When an image does not immediately convey ‘good figure’, we have a tendency to search for and ‘find’ something familiar. In this way, subjective contours can arise and these represent the perception of objects or shapes which don’t exist except as an artefact of perception.
– Colour, Contrast and Gestalt Theories of Perception: The Impact in Contemporary Visual Communications Design
Thus, simply calling something by its name may shift the representation of the labelled object such that properties typical or diagnostic of the category are highlighted while properties irrelevant to the category are abstracted over.
– What do words do? Towards a theory of language -augmented thought
When the Athenians set out to take over Melos, they sent negotiators to convince the rulers of Melos to surrender. The negotiators attempted to convince their counterparties with a maxim which they thought should have been obvious – the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Hedonism proposes that the highest goal of living is to maximise pleasure and minimize suffering. Much suffering including physical pain comes from thoughts – someone who feels the burn in the muscles during exercise would arguably suffer less, even enjoy such pain compared to another who has to carry heavy bags up several flights of stairs because the lift is not working.
This has prompted the rise of positive psychology which has as its stated aim, to achieve happiness and a life well lived. As its name suggests, much of positive psychology has to do with selecting positive thoughts over negative ones about a given state of affairs. The field of positive psychology and its tenets have been embraced across offices and customer facing outfits across industries and in schools.
For example, some schools in the UK practice what is termed Mindfulness-based Strengths Practice (MBSP). This entails teachers becoming deliberately focused on spotting strengths in each other and their students. MBSP espouses reframing to highlight such strengths on a regular and frequent basis such that a consciousness of strengths becomes prevalent. MBSP has been described to be a resounding success which entrenches a culture of positivity and growth. It has been said to empower practitioners to be resilient and perseverant in challenging situations.
Gray and Eades (2017) describe how some teachers in the UK practise highlighting strengths of their charges even in circumstances when the actions of the latter are not socially desirable. A child kept looking into a teacher’s handbag. Instead of labelling the child in some negative way, the teacher “reframed it in terms of the child’s quite natural curiosity and allowed the child to observe some of the contents of the bag before gently explaining that, in the future, the bag was private to the teacher” (p.110). T.J. Lottman et al. (2017) give another example of reframing in schools. When a child is “holding up the line because they insist on zipping their own coat or tying their own shoe” a teacher practising MBSP might affirm the child for perseverance. In this way, teachers recalibrate “their ‘radar screen’ to see the perseverance and change the way they view a ‘stubborn’ child.”
Examples of positive psychology at the workplace are the FISH! Philosophy and Dr. Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved my Cheese. FISH! was developed when John Christenson observed at Pike Place Fish in Seattle, fish mongers immensely enjoying what in other places might have been considered mundane, routine work.Two practices of FISH! are Play and Choose your Attitude. Who Moved my Cheese is a tale of two mice and two “Littlepeople” which teaches not to resist change – which to some sounded ominously like resistance is futile.
Is resistance futile or is it unprofitable? Potayto, potahto? Is it simply a matter of framing? How do connotations of words like ‘resistance’ shape our response to them? Cynics or critics have framed positive psychology as a bourgeoisie Jedi mind trick. For example, Billig (2018) in Positive Psychology, Humour and the Virtues of Negative Thinking alludes to the “happiness industry” as a “major profit-making business”. In essence, he argues that rainmakers make people feel good or more optimistic than they really should be, by defining situations. He suggests that positive psychology imposes false frames which encourages accepting one’s lot and changing oneself to suit the environment and discourages attempts to forge more favourable environments. Criticism against FISH! and Who Moved my Cheese has proceeded in the same vein.
A frame is a way to define a situation. People need working definitions or to form some interpretation of a situation to decide how they feel or what they should or should not be doing about it. Lupyan (2012) shows how a single word can operate as a frame. He gives the example of airplanes. The “Airbus 380”and the “Cessna 152” are both labelled as airplanes even though between them there are differences, large and small.
He says that a word is essentially a label which groups discrete items by common characteristics. This grouping is done deliberately for ease of operations and organization of concepts in the mind – it is convenient to remember prominent characteristics of all airplanes than to label each one differently based on each and every unique detail.
Also, this practice of broad grouping is what allows every existing and yet to exist concept to be encapsulated in the English vocabulary with its relatively limited number of words (Pinker, 1994). However, Lupyan points out that this efficiency comes at the cost of recognising nuances.
Words as frames are selections of certain characteristics over others to form a definition or interpretation. For example, the word ‘stubborn’ refers to a certain prominent characteristic – refusal to budge. Perseverance too shares this characteristic. However, the word ‘stubborn’ has negative connotations – someone who is stubborn does not budge despite very good reasons why he should do so. A perseverant person on the other hand does not budge because there are good reasons why he should not do so. In choosing to label some act as a manifestation of perseverance instead of stubbornness, negative features of the act are deselected. This is the process of reframing inherent in positive psychology.
Psychiatrist Victor Frankl suggests that Man’s chief occupation is to find meaning. When meaning is not immediately apparent or even when it does not exist, it is nonetheless sought. Gestalt psychology suggests that “human perception is not just about seeing what is actually present in the world around us” but “heavily influenced by our motivations and expectations” (Cherry, 2019).
Cynics like Billig argue that the search for meaning has been exploited by bad actors who define situations (by choosing only advantageous characteristics) to suit their own ends. The Athenians, for example, defined Melos as ‘the weak’ and themselves as ‘the strong’. This definition of the situation, based on the characteristic of size, was presented as unassailable truth and made surrender seem only preordained.
Size of course is not the only relevant characteristic in assessing strength. In Dou Shou Qi, the rat is the only animal able to defeat the elephant which in the game is the strongest. While this is indeed a children’s game, the principles it is based on does contain some larger truth of relevance.
Cynics also laugh off maxims like Choose your Attitude as attempts to make bearable otherwise toilsome drudgery – how Tom Sawyer persuaded oblivious Ben Rogers to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence and give him his apple while he reposed in the shade. They paint positive psychology as new-fangled and as popular psychology with no basis in Science.
It should be noted however that while the term positive psychology is relatively new, there is nothing avant-garde about its principles, which are indeed quite ancient. The Power of Now documents evidence from a variety of sources, including ancient texts, how everyone regardless of station in life goes through suffering and how the way out is to stop resisting the moment. The idea behind non-resistance is that everything including pain or pleasure is but transient phenomena.
In the popular series Suits, the interns and juniors complain about the massive amount of grunt work Louis Litt, their boss puts them through. In one scene, Louis explains the value of ‘grunt’ work and how that made him razor sharp in what he does. Also, Nyoho practitioners would attest to how seemingly mundane events can lead to a sense of blissful flow (Csikszentmihalyi) and can be deeply therapeutic. Shaolin monks practice Kung Fu in everything including daily chores such as sweeping leaves.
Words are deliberate selections of characteristics and certainly not entirely representative of some state of permanence or some unchallengeable truth.
A good figure can be shaped from careful selection.
The Brain Dojo
