Michael Argyle (1925–2002)

Now very out of date, Argyle's summary of largely quantitative and statistical research into what makes people happy or 'satisfied' is not enormously useful today but should be respected as a book that helped shift public opinion towards caring about how people felt about their condition.

Of course, the cult of feeling has gone way too far since then, perhaps to the extent of making the population much less resilient than it should be but this is an over-correction from a period when there show more was virtually no interest in anything other than delivery of material improvement.

There is not much to be learned from the book for the rather positive reason that nearly everything it offers about what makes people happy or unhappy is now largely common knowledge. Things have moved on considerably since the 1980s.

Apart from its being lodged in a particular time and culture (class conscious Anglo-America), the book suffers from the statistical fetishes of the era. The result often seems to be a validation of what common sense might have told us was often the 'bleeding obvious'.

Indeed, it could be regarded as representing an elite managerialism where the 'bleeeding obvious' is not allowed to be the 'bleeding obvious' unless validated by men in white coats 'doing research' and talking of coefficients without always being able to find many reliable reasons for their findings.

The lack of a phenomenological approach to the human condition leaves one with a rather dull book that seems unable to give much by way of explanation for the cold quantitative data that one suspects hides the really interesting insights that would come from exceptions.

Set in its time of high unemployment in the UK, it reminds us that this was the point when the emotional misery and risks of not being able to work helped to halt the sinister acceptance of another group of social 'scientists' (economists) of unemployment as an instrument of policy.

There is also the beginnings here of an understanding of the miseries inherent in traditional gender relations even if this was eventually to help liberate women while leaving men stranded much as they still are today. Some of the issues raised here are still not being addressed.

The role of health in happiness is also quantified. The quantification - with its undoubted class aspects - is something a grossly underfunded health and social services structure is still trying to deal with as funds run out under a terminally inept British political class.

On the other hand, Argyle is writing about a world where most people seem to have spent hours in front of the television (which he seems curiously to consider a happy rather than a palliative habit) and where traditional values remain in place and mass migration had not started in earnest.

Such a book today would be very different not only because of social change but because current thinking is less likely to place emphasis on self-justification of psychology as 'science' in favour of trying more humanistically to understand the complex condition of people in complex societies.

What is not well clarified is what happiness is. It is understood reasonably enough as a set of positions from black misery to possibly unhinged elation on a useful scoring sheet produced in 1966 by the psychologists Wessman & Ricks but exactly what does each state mean and how authentic is it?

Taken at face value, if a reliable non-addictive 'happy drug' was on offer, it might reproduce the states in the upper 'happy' register. Similarly a whole range of palliative behaviours might be uncovered that push people up the register. Technically this would increase 'happiness'.

Perhaps a 'wise' authoritarian liberal democracy might make everyone happy without changing any other condition of existence. It seems that the correlation between happiness and certain material states of being like wealth is not as evident as we might think.

Argyle's conclusion (noting that he does not include health which is surprising especially in relation to older people) is the rather accepted and now obvious one that people are generally happiest who have good social networks, meaningful work regardless of pay and can lose themselves in leisure.

The picture is of a community of loose-knit families and friends with stable fulfilling workplaces where people can go home to the TV set or off to the pub or for a meal without a care in the world. As an average this may ring true but it also looks like a recipe for complacency and inaction.

The nagging sense here is that the quantified average is not telling us much about the totality of our species' experience and certainly not about the considerable number of outliers. It may also be telling us that a 'wise' political class has the opportunity to create a mass to cull in war when it takes a fancy.

It might be fortunate in this respect that our political class are not social democrats who believe in science as the means for running a society but are instead somewhat inept fat-heads who leave happiness to us to enjoy as we can despite them. This at least gives us some leeway to resist the cull. show less

This book covers a wide range of relevant areas touching on social behaviour, dynamics between individuals, and some aspects of an individual's psychology that are affected by, and in turn influence these.

Frameworks are provided to help conceptualise the relevant relations and dynamics, and results are summarised from prior research. Though this was originally published in the late 1960s, much of the background is relevant now, and useful as an introduction.

This will be of wide general show more interest as the issues discussed in virtually every chapter will be relevant to the majority of readers. These span everything from eye contact, different personality types, group and pair dynamics, self-image and self-esteem, social skills, friendship, and conflict. Towards the end we also learn about mental disorders in which disrupted social functioning is the cause or effect, and how sub clinically similar disruptions may affect mental health.
Generally a concise and informative read, of interest throughout. A little dated in places, and of course the modern issues of digital interpersonal relations are not covered. show less

The author was in some ways an inspiration to me. Scottish country dancing was his answer to happiness, as substantiated in this book. I once heard him tell a politically incorrect joke at a dinner. A blind man goes into a shop and swings his guide dog round his head on its lead. What are you doing? said the shopkeeper. Just looking around. He told another tale about the Bodleian Library. He discoverd that someone else had called up and was looking at a book he had been using. To the library show more assistant, he said, "Can you tell me who the person is who is consulting the book?" "Some jerk called Arglye", came the reply. i checked this out. It was a true story. show less

Psychologie, Psychiatrie

3€ Amazon
etwas vergilbt, sonst gut