Culture: Positivity and Self-Esteem

TORONTO, ONTARIO - When I first heard about Barbara Ehrenreich's research questioning the emphasis on positivity in United States culture (discussed earlier), one of the first things that came to mind was the "self esteem" movement. Now, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have offered some additional criticism of that movement that, at least in my opinion, supports Ehrenreich's assertions and matches my personal experience.

In their new book "NutureShock", Bronson and Merryman argue that in reaction to issues created by the World War II generation providing only conditional love to their children, the Vietnam generation tried so hard to love unconditionally that they actually failed to do communicate that to their children. As a gross simplification, by saying, "We love you! You are so smart!" all the time to their children, the kids actually linked being smart to the love, effectively thinking that they were loved because they were smart. The problem becomes acute when it becomes obvious to the child that in a given situation, they weren't so smart, and they thus expect not to be loved. The parents that said "We love you for who you are" avoided this particular problem.

The root of the problem here was providing positive feedback to the child (being "smart" or just "good at" something) regardless of whether they had earned that exact praise. At some point, the child starts seeing the gap between the feedback and the reality, and the feedback starts to becoming meaningless. The culture of positivity that Ehrenreich so disdains had entered into parenting, and prevented it from being effective.

I distinctly remember, in elementary school, being subjected to "self esteem" exercises in which we were supposed to write positive phrases about our performance and our selves regardless of the reality of the situation. It didn't matter if it was clear that my peers were much better at playing soccer, for example--I was supposed to write about how well I played soccer. Not just how I might have improved recently at a specific soccer skill, which might be truthful, mind you--we were directed to broadly reinforce that were good at everything we were doing, even if it were blatantly, obviously untrue. I could complete the exercises, but I never believed anything I wrote on those exercise sheets. The supposedly-intended objective of making the children feel better about themselves was not accomplished, because my actual skills hadn't actually improved, and I knew that. Furthermore, my peers (most of whom just kept quiet about their deficiencies and thus were not subjected to the "self esteem" exercises) knew that.

Interestingly, in the first grade, a gym instructor (whose name I shamefully cannot remember) actually took a different tact with me which was far more effective. When I accurately stated "I can't do that" with respect to a physical skill, he held me after class to practice the skill until I actually could do it. I still usually wasn't nearly as skilled as my peers, but it allowed me to change language to "I'm not very good at that" or "I don't like doing that" from the flat "I can't," and basically coerced me to participate in the game in question. However, from the second grade onward, I can't remember any instructor doing anything analogous to what that gym teacher had done; it was all "self esteem" exercises for the rest of primary school.

In a recent CBC interview, Po Bronson didn't have anything much better to say about self-esteem exercises than I do. Bronson makes the argument that the "self-esteem movement" capitalized on the trend to provide unconditional love and furthered its distortion. Children were not given feedback commensurate with their achievements--in effect, self-esteem exercises were confusing them.

The only coherent message a child could get out of "self esteem" exercises (at least as constituted when I experienced them) was that adults only wanted to hear positive language, and the reality doesn't matter. Basically, positivity was being taught--Ehrenreich's thesis incarnate. It was certainly the message I got from the exercises, which I considered to be madness. As both Ehrenreich and I would experience, indeed, adult culture in the United States largely does work that way, with a positive attitude far more important than real skills or accomplishments.

Bronson argues that we should be providing accurate feedback to our children, and encouragement to keep developing skills regardless of their state at a given time. Statements of unconditional love should be made, but they should be simple, not based on compliments that may not be true.

However, it will probably take a generation of "true" unconditional love and accurate feedback for the culture of positivity to decline in the United States. It will take a lot more than Bronson and Merryman's book to initiate a real shift in the culture. I suspect it will take more than a generation for "positivity" to be subdued and its results in the business culture (like housing bubbles) to subside, if it ever happens.

Culture: It's Action, Not Attitude

TORONTO, ONTARIO - Barbara Ehrenreich is currently on a book tour for her latest book, Bright-Sided. A simplified version of the thesis that she presents is that a culture of positive thinking has blinded United States culture from identifying and addressing the root causes of major problems, allowing things like the financial collapse in 2008 to happen because people that warned that it might happen were told they were "too negative" and ignored--or even punished.

Anyone that knows me will not be surprised to find that I agree with pretty much everything that Ehrenreich posits. The United States does have a real problem with a "positivity" culture that eschews realism. Never mind the economy (but listen to what happened to dissenting figures in this episode of This American Life if you want to see her opinion supported), I've seen friends decide not explore the root cause of their personal problems and instead just take a more positive attitude, only to find similar events happening again--and blame themselves for not being positive enough. To me, excessive "positivity" is just another aspect of the extreme individual focus of culture in the United States that completely ignores any problems or disadvantages that occur at the community or group level--or just through chance. If you don't like your own life, it's your fault, and you shouldn't expect any help from anyone to change it. If you don't like someone else's life, then you're putting the blame in the wrong place if you think society caused them problems--it's their own fault, and you shouldn't help them. Those are the messages that constantly bombard anyone in the United States that is "negative."

Ehrenreich--who presents the historical roots of the trend thoroughly in her book--started exploring this topic as a result of her struggles with breast cancer. Everywhere she turned, she was told to be more positive about the disease. While Ehrenreich has discovered that medical studies have shown that it actually makes no difference what kind of attitude one takes during treatment on its success, the convention wisdom is that it does matter. Besides some early studies that seemed to indicate this, the convention wisdom exists because it tends to match our experience--everyone can think of a story about someone that seemed to give up emotionally and died shortly thereafter, or someone that badly wanted to live and recovered when doctors thought they were terminal cases.

What Ehrenreich points out, almost as an aside to her core points, is that what really seems to make a difference is taking action. Someone who has emotionally given up may decide not to take action--not telling a caregiver when their condition changes, or proactively asking what to expect during a treatment, whereas someone with fight in them will probably take every action that they have the energy to do. The same thing applies in economic self-help situations. Someone who has given up likely won't do anything to change their situation, whereas someone who is "more positive" is probably taking actions to try to find a job or whatever assistance can improve their situation. Yet, a person who expresses dark humor or muses on their long odds but still listens to their doctors or networks to find a job may be just as likely to work their way out of the situation as the overtly positive individual. What people ascribe to attitude seems to have a lot more to do with action.

There have been a long list of business situations in which I have said something to the effect of "X is unlikely to work--we can try Y or Z." Every single time I've done that, I've been accused of being too negative. Almost every single time, X has failed before too long. The smart bosses let me work on Y or Z in the background while telling their own bosses we were focused on X, and in some cases we salvaged the situation. The less intelligent bosses actively prevented me from doing anything other than working on X and watched their enterprises devolve into big trouble, sometimes too late for Y, Z, or anything else to do any good. Needed action wasn't taken, and "positivity" didn't save those situations any more than it saved the US economy in 2008 or the war in Iraq in 2003.

Sadly, Barbara Ehrenreich will likely be ignored--maybe even punished economically for questioning positive thinking. A culture that has been based on marketing since its inception (think Paul Revere and Benjamin Franklin) will always find careful evaluation threatening and reject it. And, sadly, I don't see that there's any action I can personally take to prevent that.