What should the further development of psychology look like?

A special edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science has come out around this theme: The Next Big Questions in Psychology. In this issue a list of leading psychologists share their views on what they see as the most important questions to be asked in the coming decade. A few examples of the content. Timothy Wilson, author of Strangers to ourselves, has a contribution on self-knowledge which he sees as a very important topic. Lisa Feldman Barret writes an interesting article on how to connect mind to brain. Martin Seligman and Michael Kahana write about the topic of intuition. I think the the question of how psychology will or should further develop is interesting and important. I am extremely curious about how psychology will develop the coming years. In their terrific article Achieving and sustaining a good life, authors Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson provide the following description of the dynamic and diverse development of psychology so far:

"Since its beginning, psychology has been variously defined as the objective description of the elements of consciousness (structuralism); the study of the inherent patterning of these elements (gestalt psychology); the investigation of the consequences of consciousness-mind in use (functionalism); the prediction and control of overt behavior (behaviorism); the uncovering of unconscious motives and conflicts (psychoanalysis); and the science of cognitive contents, styles and processes (the cognitive revolution). Psychology has been pursued as a natural science and as a social science. It has employed numerous qualitative and quantitative research methods. It has been regarded as a basic science, as an applied science, and sometimes as both. At present, psychology is expanding in two different but equally exiting directions - inward (where it joins forces with neuroscience) and outward (where it joins forces with anthropology and sociology)."

This description shows how diverse psychology is and always has been and how it has constantly evolved over time and continues to do so. The question is: how will it further evolve? Or maybe: how should it further evolve? Should it focus on different topics that before? (self-knowledge, the good life, etc). Or should it change its research approaches (more multivariate, multimethod, longitudinal, etc...). Or should it make a change that is perhaps more fundamental and develop into a psychology of possibility? Should it seek more cooperation, or integration with other disciplines (maybe even to the point of dissipation)? (biology, economics, network science, information technology, etc).

I would love to hear some comments on this topic from you (psychologist or not). My question is: How do you think psychology should further develop in the coming years?

Aristotle's insight on avoiding excess and aiming for the intermediate is useful for solution-focused change and positive psychology

"One ought to choose that which is intermediate, not the excess nor the defect, and the intermediate is determined by reason."

This is a quote by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle (The Nicomachean Ethics VI.1). What interests me in this quote by Aristotle is that is draws attention to the fact that in life often 'the more the better' is not valid. In many situations it seems to be true that there can be too much of a good thing and that moderation is wise. I have written several times about this idea. Here are some examples. The post Good enough is the goal argues that the goal of the solution-focused approach is not to achieve an ideal state (a perfect future), but, instead, to achieve a situation that is good enough (this can be quite good though). The post Pacing: helping clients find an optimal speed of change discusses the idea that there is such a thing as changing too fast. The post How happy is happy enough? quotes Ed Diener who says it may be counterproductive to focus extremely on pursuing happiness. The post Optimal happiness level mentions a book chapter by Shigehiro Oishi and Minkyung Koo in which they discuss several studies which suggest that the optimal level of happiness may not always be the highest level. Finally, the post The Optimal Zone Scale presents an adaptation I developed (during a conversation with a client) of the regular scaling intervention. The desired range on this optimal zone scale is the middle area. (A description of my optimal zone scale will be published in a forthcoming book edited by Thorana Nelson)

Anyone got more information or examples of the value of the intermediate?

When DO solution focused coaches and therapists offer direct tips and advice?

SF-coaches, counselors and therapists acknowledge what clients bring to the conversation and generally avoid interfering with the clients’ frame of reference as much as they can. They use questions to help clients define their desired situations and find their own solutions. In other words, it leads to what I have dubbed self-found internal solutions. The main advantages of a process leading to self-found internal solutions are: 1) the individual trusts these solutions, 2) knows how to apply them, 3) knows they're relevant for him, and 4) knows he has the skills required to apply them; furthermore, 5) he has identified them himself and 6) is most likely to be committed to trying them out; my prediction would be that 7) they are most durable, too. (Also view this video).

My question today is: What are the exceptions to this principle? When do you as a solution-focused coach offer direct advice? When does this work? In which circumstances is there in your view a good reason for doing this?

Building solution-focused skills through deliberate practice of techniques like scaling questions, desired situation questions and miracle questions

Many students of the solution focused approach at some time or another experience that building solution-focused skills requires quite a bit of effort. At first, they may notice the simplicity of the approach and infer from that that it must be easy to learn to work solution-focused. But as Insoo Kim Berg has often said: the approach is simple but hard to learn. Two things make it hard. One is learning to use techniques like scaling questions, the miracle question, exception seeking questions, coping questions, desired situation questions and so forth. The other thing that makes it hard is that you leave out many things that you may learned before, like looking for causes of problems, finding out who's guilty, asking about feelings, confronting people, etcetera. So building solution-focused skills requires a lot of effort. When I asked Insoo in 2003 whether she was still learning and trying to improve her skills she answered without a moment of hesitation that indeed she was. I asked what it was she was now trying to improve and she answered: "I am trying to make my way of working simpler which is very hard."

In my mind I often compare building solution focused skills with learning to play a musical instrument. This comparison may provide a useful clue about how to become better at practicing the solution-focused approach. As I have written about many times before, researcher Anders Ericsson and his colleagues has found evidence of how people can become expert instrumentalists (and experts in many other fields for that matter). The way this is done is through a process called deliberate practice. Author Geoff Colvin explains that deliberate practice can be described by these five characteristics: 1) It's designed specifically to improve performance, 2) It can be repeated a lot, 3) Feedback on results is continuously available, 4) It's highly demanding mentally, 5) It isn't necessarily much fun. Deliberate practice is hard and not particularly enjoyable because it means you are focusing on improving areas in your performance that are not satisfactory. Thus, it stretches you. If you'll be able to do deliberate practice, you'll benefit by becoming better.

One way of practicing solution-focused skills, which I have found very useful myself, is to take a good book (like Becoming solution-focused in brief therapy, Interviewing for solutions, and Words were originally magic) and search for the dialogues (if you read Dutch you may read one of the many Dutch dialogues we have written in our books and on our sites). Then read those dialogues very slowly. What I would do is read what the client said and cover with a piece of paper what the SF practitioner said. Only after I had thought of how I would reply how the practitioner could respond I would move the paper down a bit to read what the practitioner had actually said. At first this was often a sobering experience. I found it very hard to come up with good responses and was surprised by how effective the responses that were written down in the book were. But practice improves and I became better?

What do you think? How can deliberate practice help to build solution-focused skills?

The new approach of solution-focused coaching (joke)

The 7-steps model of solution-focused change

When did the potential of the solution-focused approach first hit you?

My question today is: When did the potential of the solution-focused approach first hit you?

Here is my story: It was about ten years ago. I was walking in a large bookstore. It had been a while since I had bought a book and today I was determined to find me something interesting to read. Only, I did not have a clue what it could be. Then I saw a modest pile of books which drew my attention. The book piled up there was Interviewing for solutions by Peter de Jong and Insoo Kim Berg. "Wait a minute", I thought to myself, "Wasn't that about this solution-focused approach I heard about recently?" Indeed, my colleague Gwenda Schlundt Bodien had recently come across the approach and had mentioned it once to me. But somehow it did not make too much of an impression to me, then. In fact, I thought it sounded simple and superficial. Furthermore: nothing new, I was sure. So there I was in the bookstore. Since I could not find any other interesting book, I thought I'd give Interviewing for solutions a try. I bought it and sat down somewhere for a cup of coffee. I took the book and thought I'd read a page or two, out of curiosity. I started reading and on the first and second page I recognized bits of what I'd heard about the approach. I thought it did sound interesting and friendly. I read it bit more. I read about a woman, Rosie which was interviewed by a group of students asking her al kinds of questions. These questions sounded very sensible to me. Reading further, I wondered what the authors would have to say about these very resonable questions. Nothing wrong with them, I thought. Then, the authors started to explain how all of the questions were about problems, mistakes, feelings, causes and implied solutions. Next came some explanation about the solution-focused approach and the authors showed how the interview might have been approached differently. Then and there the potential of the solution-focused approach hit me at once. I remember thinking how this was exactly what I had been searching for for some time and I realized I was going to do this and be busy with it for many, many years. And so it went.

What is your story? When did the potential of the solution-focused approach first hit you?

$20 bill lying on the sidewalk

Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and author of What Were They Thinking? Unconventional Wisdom About Management has written a new article:

'Efficient Market' Thinking Is Inefficient

You know the joke about two economists walking down the street and seeing a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk. The first economist says, “Look at that $20 bill.” The second says, “That can’t really be a $20 bill lying there, because if it were, someone would have picked it up already.” So they walk on, leaving the $20 bill undisturbed. The logic — that there are no opportunities for achieving exceptional returns because if such opportunities existed, they would be quickly discovered and implemented by almost everyone — underlies not only the efficient market theory in the world of finance but is incredibly pervasive in management decisions about all sorts of topics. I have had people tell me that downsizing must be effective — notwithstanding lots of empirical evidence to the contrary — because if it weren’t, companies wouldn’t be doing it. Read the article here.

Also read: Interview with Jeffrey Pfeffer

Pattern detection

"Patterns are everything to us. We hunger for them. We revel in them. They are the basis for art, literature, music and much more in our lives. But a percepetual system that is so geared to wrestling patterns out of complex arrays of simuli is bound to produce some false positives. [...] Over time, natural selection probably favored perceptual systems and pattern detectors that were hyperactive enough to make their share of Type I errors [false positives]. In a perilous world, Type I errors tend to be less costly. And one of natural selections mottos has always been, "Better deluded than dead.""

~ Hank Davis in Caveman logic

How effective are threats?

Sometime ago I asked this question: What research is there on how to lead people effectively? I did get some responses but I would like to get a lot more. In the meantime, I have begun to think there is not a lot of evidence on this. Still there is some. In 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot by Richard Wiseman I read about research by Jonathan Freedman. It is old study published in 1965 (Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Vol 1(2), 1965, 145-155.) and done with children, so not exactly in an organizational setting. Still, I think it implies something interesting for how to lead people. It examines the question what the effects of threading children is when you want to keep them from doing something. Here is a summary of the paper:

Long-term behavioral effects of cognitive dissonance.

To investigate whether or not the arousal of cognitive dissonance can produce long-term behavioral effects, children were told not to play with a very desirable toy under high or low threat, and were left alone with the toy. Those who did not play with it were given a 2nd opportunity to play with the toy several weeks later, with the original threat removed. The prediction was that those subjects who had resisted temptation under mild threat would be less likely to play with the toy in this 2nd session than would those who had resisted under severe threat. The results supported this prediction.

Richard Wiseman summarizes the conclusions as follows:

"Threat works well in the short term, but can actually prove counter-productive over longer periods of time. By pointing out all the terrible things that will happen if your child follows a course of action, you may be making that activity more attractive in their minds."

Comments and further references are welcome.

Evidence for the motivational impact of the perspective change question

In the post Perspective change I described a simple way to help clients visualize the desired situation from a third person perspective. With this technique you ask in essence: ”How will other people notice things will have become better?" An example: "How will the customer notice our service orientation will have improved?" My experience is that this type of question, which I dubbed the perspective change question helps clients to get a broader perspective on themselves and their situation so that they can develop clearer goals.

Now, I stumbled on some research which affirmed the usefulness of the perspective change question. Noelia Vasquez and Roger Buehler found the visual perspective adopted in using positive mental imagery moderates its motivational impact. The authors tested their hypothesis that people feel more motivated to succeed on a future task when they visualize its successful completion from a third-person rather than a first-person perspective. Actions viewed from the third-person perspective are generally construed at a relatively high level of abstraction—in a manner that highlights their larger meaning and significance—which should heighten their motivational impact. Three studies in the domain of academic motivation support this reasoning. Students experience a greater increase in achievement motivation when they imagine their successful task completion from a third-rather than a first-person perspective. Moreover, mediational analyses reveal that third-person imagery boosts motivation by prompting students to construe their success abstractly and to perceive it as important.

Here is the full article: Seeing Future Success: Does Imagery Perspective Influence Achievement Motivation?

Writing provides a solution-based approach

"From a psychological perspective, talking and writing are very different. Talking can often be somewhat unstructured, disorganized, even chaotic. In contrast, writing encourages the creation of a story line and structure that help people make sense of what has happened and work towards a solution. In short, talking can add to a sense of confusion while writing provides a more systematic, and solution-based, approach."

~ Richard Wiseman (photo), in 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot

Related posts:

• Pratenonline.nl - free and anonymous access for youth to highly trained solution-focused professionals
• Language use and mental health
• Fast writing

Quote by Lao Tzu

"To lead people walk behind them."

~Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher, central figure in Taoism, lived in the 6th century BC.

Some solution-focused principles work so well that I am convinced that people throughout history us must have also noticed this. Because I am interested in checking this notion I am always on the lookout for ancient references to solution-focused principles. This quote by Lao Tzu relates to the principle of leading the client from one step behind (Cantwell & Holmes, 1994; De Jong & Berg, 2008). By using this metaphor we want to illustrate how we let the client determine the direction, the content and the pace of the conversation. The client says something and we follow closely. We always stay just one step behind. By asking questions we help the client to keep choosing the right direction and pace. We are very reluctant to ever overtake the client. Once we´d do that, the client would notice directly that something had changed in the conversation. Instead of working at his pace he´d suddenly have to adjust to ours. Generally that´s disturbing and does not work well. Every now and then we might give the client a ´gentle tap on the shoulder´ for instance when we ask something like: what will be different further down the road? (How will you know you’ll be higher on the scale?).

Also read: Literally leading from behind

Quote Richard Wiseman

"Fantasizing about heaven on earth may put a smile on your face but is unlikely to help transform your dreams into reality."

~ Richard Wiseman in his new book 59 Seconds, Think a Little, Change a Lot.

What I like about this quote is that it warns against thinking about goals in terms of ideal situations, just like I do in this article: Solution-Focused Scaling Questions.

When performance-related pay backfires

"Performance-related pay often does not encourage people to work harder and sometimes has the opposite effect, according to new research due to be unveiled at the London School of Economics and Political Science. An analysis of 51 separate experimental studies of financial incentives in employment relations found overwhelming evidence that these incentives may reduce an employee's natural inclination to complete a task and derive pleasure from doing so. 'We find that financial incentives may indeed reduce intrinsic motivation and diminish ethical or other reasons for complying with workplace social norms such as fairness. As a consequence, the provision of incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance,' said Dr Bernd Irlenbusch from the LSE's Department of Management."

This quote was taken from this article: When performance-related pay backfires. Readers of this blog won't be too surpirsed. Here are a few ealier related posts:

• The discounting principle
• Demotivating effects of incentive pay
• Praise can demotivate

What scientific articles deserve a larger audience?

After my book-question of last week, I'd now like to ask you something about scientific articles. My question is: what are the 2 or 3 scientific articles which have appeared in a peer reviewed journal you consider so important that they deserve a larger audience? It would be great if you could explain your choice too. What is it about those articles that makes them so great and important? How have they influenced your thinking and the way you approach your work? Hope to hear from you and, of course, after some time I'll share my list.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on The Colbert Report

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16 More Solution-Focused Quotes (repost)

Step our of the Moral Matrix

The previous post raised many stimulating ideas and references. I am still busy checking some of them out. Paolo Terni suggested the work of jonathan Haidt with which I was not yet familiar. I have watched a TED presentation he did in 2008 and it indeed addresses my question directly. If you want to watch it too, here it is:

What is an effective way of dealing with persisting primitive thinking in this modern world?

There is a new book out by University of Guelph evolutionary psychologist Hank Davis with the title Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World. Here is amazon.com's product description:

We see the face of the Virgin Mary staring up at us from a grilled cheese sandwich and sell the uneaten portion of our meal for $37,000 on eBay. While science offers a wealth of rational explanations for natural phenomena, we often prefer to embrace the fantasies that reassured our distant ancestors. And we'll even go to war to protect our delusions against those who do not share them. These are examples of what evolutionary psychologist Hank Davis calls 'Caveman Logic'. Although some examples are funny, the condition itself is no laughing matter. In this engagingly written book, Davis encourages us to transcend the mental default settings and tribal loyalties that worked well for our ancestors back in the Pleistocene age. Davis laments a modern world in which more people believe in ESP, ghosts, and angels than in evolution. Superstition and religion get particularly critical treatment, although Davis argues that religion, itself, is not the problem but 'an inevitable by-product of how our minds misperform'. Davis argues, 'It's time to move beyond the one-size-fits-all, safety and comfort-oriented settings that got our ancestors through the terrifying Pleistocene night'. In contrast, Davis advocates a world in which 'Spirituality' is viewed as a dangerous rather than an admirable quality, and suggests ways in which we can overcome our innate predisposition toward irrationality. He concludes by pointing out that 'biology is not destiny'. Just as some of us succeed in watching our diets, resisting violent impulses, and engaging in unselfish behavior, we can learn to use critical thinking and the insights of science to guide individual effort and social action in the service of our whole species.

I find this theme interesting. We live in times in which science has given is much insight into many natural phenomena and has debunked many supernatural claims. You would say this would be enough for most people to reject blind faith, superstition, magical thinking, supernatural explanations for things for which there now are natural explanations. But this is not the case (for just a few examples view here: Evolution vs. Intelligent Design and here: The Amazing Brown). I have not read Hank Davis' book yet but it I am curious about what it has to say about the following question: "What is an effective way of dealing with persisting primitive thinking in this modern world?" There are several things to be kept in mind when thinking about an answer to this question. The first is that nobody is free from some degree of primitive thinking, something which Davis explicitly acknowledges by the way. So who are you to talk about primitivism of another person when you're not free from it yourself? The second thing to keep in mind are so-called reactance effects (when people think someone is trying to convinces them of something out of a certain interest they will try to defend their autonomy and resist to the persuasion attempt by strengthening their own position). As Daniel Dennett put it: "You seldom talk anybody out of a position by arguing directly with their premises and inferences."

So, What are your ideas? What approach for dealing with persisting primitive thinking in this modern world do you prefer? Do you prefer a direct, well-argued, provocative yet polite approach of people like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett? Or do you prefer a challenging debunking approach as shown by people like Michael Shermer, Derren Brown, James Randi and QualiaSoup? Or do you prefer a satirical approach as followed by people like Edward Current and the Monty Python team? Or is there a way of leading by example? Or is it better to leave it alone and not discuss this at all in order to respect whatever people believe to be true or just in order to mind your own business? And is it important at all to get rid of primitive thinking at all or is usually harmless? What are your ideas?