Tom Kindlon
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The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness
The astonishing story of Nick Brown, the British man who began a part-time psychology course in his 50s – and ended up taking on America's academic establishment
The Observer, Sunday 19 January 2014
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/19/mathematics-of-happiness-debunked-nick-brown
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On whistle-blowing:
Fredrickson is the object of widespread admiration in the field of psychology. Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association and a bestselling author in his own right, went so far as to call her "the genius of the positive psychology movement". On top of which she is also an associate editor at American Psychologist.
By contrast, Brown was a first-term, first-year, part-time masters student who was about to take early retirement from what he calls a "large international organisation" in Strasbourg, where he had been head of IT network operations. Who was he to doubt the work of a leading professional which had been accepted by the psychological elite? What gave him the right to suggest that the emperor had gone naturist?
"The answer," says Brown when I meet him in a north London cafe, "is because that's how it always happens. Look at whistleblower culture. If you want to be a whistleblower you have to be prepared to lose your job. I'm able to do what I'm doing here because I'm nobody. I don't have to keep any academics happy. I don't have to think about the possible consequences of my actions for people I might admire personally who may have based their work on this and they end up looking silly. There are 160,000 psychologists in America and they've got mortgages. I've got the necessary degree of total independence."
On the specific problem:
"She's kind of hoping the Cheshire cat has disappeared but the grin is still there," says Brown, who is dismissive of Fredrickson's efforts at damage limitation. "She's trying to throw Losada over the side without admitting that she got conned. All she can really show is that higher numbers are better than lower ones. What you do in science is you make a statement of what you think will happen and then run the experiment and see if it matches it. What you don't do is pick up a bunch of data and start reading tea leaves. Because you can always find something. If you don't have much data you shouldn't go round theorising. Something orange is going to happen to you today, says the astrology chart. Sure enough, you'll notice if an orange bicycle goes by you."
This is why replication is so important. Also, sometimes one can test within the data e.g. dividing up the data using a training set.
Another reason why one needs outsiders as whistle-blowers:
But social psychology is full of theorising and much of it goes unquestioned. This is particularly the case when the research involves, as it does with Fredrickson, self-report, where the subjects assess themselves.
As John Gottman says: "Self-report data is easier to obtain, so a lot of social psychologists have formed an implicit society where they won't challenge one another. It's a collusion that makes it easier to publish research and not look at observational data or more objective data."
In general, says Gottman, the results of self-report have been quite reliable in the area of wellbeing. The problem is that when it comes down to distinguishing, say, those who "languish" from those who "flourish", there may be all manner of cultural and personal reasons why an individual or group might wish to deny negative feelings or even downplay positive ones.