A guest post by Zoe Drayson (Stirling).
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Can you imagine being happy in a non-academic career? This question is often posed by academics to prospective graduate students, who are encouraged to pursue an academic career only if their answer is ‘no’. This advice came under Nate Kreuter’s scrutiny in a recent Inside Higher Ed column:
Let me start this column by looking at what I think is a horrible but common piece of advice. […] I have often heard of faculty members advising prospective and current graduate students to pursue or continue their graduate studies only if "you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else." The implication, of course, is that you should only pursue an advanced or terminal degree if being a professor is the only way you can see yourself being happy […] [T]his is shockingly bad advice.
While Kreuter worries that this advice fails to acknowledge the possibility of combining academic degrees with non-academic careers, my own concerns are more fundamental and focused specifically on the discipline of philosophy. I’m worried that, by dishing out this advice, we are unintentionally discriminating against precisely those groups of people we are trying hardest to attract and retain.
Encouraged by philosophers like Jennifer Saul, many of us are now trying to address the widely-acknowledged under-representation of women, and the lack of diversity in terms of social class and ethnicity in philosophy. But what if we’re undermining our own best efforts to address these concerns, by encouraging students to continue in philosophy only if their happiness depends upon it? What if those under-represented groups in philosophy are disproportionately more likely to be put off by our well-meaning career advice, regardless of their philosophical potential?
Data from psychological research suggests this might in fact be the case. The first important thing to notice is that, in general, people who think their happiness depends on following a particular career path are simply wrong. Extensive studies of workplace motivation have found that when people love what they do for a living, it is not because they have pursued a pre-existing passion: their happiness results from the sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose that their job provides. Other career roles that fulfil these general psychological needs turn out to be just as rewarding. This inability to foresee how career changes would affect our happiness is part of a more general human tendency to mispredict our own emotional states. People’s skills at “affective forecasting” are notoriously inaccurate: most noticeably, people overestimate the emotional impact of an event, predicting that it will affect their happiness to a much greater extent than it actually does. This is known as the ‘impact bias’. People who are happy with a certain feature of their life (be it a partner, a job, or their health) tend to predict that extreme unhappiness would result from losing that feature. In actual fact, both the intensity and duration of the unhappiness turn out to be much lower than predicted.
What does this mean for our career advice? It suggests that many of the students who claim that their happiness depends on an academic career are simply wrong, and that any unhappiness experienced would be less extreme and less enduring than they predict. The impact bias is found throughout the population, but there are individual differences in susceptibility. Some people are more accurate in their affective forecasting than others, and those more accurate forecasters are less likely to think that their happiness depends to a great extent on pursuing a career in philosophy.
So when we suggest to students that they only pursue a career in philosophy if they can’t imagine being happy otherwise, the more accurate forecasters among them will realise that their happiness doesn’t depend on philosophy. As more accurate forecasters of their own affective states, they’re more likely to realise that other careers could bring them fulfillment. In other words, our career advice will put them off pursuing a career in philosophy. More inaccurate forecasters, however, will envisage their life without philosophy as miserable, and so our career advice will encourage them to stay in philosophy. The end result is that our career advice – to only pursue philosophy if one’s happiness depends on it – will disproportionately encourage the more inaccurate affective forecasters.
This impact bias alone should make us think twice about offering career advice that relies on people’s predictions of their own happiness.
But there is a more worrying problem, that by disproportionately discouraging better affective forecasters, we are disproportionately discouraging certain gender, ethnic, or social groups. Evidence is building that shows particular groups of people to be more accurate forecasters – and those groups appear to overlap with the under-represented groups in philosophy. For example, a 2007 study found that women exhibited greater forecasting accuracy than men. Furthermore, a 2005 study found that people from East Asian cultural backgrounds were far less susceptible to the impact bias, and therefore more accurate in their forecasts, than those with a Western cultural background.
The researchers attribute this difference to variance in cognitive style along the analytic-holistic dimension: the more analytic one’s cognitive style, the more likely one is to focus on specific events when predicting the future thus increasing the impact bias; the more holistic one’s cognitive style, the more likely one is to think about the background context and the relations surrounding an event, thus decreasing the impact bias. This is important because a 2010 study found differences in cognitive style between social classes: the working-class group was significantly more holistic than the middle-class group. If cognitive style is responsible for the reduced impact bias in East Asians, then we should expect to see the same effect in the working class. Relative to their middle-class counterparts, working-class people should be more accurate affective forecasters.
In summary, the psychological data suggests that women, East Asians, and the working-classes are more accurate forecasters of their own affective states. They are more likely to realise that their happiness does not depend on a specific career choice, and to think that giving up philosophy wouldn’t be the end of the world. Of those students considering pursuing a career in philosophy, they’re disproportionately likely to answer “Yes” when asked “Would you be happy doing something other than philosophy?”.
By telling students to pursue a philosophical career only if their happiness depends upon it, we could be unwittingly discouraging these groups of people from further study in philosophy. This looks a lot like implicit discrimination: discrimination against precisely those same groups that we’re trying our hardest to attract and retain in philosophy. It’s fair to say that the data on individual differences in affective forecasting is sparse, and the results mentioned here are far from conclusive: much more work would have to be done to replicate these studies and extend the data to other groups. But at the very least, the psychological research should make us think twice about the career advice we dispense.
Our career advice is, of course, well-intentioned. We want prospective graduate students to know that graduate school will be a lengthy and expensive process with perhaps few decent academic job opportunities at the end. They need to know what they’re letting themselves in for – but there are other ways to get this message across. Furthermore, it’s not only potential graduate students who contemplate whether they should stay in philosophy or not: graduate students, adjuncts, post-docs, and even more senior academics have been known to question their career choices.
The advice to stay in philosophy only if one’s happiness depends on it, whether it is offered explicitly or not, might have become deeply ingrained throughout our profession. And perhaps the stereotype of the academic philosopher is of someone who can’t imagine being happy doing anything else? Stereotype threat and implicit bias are factors that influence the career choices of academics at all levels. If we are serious about attracting and retaining certain groups of people to philosophy, we need to be more careful about the messages we’re unintentionally sending out.
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