The Table Video

Psychologist Everett Worthington (Virginia Commonwealth University) presents findings from positive psychology on how spiritual formation occurs. His main contention is that spiritual formation is not primarily a conscious, rational imposition of a belief, value and practice structure over our lives. In fact, he suggests, psychology has told us incontrovertibly that most of our behavior is driven by intuitive, fast cognition of which we have little awareness.

Transcript:

Good morning.

Audience: Good morning.

So I want you to know I’m taking a real risk today. Okay, I’m going to mention humility in my talk. Now the last time I mentioned humility I was getting a kind of award from APA and it was something like least likely to succeed, but I decided I was gonna talk on humility and so I’m like really rehearsing because I know there’s going to be a lot of people there and I walk in the door and when I walk through the door there’s this handle and it catches my fly. [audience laughing]

It actually rips it completely open and I spent the entire talk [audience laughing] on humility like this and see so it’s like you know God had a really good character formation program for us. If we start talking about humility it may end up as humiliation. Let’s make sure I’m working this, okay. What don’t I know, yes, okay. Good, I’m back. [clearing throat]

So I have a three point sermon today and let me tell you what those are just so that we start off knowing where we’re going. First of all spiritual formation in individuals and in the church can be aided by positive psychology. This can supplement the 2,000 years of practice that we have developed in the church.

Second, namely I’ll talk about three kind of parts of positive psychology. One a broad, the power of broad relationships. Broad in terms of relationship with God, with other people and with things. The power of situations. Situations are very powerful as we’ll see and then interventions to build virtues. So these are three things that I think positive psychology can help the church with. Point number three, the message of positive psychology to spiritual formation is through practicing and testing virtues people can be good and happy.

And then point four of my three point sermon is use of one arranging virtue promoting situations and two virtue building interventions can help both individuals and the church be conformed more to Christ’s likeness. So that’s where I’m headed and so I want to start by just reminding us of something that probably everyone knows. This is Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiment. We see that we have, I guess I have a laser pointer here, so we have a picture of Stanley Milgram right up there by the little shock machine that he’s developed.

I think he ended up changing to Wolfman Jack at some point, I’m not sure. [audience laughing] So we have Stanley Milgram up there and he designs this study because he wanted to have a vacation in Germany and he wanted the government to pay for it and so he ends up designing an experiment to look at the “German personality” and why people obey authorities to the extent that they do.

And so of course you’re familiar with this and what he does is he says this is a study on learning and he has two people that are participants, one’s a learner and one’s a teacher. Turns out that the learner is actually a confederate of Stanley Milgram and is the older guy that’s being strapped into the chair. And then there’s the teacher and that’s the real subject. And the experiment ostensibly is about the teacher teaching the learner to learn paired words and doing so by punishing wrong answers.

And the way that they’re punished is to deliver increasing electric shocks, 15 volts, 30 volts, 45, up to a possible maximum of 450. Nobody ever thought that anybody would get to 450. Now of course what happens is people start delivering these shocks and there’s minimal pressure of the white coated experimenter standing by the person saying, “The experiment requires that you continue”, very coercive stuff. “You can keep the money, the experiment requires that you continue. I’ll take responsibility.

Although the shocks may be painful they won’t be harmful.” You see dreadful you know coercion there. So what happens? Well of course what happens is there is a protocol that the confederate goes through. In some one situation he’s in a room and they can hear him through the room and he starts yelling at about 120 volts. “120 volts” says the teacher. [yelling] “135 volts next time he misses.” [mimicking buzzing] [yelling] [audience laughing] “150 volts.” [mimicking buzzing] [yelling loudly] [audience laughing] So the screams continue all the way to 180 volts. At 180 volts, “180 volts.” [mimicking buzzing] Nothing, silence, nothing from then on. The guy doesn’t answer, doesn’t press buttons.

You know the other thing that the experimenter can say is, “Treat that as an incorrect response.” You know, “The experiment requires that you continue.” [mimicking buzzing]. “240 volts.” Okay so the question is how far do people go and if you ask people that aren’t familiar with this they say, “Well they would quit about 120 volts, almost nobody would go past 120.” Actually what happened is no one stopped before 120 volts and 62% of the people went all the way to 450 volts.

Milgram said he resisted the temptation to play the sound of frying bacon in the background. [audience laughing] So what does this mean? What does this study mean? Does this mean that, you know first of all it doesn’t matter who the participants are. The participants you know participated with the same results if they were Yale college students, well we understand that, dock workers, physicians, pastors, oops, so you know it didn’t matter what kind of, you know what kind of professional training or worker training that people had. So what do we make out of this?

Is this evidence that human nature is fallen and is that what this means? Is this evidence that people are just wussies and will do whatever somebody in a white coat says? Is this evidence that we really have no moral fiber whatsoever? What is the meaning of this? Well I’m gonna come back to that and I’m gonna skip a couple if I can get this to work. Ah, okay. [indistinct talking] Where’s the computer? Right there. [audience laughing]

Man: 120 volts. [audience laughing] [mimicking buzzing] [yelling] Who said that? Okay so I’m gonna talk about spiritual direction so I’m gonna risk definition of spiritual direction from the point of view of an amateur. I’m not a professional spiritual director, but spiritual formation is God’s cultivation and development of a virtuous Christian character in which individuals and the church, the body of Christ, are conformed to the character of Jesus Christ within.

Both under times of strain and in times when no unusual stress or temptation is present as individuals and the church continually respond to the reality of God’s grace, which seeks to shape individuals and the church into the likeness of Jesus Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit by way of using broad relationships with God, others in and out of the church and within ourselves, which is usually apprehended within, differently, within different theological worldviews.

So what are the main elements of this? The main element, one God is doing the work. Two, the three parts of the Trinity are involved in this work of spiritual formation. Three, it builds virtue in the individual Christian and in the church. Four, it is eudaimonic virtue and by that I take it as virtue for myself and others, but I’m using that in kind of a modern way, not an ancient Greek way. It is relational in a broad sense and different theological traditions understand it differently. So my objective is not to explain spiritual direction.

I’m just kinda taking off there as a working model. So what is, what is positive psychology? Well positive psychology is the psychological science of, okay, it is the what? Psychological science of something, either positive emotion or happiness and subjective well being or character strength and virtue. Positive psychologists disagree about this.

About 10% say that it’s the psychological science of positive emotion, so that’s not a popular view, but there are some people that take that. It is the psychological science of happiness and subjective well being, probably about 40% say that and about 50% say it is the psychological science of character strength and virtue. So there’s a division. I like the idea that it is the psychological science of virtue for self and other, of eudaimonic virtue.

And I believe that we can through applying this psychological science, basic science and applied science, we can be both good and happy, although that happy is not necessarily always temporal happiness. So what can positive psychology contribute to spiritual formation? Well let me just kinda tell you the way that I see life in these United States and that is that cognitive psychology is employed by much of positive psychology and the way that cognitive psychology understands people today is that rationality is very overrated.

We are not rational people very often and usually when we are rational people it’s because our non-rational intuitions and emotions and drives feed into a rational system that just justifies what we intuitively wanted to do anyway.

This is kind of the look that positive psychology gives us. What rationality would say about spiritual formation is we just need to find the character that we want to develop and then just do it. Just do it, exert will power. Remember John, if you were here yesterday John Coe’s opening talk, he started with a little anecdote about a pastor who somebody comes up and says, “You know I’m having trouble with my anger” and he goes, “Well you know don’t be angry, love God.” And the person goes, “Yeah, I know that, but how?”

Well that’s the problem, see, our rationality says [audience laughing] that we can be virtuous if we just apply willpower, which is kinda like growing a new head of hair for some people. [audience laughing] And so, you know unfortunately this doesn’t always work that well. [laughing] All right, this is just a visual just for your entertainment. [audience laughing] So why doesn’t willpower work? Well it doesn’t work because of the way the cognitive psychology looks at our life and that is that in this book, it’s one of the best books on psychology in the last three or four years by Daniel Kahneman.

He says that there are two types of systems of thinking, system one which is intuitive fast thinking and system two which is rational slow thinking. And he likens the way that we live is like riding an elephant. The elephant is the system one thinking and where the elephant wants to go the elephant will go and if the elephant wants to lean left the rider, which is the rational part, leans with the elephant. It’s a very different picture than Plato with the noose driving the chariot and controlling the passions.

It’s the passions that seem to be mostly in control. And we often you know lean with the elephant and may even fall off of the elephant. So this is the way that I look at psychology. If I look at psychology this way that a lot of the parts of our life are not under our direct control but are under the control of these intuitions we have or Marie might say unconscious processes. Then how do we become more spiritually formed?

And I will sketch for you a little picture and that picture says imagine that God is here, that people in the church are here, that people not in the church are here and that structures are here. Structures like this chapel, right. You didn’t have to be told where to sit. You came in and responded to the structure. We have a structure of a lecturary. You’re not jumping up and dancing you know because you’re responding to structures, to things not just to people. Well all of those four things, God, people and things feed into a person and that person has triggers that trigger off certain cognitive processes, certain emotional processes, certain motivational processes and we’re not aware of many of those triggers.

One of the things that it can trigger is cognitive processes and those processes, those cognitive processes, the rider of the elephant gets engaged and occasionally the rider of the elephant can take that goad and can goad the elephant to go where the rider wants the elephant to go. But elephants are dangerous. Hannibal crossed the Pyrenees to go fight in Rome and the thing that he had that the Romans didn’t have was war elephants. Problem is the Carthaginians that Hannibal commanded were just as afraid of the war elephants as the Romans because they were not controllable and sometimes they turned around and rampaged and stomped their own troops. They didn’t always behave like they were supposed to.

Those triggers, those situations and those internal structures that the triggers might trigger off beliefs, values, things that are internal go together to yield my behavior. I can see I’m about time to be finished with my talk and I’m just getting into it. [audience laughing] So let’s go back to to Stanley Milgram for just a minute.

How do we explain what happened with Stanley Milgram’s study? Well my contention is that really this is not evidence that we are sheep. This is not evidence that we are evil or fallen. This is evidence that we have within us the image of God and that image of God gives us a sense that most of us wants to do good, but we’re sitting on top of that elephant and our rationality of interpreting what is good is sometimes deceived.

Now so I think that our response in this obedience situation is all about virtues, it’s all about people having a hierarchy of virtues. A hierarchy says these are ordered virtues. The virtues that are on the top are the ones that are most important to me, the ones that I use the most. They’re very accessible to my consciousness and so when I encounter a situation and that situation triggers something it often triggers those cardinal virtues that define me. Okay, and so, but there are strong situations like this obedience situation where this guy in the white coat is standing there saying, “You need to do this, this is good for the experiment.” And when people are asked, “Why did you give those shocks?” they’ve said, “I gave those shocks because I didn’t want to mess the experiment up, because I wanted to provide information that would help people for decades to come.”

In other words they didn’t say, “I gave those shocks because I’m inherently evil, because I’m a fallen person and couldn’t overcome my will to destroy.” They said, “They appealed to virtues.” What those situations do is they light up virtues often further down the hierarchy and bring those virtues to the fore. So we are you know responsive to situations, they’re important, but we’re not at the mercy of situations.

We are gonna be triggered into our hierarchy of virtues. Notice that 62% of the people went all the way in the study, right. 38% of the people did not go all the way. Why, because what got triggered in them were virtues that said, “I care about this person that I am blasting repeatedly.” Other people who didn’t have perhaps care and concern as a very high order virtue got swept into the situation. So what I’m trying to argue then is that virtues are important. They are important in the church. They are important in our lives. Trying to find, okay so [clearing throat] so then we should be concerned about how do we become more virtuous?

And so kind of a classical theory of virtue says that virtue is built in a couple of ways, first I have to see where I want to go, have to see the end point, and then I have to build habits of the heart by practicing and practicing and practicing until this becomes like Michael Polanyi says, “An automatic type thought, an automatic type behavior.” So I practice these until they become part of my elephant if you will, so that they will guide me where I want to go.

But I can be never doing something not virtuous, I could be honest say if that were the virtue I were really interested in, but I’m not really honest in my character because I’ve just never been tempted to steal or to lie. So in order to know if this is really becoming a virtue I have to test it and I have to test it repeatedly. And I can put some of those tests on to build my strength, to build up my sense of virtue and life will test virtues whether I want to or not. And if I do this, if I glimpse the goal, if I practice the virtues, if I subject it to tests and meet the tests that life throws at me then I will have some sense of virtue at the end.

So here’s just a graphical portrayal of that and this suggests really that temporal happiness might or might not happen. You know I could be happy and be hungry and miserable, but I’m happy because I’ve done the right thing and this gives my life meaning. And that kind of happiness is what I’m talking about when I’m talking about happiness.

So what I want to do is to just talk about the ways that psychology, positive psychology can help you build virtues. This is one of the things that psychology has to offer and I want to take two virtues as examples. One of those is forgiveness and the other is humility. So we have developed an intervention to help people forgive and this involves a five step process that we help people walk through and experience different things at each of these steps and we use the acrostic REACH to reach forgiveness and that acrostic, each of those steps stands for something.

There’s all kinds of free stuff that is available to you and let me give you my website. Everything is free on it, okay, so it is www of course then evworthington-forgiveness.com. You go to that, you can get leader manuals to run Christian groups.

You can get leader manuals to run secular groups. You can get participant manuals for secular and Christian groups. You can get self-help workbooks that people can work through. All of these are downloadable, free, manipulate them the way you want, use them the way you want. Just if you publish something cite me you know.

Okay so let me tell you kind of the way that I look at forgiveness. I look at forgiveness as somebody does something that hurts or offends us, we start our kind of bookkeeping in our head and you know we try to measure kind of how much injustice has been done to us and we keep adjusting that depending on what happens.

And so I call that the injustice gap. It’s the gap between the way I would like to see this situation resolved and the way it is right now. If somebody does something like apologizes we know that’s costly. That feeds justice into the situation. If somebody makes restitution to us, gives us like a million dollars for you know hurting our feelings that brings justice into the situation. The smaller the injustice gap the easier it is to deal with that and to transcend that gap. Now as it turns out we have many, many ways to deal with that gap, not just forgiveness, we have many ways.

For example we can see justice done. We can get revenge. We can turn it over to God. We can turn it over to God for divine justice. We can turn it over to God because this is not my problem. We can forbear, we can accept and move on with life. There are many ways that we can deal with this, but one of those is to forgive. So we have developed that forgiveness intervention.

A lot of research has shown that if we forgive it’s good for us, it’s also good for the person who hurt me, especially if I do that in an altruistic way. So it’s good for us in that it brings health benefits, mental health benefits, relational benefits and spiritual benefits and oh by the way it’s a good thing to do, it builds our character.

Now this intervention that we’ve developed, this REACH Forgiveness intervention has been studied a lot empirically and in 2000, I think it’s 14, it could be 13, we had published, oh it’s 2014 in January, we had published a meta-analysis analyzing all of the forgiveness interventions and it turns out that there are two that have been used a lot. One is Robert Enright’s. There were 23 randomized clinical trials studying it. The REACH Forgiveness model had 22 randomized clinical trials studying it.

And then all of the others together had 22 randomized clinical trials. So what are the findings from that meta-analysis? I would like you to believe that the findings are that the REACH Forgiveness model is the absolute best. [audience laughing] I would love for you to believe that. Would you believe that? [audience laughing] It’s not true, okay. No intervention was better than any other. What mattered was time.

Engaging people in trying to forgive and running them through some kind of structured program, but the time that they spend is what’s important. And we actually have found twice as large an effect with workbooks where people work through these on their own than in groups, twice the effect. Now we’ve only had three studies on this so I’m not ready to go to the bank with this, but it looks like that that is a really powerful way of engaging people, getting them to work through these on their own. Well let me just say a little bit about humility.

I don’t want to say too much for some you know obvious reasons. Some of the guys that have worked with me on studying humility are Don E. Davis at Georgia State, Joshua Hook at North Texas and Daryl Van Tongeren at Hope College. So I wrote a book on humility. Yes it’s about other people. [audience laughing] And the point of that book was that the measurement problem of asking you how humble are you and having you say, “I’m the most humble person in the world.” [audience laughing] You can see what a measurement problem that would be, right.

It turns out Moses was the most humble of all men, right, scripture says so. Of course who wrote that scripture? [audience laughing] Well there you go, but you know, but it’s scripture so we can believe that that’s true. In other words self-report can be true as well as can be a product of my narcissism. [audience laughing]

So in triangulating humility we try to use different methods of other you know other report and so when I said that that book that I wrote, “Humility: A Quiet Virtue” it’s about other people, that was exactly true. I said I can’t tell you if I’m humble. Maybe my wife could tell you, but humility is different in different relationships, it’s not a trait for everyone. So I could be humble with my wife, I could be humble with my kids, I could be not so humble with my graduate students, not so humble with my boss, you see, so it’s relational.

Now there is a character humility if every single person that I’m in a relationship with says that I’m humble then you would probably say I have the trait of humility, the character, the strength of humility. So triangulating humility is kind of what we try to do. Now I just put a couple of quotes on here and so let’s just look at these. Let’s see, humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts, it means freedom from thinking about yourself at all.

It doesn’t mean you don’t think about yourself, but you’re free not to have to think about yourself. There’s no limit to what can be done if it doesn’t matter who gets the credit, and appropriately author unknown. [audience laughing] So we have this ideal of relational humility and this is humility that is characterized by in a particular relationship by an accurate view of yourself, an accurate view of yourself, not thinking too little, not thinking too much.

A modest self-presentation, a practice of putting others at least equal to oneself, an openness to correction, an openness to learning and discernment about when to use humility, when to exhibit that, when it’s appropriate and when it isn’t. So we have done a couple of studies creating workbooks to promote humility. In fact on evworthington-forgiveness.com you can download the workbooks to promote humility and what we have found in that, we have created a five point acrostic that we call PROVE Humility.

These are the five steps we help people work through. Pick a time when you weren’t humble. Remember the place of your abilities and achievements in the big picture. This is that honest self-appraisal. Open yourself and be adaptable. Value all things in order to lower self-focus. This is your openness to correction, openness to learn. Examine your limitations and commit to a humble lifestyle. This is less focus on yourself and focusing instead on others.

With that workbook we have done two studies and let me just give you the results of these studies. We had people randomly assigned who wanted to build virtue. We didn’t tell them what virtue. We randomly assigned them to work through six to seven hours of workbook material and we assigned them to humility, forgiveness, patience, self-control or as a control group positivity, another control group, a non-action control group is just filling out questionnaires until they fall unconscious. [audience laughing]

So they work through these workbooks and what we found for the humility condition is that it not only made them more humble by trait, this is not feelings of humility but trait measures of humility, it not only made them more humble it drug along forgivingness and patience and it lowered their negative feelings. Remember Bob Emmons yesterday said that gratitude raises the positive, but it didn’t affect the negative.

Humility seems to lower the negative but not affect the positive. We replicated that study a second time only this time we recruited people who wanted to be in a humility intervention and we compared them with a non-action control and we had even more astounding effects. You can see the comparison there. I gave you the effect size and in trait humility, the first study, the effect size was .35, in the second one .86. It also produced more forgiveness even though, by trait, even though this is aimed at humility, not forgiveness.

It produced about the same patience. It produced more reduction in trait negativity. Our conclusion is this looks like a pretty good little intervention. So let me just, I’m sorry I didn’t show you the numbers. I know you all wanted to see the numbers. [audience laughing] Okay, so let me just summarize my three point sermon. All right, so what I hope we’ve seen is that spiritual formation can be aided by some things that positive psychology tells us about the power of the situation, that we can change situations and about virtue, that we can help people develop more virtue. Second, the message of positive psychology is through practicing virtue people can become good and happy.

They can develop often other virtues than were targeted. And then third the message for spiritual formation is that these can be situations that can change the church and individuals in the church to help both be more spiritually formed and more closely conformed to the character of Jesus Christ. Thank you. [audience applauding]

Man: My question is how it can, because the Holy Spirit in Christian theology and practice is the transformative agent and in positive psychology there would either be a denial of that agent or an exclusion of him, at least if you take the leading practitioners of positive psychology. So I’ll stop my question that way.

Okay so you know I don’t find any conflict between using positive psychology methods and for example a sermon, a Sunday school. You know if the Holy Spirit is not in it you know then it’s not gonna help us that much form Christian character, but just because this is a method derived from secular life doesn’t mean that it can’t be used.

Giving a sermon is derived from secular life also. You know teaching in Sunday school is derived by secular life. Also you know what Marty Seligman says about positive psychology is not what I say about positive psychology. You know so why do I have to just go with one or two of them who might not value applying this in a Christian context, why don’t we go with psychologists who can apply this in a Christian context.

Woman: I’m thinking about the implications of this raising children because a lot of what we do then is changing what’s been done in early childhood or you know teen years and do you have anything that would be applicable or do these workbooks, something could be adapted to using the techniques with children.

Well mostly, you know we have to work with children in an age appropriate way as they develop and so usually this fits right in. You know how do we train a child to be more forgiving? You know we train their behavior. They don’t understand you know the complexities of forgiveness and what they’re doing, but when they’re six we say you know, “Say I’m sorry to your brother, say I forgive you” and we establish a situation, a strong situation and that helps practice, helps mold the child’s behavior.

Now as the child ages of course we move more the engaging their thinking and engaging their emotions and getting them to be more self-directed so that becomes something that they want to do more. But again we’re drawing on situations and we’re drawing on training in virtue, training to practice this until it becomes a habit of the heart. So that’s a general answer

Woman: Thanks, this was really interesting and helpful. My question is in your work on humility and forgiveness is there a place for understanding anger?

For understanding anger? Yeah so is there–

Woman: A place for anger in this panoply of cultivating these particular virtues because it seems to me that anger is related to these things.

Yes so anger of course is gonna be one of those emotions that drives us often and operates very often out of our awareness by various physical pathways. Anger is important and what we try to do is not have people deny that they’re angry. You know you can’t forgive someone if you don’t admit that they have done a wrong to you. So you have to admit that you’ve been wronged and you have to admit, well you don’t have to, but it’s helpful if you admit how you feel about that wrong.

And that anger can become a righteous anger, but it can also be that intuitive anger that my narcissistic self has been wounded and my rationality is telling me that I’m in the right, this is totally reasonable when in fact what’s driving me is that elephant beneath. In that case I have to, if I’m working in psychotherapy with someone I have to help them understand that anger, not to squelch it but to be able to direct it where it needs to be helpfully directed. [soft music]