The 2004 Positive Psychology Summit

Later this month, the Third International Positive Psychology Summit will be held in Washington, DC. Each year, the Summit brings together members of the positive psychology movement, which urges psychologists to study strength of character and the successful achievement of positive values and goals.

Positive psychology is a variant of humanistic psychology. Its roots are in academic research (such as Martin Seligman’s work on optimism and learned helplessness) rather than clinical practice. Still, many of its themes will be familiar to those who know Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualization or Nathaniel Branden’s writings on self-esteem.

Many years ago, the humanistic movement aimed to transcend such “negative” outlooks as behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Today those adversaries have been defeated in academic psychology, but there are still social psychologists who see us as Machiavellian manipulators, evolutionary psychologists who see us as puppets of our genes, and positivists afraid of going near anything that looks like a philosophical question.

An admirer of The Fountainhead with an interest in psychological research will find the Summit refreshing in its emphasis on positive values and virtues. The Summit is one of the few places in the world of academic psychology where ethical eudaimonism — the view that ethics is about living a good or fulfilled life, rather than doing one’s duty or maximizing utility — is taken seriously. Eudaimonism has gained a toehold in the moral development community, but if you want to converse about human flourishing, or about happiness in a moral context, or about Aristotle’s ethics — the Summit is the place to go.

The same admirer of Rand’s fiction will also find some less desirable themes and trends at the Summit. Some of those in attendance will be hard-core communitarians (but then Aristotle was more than a bit of a communitarian himself). Some speakers will presume that psychologists all believe in bureaucratic rule by experts.

Confusion about the relationship between psychological theories and empirical data will be evident. And good old-fashioned academic sniffishness will be on display (speakers have been known to opine that nothing that appears on TV could have positive aesthetic value). But these are vices of academic psychology, which can be found at any conference within the discipline.

Overall, the positive psychology movement offers much to those who wish to deepen their understanding of self-esteem and of what it depends on, or to fill in the connections between the morality people live by and its impact on their well-being.

Like other academic conferences, the Positive Psychology Summit offers scheduled keynote addresses and sessions consisting of shorter talks. As you walk down the hall, you will see posters reporting empirical research (though there are no poster sessions; instead, the posters stay up for a couple of days). But instead of a convention center or a big hotel, the Summit goes on inside the attractive headquarters building of the Gallup Organization, which has been the Summit’s chief sponsor from the outset.

Like at any conference, the conversations between sessions or over drinks are often just as important as anything that gets said on the podium. The Summit draws somewhere around 300 people, which facilitates easy interaction among attendees. And they come from a wide range of specialties in psychology; the Summit draws cognitive as well as clinical psychologists, developmentalists as well as social psychologists. Working clinical practitioners will be at the conference, and so will entrepreneurs with a variety of schemes for applying the ideas of Seligman and others.


Several of the psychologists on this year’s program will be well worth hearing. Speaking on “An Agentic Perspective on Positive Psychology” will be Albert Bandura, who began in the 1950s as a behaviorist who stretched just far enough to allow for learning through imitation, but has become best known for his research on self-efficacy. Among the movement’s founders, Martin Seligman will be presenting on “Successful Happiness Interventions,” Ed Diener on “The Scientific Foundations of Happiness,” and author Mihály Csikszentmihályi (of Flow fame) will be speaking on “Creativity.”

It looks as though Barry Schwartz and Roy Baumeister are the designated lightning rods. Schwartz’s announced topic (“Practical Wisdom: Aristotle Meets Positive Psychology”) is innocuous. But Schwartz is best known for arguing that people are better off when they don’t have too many alternatives to choose from, and it is hard to believe that his “paradox of choice” won’t show up somewhere.

In his talk at last year’s Summit, Baumeister came out in favor of free will, and backed off just a little farther from the position that made him notorious in the 1990s: that people who say they think highly of themselves all have high self-esteem, and therefore braggarts and gang leaders have high self-esteem. This year he will be asking “Is There Anything Good about Men?” There will probably be something in this talk for everyone to disagree with, but you can be sure it will not be Politically Correct.

The Positive Psychology Summit also brings in speakers you are unlikely to encounter at other psychology conferences. Most prominent among them, this year, will be author Charles Murray, whose topic is “Transcendental Goods and Creativity in the Arts.” Murray co-authored the controversial book The Bell Curve in 1996, and his most recent book is Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950.

The Summit will begin on the evening of Thursday, September 30, 2004, and will end on the morning of Sunday October 3. Information about attending the Summit (speaker list, online registration form, and information about hotels in the area) is available on the Positive Psychology Summit web site. Also worth a visit is Martin Seligman's Positive Psychology Center web site.


Robert L Campbell is a Professor of Psychology at Clemson University. He has published articles on moral development and the development of the self, and is currently at work (with Walter Foddis) on an article evaluating theories of self-esteem.