Since publishing “The Secret,” in 2006, the Australian
author Rhonda Byrne has been writing self-help manifestos based on the idea
that people who think positive thoughts are rewarded with happiness, wealth,
influence, wisdom, and success. In November, 2013, she published “Hero,”
the fourth book in the series.
There’s some truth to Byrne’s ideas about the
relationship between thought and action. New inventions emerge after their
inventors struggle through years of planning and mental preparation, for
example. When people have a condition called somatization disorder,
their psychological or emotional distress can manifest in physical
symptoms—joint pain, headaches, even seizures. Byrne is also right to emphasize
the stubbornness of thought. Once you think something, it is very difficult to
eradicate that idea from your mind. The late, brilliant social psychologist Dan
Wegner described this as the great irony of mental control:
in order to insure that you aren’t thinking about an unwanted idea, you have to
continually turn your mind to that very idea. How do you know that you aren’t
thinking of a white bear driving a red Ferrari unless you think about whether
you’re thinking it?
The books have many adherents; most of their Amazon
reviewers give them five stars. But they also have detractors. One criticism is
that the books use a technique popularized by fitness gurus: when you see
actors with tanned, chiseled bodies promoting a new piece of fitness equipment,
you get the sense that they aren’t in excellent shape because they’ve spent
hours using that particular machine. More likely, they jog or lift weights, or
have great genes or a lightning-fast metabolism, or have some combination of
these characteristics. It’s just as hard to believe that the heroes in Byrne’s
books—let alone a feverishly productive polymath like Goethe or the notoriously
irritable Beethoven—succeeded because they cultivated good thoughts.
Moreover,
as the journalist Oliver Burkeman noted in “The Antidote: Happiness for People
Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking,” “Ceaseless
optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong;
by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive
thinker ends up being lessprepared, and more acutely distressed,
when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are
good.”
Burkeman is onto something. According to a great deal
of research, positive fantasies may lessen your chances of succeeding. In one
experiment, the social psychologists Gabriele Oettingen and Doris Mayer asked eighty-three
German students to rate the extent to which they “experienced positive thoughts,
images, or fantasies on the subject of transition into work life, graduating
from university, looking for and finding a job.” Two years later, they
approached the same students and asked about their post-college job
experiences. Those who harbored positive fantasies put in fewer job
applications, received fewer job offers, and ultimately earned lower salaries.
The same was true in other contexts, too. Students who fantasized were less
likely to ask their romantic crushes on a date and more likely to struggle
academically. Hip-surgery patients also recovered more slowly when they dwelled
on positive fantasies of walking without pain.
Heather Barry Kappes, a management professor at the
London School of Economics, has published similar research with Oettingen.
(Full disclosure: Oettingen is a professor at New York University, where I also
teach. Kappes is a former student with whom I have collaborated.) I asked
Kappes why fantasies hamper progress, and she told me that they dull the will
to succeed: “Imagining a positive outcome conveys the sense that you’re
approaching your goals, which takes the edge off the need to achieve.”
Oettingen and Kappes asked two groups of undergraduates to
imagine the coming week. One group fantasized that the week would go as well as
possible, whereas the other group conjured a more neutral version of the week.
One week later, when the students returned to the lab, the positive fantasizers
felt that they had accomplished less over the previous week.
In a provocative new analysis, Oettingen and her colleagues have
suggested that public displays of positive thinking may even predict downturns
in major macroeconomic outcomes. They used a text-analysis program to measure
the tone of articles in USA Today between 2007 and 2009, and found
that especially positive articles predicted a downturn in the Dow Jones
Industrial Average between a week and a month later. The researchers also
analyzed all twenty-one U.S. Presidential inaugural addresses between 1933 and
2009, and found that Presidents who waxed optimistic about the future saw a
rise in unemployment and a slowdown in economic growth during their terms in
office. It’s perhaps too strong to suggest that positive thinking, alone,
produced these large macroeconomic changes, but the staggering results in this
most recent paper are consistent with more than a decade’s worth of studies in
Oettingen’s lab.
There’s no
denying that many people have found comfort in Byrne’s ideas. Like religion,
they offer an appealing, non-technical solution to life’s biggest problems
while demanding nothing more of their adherents than faith. (Indeed, “The
Secret” features verses from Matthew and Mark, promoting the idea that people
receive in life what they seek in prayer.) But while many people give religion
a pass because it claims to focus on questions that can’t be answered with
science, the same is not true of success.
Though Byrne presents her ideas
without evidence, we can measure their worth with data. I asked Oettingen
whether positive fantasies might sometimes be useful. She suggested that they
might, if a person considered the specific steps that he would take to overcome
the barriers to success. Kappes said that fantasies might be useful when you’re
unable to satisfy a need—when you’re famished and hours from eating, for
example—because they temporarily blunt the pang. There’s nothing wrong with
getting lost in fantasy, as long as you aren’t ultimately hoping to indulge in
the real thing.
Adam Alter is the author of “Drunk Tank Pink: And Other
Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave,”
and an assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School
of Business.
resources pages: http://www.newyorker.com/
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