ABSTRACT
Psychology's contribution to understanding and promoting the good life has expanded in multiple directions. Modern humans in fundamental ways are no different from the evolutionary hunter-gatherer ancestors, who eked out a precarious existence living in small, intimate social groups. The positive psychology movement learned from the mistakes of the humanistic psychology movement, which lost some scientific credibility by its uncritical embrace of touchy-feely subjectivism. The interim between the decline of humanistic psychology and the rise of positive psychology in the 1990s was marked by the self-esteem movement, based on assumption that lives could be improved in widely assorted and substantial ways by getting people to love themselves more. In retrospect, the self-esteem movement was unfortunately based on mistaking correlation for causation. A review of the benefits of high self-esteem concluded that thinking well of oneself does in fact increase happiness. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
