Christopher Peterson

Introduction

Christopher Peterson (1950–2012) was an American psychologist and one of the founders of positive psychology. Asked for a one-sentence definition of the field he helped build, he answered with three words: "Other people matter." The line became his signature, and it is a fair summary of a career spent arguing that what predicts a good life is not wealth, health or circumstance but the quality of a person's relationships.

Peterson is best known for two things. The first is his work on explanatory style — the habitual way people explain bad events — which he and Martin Seligman showed predicts physical health and longevity. The second is the VIA Classification of Character Strengths, the 2004 handbook he co-authored with Seligman that attempted to do for human virtue what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual had done for mental disorder: name, define and measure it.

He was also, by a wide margin, one of the most admired teachers in American psychology. Two of the University of Michigan's highest teaching honours carry his name-bearing record, and his students' tributes after his sudden death in 2012 were less about his citations than about the fact that he answered email.

Early Life and Education

Peterson was born on 18 February 1950 and raised in Niles, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago. He had a twin brother, Carl, and remained close to his parents, Leota and Pete, throughout his life.

He entered the University of Illinois as a National Merit Scholar and took his BS in 1972. He then moved to the University of Colorado, where he completed his doctorate in 1976 with emphases in social psychology, personality psychology and learning.

What is striking about this training is how un-positive it looks in retrospect. Peterson's graduate work was in animal learning and helplessness — the experimental study of what happens when organisms discover that nothing they do matters. The whole apparatus of positive psychology he later built was, in his own framing, an attempt to finish that problem by studying the cases in which the opposite happens.

Academic and Professional Career

Peterson taught at Hamilton College until 1978, then took a postdoctoral respecialisation in clinical psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he began his lifelong collaboration with Seligman. He held faculty positions at Penn and at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University before moving in 1986 to the University of Michigan.

At Michigan he spent the rest of his career as professor of psychology and organisational studies, directed the university's Positive Psychology Center, served as chair of the clinical psychology area and as director of clinical training, and held an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship, an award reserved for faculty who excel at undergraduate teaching. He won a Golden Apple Award, Michigan's most prestigious teaching prize, voted on by students, in 2010. He was science director of the VIA Institute on Character, a member of the Positive Psychology Steering Committee and of the board of the International Positive Psychology Association, and a senior fellow at Penn's Positive Psychology Center.

In 2003 the Institute for Scientific Information named him one of the 100 most frequently cited psychologists of the preceding twenty years. He published more than 350 scholarly papers and twelve books.

Peterson died suddenly of heart failure on 9 October 2012 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the age of 62.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Explanatory style and learned helplessness

Peterson's early work was on the attributional reformulation of helplessness. Where the original theory held that exposure to uncontrollable events produces passivity, the revised account added a cognitive step: people who explain bad events with causes that are internal, stable and global ("it's me, it's permanent, it affects everything") become helpless, while those who explain them as external, unstable and specific do not. This line of work culminated in Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control (1993), written with Seligman and Steven Maier.

He then did something methodologically unusual. To test whether a pessimistic style predicted illness, he and Seligman coded the explanatory style of Harvard men from archival material collected decades earlier in the Terman Life-Cycle Study and found that pessimism measured in young adulthood predicted worse physical health across the following thirty-five years. The result, published in 1988, was among the first credible demonstrations that a cognitive habit could be a risk factor for physical disease.

The CAVE technique

Because explanatory style had mostly been measured by questionnaire, Peterson developed the Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations (CAVE) method: coding optimism and pessimism out of naturally occurring text. CAVE could be applied to archives, which let him and his collaborators score the optimism of presidential nomination acceptance speeches, sports post-game interviews and century-old diaries, and to find that the same effects appeared whether style was measured by self-report or read off a transcript.

The VIA Classification of Character Strengths

With Seligman, Peterson led the project that produced Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004). Working from a review of philosophical and religious traditions across cultures, the authors proposed ten criteria that a trait had to meet to count as a character strength — it had to be valued in its own right, be trait-like but malleable, be measurable, be distinct from other strengths, have recognisable paragons and prodigies, and so on — and arrived at 24 strengths grouped under six virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance and transcendence.

The classification was deliberately built as a counterpart to the DSM. Its purpose was to give researchers and clinicians a shared vocabulary for what is right with people, and it came with measurement instruments: the VIA Inventory of Strengths for adults and a parallel youth version. Both are freely available and have been taken by millions of people.

Orientations to happiness

With Nansook Park and Seligman, Peterson distinguished three routes to happiness — pleasure, engagement and meaning — and reported that people who pursued all three ("the full life") reported the most satisfaction, while those who pursued pleasure alone ("the empty life") reported the least. The framework is now standard in well-being research and in the design of positive psychology interventions.

Applied work

Peterson was the primary developer of the Global Assessment Tool, the self-report instrument measuring psychological fitness at the heart of the US Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness programme. He also wrote A Primer in Positive Psychology (2006), the field's standard textbook, and Pursuing the Good Life (2012), a collection of short reflections drawn from his Psychology Today columns.

Major Publications

Peterson, C., Seligman, M. E. P., & Vaillant, G. E. (1988). "Pessimistic Explanatory Style Is a Risk Factor for Physical Disease: A Thirty-Five-Year Longitudinal Study." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology — the Terman study result that established explanatory style as a health variable.
Peterson, C., & Bossio, L. M. (1991). Health and Optimism. Free Press — the case that optimism is a public health asset rather than a pleasant illusion.
Peterson, C., Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. P. (1993). Learned Helplessness: A Theory for the Age of Personal Control. Oxford University Press — the definitive statement of the attributional reformulation.
Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press / APA — the VIA taxonomy.
Peterson, C. (2006). A Primer in Positive Psychology. Oxford University Press — the textbook that defined how the field is taught.

Impact and Legacy

The VIA classification succeeded in its main aim: it gave positive psychology a measurement infrastructure and a common language, and character strengths are now studied in education, organisational behaviour, clinical practice and public health. Seligman's later PERMA model and the whole strengths-based wing of coaching trace back to it. Peterson's students carried the work into dozens of universities, and the Michigan Positive Psychology Center he directed remains one of the field's hubs.

The criticisms are serious, and several of them were raised by researchers inside the movement.

The taxonomy was constructed, not discovered. The 24 strengths and six virtues were selected by a committee through literature review and expert judgement; they were not derived from factor analysis of how strengths actually co-occur in people. Subsequent psychometric work has not supported the six-virtue architecture. McGrath's item- and scale-level factor analyses of the VIA Inventory of Strengths (2014) failed to recover the proposed structure and instead supported a much smaller set of higher-order factors — roughly caring, inquisitiveness and self-control. If the six virtues are not real dimensions, the classification's claim to map the structure of character is weakened even though its individual scales remain useful.

The measurement is entirely self-report and uniformly positive. Every VIA item describes a desirable trait, which makes the instrument vulnerable to acquiescence bias and to a general evaluative factor: people who think well of themselves score high on all 24 strengths. Critics argue that what the VIA partly measures is self-regard.

Causal claims about optimism run ahead of the evidence. The finding that pessimistic explanatory style predicts later illness is correlational. Reverse causation is plausible — people in declining health become pessimistic — as is confounding by socioeconomic status, baseline health and health behaviour. Peterson and his colleagues were careful about these alternatives, but the popular reading of the work has been far more confident than the data support.

The Army programme he helped build was criticised for being rolled out before it was evaluated. Peterson was the principal architect of the Global Assessment Tool inside Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, a programme funded on a scale of hundreds of millions of dollars. Critics, among them McNulty (2011), argued that the programme was deployed across the force without adequate evidence that it improved soldier outcomes or reduced rates of psychological casualty, and that screening the entire army on an unvalidated instrument was an experiment conducted on soldiers rather than with them.

Peterson was himself among the field's sharpest internal critics. He insisted that positive psychology was not about happiness, dismissed much of the popular happiness industry, and warned repeatedly that the movement would discredit itself through overclaiming and commercialisation. He regarded the VIA classification as a serviceable starting point rather than a finished theory. That combination — a founder who declined to oversell his own creation — is the most durable part of his reputation, and it does not fully answer the charge that the taxonomy he built has been treated with more confidence than its evidence warrants.

Learn More

Martin Seligman — his collaborator on explanatory style, and the founder of the movement he helped build.
Martin Seligman — co-developer, with Peterson, of the VIA Classification of Character Strengths.
Charles R. Snyder — whose hope theory supplied one of the strengths in the VIA classification.
Positive Psychology — the movement's central hub on well-being and human strengths.
George Vaillant — who spent decades testing Erikson stage theory against the Harvard Grant Study longitudinal data
All Psychologists — browse the full biographical collection.

References

Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. Oxford University Press.