Shoot the Canon from a Cannon – Positive Psychology News

Editor’s note: This is a very delayed article in appreciation of one of the founders of the positive psychology field. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi died on October 20, 2021 at the age of 87, having proposed and tested many of the ideas central to the field, especially the concept of flow.

Lessons on Becoming a Scientist from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

During a lab discussion about human development, my fellow grad student inquired, “How [exactly] is upward striving defined?” Without missing a beat, our advisor quipped “That you want to take the elevator.”

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi was always firing off one-liners like that, even as he threw me dirty looks for my own punnery (probably because it takes pun to know pun).

Mike was never big on formalities, which is why everyone who knew him called him “Mike”. But he also respected that my cultural background didn’t allow me to be on a first-name basis with my advisor until I finished my doctorate. That juxtaposition of informality and acceptance of others’ culturally-inspired formality was one of many great qualities that I admired in “Dr. Csíkszentmihályi,” as I called him, and emblematic of his ability to navigate this diverse, complex world. A diplomat’s son, Mike grew up with a deep understanding of the principles of heterodoxy. He lived them throughout his career.

Which Idea Do You Think is Right?

My first year as a doctoral student was my seventh as a researcher, so I was no stranger to the vagaries of academic politics when I started developing ideas for independent research that would supplement my duties on the grant-funded projects of the lab. I met with Mike and Jeanne Nakamura (Mike’s doctoral student many years prior, a co-founder of the lab at Claremont, and jointly my advisor) for coffee, and carefully laid out a set of theories I had been developing to analyze something called microflow that appeared only in a few disparate publications. There were three possible routes I could take for this project, but I was a bit wary about one of them because it blatantly disagreed with some of Mike’s earlier work on the subject and had the potential to challenge basic tenets of his theories.

So, I cautiously presented the theory with a lot of caveats, including it as one of many possible routes to take. Mike and Jeanne both noticed what I was doing, and in the ensuing discussion it came out that I was concerned about stepping on toes, being disrespectful by challenging my advisor’s prior work, and so on.

Mike, however, was interested in only one thing: “Which [theory] do you think is right?”

I shyly admitted that I thought the contradictory one was actually the correct one, and Mike and Jeanne immediately encouraged me to work on that one, pledging their efforts to help me bring the concept to fruition even if we found it contradicted the findings of the past.

Don’t Get Too Attached to Your Own Ideas

No matter how established Mike’s work was, and no matter how much evidence there was, there was always plenty of room for him to be wrong about things. He always valued the differences and encouraged me to be an independent thinker, even if it meant trampling on the canon. In fact, he went so far as to chide me once for being too dogmatic about his own theory. I was stunned because I had never seen a scientist so humble about his own work that he would not let people get attached to his theories. But, his admonishment stayed with me throughout my research career, reminding me never to get so enamored of an idea that I was unwilling to view alternatives.

Mihaly Csikszentmihaly

Mike reinforced this teaching over many different discussions about the research on flow, creativity, and human development. I remember any number of discussions where one of us made a point that contradicted the established view, and whenever I pointed out that we were effectively contradicting an earlier point, he said the equivalent of “That was so last year!”

Ideas Change Over Time

Just because he held a particular viewpoint for decades didn’t mean he would hold it forever, and he demonstrated repeatedly that reading his publications was a lot like seeing a snapshot of his mind in motion. It looked fixed only because of the medium. It served as a constant reminder never to let my thinking stagnate, and to view my own publications as an understanding of the moment. That lesson stayed with me as I wrestled with the inevitable imposter syndrome of being a scientist, and helped me to write down my work even as I knew that it did not completely reflect my understanding of what I had discovered.

Look to the World of Ideas At Large

In true dialectical fashion, Mike was also rather exacting in his demands of his students, constantly pushing us to do better and be better, but always in that subtle, gentle way that he had both with people and with words. He wanted us to transcend the boundaries of our thinking, which often meant drilling down to first principles and also treating no idea as too sacred to rebut or evolve. Respectful disagreement was a must both in seminars and in the lab, as was analyzing (nay, scrutinizing!) multiple sides of an issue of interest. We were expected to draw upon outside influences, such that our work was informed not just by the canonical sources, but by the world of ideas at large. He encouraged us always to seek more analogies and reach deeper levels of understanding.

Have Fun

Of course, there was fun. We were never allowed to be so damned serious that we weren’t having a good time, which is probably why Mike randomly looked my way in the middle of a lab meeting, nodded towards the bag of soy nuts from which I was snacking, and asked, “Is that birdseed?”

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2004). Flow, the secret to happiness. TED talk.

Upward striving: Wollack, S., Goodale, J. G., Wijting, J. P., & Smith, P. C. (1971). Development of the survey of work values. Journal of Applied Psychology, 55, 331–338.

First major mention of microflow after 1975: Nakamura, J., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2005). The concept of flow. In C. R. Snyder & S. J. Lopez, Handbook of positive psychology, pp. 89-105.

My dissertation on microflow: Davis, O.C. (2010). Using waiting time well: Toward a theory of microflow. (Doctoral thesis, Claremont Graduate University, 2010). Thesis Abstracts International, 72, 1.

Reference to dialectics: Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperPerennial.