The newish field of positive psychology aims to help people improve their satisfaction with life and develop a more optimistic outlook. Its basic thesis is that Freud was wrong to characterize the human condition by its different neuroses. Instead, they cite evidence that smiling people are not only healthier and live longer, but also work harder, are more productive, more socially engaged, and generally more successful in life. Miserable souls, they argue, are self-obsessed and pessimistic, which gives others a low opinion of them too. As a result, things get even worse for them... and they get even unhappier. The most important teaching of the positive psychologists, however, is that absolutely anyone – even the grumpiest people – can take specific actions to increase their happiness in the long term.
This is where the nuns we promised you come in. Now, nuns provide great opportunities for psychologists – positive or not. That’s because they all follow routine lives with similar activities and comparable diets. What’s more, they don’t get married or have children. In short, nuns constitute a homogeneous population.
One of the positive psychologists’ favorite studies concerns 180 nuns in Milwaukee. Back in 1932, the then novices were asked to write short sketches of their lives. One wrote: “God started my life off well by bestowing upon me grace of inestimable value. The past year has been a very happy one.” She recently died, aged ninety-eight, after a lifetime of extraordinarily good health. By way of contrast, one of her sisters painted a neutral-to-sad picture of her own life, concluding, “With God’s grace, I intend to do my best for our Order.” She died of a stroke at the age of fifty-nine.
OK, so two nuns from Milwaukee don’t prove much. But experienced researchers studied all 180 of the sketches and ranked them according to their net satisfaction with life. Then they looked at how long the nuns lived. It turns out that nearly 90% of the “happiest” quartile made it to eighty-five or more and 54% of them were still alive at ninety-four! By then, there weren’t many of the “saddest” quartile left. Less than a third of them reached the age of eighty-five and only 11% survived to ninety-four. As well as the nuns, Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the leading lights in positive psychology, cites another survey, this time of 839 patients at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. It was found that "optimists” from this sample lived 19% longer than “pessimists.” But that’s all you can conclude. Who’s to say that the main reason for being an optimist wasn’t better health in the first place?
© Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth and Anil Gaba, 2009