{"id":3096,"date":"2025-01-10T05:48:02","date_gmt":"2025-01-10T05:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/?p=3096"},"modified":"2025-01-10T05:48:05","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T05:48:05","slug":"technology-in-modern-psychological-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bullseye.ac\/blog\/deep-work\/technology-in-modern-psychological-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology in Modern Psychological Research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Number of words: 483<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our second argument for why depth generates meaning comes from the work of one of the world\u2019s best-known (and most misspelled) psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the early 1980s, Csikszentmihalyi, working with Reed Larson, a young colleague at the University of Chicago, invented a new technique for understanding the psychological impact of everyday behaviors. At the time, it was difficult to accurately measure the psychological impact of different activities. If you brought someone into a laboratory and asked her to remember how she felt at a specific point many hours ago, she was unlikely to recall. If you instead gave her a diary and asked her to record how she felt throughout the day, she wouldn\u2019t be likely to keep up the entries with diligence\u2014it\u2019s simply too much work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Csikszentmihalyi and Larson\u2019s breakthrough was to leverage new technology (for the time) to bring the question to the subject right when it mattered. In more detail, they outfitted experimental subjects with pagers. These pagers would beep at randomly selected intervals (in modern incarnations of this method, smartphone apps play the same role). When the beeper went off, the subjects would record what they were doing at the exact moment and how they felt. In some cases, they would be provided with a journal in which to record this information while in others they would be given a phone number to call to answer questions posed by a field-worker. Because the beeps were only occasional but hard to ignore, the subjects were likely to follow through with the experimental procedure. And because the subjects were recording responses about an activity at the very moment<\/em> they were engaged in it, the responses were more accurate. Csikszentmihalyi and Larson called the approach the experience sampling method (ESM), and it provided unprecedented insight into how we actually feel about the beats of our daily lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among many breakthroughs, Csikszentmihalyi\u2019s work with ESM helped validate a theory he had been developing over the preceding decade: \u201cThe best moments usually occur when a person\u2019s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.\u201d Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow<\/em> (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title). At the time, this finding pushed back against conventional wisdom. Most people assumed (and still do) that relaxation makes them happy. We want to work less and spend more time in the<\/a> hammock. But the results from Csikszentmihalyi\u2019s ESM studies reveal that most people have this wrong:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When measured empirically, people were happier at work and less happy relaxing than they suspected. And as the ESM studies confirmed, the more such flow experiences that occur in a given week, the higher the subject\u2019s life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Excerpted from page number 82-84 of \u201cDeep Work\u201d by Cal Newport.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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