Positive Psychology and Caring Practice

Someone might think that the relatively cautious account of care education I defend has little to do with anything “positive.” I think that would be a mistake. Refusing to promise direct value-enhancement does not commit us to a negative psychology. Positive psychology still matters because any moral education worthy of the name must eventually lead to positive action, not merely to the possession of correct attitudes.

For care education, the positive element refers above all to patience in building relationships and to the cultivation of a healthier mode of life. Any caring relation is, in part, also a process of self-construction. Through relation, people learn both how they differ from others and how they themselves become identifiable. In ordinary life, two obstacles often interfere with this process.

The first obstacle often appears in collectivist settings. Some students strongly feel that they are different, do not fit in, and have been treated unfairly. Yet they still remain inside an active network of relations. They may fail to achieve consensus with others, but they are not simply invisible. In cases like this, teachers do not necessarily need to fear severe negative emotion. Often what is needed is an objective but positive evaluation of the student’s assumptions and stance. Such a person has not been cut off from relation. Rather, the person struggles to establish care or consensus in a particular way. The surrounding network may refuse agreement, but it has not yet withdrawn recognition.

The second obstacle is more serious. Here the person cannot establish effective relations with others at all. That weakens confidence and deprives self-formation of sustained motivation. People in this condition are often highly sensitive both to themselves and to their relational environment, and in some cases they may also see their situation in a comparatively detached way. This is where depressive realism, or the “sadder but wiser” effect, becomes relevant.[1] [2] Ordinary people often exaggerate their control over events; depressed subjects often lack that optimistic distortion. Their characteristic style of explanation tends to treat failure as stable, pervasive, and internal.

This is why care education needs what I would call positive patience: confidence that the work of building relation can be effective. Such confidence can gradually become trust in oneself and, under some conditions, trust in others. Many factors shape this process, and some of them lie beyond the educator’s control. Teachers therefore need to recognize their own limits and work carefully with the limited resources they actually possess.

The psychology here is complicated. In some circumstances, what sustains a person’s positive orientation may look quite close to self-deception. Yet we do not always judge those mechanisms negatively. Brodt and Zimbardo’s experiment on shyness is suggestive. Two groups of shy female students were asked to converse with the same attractive male experimenter. One group was first exposed to loud noise and told that bodily reactions such as increased heart rate were caused by the noise rather than by anxiety. The other group received no such framing. The students who had heard the noise appeared less shy.[3] Is this self-deception in the strict sense? Perhaps in some respects it is close. But even if it is, some kinds of intervention may still be positively useful.

In my own philosophical work on self-deception, drawing on Alfred Mele, I have argued that cognitive bias can arise from both external and internal sources. Not every bias shaped by subjective attitude is therefore a moral defect. Some biases are unavoidable consequences of the paradigmatic assumptions through which each person already interprets the world. The key question is whether one can bring those assumptions under reflective scrutiny and ask whether they support or damage both relation and self-formation. That is difficult, but it cannot be avoided. For that reason, care education must combine cautious critical thinking with a refusal to drift toward depressive realism.[4]

Positive psychology also matters in a practical sense. We should be cautious about the large number of self-improvement and educational interventions now on the market, many of which are ineffective or even harmful. Still, some modest practices are worth taking seriously: regular exercise, adequate sleep, and appropriate physical affection within close relationships, for example. Such practices can help support self-discipline. At the broadest level, this gives us a practical scale for care education: first, classroom teaching centred on critical thinking and knowledge; second, the broader school and family environment, where limited cognitive and behavioural interventions may be appropriate; and third, service learning, which takes students out into the community. These levels must develop progressively, not in reverse.