Agential Success and False Beliefs

On 4th and 5th February the project I current lead, PERFECT, hosted a two-day workshop in central London, called "False but Useful Beliefs". The idea was to discuss the costs and benefits of those beliefs that do not correspond to reality or that are not constrained by evidence, but that in one way or another benefit agents. They might increase self-esteem, help support motivation, enhance wellbeing, be biologically adaptive, and so on.

Several talks addressed the relationship of success with rationality and truth. It is not always the case that true and rational beliefs are conducive to agential success, whereas false and irrational beliefs are conducive to agential failure.

For instance, Lubomira Radoilska (University of Kent), in her talk "Could False Beliefs Be Non-Accidentally Conducive to Agential Success?", argued that some false beliefs are useful, not because of their falsity, but because they lead people to act and increase their chances to fulfil their goals in the future. It is their practical dimension that makes such beliefs useful.

Jesse Summers (Duke University), in his talk "Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: Some Benefits of Rationalisation", was concerned with false explanations or justifications for actions and choices. Although such explanations and justification do not help agents understand why they acted and chose as they did, they still have benefits, as they allow agents to see themselves as providing coherent reasons.

In my talk, on "The Epistemic Innocence of Self-enhancing Beliefs", I related some of the themes from the previous two talks to the phenomenon of positive illusions, when people adopt excessively optimistic beliefs about their own worth and their own capacity to control external events, and make excessively optimistic predictions about their own future. Although such beliefs and predictions are not well supported by evidence, they help people form a sense of themselves as coherent and competent agents, and they support socialisation. The absence of a coherent and competent sense of oneself as an agent and social isolation or withdrawal are symptoms of mental distress and cause the person to lose the motivation to act, making it harder for her to achieve her goals.

Agential Success

Success!
Credit John Wildgoose, Wellcome Images

My idea for the project focuses on agential success. We need to better understand the notion of agential success which is often upheld as a worthy goal without being fully understood or critically examined in the philosophical, psychological, or mental health literature. The notion of agential success is usually explained in terms of an agent’s capacity to pursue and sometimes achieve her goals. My research goal is to identify the psychological factors contributing to agential success and explore the costs and benefits of those factors for human agency broadly conceived. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between success and rationality, and in the relationship between success and wellbeing.

Rationality and success

As I am starting to explore via Project PERFECT and I hopefully will explore as part of a new fellowship supported by the Templeton Foundation, positive illusions and unrealistic optimism (i.e., the tendency to have a higher opinion of oneself than is warranted by the evidence and to predict one’s own future in a rosier way than statistical evidence would recommend) seem to support successful agency. This would mean that some forms of irrationality (false beliefs and inaccurate predictions) are good for agents. But it is not clear whether optimism is beneficial and conductive to success across contexts and populations. In what way does optimism promote engagement with the social and physical environment surrounding the agent? Moreover, it is not clear that the best way to understand the literature is in terms of a trade-off between rationality and success. Cannot optimistic beliefs enhance rationality as well as success in some context, and compromise both in other contexts?

Success and wellbeing

The identification between agential success and mental health has a long history. Some of the criteria for mental health (such as good functioning) seem to be other ways to capture agential success. But it is not obvious that agents with compromised mental health are less successful as agents or that agential success intended as goal satisfaction contributes to psychological wellbeing. We can all think of cases where mental distress and creativity go together, and similarly of cases where highly successful agents present symptoms of mental distress, often related to their prioritising their goals over other aspects of their lives.

Responding to negative feedback

Once the notion of success and its relationships with other values are critically examined, the recent empirical literature on agential success can be taken to suggest that the key feature is the capacity to respond positively to negative feedback and other challenges (psychologists talk about ‘hardiness’ and ‘preparedness’ in that context, in the popular culture we talk about ‘bouncing back’, and in the mental health literature the word ‘resilience’ is used to denote some of these phenomena). Are successful people in different domains hardy and prepared for set-backs? How do they overcome disillusionment and maintain motivation in the face of failure?

In the proposed project, I see my role as analysing some features of agential success that can help us understand in what contexts and to what extent success is something that agents should aim to achieve. This requires the study of case studies: success in elite sport (which will be explored in collaboration with Silvia Camporesi), success in the arts and fashion (Victoria Tischler’s focus), success in relationships (Zoe Boden’s focus), success and mental health (Michael Larkin’s focus), success and political or social power (Matteo Mameli’s focus), and at a more methodological level, success in interdisciplinary research (which concerns all of us!). Such cases will illustrate the complexities of measuring or assessing success: elite sportspeople, successful managers, and even top academics often give up long term health prospects or happiness in their relational and family lives to achieve career objectives in their field; self-harm, psychotic symptoms, or eating disorders involve actions and experiences that are at the same time bad and good for the agent. They may bring relief and some sense of achievement or accomplishment, maybe in the short-term, but they also cause pain or suffering, and are responsible for broken relationships or ill-health down the line. And many more examples sping to mind where assumptions about success are challenged.

My own research goal is to try and understand the significance of the single case studies for the general context of any agent’s success. The framework I would like to propose rests on the notion of success criteria for engaged agency. The proposal I would like to test is that the successful agent is the agent who engages with the physical and social environment in a way that allows her to give meaning and direction to her life. This is possibly one sense of success that is central to mental health. We often identify long-term wellbeing and mental health with the agent’s capacity to effectively pursue and ultimately achieve at least some of her goals, forgetting that the agent needs to be engaged to do so: she needs the capacity to interact successfully with her physical and social environment, to feel motivated and supported, and to develop creative responses to inevitable failures and set-backs.

My dream collaborators

Charlotte Gwinner – theatre director who would assist us in producing a play on success for families, to be performed on weekends at the Wellcome Trust.

Matthew Syed – successful sportsperson and now author and media who would feature in a podcast on the residency and deliver a public lecture on what elite sports can teach us about success in more general terms.

Anne Khazam – producer for the radio programme BBC Forum (World Service) who provisionally agreed to work on one or  two episodes of the Forum with core members and collaborators on success, to be aired worldwide and available as a podcast on the BBC website. She has confirmed that her editor is keen to pursue the project.

Amy Hardy – research clinical psychologist interested in the role of imagery in mental health who will deliver a series of lectures on positive and negative aspects of imagery and its role in ‘success’ (including a critical perspective of the recovery framework in mental health).

Some outputs and activities

• Preparation of two research articles on agential success
• Organization of a series of interviews, lectures and debates with experts from different backgrounds (podcasted)
• Book: Bortolotti and Larkin, Health and Happiness, Routledge (contracted)
• Contribution to set up an open access journal: Journal of Human Experience
• Co-editing a collection on success with papers from Core Members and their collaborators
• One or two episodes of BBC Forum (World Service) for each year of residency: (1) on individual vs. society and (2) on success in sport and performance art.
• Play for families on success to be performed at weekends at the Wellcome Collection.
• Two informal exhibitions in the Hub or Reading Room contributing to the two themes, success and rationality, and success and mental health.

Imagery and Optimism as Ingredients of Success

Credit: Jasmine Parker, Wellcome Images

In the last couple of days I further elaborated my thoughts on the success project, and on ways my research questions can be addressed in collaboration with the other potential team members.

On Monday, as part of a public engagement event I organised for the Arts & Science Festival in Birmingham, I heard a talk by Amy Hardy on imagery that touched on many aspects of my interest in success.

She talked about imagining supports both memory construction and forward planning, and she discussed several examples of the costs and benefits of imagery. Some of her examples, the use of imagery to improve academic performance or performance in elite sports, and the use of imagery in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in the context of post-traumatic stress, are cases in which the way we use imagery helps us overcome obstacles and achieve the results we want to achieve.

When I am thinking about a talk I need to deliver to a tough audience, imagining how giving the talk will be like before it takes place will make me less nervous and more confident, improving my performance. Similarly, it has been shown that elite sportspeople improve their performance in competitive events when they imagine the race or the match in advance of competing. The key is to focus on the process, not the outcome. Imagining the event is part of the preparation for it. It is conducive to success.

Successful Research

Credit: Tim Ellis, Wellcome Images

The open event at the Wellcome Trust was for me, as for Michael and for Zoë, a very powerful experience for a variety of reasons. It gave me a chance to explore the space where Hub residents research and know more about what opportunities a genuinely collaborative and interdisciplinary research group can offer.

I also got to brainstorm with people who want to reflect on the theme of success from different disciplinary backgrounds from mine, but have partially overlapping research goals.

Thinking about the theme strengthened my motivation to embark in the journey of exploring success.

Successful research

What makes an interdisciplinary research project successful? Some of the psychological research I am reading right now identifies the characteristics of successful agency with preparedness (being ready for set-backs and responding well to challenges) and with engagement (interacting with the physical and social environment in a productive and supportive way). Those also strike me as plausible criteria for the success of interdisciplinary research projects that aim at addressing (and learning from) the public.

As researchers, we need to be ready to step out of our comfort zones and learn to speak other languages (the language of other disciplines, or the language of the layperson) when we want our ideas to move beyond the constraints of our labs, offices, studios, and classrooms. We need to embrace new ideas, follow up new connections, be creative with our methods of investigation. These activities usually occupy a mental or virtual space (the space in our minds, the space of our inboxes, websites or blogs) but wouldn't it be much more exciting if they could also occupy a physical space, a space that changes together with the ideas that are being explored within it?


Striving and thriving

When the phrase "striving and thriving" was mentioned by Michael and Zoë at the meeting, it brought it all together for me. I have been interested in what success entails and in the extent to which success, intended (very roughly) as pursuing and achieving the goals we set for ourselves, contributes to wellbeing and mental health.

From personal experience and by reading psychological research, literature, and the popular press, it seems clear to me that achieving the goals we set for ourselves (as individuals and groups, or as a society) is a source of satisfaction and helps us see our lives as meaningful and coherent, as going somewhere. However, the pursuit of such goals (the striving) can carry considerable psychological costs (e.g., the yellow lady in the picture seems very happy about losing weight, but I bet all the dieting that contributed to her 'success' was not much fun).

Even the attainment of our own goals may be ultimately disappointing, as we often do not know ourselves well enough to identify goals that would lead us to genuinely thrive (see this post on unintended consequences of our actions and choices). For instance, we may underestimate the role of supporting personal relationships in enhancing our wellbeing and in enhancing the sense that our lives are meaningful. Or we may overestimate the value of those goals that are promoted in the society where we live at the expense of goals that would fulfil our less popular aspirations.

Now, the need to unpack what we take success to be and to explore the tension between wellbeing and success applies to agency in general, and this is the level at which I would like to investigate success and its limitations. But, by entering this conversation with Victoria, Michael, Zoë and Matteo, I realised that some of the most interesting aspects of success are brought into focus in specific domains, such as the capacity to bounce back after the experience of mental distress; the need to survive a goal-driven culture in the competitive environments of academia, elite sports, business, and politics; the struggle to be original, creative, and 'different' in fashion and the arts.

I am looking forward to examining the connections between these strands of research and imagining or project as the place where existing notions of success are dissected, and new notions of success are proposed and tested!