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.

Some Reflections on the 'Success' Theme and Team

On the train back from London last week, I made a lot of notes in order to try to capture some of my initial thought about a collaborative project on success. Lisa, Zoë, Matteo, and myself had lunch together before an event about interdisciplinary research collaborations at the Wellcome Collection, and discussed some of our ideas. It struck us that there was a promising set of overlaps in the topics and questions which we wanted to address. After lunch, we attended the event, and heard from Wellcome Trust staff, and from Felicity Callard, leader of the current ‘Rest’ Hub residency.

In the breaks between presentations we had a lot to think about, and a lot to talk to each other about. When we had arrived, we were told that the event was being time-lapse photographed. On the train home, it occurred to me how much time we had spent together as a four, rather than dispersing ourselves around the room. We also spent that time in an unusual rhythm, alternating between periods of quiet reflection (or stunned silence - gloss as you prefer!) where we all tried to process the overwhelming surge of ideas and possibilities, and other periods of intense discussion where we worked together to give these ideas some shape. I came away convinced that Lisa’s initial idea of ‘success’ was going to work really well as a means of facilitating interdisciplinary research, and that we already had enough in common (in terms of interests in experience, ethics, 'the good, healthy life,' and 'the good society') to make that research cohere.

'Facilitated permeability'

As we listened to the presentations, I was struck by the enthusiasm of the Wellcome staff. Some of my more recent research involves understanding organisational change processes in healthcare, and particularly the psychological aspects of that (in terms of identity, status, group dynamics and processes, for example). I’m quite used to being an ‘outsider’ who is coming into an organisation for research purposes. Usually this process is a cautious negotiation; sometimes it is characterised by defensiveness and obstruction. The thing that really struck me about the attitude of the Trust staff was how open and encouraging they were. I came away with the idea of the Trust as a very permeable space. I think part of our conversations about how to proceed from here will need to be about how we can demonstrate our ‘good faith’ and trustworthy-ness (it’s good to be invited in, but it’s also right - and polite – to get a sense of the boundaries and expectations before accepting such an open invitation). I also think we need to give a lot of thought to how we use that permeability in our plans for a project on success. It’s clearly a critical feature of the concept: who will join us in the project, and in what sequence, and what will they do there?

Planning

A less positive aspect of the event was the sense of ‘ordeal’ which seemed to be associated with the application process for funding for large collaborative projects when Felicity Callard spoke about her team’s experience of that. I can’t say that this didn’t dent my enthusiasm for a time. On reflection, however, I think we can perhaps make our experience of that process a bit more positive if we take the opportunity to learn from past experience and the experience of others. We can do this partly by using this blog to ‘stay ahead of the curve,’ and to keep track of our ideas and plans. And we can align our diaries and block out some chunks of time for meetings and development work at key times. 

Interdisciplinary and Public Engagement

Here are some of the question relevant to what we want to achieve from our proposed project:

• What kinds of events and processes can we set up during our project?

• How can we make sure that each of these activities presents us with an opportunity to learn something about the meaning and quality of ‘success’, and for our partners and collaborators to learn something too?

• How can make sure that we gain as many insights as possible from taking an interdisciplinary approach to these activities?

• And finally, how can we structure this so that it combines to form a coherent programme of work, and adds to our cumulative knowledge about success and health?

The possibilities afforded by this seem very exciting, but I also feel a bit of trepidation about it. If we are successful, then we will be embracing a really new way of working for a couple of years. I can imagine that this will be transformational in terms of integrating art and performance in the project. I have begun to appreciate just how important it will be to have Victoria’s curatorial experience as part of our team!

It was really useful for four of us to all be in the same place, I thought. The link between the interdisciplinary component and the curatorial elements really started to take shape in our discussions that afternoon. On the train home, I could see that we’d had a small sample of the sort of thing that a project of this form might offer up every day. Through our conversation, we opened up some avenues for including some aspects of our research interests that we hadn’t initially considered relevant. I’m now quite keen to think about the Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD) work as part of this scheme, for example. Partly this arose through getting a better sense of Matteo’s interests in empowerment, and in access to social and structural resources, and partly it arose from a ‘lightbulb’ moment. Bringing people together – with the purpose is to improve health – and bringing them there to engage with the idea of success is an opportunity to ‘learn from what works.’ In terms of service-user involvement and healthcare improvement, EBCD fits really with that agenda. 

Structure

As we talked, I began to visualise a structure to our theme. The project is going to be segmented (there are elements of work on success at the personal, interpersonal, social and cultural-structural) and layered (we can foresee themes on success as a response to negative feedback, costs of success, the relational context of success, the different meanings and values associated with different definitions of success, the notion of ‘succeeding against the odds,’ success in elite domains, success in the arts as a source of wellbeing - and so on). Zoe described ‘thriving and striving’ as one of our interests and this certainly seemed to capture the dynamic very well.

Spokes reach out from this hub, connecting the core members to various partners and collaborators. Each of these spokes captures a different strands of work, linking to a likely output. Our task now is to add some detail to these strands, so that we begin to see how they might fit together, and how they might best be structured. I’m really excited at the prospect of so many different levels of activity – co-produced ‘events,’ insights into processes through performances, development and delivery of some innovative research outcomes, opportunities for engaging with some new audiences,  and many of those potentially leading to co-authorship/co-presentation.