Lifestyle Gurus by Stephanie A. Baker

Author:Stephanie A. Baker [Rojek, Chris and Baker, Stephanie A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

What these enumerated studies reveal is the inexorable relationship between mind and body. The placebo effect is both individually and culturally defined. For example, consumers are likely to be influenced by advertising if they live in a culture surrounded by advertising (Goldacre 2009: 81–2). On an individual level, the placebo effect reveals the power of the mind. There are strong parallels here with the self-help movement in so far as discourse about wellness takes the basic truth about the power of our mind to shape our reality and exaggerates it by promoting alternative, ‘non-hierarchical’ therapies as cures for cancer and disease.

There are obvious benefits of adhering to a positive outlook and a healthy lifestyle. The problem with much of the discourse around wellness and self-help is that they exaggerate these claims for profit and commercial success; profiting from the fact that consumers feel empowered by such advice, believing that they can achieve health and happiness in life. Positive thinking feeds into our cognitive biases, which make us susceptible to the belief that we can control our future. While our thoughts shape our reality, we tend to imagine that we can control forces beyond our control, expecting a higher probability of success than probability would warrant. This phenomenon is referred to as the ‘illusion of control’ (Langer 1975). It operates in a range of contexts from gambling and investing, to the way we assess risk and our perceptions about our health and prosperity (Caulfield 2015: 170–1). There is a large body of psychological literature that shows how these tendencies are tied to cognitive biases: confirmation bias, the tendency for people to focus on corroborative evidence and to ignore evidence that contradicts their preconceived notions, and optimistic bias, the tendency to think that negative events are less likely to happen to oneself than to one’s peers, feed these illusions (Kahneman and Tversky 2004; Kahneman et al. 2011; Sharot 2011). Our proclivity for positive thinking, together with the modern Western ethos of personal responsibility, inform contemporary understandings of vulnerability and well-being as an ongoing individual project susceptible to commodification.

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