I recently read an interview of Barbara Fredrickson in The Sun magazine (a really lovely example of Hippy Lit, by the way). She's a psychology professor at UNC Chapel Hill that looks at the effects of positive emotions on perception, productivity and overall well-being. In the course of the interview, she explained some research she did with a retired industrial psychologist Marcial Losada, where they showed that by assessing an overall 'positivity ratio' (calculated by looking at things like the proportions of positive vs. negative comments, people talking out their butts vs. asking questions, focus on self vs. others), they could predict the overall productivity and creativity of business teams, as well as as the long-term stability and contentment of a marriage.
It sounds pretty commonsense when it's put like that, I know, but the critical piece of their work is that the whole setup in NONLINEAR, and their predictions rely on Lorenz equations. More positivity didn't simply lead to better teams or marriages; a critical positive/negative range of about 3:1 to 11:1 was required. They call this the Losada zone. Below the range, businesses slowly fail and people get divorced. Above that range, things fall into a rut. But within that zone, teams, marriages, and individuals all thrive.
In fact, they show that the Losada range can be described as a strange attractor (an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_attractor).
The elegance of strange attractors is that they produce stable long-term states that are nonetheless infinitely variable in their output.
They're saying that our ability to be truly creative and durably flexible as groups and as individuals relies on that combination. I can't begin to describe how awesome I think this all is.
I could write about this for a long time, but I have finals to work on. Instead I'll let these folks speak for themselves...
two online articles by Losada:
http://pos-psych.com/news/guest-author/200812081289
http://pos-psych.com/news/guest-author/200812091298
Losada and Fredrickson's first collaborative paper:
http://www.unc.edu/peplab/publications/human_flourishing.pdf
It's curious that as high as 1 in 4 things a guy says or does to his girlfriend can be overtly negative and their relationship can still flourish.
ReplyDeleteOn the plus side, I now know I can safely be a prick about 10% of the time whenever I talk to anyone.
Your MOM is a strange attractor.
ReplyDelete(I'm sorry, this is pretty fantastic and a bunch of people who've read the blog (but cannot post on it) have really enjoyed reading about this. I hope you do talk more of it.)