Critiques against positive thinking are scarce due to the fear of coming off as heartless or “against” happiness.

However, there are some problems with the positive thinking methods touted by self-help books, life coaches and the pseudoscience of positive psychology that started this cultural movement. The aim of positive thinking—making people happy—is an honorable one, but the science behind it is questionable at best.

One major critic of positive psychology, professor at Bowdoin College Barbara Held, said that positive psychology promotes the acceptance of illusions and disregards any attempts at realism and objectivity. How can positive psychology be regarded as an empirical science when it promotes a distorted view of the world?

One claim often cited by positive studies is that optimistic people are healthier than pessimists. The “nun study” reviewed reflective paragraphs written by recently-ordained nuns around 22 years of age in the 1930s. Researchers judged the paragraphs by the presence of high positive emotional content found in the statements.

Researchers concluded that nuns whose statements revealed high positive emotional content often outlived other nuns. However, the study assumed that happiness correlates with positive, well-worded statements. It didn’t account for the possibility that some nuns were simply more proficient in expressing emotions through writing than others.

Do good writers live longer? Another study suggested that nuns capable of writing complex sentences as young adults were less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease in their later years. If anything can be garnered from these studies it is not that optimism helps you live longer, but that writing keeps the mind sharp throughout life.

Another reoccurring problem with positive psychology is the tendency of the media and researchers to blow results out of proportion. While most people wouldn’t put it past the media to spin scientific results to please audiences, the spinning of results by researchers themselves is even more appalling.

In a 2002 interview with the New York Times, a researcher at the University of Kentucky, Suzanne Segerstrom, said her study had found that the health benefits of optimism are “significant,” and “optimists almost always have better emotional adjustments…and show higher immune response to illness.”

But these statements conflict with the results of another paper by Segerstrom from 2001, which noted “some contradictory findings” regarding the correlation between immune system health and optimism. In some circumstances, a greater number of optimistic individuals “fare worse immunologically” than pessimists. Despite these contradictory findings, Segerstrom’s research won her the Templeton Foundation Award for Positive Psychology in 2002. When these discrepancies were pointed out to Segerstrom in a 2007 interview, she responded, “To get the Templeton award…You don’t get anything for a null result.”

Of course, positive psychology, like any new science, makes some promise to contribute to our sense of what it means to be human. For now, positive thinking is more of a philosophy than a science – more a choice of subjective existence within an American cultural construct than an objective description of how the human mind functions.

As with any science in its infancy, we need to focus on, as Professor Emeritus at Princeton University Clifford Geertz said, “disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its [positive psychology’s] celebrity, it has also given rise.” Although positive psychology currently lacks a legitimate sense of empiric scientific theory, who knows what future studies may hold? We should wait until the science catches up with the popularity before succumbing to the promises of this cultural phenomenon.