surveys of 18-year olds and adults in the US, college students in the US and South Korea, and business school students in Singapore found that individuals who said that acquiring wealth was an important goal in their lives had lower psychological well-being and energy, were less productive in school, work, and community, and had more anxiety and depression than those not so concerned about acquiring wealth. Those who reported that their important goals were not wealth but rather personal growth, self-esteem, good relationships with family and friends, and a desire to improve the world fared better on most of the measures (Kasser & Ahuvia ,2002; Kasser & Ryan, 1993; 1996; Kim et al., 2003).

You might note that these studies measured only whether people have goals to acquire wealth, not whether they achieved those goals. Fair enough. The best way to determine the relationship between happiness and a goal of acquiring wealth is through longitudinal research (examining groups of individuals over time), which one study has managed to do. The study found that when college students who had the goal of acquiring wealth reached their late 30’s, those who earned high incomes did not score lower on measures of life satisfaction, as you might expect from the earlier “dark side” research. On the other hand, they did not score higher, as you would expect for people who had achieved their life’s goals. Further, whether they had achieved their goal or not, the participants who had the goal of acquiring wealth had lower satisfaction with their family and friends, so there may still be lingering negative effects of focusing on money (Nickerson et al., 2003).

Taken together, these results suggest that materialism, placing importance on money, possessions, image, and status, is consistently associated with lower levels of happiness, a conclusion verified by a meta-analysis of 179 individual studies (Dittmar et al., 2014; Kasser, 2018). Further, longitudinal studies covering time periods ranging from one year to 12 years found that as peoples’ materialism increased, their happiness decreased (Kasser, 2018).

But wait, you might say. My uncle makes $3 million dollars per year; he goes on many exotic vacations, drives a $90,000 Porche and a Tesla, and he has many friends and is very happy. We have two thoughts for you. First, you cannot be sure that someone is happy by seeing how he spends his money. It may just be that he is going on all of those vacations and buying all those things because he is unhappy and is searching for some experience or magical purchase that will make him happy. Second, and more importantly, you cannot argue from individual people that something is true in general; you cannot generalize from testimonials and case studies. (We have lost count of how many times we have made this point, but by now we are sure you get the idea that it is an important one.) For every happy rich person you find, we may be able to find several happy poor people, several unhappy rich people, and several unhappy poor people. Psychologists do research using large numbers of people so we do not have to rely solely on individual cases to draw conclusions.

On the other hand, we have little doubt that some people can use their money to purchase vacations and expensive products that make them happy. If they had not had the money, however, perhaps they would have found another way to be happy. Consider a finding from a survey of lottery winners. These newly rich people reported that they derived less pleasure than non-winners from everyday events, such as reading or eating (Brickman et al., 1978). And anyway, it may be that buying expensive products is not the most effective way to use the money. Individuals report that they derive more happiness from purchases that lead to experiences (say, concerts, travel) than material purchases (such as clothing, jewelry, electronics), regardless of the cost of the purchase (van Boven & Gilovich, 2003).

Other Potential Sources of Happiness

You might now be able to guess that it is not just money that makes a relatively small contribution to our long-term happiness. In reality, researchers have found many additional major life circumstances that have only a small impact on happiness. Factors such as age, gender, race, income, marital status, education level, physical attractiveness, and health have only small correlations with happiness or life satisfaction (Campbell et al., 1976; Diener et al., 1995; Okun & George, 1984).

You might be tempted to think that, although individually these factors may not have much of an effect on happiness, perhaps in combination they are the formula. For example, maybe being married with a high income, good health, and lots of education together lead to happiness. There is probably some truth to this, but not as much as you might think, and the information may not be particularly useful anyway. First, many of these factors themselves are correlated with one another. For example, income tends to go up with education, so the two factors would probably not contribute independently to happiness, even if they did cause it. (Of course, because these studies are not experiments, we cannot say with confidence that any factor is a cause at all.) Second, several of the factors (for example, age, ethnicity, intelligence, and health to a degree) are not exactly under our control, so even if they were independent causes, we could not use them to enhance our own happiness.

When a Really Good Thing Is Not Enough

It is true that changes in one’s life situation, such as a sudden windfall of money, can lead to an immediate increase in happiness. The problem is that the increase tends to be short-lived. Similarly, although negative events cause an initial large increase in sadness and other negative emotions, the effects often wear off over time (see durability bias above). How can that be? Why do these major life changes not have an impact on our long-term happiness? One major reason is an extension of some ideas from research into Sensation and Perception. We judge the brightness and movement of objects by comparing them to surrounding objects. We are relatively insensitive to the absolute levels of motion or brightness, but extremely sensitive to contrast, or changes. So in order to sense some stimulus over time, it must change. If it does not change, we adapt to it and stop sensing it, a phenomenon called sensory adaptation (Module 12). It is a remarkably efficient strategy that saves our brains the trouble of paying attention to the vast majority of our world that is exactly the same as it was one second ago.

We make judgments about our experiences using a similar process. We adapt, or get used to, situations that do not change over the long-term. These unchanging aspects act essentially as a background and do not enter into our judgments about our current happiness. The idea has been dubbed hedonic adaptation by researchers to distinguish it from sensory adaptation (Frederick & Lowenstein, 1999). Basically, because of hedonic adaptation, we will often judge our happiness by comparing our current situation to the background level determined by the recent past. If it is markedly different, then we may notice that we are particularly happy or unhappy.

So, if you win the lottery tomorrow, you will jump up and down and laugh at how wrong your psychology textbook was about money and happiness (perhaps in your new BMW on your way to the Lexus dealership). Wait a year, though, until after you have had time to adapt to an opulent, luxurious lifestyle. You might find that you will be no happier than you are today.

There are important violations of this general rule, however. In other words, there are some changes to our lives and circumstances that can lead to long-lasting changes in our happiness. Generally speaking, people tend to adapt within a few years to marriage, divorce, and becoming a parent. People also can adapt to having a spouse die, but it can take longer. Research has found that unemployment and becoming disabled can lead to happiness changes that are permanent in some people (Luhmann & Intelisiano, 2018). It is important to note that the events that seem to lead to permanent changes are negative life events.

What Does Predict Happiness?

So far, we have told you about what does not make us happy (or at least what does not have much effect). Remember, though, that the goal of positive psychology is to discover what does lead to positive emotions. It would be quite odd, then, if we were to leave out that part of the equation. Although it is obviously important to realize that some commonly believed “causes” of happiness will not likely have the expected effects, we certainly want to know what does have a major effect on happiness.

You have seen one suggestion in the “dark side” research. The goals that the happier people had were personal growth, self-esteem, good relationships with family and friends, and a desire to improve the world. Note that the goal to be happy was not included. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill astutely noted, “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

Genetics plays a role in nearly all psychological phenomena, so it should come as no surprise to you that happiness is no exception. Researchers have estimated the heritability for happiness is about 30% – 40% (Røysamb & Nes, 2018). In other words, 30 – 40% of the variability in people’s tendency to be happy is related to differences in their genetic makeup, and 60 – 70% is related to differences in their environment. So, although genes play a significant role in giving us a predisposition to be generally happy or unhappy, there is room for a substantial contribution beyond that. In other words, we have many opportunities to deviate from the level of happiness that is suggested by our particular genetic makeup.

Cognitive Factors and Happiness

Two factors with reasonably strong links with happiness are subjective health and satisfaction with religion (Argyle, 1999). Note that these factors are not simply being healthy or religious but rather believing that one is healthy and being satisfied with one’s religion. So happiness in these cases is not just a matter of environmental circumstance. The beliefs that people hold and the judgment styles that they adopt can influence their happiness. As you might expect, then, when people have certain characteristics, such as optimism or hope, they are very likely to be happy (Buchanen & Seligman 1995; Snyder, 1994).

These cognitive factors even include basic phenomena like attention. For example, people who suffer from anxiety and depression tend to pay attention (measured by eye-tracking, as where you look is a very good indicator of what you are paying attention to) to negative and threatening stimuli (Armstrong & Olatunji, 2012). When researchers have trained individuals to change what they attend to, happiness ratings changed correspondingly (Wadlinger & Isaacowitz, 2011).

One very important factor that researchers have focused on is gratitude, being thankful to an outside source for some positive situation or outcome. At first, correlational, then later, experimental research, has consistently indicated that gratitude is associated with and causes happiness. For example, several studies have followed research participants who have been randomly assigned to express gratitude or complete some control task over time and found larger happiness increases for the gratitude groups (Margolis & Lyubomirsky, 2018). Some observers have feared that gratitude is limited in its usefulness because sometimes, there is no outside source to thank. Appreciation, acknowledging the positive situation, finding meaning, and experiencing positive emotions connected to that situation, however, appears to serve the same purpose, as the two concepts appear to share the important essential features (Adler & Fagley, 2005; Wood et al., 2008).

Think Small

Think about what it means to be a happy person (as opposed to happy right this moment). Although there may be different definitions, one useful one is “having many episodes throughout the day that are accompanied by positive emotions, such as happiness, contentment, and satisfaction.” Thus, we need not look at general, long-term judgments of how happy an individual claims to be in life. We learn a lot by asking how many times she felt happy today and what she was doing when she did. When researchers ask the question this way, they find several activities that are associated with high levels of positive emotions. A recent survey of 1,000 women, for example, found that having sex, socializing, relaxing, praying or meditating, eating, and exercising were accompanied by the highest levels of happiness and enjoyment. The researchers concluded that daily features of life have a large influence on a person’s mood and enjoyment of life. Long-term features of one’s life situation have an influence only when you focus on them—for example, right after they happen or when something draws attention to them (Kahneman et al., 2004).

Suppose after an exam you walk out feeling very uncertain; there were several questions that you are afraid you got wrong. When you go to class on the next day, you discover that you got all of the uncertain questions right, and you got the highest grade you have ever received on an exam. You are ecstatic and cannot wait to go home and share your good news. You walk in and say, “Guess what, I got a 97% on my psychology exam. It is my highest grade ever, and it looks like I will be getting an A in the class.” Your friend (or boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, parent) replies, “Huh, sorry, I wasn’t listening, were you talking to me? Did you see this hilarious meme?” or, worse, “Big deal. I am not in the mood to listen to your bragging. I happened to fail that test, and I need to figure out how I am going to pass this class.” All of a sudden, your ecstatic mood is gone. You may even feel angry or depressed because your friend did not appreciate your good news.

Researchers, too, have discovered this phenomenon. Although good news can make you happy, sharing that news has benefits that go way beyond the news itself—but only if it is constructively and actively received (Gable et al., 2004). So you would have gotten an extra boost if your friend had responded, “Hey, that’s great. All of that hard work you put in is really paying off. Maybe I should start studying with you more often.” We hope you remember the next time someone shares good news with you that you have the power to make the person feel even better about it.

Benefits Associated with Pleasant Emotions

Contentment and happiness are goals in and of themselves. Beyond that, happiness and optimism have several benefits. For example, they are associated with perseverance and achievement. Optimistic and happy people are also healthier. (Peterson, 2000; Seligman 1990; Taylor, 1989; 2000). Researchers have even shown that our immune systems are boosted by positive emotions (Salovey, Rothman, Detweiler, & Steward, 2000). Longitudinal experimental research has also found that happiness causes some improved outcomes. In one study, individuals who received training on a set of activities designed to increase happiness (for example, expressing gratitude) improved on happiness ratings, and on both self-reported health and number of sick days taken (Kushlev et al., 2020).

There are also benefits for others when you are happy. Research has shown that people are more cooperative, generous, and helpful when they are in a good mood (Gendolla, 2000; Isen, 1987).

We are about to move on to the dangers of pleasant emotions. Do not be fooled by the fact that the following section on the perils is longer. These benefits that we just described are extremely important to both mental and physical well-being.

Dangers Associated with Pleasant Emotions

Even if you agree with the value judgment that it is a worthwhile goal to enhance our happiness, you should be aware of the potential dangers associated with some pleasant emotions. Quite simply, the fact that something feels good does not necessarily mean that it is good. Think about the thoughts behind some of these pleasant-feeling emotions:

• Schadenfreude (pronounced sha-den-froy-duh) is a German word that means “the malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others” (Oxford English Dictionary). For example, a disliked rival fails an important exam, and we may be secretly glad. Many people take pleasure in witnessing the failures and setbacks of others, especially when they feel threatened by the others and especially if the others’ prior successes had been judged undeserved (Feather & Sherman, 2002; Leach et al., 2003). As you may realize, schadenfreude is a serious barrier to fighting against stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination.
• Contempt, feeling that you are superior to another person, also feels good yet is very damaging. Contempt may be the most destructive emotion for a marriage (see Module 22; Gottman & Silver, 1999). Indeed, researchers have found that contempt is common among married couples who are violent toward each other (Holtzworth-Munroe, Smutzler, & Stuart, 1998). We are sure it comes as no surprise, then, that contempt is associated with conflict and problems in other relationships, such as between parents and adolescents (Beumont & Wagner, 2004).
• Hubris is the dark side of pride. According to psychologist Michael Lewis (1992), pride occurs when you feel good about yourself because of a specific action. A child may be proud that she got a high grade on an exam, that she won an athletic competition, or that she cleaned her room without being asked. Hubris, on the other hand, is a good feeling about yourself that is completely unrelated to any specific actions. In essence, it is saying, “I am great because I am me.” Lewis notes that hubristic people have poor interpersonal relationships and often feel contempt toward other people and that hubris can be linked with grandiosity and narcissism in extreme cases. We tend to use the word pride for both kinds of feelings, but it is probably worth paying attention to the distinction because hubris is clearly a good-feeling emotion that has negative consequences. Note also that, although pride is considered a positive emotion in western cultures, it is a negative one in many Asian cultures because it separates one from others in the community.
• Unrealistic optimism is not helpful, even though we typically think of optimism as good. A college sophomore we knew a few years back turned to his best friend one day, cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other, and said, “I’m going to get in shape by next week.” Seeing as he had not exercised once in the previous 18 months was at least 30 pounds overweight, it strikes us that his optimism was a bit unrealistic. As it turns out, he did nothing at all to get into shape. On the other hand, an individual who is optimistic that he can get in shape and lose 30 pounds over the next six months and has a realistic idea about how to accomplish it has a much greater chance of success. Part of the puzzle is a trait known as self-efficacy, the belief that one has the ability to perform a task or reach a goal (Bandura, 1977). You can think of self-efficacy as a specific kind of optimism, a (realistic) optimism, perhaps derived from past successes, about one’s own abilities (Cervone, 1997).

It turns out that emotions often interact with other behaviors, sometimes in ways you would not expect and in ways that make “positive” emotions bad and “negative” emotions good. Let us close this section with a few examples:

• When people feel guilty, they are more likely to cooperate with others, so it is not only pleasant emotions that can increase helping behavior (Ketelaar and Au, 1999).
• When people are happy, they are more likely to use stereotypes when making judgments about people. When they are sad, they pay more attention to specific information about individuals (Isbell et al., 1999).
• When people are in a good mood, they are more likely to fall for the correspondence bias, in which they (often mistakenly) attribute people’s behavior to personality and ignore situational influences (Forgas 1998).
• When people are in a good mood, they are less accurate at recalling events that they have witnessed and make less persuasive arguments than when they are in a bad mood (Forgas, 2006).

25.2. Prosocial Behavior

Are people basically good or bad?

You might remember this as one of the enduring questions from philosophy that psychology has tried to answer empirically. And by now, of course, you may realize that this is a false dichotomy. The answer need not be one or the other; rather, it is some combination of “both.” Personality psychology, through its recognition of traits such as agreeableness, might suggest that part of the answer might be that some people are basically good while others are basically bad. Social psychology, on the other hand, through its recognition of the power of situations in determining behavior, might suggest that sometimes, people are basically good and sometimes, they are basically bad. Both suggestions are probably correct.

Let us remind you for a moment about the bystander effect from Module 21. Remember, this concept was developed after the discovery that some people fail to help in an emergency. We suspect that many people who are aware of the bystander effect remember only that part of the lesson, that some people fail to help. To our minds, the more important lesson is that many people do help, and many factors can increase the likelihood that people will help. In essence, that is the subject of the present module, prosocial behavior, defined simply as behavior that is intended to help other people. As you will see, there are situational, dispositional, and biological factors that are related to this important, but easy to overlook, behavior.

And it can be easy to overlook. For example, during the spring and early summer of 2020, as scientists promoted the wearing of masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, many observers were dismayed that many people were unwilling to engage in a seemingly simple behavior that would help others (even before the benefits to the mask-wearers themselves were known). Every week, it seemed, news reports highlighted the throngs of people who refused to comply, sometimes violently. The New York Times reported that most people actually did wear masks, however. According to several (self-report) surveys, about 80% of the public wore masks frequently or always when they could not maintain physical distance in public. One survey found that only 14% of people never wear masks (Katz et al., 2020). In other words, the vast majority of the population reported prosocial behavior, and the news reports were emphasizing the behaviors of a relatively small group. When we overestimate the prevalence of not wearing masks because of the ease of recalling examples of non-wearers, we are falling victim to the availability heuristic (Module 6).

Why Do We Help Each Other?

In Module 21, we told you that reciprocation may be a human universal. And this is certainly one reason that people help others, that they expect the others to return the favor someday. How can we explain the interesting case of altruism, helping behavior when no such expectation of reciprocation exists, however.

Helping behaviors are no different from many other human behaviors in many respects. Thus, they are governed by the same laws. To be sure, we can learn these behaviors through observation and through operant conditioning (Module 6). For example, when children watch their parents and older siblings engage in helping behavior, they can learn it themselves. We can also learn from larger elements of culture. For example, many religions teach followers the importance of charity and helping others.

Let us focus on the operant conditioning idea for a moment because it quickly gets interesting. It is a bit crass to suggest that we do good deeds for others to get a reward, but it certainly sometimes happens that we do get those rewards. Picture the middle schoolers who win citizenship awards at 8th-grade graduation because of their habitual helpfulness, or a thankful dog owner offering money to the kind person who returned a lost puppy. We once knew a college student who was given $100 in return for giving up her seat on an airplane so a married couple could sit together. It is not unreasonable to expect that these pleasant outcomes would make similar behaviors more likely in the future (positive reinforcement).

But wait, have you ever seen someone refuse to accept a reward? And frankly, the tangible rewards seem few enough that it would be difficult to expect them to consistently lead to high levels of helping behavior (remember, with partial reinforcement, it is difficult to establish a behavior, but once it is established it lasts a long time).

We are acting like this is a big puzzle, but the truth is, many of you figured it out a long time ago. Often, we do not help others because we get a reward, or even because we expect a reward. Sometimes, we just like the way it makes us feel to do good deeds. In other words, we might find reward or positive reinforcement from the pleasant emotions that result from helping others. Indeed, volunteering, caring for family members and friends, and donating money are all positively correlated with happiness (Helliwell et al., 2018). And before you remind us about correlation and causation from Module 2, we should point out that experimental research suggests that the relationship is causal. For example, one study (and don’t worry, there are others) found that research participants who were randomly assigned to do five good deeds for other people on one day during each week had more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions over a six-week period than participants instructed to do something good for themselves (Nelson et al., 2016).

OK, so it feels good to help others, even in the absence of rewards, but why? We think biology and evolution offer quite a good explanation. Humans are social animals, more social than most species. As such, we are disposed to creating, maintaining, and strengthening social connections. According to the social brain hypothesis, in fact, our brains are so large and complex compared to other animals precisely to allow us to function in complex social groups (Dunbar, 1998; 2016). Humans are not a particularly strong or fast species. Alone, a human being living in prehistoric times would seem to be easy prey and a poor predator. Together, however, a group of humans can accomplish a great deal more and thus achieve the goals to survive and reproduce. In other words, a key element of the social complexity that our brains have evolved to accommodate is the need to connect with others socially to achieve goals that we cannot achieve on our own. Evolution has a way of making behaviors that are helpful for survival and reproductive success pleasant to ensure that we will engage in them (e.g., eating and sexual behavior). So perhaps this is why we find it so enjoyable to help others. It should come as no surprise to you, then, to discover that prosocial behavior that strengthens social connections are particularly associated with positive emotions (Helliwell, 2018).

What are Some Other Traits That Lead to Prosocial Behavior?

Earlier, we noted that people are more generous and helpful when they are in a good mood. And we learned from the bystander effect in Module 21 that people will help in an unambiguous emergency situation where they are the only helper available and they know how to help (Darley & Latane, 1970). Let us conclude this section with a couple of additional traits that are associated with prosocial behavior.

One key trait is humility. In section three of this module, we will cover self-concept and self-esteem more fully. Humility is obviously related to both, but because of its role in prosocial behavior, we will cover it in this section.

We hope you recall the HEXACO model from Module 19 (Ashton & Lee, 2007). This was the trait approach that expanded the Big Five personality factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) to include Honesty-Humility.  This additional important trait is subdivided into separate facets of Sincerity, Fairness, Greed Avoidance, and Modesty. The fact that jumps out to us is that three of the four facets seem variations on the Honesty part of the trait. Only modesty is obviously related to humility, which is unfortunate because humility is a remarkable trait.

The modesty facet is related to the idea of not seeing yourself as overly important and not entitled to special privileges. Other researchers have broadened the concept of humility, and we like this broader conception. Weidman et al., (2018) noted that there may be two types of humility. One is related to the appreciation of others and self. This dimension includes aspects such as being kind, compassionate, and respectful, as well as having an awareness of one’s weaknesses and limitations while maintaining a healthy regard for oneself and an appropriate pride in one’s accomplishments. It may be that both types of humble people are more generous and more likely to help people in need than non-humble people (Exline & Hill, 2012; LaBouff et al., 2012). Individuals who have too much of the modesty-only type, however, might suffer some ill effects, such as lower self-esteem (Weidman et al., 2018). 

25.3 Self-Concept and Self-Esteem

Humanistic and positive psychology have a deep interest in the self: how people regard the self, how they can enhance their sense of self and their self-esteem. A person’s general outlook on life has a great deal to do with her or his sense of self. But the self or identity on its own is a concept seen throughout social and personality psychology and in developmental psychology. It was also one of the key ideas examined by the first psychologists.  William James (1890) divided the self into three parts: contents of the self-concept, feelings and emotions about the self, and the actions to which they lead. Psychologists through the years have devoted a great deal of effort to describing these elements of the self. The main focus in this section is what we have learned about maintaining a sense of self that contributes to well-being.

Contents of the Self-Concept

We want you to consider seriously the term “self-concept.” It is, literally, a concept about the self. In other words, we can understand our thinking about our self by referencing many of the principles that psychologists have learned about other concepts (Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Markus, 1977). You may be resisting this idea, thinking that your self-concept is far more complex than your concept of apple, for example. What if you were the world’s leading expert on apples, though? It is reasonable to expect that your concept of apple would be far more detailed, complex, and flexible than someone who simply eats one, two, or three days per week. Well, you are the world’s leading expert on another concept, namely you. Our self-concepts, because of the rich set of detailed knowledge that we have about ourselves, are extremely complex, but they are concepts nonetheless.

We have a sense of self that feels constant—that is, a self-essence or core self. That self is defined, in part, by our stable relationships with other people (Baumeister, 1998). At the same time, we have very different conceptions of the self in different spheres of life or in different situations. For example, you might be competitive in sports versus cooperative at work, playful with your friends versus serious with your partner. The idea of a complex self-concept helps solve this apparent puzzle. Factors such as our motivations and emotions, the strategies we use to access the knowledge, and the environmental context help determine which self-information is called to mind in any particular situation (Showers & Zeigler-Hill, 2003). For example, if you are in a good mood, you might be more likely to think about your playful side. If you are giving an important speech in front of a large group of students and faculty members, perhaps you would be aware of the serious, studious, professional part of your self.

We also extend our self-concept to include future possible selves. Each of us may have sets of ideal, expected, and feared “selves” that we might become in the future. We use these possible selves to motivate us, especially when we have strong positive and feared possible selves. For example, a student who hopes to be a doctor yet fears that she will fail to graduate and end up working at Wal-Mart for the rest of her life is likely to be very motivated to work hard at school. Our future possible selves also protect us by providing hope (Cross & Markus, 1991; Oyserman & Markus, 1990; Frazier et al., 2000; Morfei et al., 2001).

Feelings and Emotions About Self: Self-Esteem

William James (1890) defined self-esteem rather simply, as the ratio of successes or accomplishments over the opportunities that we have to succeed. For example, if you are successful in most or all of the opportunities, you have high self-esteem. According to James, each person gets to choose the aspects that enter into the calculation. For example, some of the situations that you judge important may involve accomplishments in your career or athletic pursuits and goals related to generosity and honesty. Another individual’s important situations may involve being a good friend and being a hard worker.

Although thinking about self-esteem has advanced a great deal since James’s time, and different researchers may define it differently, the basic idea is still the same. The degree to which you believe you “measure up” on aspects of your self-concept that you judge important is essentially your self-esteem.

“Everybody knows” how important it is to have high self-esteem. People have judged it so important that in the early 1990s the Department of Education of California made it a primary goal to improve children’s self-esteem (Baumeister, 1998). State officials believed that raising children’s self-esteem would reduce violence, crime, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and child abuse and would improve school achievement (California Task Force, 1990).

The problem is, these conclusions were based on non-experimental research and everyday observations only. The public has assumed that high self-esteem leads to good outcomes, but in fact the reverse, that good outcomes lead to high self-esteem, is just as likely true. For example, there is no doubt that children who have high self-esteem tend to do better in school than those with low self-esteem. It may very well be, though, that success in school leads the children to feel good about themselves, so the high self-esteem is a consequence of success rather than a cause. Robyn Dawes (1996) has gone as far as labeling the belief in the power of improving people’s self-esteem as one of the key myths of psychology.

Several years ago, Roy Baumeister and his colleagues (2003) attempted to examine the research literature on the effects of self-esteem. They focused primarily on studies that used objective measures of various outcomes in school, health, work, and social interactions. Objective measures are important to prevent the outcomes from being contaminated by the participants’ own self-esteem. For example, you cannot ask people with high self-esteem whether they believe that others like them (the answer is usually yes); you have to ask the other people directly (the answer is sometimes no). The research team found that nearly all of the believed benefits of high self-esteem do not hold up under the scrutiny of comparison to actual research. In other words, Robyn Dawes was very nearly exactly correct.

Baumeister’s team concluded that high self-esteem does not lead to better school performance; it does not make one less likely to smoke, drink alcohol, use drugs, or engage in sexual activity. It does seem to protect against eating disorders and may provide some protection against depression. The most consistent positive finding is that high self-esteem makes people more persistent, so they are less likely to give up after failure. It also probably makes people happier; in short, it feels good to have high self-esteem.

Given this observation that it feels good to have high self-esteem, it would seem a reasonable idea to bolster it, even if self-esteem does not have the strong benefits so many people believe that it does. Unfortunately, however, the fact that it feels good to have high self-esteem does not necessarily mean that it is good to have high self-esteem. There is evidence showing that inflated self-esteem can be a problem for some people. For example, many people believe that low self-esteem leads to violence or aggression. In fact, there is little evidence that this is true, and often individuals with very high self-esteem commit acts of violence and aggression (Baumeister et al., 1996). Certainly, not everyone with high self-esteem is prone to aggression. People to whom high self-esteem is extremely important; however, are especially likely to become aggressive when their self-esteem is challenged (Bushman & Baumeister, 1998).

It is simply the case that not all self-esteem is alike. Some people who have high self-esteem probably do benefit from it. On the other hand, some people with high self-esteem try too hard to boost or keep their high self-esteem, and for these people, high self-esteem is likely to lead to problems (Tangney & Leary, 2003). One way to tell whether high self-esteem will be good or bad is probably to look at how secure that self-esteem is (Kernis, 2003). Some people with high self-esteem need to defend it; their self-esteem is unstable or fragile. On the other hand, when people are secure in their high-self esteem, it may be associated with more positive outcomes. For example, people with secure high self-esteem and fragile high self-esteem score on opposite ends of scales that measure anger and hostility (Kernis et al., 1989).

Actions That Enhance Self-Esteem

Originally, William James described the key actions associated with the self as self-seeking and self-preservation behaviors. Although the general self-concept plays a role in a great many of our actions throughout our lives, we would like to focus on those that enhance our self-esteem.

Roy Baumeister (1998) has noted that it certainly feels good to have high self-esteem. Thus, we have strong tendencies to try to increase it, through what are called self-enhancement behaviors, or self-serving biases. People often naturally seek situations and engage in behaviors that will increase their self-esteem, and as a consequence, their self-esteem tends to be high (Baumeister et al., 1989). For example, people have a strong tendency to take credit for their successes and to blame outside causes for their failures (Zuckerman, 1979). Consistent with this idea, students give lower course evaluation ratings to teachers when they get lower grades than expected but do not give higher ratings when they get higher grades than expected (Griffin, 2004). Our self-serving biases also lead us to overestimate the amount and importance of our contributions to group tasks, a fact you might want to remember when you participate in group projects in school or throughout your career (Tesser, 2003). These are not isolated examples; on the contrary, there is an enormous list of behaviors and attitudes for which researchers have demonstrated that we judge ourselves very favorably, including generosity, fairness, morality, cooperativeness, kindness, loyalty, sincerity, honesty, and politeness, among others (Epley & Dunning, 2000). And, in what may be our favorite example of a self-serving bias, many people believe that they are less prone to self-serving biases than others are (Pronin et al., 2002).

Another sort of bias is our tendency to choose for ourselves the basis of our self-esteem (James, 1890). It should not surprise you that we are likely to choose factors that will make us feel good about ourselves. For example, if you are an athlete, you probably do not base your self-esteem on your singing ability (unless you are a singing athlete). Of course, then, people are likely to seek out situations and engage in behaviors that will help them to feel good about themselves in the domains that they have chosen (Crocker & Wolfe, 2001; Crocker et al., 2003).

There are a number of additional strategies that people use to enhance their self-esteem; let us describe two more. You will probably be able to recognize these in yourself or other people (try not to fall for the self-serving bias of only recognizing these tendencies in other people). First, when some people face situations in which they might damage their self-esteem by failing, they lower their expectations, a behavior researchers have called defensive pessimism (Crocker & Park, 2003; Norem & Cantor, 1986). For example, you will commonly hear classmates predict that they will not do well on an upcoming exam. This is often an attempt to manage expectations, so the students are not too upset if they do poorly.

Individuals can also lower their expectations, and thus protect their self-esteem, by self-handicapping, engaging in behaviors that sabotage their chances at success (Jones & Berglas, 1978). For example, a student might agree to work when his boss calls him the night before a big exam. Then, if he does poorly on the exam, he can attribute it to the handicap of not being able to study instead of to a lack of ability. By the way, if an individual succeeds after a bout of self-handicapping, the effect on self-esteem is doubly positive. He has the benefit of succeeding at the task even in the face of the barriers that were in the way (Tice, 1991).

Although you can (and probably should) read the information about self-serving biases (and other concepts in this module) as cautionary notes, there is another perspective to keep in mind. Perhaps His Holiness, the Dalai Lama was right; the very motion of our life is toward happiness. If we can avoid such pitfalls as unrealistic optimism, fragile self-esteem, pleasant emotions that damage other people, and, self-serving biases that do more damage than good, most of us have the ability to create our own positive outlook.