Instead of measuring Stoicism properly, the scale measures a caricatured version. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the Pathak-Wieten Stoicism Ideology Scale reflects this. Doing the latter well requires an accurate picture of Stoicism. More work needs to be done to assess the impact of Pathak-Wieten beliefs on wellbeing and the influence of contemporary Stoic beliefs. Not complaining, bottling up emotions, and not sticking up for yourself may predict ill-being - at the very least, they're correlated. People who attend therapy are likely unhappier than those who don't - but that is because they need therapy! It could be the case that unhappy people are drawn to Stoic beliefs to weather the storm. But the main upshot is to highlight the importance of what we should consider the core parts of the philosophy.įirst, one crucial aspect to note: this study doesn't show that Pathak-Wieten beliefs play a causal role. There's no doubt that this research is informative and worth doing. So what should we take away from this? Are the benefits of Stoicism disconfirmed? That is, they have less hedonic and eudaimonic wellbeing, disconfirming the original hypothesis. It turns out that people who agree more with the Pathak-Wieten Stoicism Ideology Scale tend to fare poorly on both kinds of surveys. Karl and Fischer put this hypothesis to the test by administering surveys psychologists use to measure both kinds of wellbeing and a questionnaire for measuring Stoicism called the Pathak-Wieten Stoicism Ideology Scale. "Stoicism is positively related to eudaimonic orientation and negatively to hedonic orientation to happiness." Since eudaimonic wellbeing is closer to the Stoic picture of value, the authors predicted that: It’s less about feeling good, and more about being good. Eudaimonic wellbeing emphasizes meaning and purpose in life. It’s related to subjective happiness, pleasure, and experience. Hedonic wellbeing is all about feeling good in the moment. They hypothesized that a Stoic would have less hedonic wellbeing, but would possess more eudaimonic wellbeing. In fact, this outcome wasn’t expected by the authors of "Stoicism and Wellbeing", Johannes Alfons Karl and Ronald Fischer. If Stoicism is so great, why does it negatively predict wellbeing? Modern proponents of Stoicism have claimed that Stoicism is “an operating system for living in high-stress environments” and that it is a path for “cultivating a good life” - this research potentially calls these claims into question. I've been trying to tell this to my friends for years.
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