I’m not a psychologist, and I haven’t been able to find much about the validity of Dr Seligman’s theories, but he set off my personal Crank Alarm when I saw that he apparently spends time attempting to legitimize virtue ethics with (psuedo?)psychological theory.
Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV) is his supposed ‘positive’ counterpart to the DSM; it evidently consists of a list of virtues like Humanity Temperance and Courage, along with subcategories (e.g. love kindness and social intelligence for Humanity) and examples of famous people who exemplified certain virtues (MLK Jr is called out as an exemplar of hope). This is an extraordinarily troubling choice on his part, for reasons I hope are self-evident.
In addition, his work on clinical depression (“Learned Helplessness”) needs someone with more psychiatric / neuroscience background to look it over. I can’t tell if it’s legit or not with my current non-expertise, but it certainly sounds fishy.
TL;DR: We should look into this guy’s work a little further before we follow his suggestions, especially since they seem in this case to be bog-standard virtue ethics.
“Learned Helplessness” and its opposite “Learned Optimism” are widely replicated results that have now become the basis for some therapeutic approaches in the academic/scientific psychology world. Seligman did a lot of work on this and got his early academy fame on this work.
The character strengths and virtues on the other hand are not based on reproducible experiments, rather literature study (as Seligman writes: “lists of virtues from all cultures”). It’s not knowledge and results, but rather trying to open up a new area and advocate real experimental research in that field. We’ll have to wait at least a decade until the results are in ;-)
I’m not a psychologist, and I haven’t been able to find much about the validity of Dr Seligman’s theories, but he set off my personal Crank Alarm when I saw that he apparently spends time attempting to legitimize virtue ethics with (psuedo?)psychological theory.
Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV) is his supposed ‘positive’ counterpart to the DSM; it evidently consists of a list of virtues like Humanity Temperance and Courage, along with subcategories (e.g. love kindness and social intelligence for Humanity) and examples of famous people who exemplified certain virtues (MLK Jr is called out as an exemplar of hope). This is an extraordinarily troubling choice on his part, for reasons I hope are self-evident.
In addition, his work on clinical depression (“Learned Helplessness”) needs someone with more psychiatric / neuroscience background to look it over. I can’t tell if it’s legit or not with my current non-expertise, but it certainly sounds fishy.
TL;DR: We should look into this guy’s work a little further before we follow his suggestions, especially since they seem in this case to be bog-standard virtue ethics.
“Learned Helplessness” and its opposite “Learned Optimism” are widely replicated results that have now become the basis for some therapeutic approaches in the academic/scientific psychology world. Seligman did a lot of work on this and got his early academy fame on this work. The character strengths and virtues on the other hand are not based on reproducible experiments, rather literature study (as Seligman writes: “lists of virtues from all cultures”). It’s not knowledge and results, but rather trying to open up a new area and advocate real experimental research in that field. We’ll have to wait at least a decade until the results are in ;-)