I read “Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride” by Northeastern University social psychologist David DeSteno. Although the book has a self-help-y sounding title, it's more an effort by DeSteno to explain some ideas from his area of psychology research and extrapolate those into a different way to look at issues of self-control and willingness to value the future over the immediate desires of the present. I first learned about the book from DeSteno's appearance on the Very Bad Wizards podcast where they discussed the main ideas of his book, I found it interesting enough that I wanted to dive deeper.

(image from davedesteno.com)

Self-control: Not just a cognitive good guy vs. an emotional bad guy

DeSteno's main argument is that society has framed the story of self-control and delayed gratification as one in which the unruly emotional passions are constantly trying to lead you astray, and cognitive elements like willpower, executive function, and distraction are key to keeping you on the straight and narrow (the classic illustrations of this are the famous “marshmallow test” experiments). While that formulation can obviously be true in some cases, DeSteno argues that the full picture puts elements of cognition and emotion on both sides of the “now” vs. “later” divide. Specifically, he argues that emotions like gratitude, compassion, and pride (the “job well done” kind, not the hubristic kind) make you more future-oriented, and some instances of “greedy” short-termism such as cheating are actually more cognitively-oriented as you find rationales to convince yourself to go against your natural inclinations. Additionally, a lot of the cognitive methods like relying on willpower just don't work very well – willpower gives out, we overtax our resources and give in to temptation, our virtuous habits only work in the area they were built in and don't translate to other aspects of life, etc.

The mistake of earlier theories lay in mapping virtue and vice onto cognition and emotion in a one-to-one way. If we're going to improve on our strategies we can't make that mistake again. We need to recognize that certain emotions will prove useful in delaying gratification whereas others will not. The trick, then, is to select the appropriate emotional tool for the task at hand.

DeSteno's basic idea is that the way we value immediate vs. distant rewards was evolved for a world that's a lot less stable and predictable than our modern lives: if you live in a world of scarcity and no refrigeration it probably makes sense to eat whatever food you can get your hands on right now rather than hoping it will still be around in a day, a week, a month, etc. But our emotions are also tuned to being a social species: emotional states that are associated with positive social interactions have a tendency to reinforce trust and willingness to sacrifice for others. Putting those things together, DeSteno notes that there's a really special “other” that our modern society tells us we ought to sacrifice for: our future selves. Feeling gratitude for something nice your neighbor did makes you more likely to do something nice for them. But emotions don't tend to be highly specific (have you ever taken your anger out on someone who had nothing to do with getting you angry?), so feeling gratitude also makes you more likely to do something nice for anyone, and that seems to include being willing to put a little bit more into your retirement fund as a way to be nice to your retired self.

Experiments

As a book about psychology research, a lot of the text involves descriptions of the experiments that DeSteno and others have conducted and what inferences can be drawn from them. Since psychologists frequently have to be clever about figuring out ways to subtly measure things a lot of these make for interesting stories – people can't just feel emotions on command so setting up a situation in which the experimental subject ends up feeling something like pride or gratitude can take some ingenuity. I found most of the explanations pretty engaging, but in a few cases I found some of the writing a bit overwrought, perhaps trying a little too hard to make it interesting. He's writing primarily for a popular audience so while there are some numbers involved he doesn't go deep into the data (which can be good or bad depending on your tastes, personally I wish it was a bit more involved but I imagine many people would prefer not to get bogged down by too many numbers or charts and graphs). The results that he does discuss make his core idea seem like it's worth taking very seriously:

To see if gratitude might increase patience, we repeated this experiment, but now with two different types of people: happy and grateful. The reason for including happiness was to be certain that any benefits we found with gratitude weren't simply due to people just feeling good. After all, happiness and gratitude are both positive states. If there were something special about gratitude, we needed to show that its ability to enhance self-control didn't mirror that of any pleasant emotion.
…
The results were impressive. Whereas people who were feeling rather neutral showed the usual impatience, those feeling grateful were significantly more future-oriented. It took $31 to tempt them to forgo the $100 future reward compared with the $17 neutral folks were willing to accept. What about those feeling happy? Their level of impatience was indistinguishable from that of the neutral people; they'd take the pleasure $18 could buy them right now rather than wait a year for $100.

Intriguing, but maybe not a slam-dunk case

While experiments like that lead me to believe that DeSteno is on to something, I'd prefer it if the research was more comprehensive before coming to final conclusions. That happiness vs. gratefulness experiment seems like a terrific first step, but it would be even more impressive to have apples-to-apples comparisons for a whole range of emotions (presumably that research hasn't been done or it would have been mentioned). Instead the experiments are a lot more piecemeal: this experiment in with gratefulness points in the direction the theory predicts, this other one with compassion seems to follow the pattern, this other experiment involving pride can be read as supportive, etc. I'm ready to believe that the dots will all connect the way DeSteno thinks they will, but it would be easier to do so if there was a more systematic and comprehensive set of experiments shoring up the foundation (especially in the current “replicability crisis” zeitgeist where a lot of ideas that seemed really promising haven't held up as well as one would hope).

So what's the takeaway?

As mentioned above, people can't just feel emotions on command – even if it's the case that you'd be better off if you upped your baseline level of compassion you can't just turn a knob on your emotion control unit. DeSteno's position is that these emotions can be cultivated. For example, he suggests that keeping a “gratitude journal” is one way of making the little things in life that you can be grateful for more salient, which will increase your overall level of gratitude. Similarly, he advocates meditation for increasing compassion. While a lot of the western embrace of meditative practices seems focused on the cognitive aspect, such as the ability to increase focus and control, in Buddhist tradition those are usually just precursors to things like “loving kindness meditation” which are intended to increase your feelings of compassion. He also thinks that cultivating these emotions will have social knock-on effects: If I'm feeling more compassionate I'm more likely to give you some sort of help you need, which will make you feel more grateful. If you're feeling more grateful you're more likely to express gratitude to someone else, who can take pride in accomplishing the thing you're expressing gratitude for.

Easier said than done?

When spelled out in high level terms it seems to make a lot of sense. I'm not sure it will be that simple in practice. A lot of people would love to be able to take more pride in their work, but sometimes that's not so easy. What if the people around you, in an effort to be positive and supportive, say nice things about everything that everyone does so you can't be sure what is truly valued? Does that interfere with your cultivation of pride? How about the social expectations to express gratitude in appropriate situations even if you don't feel it – does that complicate the picture? While the future-orientation effects of these emotional states might be a novel finding it isn't like nobody has ever tried to increase the amount of gratitude, compassion, or pride in the world before – these are stubbornly hard problems to solve!

Overall conclusion

I thought this was a good book, but not a great one. The idea at the core of the book is an interesting one, and one I intend to take seriously and follow up on, but the book seems more geared toward “starting a conversation” than making a comprehensive case. I found it to be a pleasant read, but not a compulsive page-turner. And the conclusion, about how this approach can remake society, struck me as a little too speculative and pie-in-the-sky to be a compelling ending. Still, I'm glad I read it. If I had to rate it I'd give it 3 out of 4 stars.