Michael Fordyce

Introduction

Michael W. Fordyce (14 December 1944 – 24 January 2011) was an American psychologist who spent his career at a community college in Florida and, almost incidentally, produced the first controlled evidence that happiness can be deliberately increased. His Happiness Training Program, built around fourteen behaviours and attitudes characteristic of very happy people, was tested in the mid-1970s on his own students and reported significant gains against a placebo control. The work predates positive psychology by two decades, is cited by the movement's founders as a precursor, and remains unusual for having been conducted almost entirely outside the research university system.

Early Life and Education

Fordyce took his bachelor's degree at Emory University in 1968 and then went to California for doctoral study at United States International University, completing his PhD in 1972 with a dissertation on happiness — an unusual subject choice at a time when the topic was close to unemployable. USIU was then a centre of counter-cultural and humanistic psychology, with Carl Rogers among its faculty, and the intellectual environment suited him. His colleague and later obituarist Harris Friedman recalled him arriving at campus in a Volkswagen bus covered in hippie decals and full of instruments from the rock band he played in, barefoot and shirtless, having performed in a club the night before.

Academic and Professional Career

In 1974 Fordyce joined Edison Community College in Fort Myers, Florida — later Edison State College — and stayed for more than three decades, teaching multiple sections of the psychology of adjustment each semester alongside a section on contemporary social problems. He was, by all accounts, a performer: he would lock the classroom door so latecomers were excluded, then pace in front of the room until he received the standing ovation he expected, and only then begin. Students adored him.

The teaching arrangement was also the research arrangement, and this is the key to understanding his output. Fordyce used his own classes as a laboratory, adjusting his programme between terms in ways that a university researcher could not — without, as Friedman put it, submitting every alteration to an institutional review board. Large community-college enrolments gave him samples; the mission — he wanted his students to become happier — gave him the dependent variable. He also maintained a private practice and authored popular materials, and much of his writing was self-published through Cypress Lake Media and distributed freely through his own website rather than through journals.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The Fourteen Fundamentals

Fordyce began by identifying what distinguished happy from unhappy people through survey work, and then converted the findings into trainable practices. The resulting fourteen fundamentals group into a handful of themes: be more active and keep busy; spend more time socialising; be productive at meaningful work; get better organised and plan things out; stop worrying; lower expectations and aspirations; develop positive, optimistic thinking; become present-oriented; work on a healthy personality; develop an outgoing, social personality; be yourself; eliminate negative feelings and problems; treat close relationships as the number one source of happiness; and value happiness itself — the last of which he called the "secret fundamental."

The 1977 Experiments

The 1977 paper in the Journal of Counseling Psychology reported three studies with a total of 338 students. Study 1 compared three pilot programmes against a placebo control: an insight programme that taught the research literature on happiness, a fundamentals programme built on nine of the characteristics of happy people, and an activities programme in which participants simply generated their own list of happiness-producing activities and did more of them. All three beat the control, but the two that gave concrete daily instructions did better than the one that only supplied information. Study 2 expanded the fundamentals from nine to fourteen and extended the course from two weeks to six; participants selected one fundamental per day and kept a diary, and 97 per cent later rated the programme successful. Study 3 delivered the same material on a take-it-or-leave-it basis and found that those who applied it improved while those who did not showed little change — evidence, Fordyce argued, that the effects came from the practices rather than from expectancy.

Demonstrating Increase, and Measuring It

The 1983 follow-up extended the work and reported that gains were still present at follow-ups of nine to eighteen months. Alongside the interventions, Fordyce developed brief instruments — including a single-item happiness scale and a "sixty-second index" asking what percentage of time a person feels happy, unhappy, or neutral — and his review of research on these measures became one of the most-cited articles in Social Indicators Research. His claim, in the language of the field, was that happiness is volitional: not fixed by circumstances or temperament but responsive to what a person deliberately does.

A Hedonic Precursor

Fordyce worked squarely in the hedonic tradition, treating happiness as the preponderance of positive over negative affect and asking how to increase it. This put him at odds with eudaimonic critics, including Friedman, who argued that happiness so conceived is not the same as a life going well. The debate has never been resolved and is still the central fault line in well-being research between the tradition represented by Ed Diener and Sonja Lyubomirsky and the meaning-and-flourishing tradition represented by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Major Publications

"Development of a program to increase personal happiness" (1977), the three-study report in the Journal of Counseling Psychology.
"A program to increase happiness: further studies" (1983), the follow-up reporting maintenance of gains.
"A review of research on the happiness measures: a sixty-second index of happiness and mental health" (Social Indicators Research), the measurement paper that became one of the journal's most-cited articles.
Psychology of Happiness (Cypress Lake Media, 1993), his self-published synthesis, distributed freely and later archived online.

Impact and Legacy

Fordyce is the standard citation for the claim that well-being can be raised by deliberate action, and the founders of positive psychology treat him as a predecessor. His practical legacy is larger than his academic one: the fourteen fundamentals anticipate the multi-component positive-psychology interventions now tested in schools and workplaces, and later work confirmed an extension he would have liked — Smith, Compton and West reported in 1995 that adding meditation to the happiness programme enhanced its effects. He was also among the first to put his materials in the hands of the public rather than behind a paywall, and his archived site continued to be read long after his death in 2011.

The methodological objections are substantial and Fordyce's own colleague made the sharpest of them. Friedman, writing the obituary, observed that the kind of free-flowing research he did — experimenting on his own students, adjusting protocols as he went — would likely be disallowed now, on the grounds that it is a conflict of interest to study the people one teaches and grades. Samples were students in the researcher's own classes, the outcome measures were self-report instruments the researcher had developed, and the control condition was a placebo rather than an active alternative; participants were not blind to the purpose of the study, and there were no informant or behavioural outcomes.

A second objection is inferential. The fourteen fundamentals were drawn from cross-sectional comparisons of happy and unhappy people, so they are correlates of happiness; teaching people to adopt them assumes the arrow runs from behaviour to feeling. That is exactly the assumption the intervention was designed to test, and the design does test it, but the derivation means the programme could not have discovered any cause of happiness it had not already inferred from correlational data.

Third, the durability claim sits awkwardly with the hedonic-adaptation literature. Fordyce reported maintenance at nine to eighteen months, which is better than the strong set-point accounts associated with Brickman and Campbell and with Lykken and Tellegen predict, and later researchers have argued that timing and variety of practice determine whether gains survive — Sheldon and Lyubomirsky suggested that repeating an exercise too often turns it into a habit and kills its effect. There has been no independent replication of the full fourteen-fundamentals package. Later meta-analyses of positive-psychology interventions find effects that are real but small, consistent with his conclusion though far more modest than a 97-per-cent success rate implies.

Finally, parts of the content are contested on their own terms. "Lower your expectations and aspirations" is difficult to reconcile with achievement motivation, and the whole package reflects a hedonic conception of happiness that eudaimonic critics regard as the wrong target. Fordyce's defenders would reply that the appropriate comparison is not with an ideal but with what else was available in 1977, when the received wisdom held that happiness was largely fixed and that psychology's job was to treat misery.

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References

Fordyce, M. W. (1988). A review of research on the happiness measures: A sixty second index of happiness and mental health. Social Indicators Research, 20(4), 355-381.