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P. ALEX LINLEY and SUSAN HARRINGTON discuss academic and applied perspectives on strengths psychology.
WHAT are your strengths? In everyday conversation people are generally modest and reluctant to talk about their strengths. When asked this question in an interview, most people feel slightly awkward and tend to rely on formulaic answers designed to create a positive impression and improve their prospects of interview success. Likewise, surveys that ask people to name their strengths have found that only about one third of people can readily name their own trait-like strengths (Hill, 2001; cf. Arnold, 1997). Could this simply be a reflection of natural reserve? Or is it that we just don't know what our strengths are? Possibly, but all this may conceal a deeper truth: that we often do not fully appreciate our strengths, and may not even know what they are.
This reluctance to talk about one's strengths is also reflected in psychology, where strengths have been the subject of very little systematic empirical research. However, with the advent of positive psychology, this is now changing. In this article we review the historical context of psychological work on strengths, consider approaches to strengths from both academic and applied perspectives, and identify some of the most exciting potential applications of putting strengths into practice in education, work and life.
Historical context
The absence of an integrative theoretical framework for strengths research within mainstream psychology can be traced back to the earliest origins of modern personality psychology, and Gordon Allport's (1937) seminal definition of personality (Cawley et al., 2000). Allport - one can only assume with the best of intentions - argued that character was a term that was more relevant for ethics and philosophy than for psychology, and specifically and explicitly excluded the topic of character from his definition of personality:
Character is personality evaluated, and personality is character devaluated. Since character is an unnecessary concept for psychology, the term will not appear again in this volume... (Allport, 1937, p.52).
The effect of this 'defining out' of evaluative terms (e.g. character, virtue) was decisive (Nicholson, 1998). Personality psychologists since Allport have almost totally ignored the concepts of character and virtue, from which a psychology of strengths would be derived, and this has been one factor...