How humanism came about
Moving into the 40s, 50s, 60s now
Humanists are in between Freudians and Behaviourists
humanistic perspective
Doesn’t have a strong experimental focus rather more interested in the black box.
- What’s going on mentally, how people are feeling/thinking, what motivates people, how to get us to be the best we can.
Focus on phenomenology (fancy word for how you perceive what’s happening in your mind.)
- ‘the study of conscious experience as it exists for the person, without any attempt to reduce, divide, or compartmentalise it in any way.’
- Just how you experience the world. Not you tell me how my world is supposed to be.
Defining characteristics
- Focus on phenomenology
- Believe in free will
○ ‘i have to…’ NO, actually you don’t - Believe meaning is important
○ Influenced by existential philosophers
○ Find a meaning and reason for life - Emphasise uniqueness of each individual
- Personal growth
- Enjoying the ‘here and now’
- Hippies loved this period –> living in the moment etc.
A kinder and more human view on people
By nature, humans are quite good
○ Not all evil, want to kill mothers, not born a blank slate
Optimistic about the future and humanity (vs pessimism) –> solve all our problems
Very pro personality change –> for the better (unlike behaviourists)
Carl Rogers
sees culture as steering us in the wrong way. Culture is keeping us from being the best people that we can be. We humans are potentially all born good.
Effects of culture on personality
- E.g. ○ What our bodies should look like. ○ How much money we should have ○ Gender roles ○ What we should eat/drink
Rogers says a lot of culture is bad, taking us in the wrong direction.
Without culture, we would all grow up in a state of utopia.
Effects of culture on personality: Case study of materialism
Money: happier people earn more money
People in higher-income countries tend to be happier
○ On average yes –> richer countries like Australia are
happier than poorer countries like Lithuania
BUT once you’re in a wealthier country you’ve kind of ‘made it’ already
They found that richest Americans rate their happiness the same as Pennsylvania Amish
Its more the strong social ties that makes people happy.
Reasons for why people in rich countries are happier than poor bc:
○ There are low levels of corruption
○ Don’t need to worry about education
○ We have good healthcare
○ Generally things that make us happy are things that
can be obtained through money
○ Increase in wealth does not mean increase in
happiness. (look at graph)
LOOK AT PIC
○ Another example of how increase in wealth doesn’t affect happiness is in Japan after WWII. The US gave them a lot of money but their ‘satisfaction’ always remained the same.
MORAL: money is necessary but not sufficient to be happy
○ Humanists say that humans have needs and money is not one of them.
Just culture steering us the wrong way.
The Elements of Roger’s Theory of Personality
Actualizing tendency
Built in motivation to develop its potential to the fullest extent possible
E.g. a tree will want to be the best it can be
We all want to be the best person that we can be IF WE SHAKE OFF CULTURE
The Elements of Roger’s Theory of Personality
Organismic Valuing Process
Subconscious guide that attracts people to growth-producing experiences and away from growth-inhibiting experiences
E.g. the marketing of Maccas attracts us to it (unhealthy stuff) contrasting with healthy fruit and vegetables
○ Steer towards the good choices
○ Steering away from things we don’t need and
towards things we do need to be the best person
we can be.
The Elements of Roger’s Theory of Personality
Positive regard
Experiencing love, affection, attention, nurturance and so on
Something the Freudians and behaviourists wouldn’t have cared about
We all need to feel loved and nurtured etc.
The Elements of Roger’s Theory of Personality
Positive self-regard
Self-esteem, self-worth, a positive self-image
Achieved through parental unconditional positive regard: when parents let you know that they love you no matter what.
Conditional positive regard
Instead of actualizing tendency: now listening to what society is telling us (culture is the root of all evil)
Conditional positive regard: only cool/good person if you do what society tells you e.g. own the best car etc.
○ Problem is no one can live up to all those conditions
Conditional positive self-regard: internalise these conditions and are only happy with ourselves if we meet the societal conditions (which we can never meet)
○ Trying to be an ideal self
○ Stuck in an incongruence with real self and ideal self which causes psychological problems
○ Can never live up to the ideal self which causes the incongruence
LOOK AT PIC
The fully functioning person (described by Rogers)
- Openness to experience
○ Receptive to the objective and subjective
happenings of life
○ Expanded consciousness
○ Able to tolerate ambiguity - Existential living
○ Living fully in each moment e.g. mindfulness
○ What the hippies mindset was like
○ Humanists were critiqued in this part of their theory
bc if you only did what felt right in the moment-
what if its bad, like road rage etc. - Organismic trusting
○ Allowing ourselves to be guided by the organismic
valuing process
○ Shouldn’t feel good to hurt others, feel angry etc. - Experiential freedom
○ We feel free when we have choices
○ There is no ‘I have to do this’ - Creativity
○ Adapting to new situations
○ Creative expression
○ Solving problems and coming up with a solution to
something
Roger’s creative environment
Facilitates openness to experience (aware of subjective/objective environment)
Facilitates internal locus of evaluation
○ Real and ideal self
○ Putting judgement of worth of the idea on yourself
(don’t think about what society/others say)
○ Provides the ability to toy with conceptual elements
and ideas
Creativity experiment (Fodor& Steinrotter, 1998)
IV = leadership style
- Rogerian style: ‘water problem is an exploration into your ideas on problem solving’ (openness to experience situation, really no wrong answer, whatever idea counts)
- Structured: ‘pay careful attention to instructions’ (follow instructions)
- Considerate: they just had a rlly friendly experimenter
Problem: design a method of releasing water to the family dog while on holiday
DV=creativity ratings on the solutions
Results: they found that the Rogerian style people were more creative
LOOK AT PIC
Rogers developed Client centred therapy
Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Psychotherapeutic Change
Therapist Congruence
- Being genuine and honest with the client
- The general case for the good clinical psychologists these days
Empathetic understanding
- Try to experience in their own mind what you might be going through
- To help them help you
Unconditional Positive regard
- No matter what you tell them, ITS OKAY
- They won’t judge you, laugh, scoff etc.
- Unless you tell them about something like dead body in their attic
Maslow’s Theory
Maslow’s Three types of Needs
This is the beginning of the positive psychology movement.
Zeitgeist (spirit of the time)- Great Depression Era
- High rates of unemployment
- Many basic needs were unmet
- When basic needs are unmet when younger, it can influence you when you’re older.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
Start at the bottom and once its fulfilled, you keep going up the ranks in the hierarchy.
Very few people make it to self actualisation.
This is due to society and culture which stops people from getting up there.
Physiological needs
- Need for food, water, air etc.
- Most ‘prepotent’ needs
- One function of civilisation is to satisfy these needs so we can focus on the higher ones (what separates us from other animals)
Safety Needs
- Safety, order, security, health, employment etc.
- Focused on after physiological needs met
- Seen in some mental disorders (e.g. OCD, Anxiety, dependent personality disorder)
- E.g. children in the Syria war don’t have safety needs met and this will effect them when they get older.
Belongingness and Love Needs
- Need for affiliation, friends, supportive family, group identification, intimate relationships
- This is often not satisfied even in affluent countries E.g. in US young people have high rates of loneliness
- These needs being unfulfilled may be at the root of many mental disturbances (depression, Borderline personality disorder)
- Need to receive AND to give love
Esteem Needs
- Need to be held in high regard by self and others (not just self-esteem but also others)
- Comes from mastery, achievement, adequacy feeling of competence, confidence and independence (need to be good at things)
- Ideally this need is met by the deserved respect of others (you’ve earned it)
Self Actualisation needs
- Maslow estimated 10% of population satisfies these needs
- A person must actualise what exists inside them as a potential
- 90% of people never get to be the best that they can be
- Most other theorists wouldn’t see this as a need
○ Freud wouldn’t see this as a need and would
predict people would stop at lower needs
Specific needs of self-actualised people
- Truth (not dishonest)
- Goodness (not evil)
- Completion
- Justice/order
- Beauty
- ETC.
Characteristics of self-actualised people
- Efficient
- Acceptance
- Problem-centred
- Peak experiences
- Humility/respect
- Sense of humour
- Creativity
- ETC.
Maslow had a look at Sources of Neuroses
E.g. Someone who has gone through war
- They may have experienced war as a child
- When they are older (and no longer experiencing war conditions), they may think about the safety/needs that they didn’t have when they were younger.
- This may cause things like anxiety/depression in their current lives.
LOOK AT PICS
So its these developmental periods which can go wrong. If needs aren’t met in these periods, it may lead to mental illness later on.
Other e.g.
- Parents got divorced early in child’s life.
○ Later on in life, the child may have difficulty being
intimate with others
Exceptions to the Hierarchy
Esteem taking precedence over love
- The needs don’t always go in that order
- E.g. person who ignores and ruins relationships in order to achieve
People not striving after physiological & safety needs met
- The ‘psychopath’ who seems not to desire love
○ Could be bc they were deprived of love when they
were young
○ OR they have the need met in abundance (too
much love)
More extreme reversals
- Artists who have produced their greatest works in times of dire safety, belongingness, and physical need
○ E.g. Van Gogh
○ Art is like the self actualised creativity
○ People working at the top of the pyramid when they
don’t even have the base.
- People who sacrifice their safety and lives for a value or ideal
○ Martyrs
○ E.g. Joan of Arc
The Humanistic Formula for Happiness:
Need Satisfaction
Self determination theory proposes three universal needs (if we fulfill them we should be pretty happy)
Autonomy: needs some control over actions/behaviour/day/other people (can’t just be a victim), doing what you want to do.
○ Sense of choice/freedom in things you undertake
○ Decisions reflect what you want
○ Choices express who you are
○ Doing what really interests you
Relatedness: we need social connections, positive relationships, well respected, experience love from others
○ People you care about also care about you
○ Connection with people who care for me/who I care for
○ Close and connected with other people who are important to me
○ Experience a warm feeling with people I spend time with
Competence: we need to be good at something ○ Confident that you can do things well ○ Capable at what you do ○ Competent to achieve goals ○ Successfully complete difficult tasks
Ideally these three things work together.
This theory is a modern humanistic theory of motivation and personality.
This is what drives us to be the best/happiest person we can be.
Chen et al (2014) found that fulfilment of all three universal needs positively predicted sense of well being in Belgium, China, USA and Peru. (all v different countries)
Suggests these needs are universal and all humans value them
The Humanistic Formula for Happiness:
Flow
Happiness = taking personal responsibility for finding meaning and enjoyment in our ongoing experiences. (sense of free will)
Flow state: (usually from something like a hobby)
- Engaging in activity that is challenging and requires skill
- Ones attention is completely absorbed by the activity
- Activity has a clear goal
- There is a clear feedback
- Can concentrate only on task at hand
- Achieves a sense of personal control
- Loses self-consciousness
- Loses sense of time.
