THE CLAIM In 2005 Professor Barbara Fedrickson et al found the ratio for positive to negative emotions required for people to flourish was 2.9013. THE EVIDENCE The positive ratio was applied in education, business and marriages. Some went so far as to claim that the positivity ratio was actually equal to PI (3.14). But a study by Brown et al in 2013 found that the mathematical methods used did not support the positivity claim. Fredrickson softened her claim and suggested that a different experimental design would have been appropriate. But Brown et al responded again to reaffirm that the crux of the argument wasn’t so much about the math but whether you can really measure positive emotions in any meaningful way at all e.g. 'if someone laughs at a joke on TV, eats an ice-cream, sees their dog get run over, and watches a nice sunset, are they at a 3 to 1 ratio of positive to negative emotions and flourishing?' The question went to the heart of positive psychology movement – can emotions be measured in a universal–invariant way? But the positive psychology movement still clings onto the ratio. THE VERDICT Why is it so difficult to let go of our beliefs even when there is no evidence to support them and when the claims seem too unbelievable to be true? #evidencebasedmanagement
Like I wrote in a recent post..critical thinking drops dramatically in academia once you’re invested in your own research
References for this mythbuster are; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3126111/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022167818762227 https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/74336 https://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/complex_dynamics_final_clean.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.4837.pdf https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022167818762227
Independent Thinker, Business Professor, Organizational Psychologist, OCM Expert
5 年Measuring emotions, even those of a more persistent nature, e.g. anger or love, is fraught with difficulties. Not the least of these are the fact that emotional responses are in the nanosecond range (Kahneman, 2011) requiring very specialized equipment to register neurological responses (Bastiaansen et al, 2019). This make applicability in a normal work environment just about preposterous. Nonetheless, emotional awareness is a basic necessity in OCM because it will give the rawest 'data' and where the emotion is persistent, crucial to making intervention corrections. I would also add that 'flourishing' should not be an OC metric due to its potential invariable relationship to change RIO. Kahneman, D. (2011), Thinking, fast and slow, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, NY. Bastiaansen, M., Lub, X. D., Mitas, O., Jung, T. H., Ascen??o, M. P., Han, D. I., ... & Strijbosch, W. (2019). Emotions as core building blocks of an experience. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.