Positive psychology is value-laden—It’s time to embrace it

ABSTRACT

Evaluative claims and assumptions are ubiquitous in positive psychology. Some will deny this. But such disavowals are belied by the literature. Some will consider the presence of evaluative claims a problem and hope to root them out. But this is a mistake. If positive psychology is to live up to its raison d’être – to be the scientific study of the psychological components of human flourishing or well-being – it must make evaluative claims. Well-being consists in those things that are good for us, that make life go well. Thus, one cannot investigate this topic without making claims about what is good for people and what they have reason to do. It’s time, therefore, to embrace the fact that positive psychology is value-laden. Doing so would benefit the field by allowing for more rigorous theorizing, and – perhaps counterintuitively – increasing the field’s objectivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Happiness
• objectivity
• positive psychology
• subjective well-being
• values
• well-being

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While I focus on positive psychology (as it is the field I’m familiar with) a lot of these points will apply equally to other social sciences (Douglas, 2007, 2013; Dupré, 2007). This is because social scientists typically study phenomena picked out by what philosophers call ‘thick ethical concepts’ (Kirchin, 2013; Williams, 1985). Thick concepts have both descriptive and evaluative content. To apply a thick concept is to judge that something has certain empirical properties as well as certain evaluative properties. For example, bravery isn’t merely a willingness to face danger. Those willing to face the danger of walking off a cliff aren’t brave; they’re stupid. Bravery is being willing to face danger for a good cause, or when it’s right to do so, or some such thing. It turns out that many folk psychological concepts – including emotion concepts like love – are thick (Phillips et al., 2011). Or consider aggression (Longino, 2013). Central to this concept are the notions of harm and offence (Ramírez & Andreu, 2006), which are evaluative. A harm just is something that is bad for a person. And we wouldn’t think that a friendly hello was aggressive just because an irate person took unjustified offence. That someone took offense is only significant to the aggressiveness of the action if the action merited that offence. Whether this is so is an evaluative or normative question, not an empirical one. Other thick concepts include health and disease (Hausman, 2015; Kingma, 2014), economic efficiency and unemployment (Hausman & McPherson, 2006), and – of course – well-being. If there is anything distinctive about positive psychology here, it’s the fact that the research products – claims about the nature of human flourishing – are so obviously evaluative. In contrast, it’s often less clear whether, for instance, an economist’s claims about economic efficiency are value-laden.