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4 - Flow and biocultural evolution
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- By Fausto Massimini, University of Milan Medical School, Italy, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, University of Chicago, Antonella Delle Fave, University of Milan Medical School, Italy
- Edited by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, University of Chicago, Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi
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- Book:
- Optimal Experience
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 26 August 1988, pp 60-82
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- Chapter
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Summary
This chapter is about the role of the flow experience in the construction and complexification of the self, and, in a broader sense, its role in biological and cultural evolution. Some of the theoretical assumptions underlying this relationship have already been developed elsewhere (e.g., Massimini & Calegari 1979; Massimini 1982; Csikszentmihalyi & Massimini 1985; Csikszentmihalyi 1987b). The main contention is that people tend to replicate optimal experiences more often relative to other experiences in order to maintain an ordered state of consciousness.
The characteristics that make the flow experience a negentropic state of consciousness – high concentration and involvement, clarity of goals and feedback, and intrinsic motivation, all made possible by a balance between perceived challenges and personal skills – have already been described theoretically and confirmed empirically (Csikszentmihalyi 1975b, 1982a; Csikszentmihalyi & Graef 1979). One of the purposes of this chapter is to show the underlying sameness in the phenomenology of this experience by reporting examples from interviews with individuals in very different cultures.
In addition, by considering which activities produce flow and the number of people in each sample who find flow in various activities, it is possible to begin estimating how this experience might influence biological and cultural evolution. For example, when a person learns to experience flow in the context of a religious vocation, as in one of the samples considered in the following pages, the replication of cultural instructions having to do with prayer, meditation, and ritual ceremonies may take precedence even over the replication of that person's biological instructions.
12 - Modernization and the changing contexts of flow in work and leisure
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- By Antonella Delle Fave, University of Milan Medical School, Italy, Fausto Massimini, University of Milan Medical School, Italy
- Edited by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, University of Chicago, Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi
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- Book:
- Optimal Experience
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 26 August 1988, pp 193-213
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Cultures differ enormously in terms of the range of opportunities they make available to the people who live in them, and in terms of the skills that the average inhabitant feels he or she possesses. The same culture may vary dramatically along these dimensions at two different points in time. Therefore the quality of subjective experience of a typical member of society will also vary. These days, when anthropologists are more than ever hesitant to breach the neutrality of cultural relativism, and when imposing Western standards of interpretation and description on foreign cultures has become a heresy to be avoided at all costs, it might be that focusing on the self-reported experiences of native respondents will provide a viable comparative method.
Accordingly, this chapter reports on extensive interviews with four European groups that, although living in close geographical proximity, are part of very different ecologies and cultural environments. They differ especially in the degree to which they still follow a traditional agricultural lifestyle, as opposed to being integrated with the technological life of the cities. The purpose is to compare how optimal experience is described in such contexts, to see what different activities it is experienced in, and to infer the effects that modernization is having on the quality of subjective experience.
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