Mention the University of Chicago, and some people picture a place where an all-star faculty devotes its days to theories and problems too complex for most of us to fathom and too removed from the real world to be of relevance.
While this view may be accurate in some cases, it certainly doesn’t apply to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced ME-high CHICK-sent-me-high-ee), a psychology professor of Hungarian descent. (Many of his friends and colleagues simply call him Mike-pronounced MYK. So does his wife.)
Whether Mihaly or Mike, throughout his career, the 59-year-old Csikszentmihalyi has focused on questions that intrigue everyone, primarily:
What makes people happy, really and truly happy?
He presented his findings to the public in a 1990 book, “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” which has sold more than 125,000 copies and been translated into 10 languages, including Chinese and Japanese.
In its sequel, “The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium” (HarperCollins), released last month, he looks at how we got where we are and why we’re still around, concluding that if we don’t control ourselves, it’s sayonara for Homo sapiens.
His rigorous research and thinking have made Csikszentmihalyi a big name among his peers. Scholars who toil in the same intellectual vineyards describe him as an important and influential figure in the study of human behavior, a maverick and innovator whose work has broad and enduring applications.
“I always say Mihaly is one of the few social scientists who will be read 50 years from now,” says psychologist Howard Gardner of Harvard University, a former MacArthur fellow and an authority on learning and intelligence.
What has cast Csikszentmihalyi as a maverick is his concentration on the everyday lives of ordinary people. This puts him well outside psychology’s mainstream, which is more intent on probing the abnormal, isolating slices of human personality and devising laboratory experiments.
Says psychologist Bertram Cohler, a U. of C. colleague: “Mike believes the way to study people is to talk to them, to ground your study in the reality of people’s lives, which puts him in the forefront of a major revolution that’s going on now in our concept of what psychology should be.”
Jerome Singer, professor of psychology at Yale University, applauds Csikszentmihalyi’s attentiveness to the causes and components of contentment, which are discussed in “Flow.”
“Until a decade or so ago, there was little research on the extent to which human beings experience positive emotions-joy and happiness and exhilaration,” Singer says. “He has done much to develop this research. Contrast his work to psychoanalysis, where people come in and talk about their troubles and anxieties.”
Csikszentmihalyi also pioneered the use of the electronic pager as the means of overcoming a longstanding puzzle for researchers: how to observe individual experience.
To gather information, he has used a computer linked to a radio transmitter to signal his subjects’ beepers at random moments each day. At the beep, each records on a form what he or she is doing, thinking and feeling.
“His methods for capturing the range of people’s lives on a day-to-day basis have had a major impact,” Singer says.
Says Harvard’s Gardner: “In the world of behavioral science, Mihaly has followed his own star and curiosity, and, by a happy quirk of fate, the rest of the world is starting to notice. He has become a leader by doing work that reaches the wider public as well as his colleagues in behavioral science.”
A crew from a German TV network was in Chicago last week to tape a program about Csikszentmihalyi. That forced him to postpone congressional testimony about his participation on a panel to evaluate national standards for American schools.
He will soon appear at Cooper Union college in New York City as part of its visiting speaker program, then talk to the staff of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington about how museums can be more enjoyable.
Executives in charge of employee training for the Xerox and Apple computer companies pick his brain. Experimental schools in Indianapolis and Philadelphia have adopted his ideas. Zygon, a journal on religion and science published by the Lutheran School of Theology in Hyde Park, will devote an entire issue to him.
“Mihaly’s genius is to take the big issues such as happiness and the future of the species and bring them down from the level of total speculation to an empirical base,” Gardner says.
A defining moment
Csikszentmihalyi traces his fascination with the way people are to a moment in his childhood in Europe during World War II.
“I was 10 years old when I noticed that adults often were unable to face reality,” he says.
Interviewed in his large, elegant campus office, Csikszentmihalyi is a thick-set 6-footer who wears aviator glasses and a carefully trimmed white beard; his once-flaming-red hair has been dampened with gray, his demeanor is calm, grave, earnest. He speaks with an accent. You see Sean Connery in the role.
When the war began, he says, his father was the Hungarian consul in Fiume, Italy. Mihaly, his mother and two sisters were shuttled between Italy and Hungary to avoid the fighting.
“In September 1944 we were in Budapest,” he says. “The Russians were coming. They were already shelling the city.” His father ordered the family to join him in Venice. “Mother’s relatives urged us to stay. I remember one of them saying, `The mosquitoes are terrible this time of the year in Venice.’ “
He pauses.
“Ours was the last train out of Budapest. The Russians blew up the bridge over the Danube just after we passed.”
His grandfather and some of his other relatives would die that winter during the Russian siege and later during the occupation.
In 1951, when his family was living in Rome, 17-year-old Mihaly was on a skiing holiday in Zurich when he read about a free public lecture. He attended. The speaker was Carl Jung, the renowned Swiss psychologist.
Five years later, Csikszentmihalyi came to America to study psychology; at European universities then, the subject was treated as a minor adjunct to other disciplines.
He says he arrived in Chicago by train from New York City with $1.25, enough for a cab to the North Side rooming house where the landlady from the old country was expecting him.
A positive approach
After getting an all-night job as an accountant at a Loop hotel and enrolling at the U. of C., he was soon discouraged, wondering if he’d made a mistake.
“I was interested in studying and understanding people who led positive, productive, responsible lives, people who persevere and build a life of integrity no matter how difficult their circumstances,” Csikszentmihalyi says.
Instead, psychology appeared to be preoccupied by watching rats scurry through mazes or seeking neurotics to study when schizophrenics were unavailable, he says.
He was inspired to plumb the nobler elements of the human spirit, he says, by the example of his father, who died several years ago, and a brother, Moricz, now 79 and living in Budapest.
“My father stuck his neck out to get passports for Jews to escape during the war,” he says. “On more than one occasion in this country, I have met people who have told me that my father saved their lives.”
Csikszentmihalyi’s brother was conscripted by the Hungarian army in the last days of the war, then captured by the Russians. “He was sent to a slave-labor camp in Siberia. He worked in a salt mine for six years.”
In ill health, Moricz was released through the intervention of the Red Cross and returned to Budapest. The communist government forced him to work as a laborer, even though he had two Ph.Ds.
“He and his wife have devoted themselves to their five children, who are now grown. They now have almost 30 grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. They designed and helped build or remodel houses for each of the children, making their own bricks.”
Artists flout the rules
In 1961, Csikszentmihalyi wed Isabella Selega, a dark-haired Polish immigrant also marked by the war. She and her family had survived a German concentration camp and a period as slave laborers on a German farm. They have two sons, ages 25 and 29.
Also in the early ’60s, Csikszentmihalyi launched a project for his doctoral dissertation that would shape his future. His mentor, Jacob Getzels, proposed exploring the process of creativity by scrutinizing students at the Art Institute of Chicago.
In doing so, he discovered something unrelated to his main thesis. The artists were ignoring a hallowed theory of psychology, which held that people are motivated by the prospect of a reward.
These students would toil for long hours, seemingly losing themselves in their work, going without food and sleep, intense yet exhilarated. They were enjoying the act of painting, and when they were done, they would set their works aside, unconcerned about any reward.
Csikszentmihalyi began quizzing athletes, musicians, chess masters, surgeons. Many used the same word for the sensation of being totally involved in what they were doing: flow.
He branched out to adolescents, workers on assembly lines, people in an array of occupations and professions, compiling thousands of responses and interviews. When did they feel strong, confident, happy? When were they weak, self-conscious, unhappy?
He published his findings over the years in a number of scholarly books, usually in collaboration with students.
” `Flow’ was my first book for a general audience,” he says. “It’s a summary of 25 years of research, but I avoided footnotes and technical language to try to make it more accessible.”
It received a favorable review in The New York Times and a wonderfully unexpected plug from, of all people, coach Jimmy Johnson of the Dallas Cowboys just before his team won this year’s Super Bowl.
How to stifle happiness
Happiness, it turns out, isn’t the act of love or the downing of a delicious meal or the savoring of a bottle of good wine. Those things have to do with pleasure, which is fleeting and geared to sating instinctual drives to survive and procreate.
Flow, Csikszentmihalyi says, is as close to happiness as we can come. “Contrary to expectation,” he writes, ” `flow’ usually happens not during relaxing moments of leisure or entertainment, but rather when we are actively involved in a difficult enterprise, in a task that stretches our mental abilities.”
Athletes, of course, experience flow during competition. The average person attains flow in activities as varied as athletic endeavors, reading an absorbing novel and teaching a child the alphabet.
But for most people, the main source of flow is work, which posits a paradox that Csikszentmihalyi addressed recently in an op-ed essay in The New York Times.
He noted that “when working, people-from assembly-line workers to surgeons-report feeling generally strong, creative and satisfied; when free to do whatever they want in their free time, they tend to feel weak, dull and dissatisfied. Yet given a choice, few would want to work more; instead, everyone prefers to have more discretionary time.
“The amount of time spent in the passive consumption of commercially produced entertainment is increasing. But most people, when carefully surveyed, report feeling depleted and depressed after watching television for hours. . . .
“Human beings seem to be biologically programmed to enjoy confronting challenges, using their skills and developing their potential. Coercive work and empty leisure stifle this essential pleasure.”
In “Flow,” he writes: “To transform the entirety of life into a unified flow experience, it helps to have faith in a system of meanings that give purpose to one’s being.”
He enlarges on this theme in “The Evolving Self,” warning that the genetic, cultural and egocentric forces that have enabled us to survive now imperil our future, and calling for a vision of global unity.
“I’m trying to find ways in which scientific understanding can give us a set of moral directions,” he says. “There must be an ethical component to how we use our knowledge.”
Says U. of C. anthropologist Richard Shweder: “In many ways, social scientists have replaced priests and theologians in this age of science. I think Mike understands that role. He’s one of the few social scientists concerned with promoting human excellence.”
