Advances in Flow Research PDF
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Editor Stefan Engeser Advances in Flow Research Advances in Flow Research Stefan Engeser Editor Advances in Flow Research Editor Stefan Engeser Institute of Psychology University of Trier Trier, Germany ISBN 978-1-4614-2358-4 e-ISBN 978-1-4614-2359-1 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-2359-1 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2012933754 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identifi ed as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Foreword This summer, the 24th translation of F low appeared in the Russian language. The other 23 include practically all of the European languages, plus Chinese (traditional and modernized), Japanese, Korean, and some Indonesian languages I did not know existed. At least three prime ministers have been asking how fl ow could help their countries to avoid alienation from work or emigration to countries that offered more interesting challenges. The mayor of Seoul has shared his concern that the 40,000 employees of his metropolitan government might become too bureaucratic, as civil servants have a tendency to do. CEOs of some of the major companies worldwide have implemented fl ow in various aspects of their operation and, in at least two cases, have reported startling jumps not only in revenues but also in profi ts. All of this started 43 years ago, when I decided to teach a senior seminar at Lake Forest College. The dozen or so undergraduates were not particularly academically oriented, and they were not even majoring in psychology—most of them came from the department of sociology and anthropology. I decided to teach the seminar on the topic of play—but what I had in mind was not children’s play, on which there was a huge literature, but on the kind of play adults engage in. Although I was in my 30s by then, I still “played” chess, climbed rocks, and did many other things that did not have to be done, just for the sheer enjoyment of it. As I started to read the psychological literature on play, I felt a sense of mounting incredulity and dismay. First of all, almost all the articles (or books) were on the play of children. But what was much worse was that even children’s play was described in strictly functional terms, without reference to the experience of play itself, which, as far as I was concerned, was the only reason that made play interesting in the fi rst place. True, playing football could be good training for a healthy lifestyle and for working on a team (as an adult), and playing chess might be a good way to develop intellectual skills that a child could use (as an adult). But I was quite sure that children did not play football or chess to prepare themselves for a later job. It occurred to me then that most of the literature (and even such eminent psy- chologists as Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson) had been trying to explain the d istal outcomes of play, not the proximal ones. They wanted to know “what good is it?” not “how does it feel like?” Having been exposed to the phenomenology of Husserl, v vi Foreword Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, I realized that what was missing from the literature was a consideration of the phenomenology of play. The next major realization was that the phenomenology of play seemed indistinguishable when the person felt it in a play situation like a game or in settings that are not usually thought of as play, like music, painting, and even in work. When I started publishing the results of our fi rst interview-based studies, I called the peculiar state people reported when they were “playing” the a utotelic experi- ence, Greek for something you might be doing primarily for the sake of the experi- ence itself. Later, to use more accessible language, I called it fl ow , borrowing from the language of the people we interviewed, which often used the image of fl owing waters as an analogy to the feeling they were describing. T he initial reception to the fi rst book, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, and to the research articles that ensued, could be best described as benign neglect. In private, some colleagues congratulated me for having given a name to something very obvi- ous that they had known forever. Others congratulated me for having had the cour- age to write about something so fascinating, but that unfortunately was not amenable to scientifi c investigation. Even though patronizing, such responses were more comforting than the deep silence that otherwise surrounded my work. The only formal recognition in the fi rst dozen years or so came from a brief and not exactly encouraging review of the book by Edward Deci in P sych Abstracts . Interestingly, the fi rst sparks of academic interest came from anthropologists, followed by sociologists, and fi nally by psychologists of sports and leisure. Then, slowly, the fi eld began to grudgingly accept fl ow as something that might have some relevance to the central issues of psychology. The fi rst intellectual contribu- tion from a psychologist came from Fausto Massimini, a physician who became professor of psychology at the University of Milan. He and his lively lab have con- tributed more to the development of research on fl ow than could be summarized in a few pages. His insight into the role that fl ow plays in cultural evolution was a bril- liant extension of the theory, and the many cross-cultural studies done under his aegis are now part of history. So now, more than a generation later, as I am paging through the various chapters of this volume, I am reminded of an anecdote I read—a long time ago—about the last days of Leonardo da Vinci. In 1519, the old master was ailing and despondent in his sickbed at the Clos Lucé, a noble manor house Francis I of France had placed at his disposal near the royal chateau at Amboise, and the staff let the king know that they were worried about his guest. Francis hastened to the old man’s bedside, and seeing how depressed he appeared to be, he said something like: “Maestro, you who have achieved more in your life than all other artists and scientists put together, how can you be so sad?” to which Leonardo is supposed to have answered: “Thank you Sire, for your kindness—but no master can die happy until at least one of his disci- ples surpass him.” If Leonardo was right, then—m utatis mutandis —I ought to die happy (but hope- fully not for a long time yet). The chapters in this book show that there are quite a few directions in which the work I was able to accomplish is being stretched, con- tinued, and improved upon; they show that new directions, unexpected and unimag- ined before, are being opened up for investigation. Foreword vii Of course, Leonardo could also have been wrong—as a student of human nature, he did not shine as well as in other fi elds—and being surpassed might not make you as happy as he thought. After all, do you really believe that if some connoisseur of art had written: “Andrea Salai, who learned to paint in Leonardo da Vinci’s studio, just painted a young lady’s portrait he calls Monna Vanna, and it leaves his master’s Monna Lisa in the dust,” Leonardo would have been happy? I don’t think so, either. So it is a bittersweet experience to read these excellent scientifi c essays, each one of which adds something new and important to what has been written about fl ow so far. And, of course, I realize that whether I am happy or not is besides the point; what counts is that the ideas are carried forward into the future—it is their survival that matters and the consequences they will have for the lives of the next generation. In this respect, the present volume guarantees that the contribution of fl ow to an understanding of human behavior will grow and prosper in the years to come. At the end of day, I am grateful to all those who have contributed to it. Claremont, CA, USA Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Foreword “There’s a guy in Chicago with an unpronounceable name who recently described exactly what you’re reporting.” This is what my teacher, Heinz Heckhausen, told me back in 1978, when, in a research colloquium of our motivational psychology work- group, I reported on a “new” activity incentive that I was unable to categorize. In the course of the c ognitive revolution , our research group in Bochum had become accustomed to analyzing motivational phenomena according to the per- spective that individuals constantly act with a view to the attainable outcomes and the value of their likely consequences. Of course, this purpose-centered analytical perspective was not erroneous, but it was constricted. We quickly notice this if we look at leisure activities, in which it is irrefutably apparent that besides the incen- tives linked to the consequences of the outcome, there are also incentives that lie directly in the performance of the activity itself (a ctivity-related incentives ). And here, one can fi nd a colorful diversity of the most varied of perceptions, states, and feelings, which people like to have and for which reason they carry out certain activities time and time again and for as long as possible—even if these activities have no valuable outcome consequences and at times even bring with them foresee- able costs. Back then, I wanted to fi nd out about these things as comprehensively as possible and to describe and classify them precisely. A lot of things could be quickly under- stood or were already known: the experience of “thrill and adventure,” joy in the interaction with nice people, feeling how one’s own movements are functioning perfectly, experiencing how a piece of music is succeeding to an ever greater degree, the sense of well-being in nature, and much more. For one thing, however, no theo- retically introduced category of experiences could yet be found at fi rst glance: that good feeling of becoming so completely absorbed in a smoothly running activity that one loses track of time, forgets the original purpose of the activity, and indeed even forgets oneself. Even if one is working to one’s full capacity, it is not experi- enced as a burden but rather as a pleasant state in which one is happy to become immersed. ix
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