“Coping and co-creation: one attempt and one route to well-being” - Paper talk through

This video is about a recent paper called “Coping and co-creation: one attempt and one route to well-being” that Florence and I wrote and submitted to a special issue on well-being. We also published it on PsyArXiv.com as preprint (https://psyarxiv.com/fxyg9/). The version we discuss can be found here.

We describe the evolutionary core cognition of well-being in general living agents, and we apply this to humans.

We identify two strategies for the creation and protection of the conditions required for well-being, and describe the associated behavioral ontologies. One strategy, coping, is for survival and the other strategy, co-creation, is for thriving.

We derive the properties of coping and co-creation and apply it to explain the structure of identity as it has been uncovered in Psychology.

We then apply it to demonstrate that the theory of ontological security is entirely based on how the coping mode tries to realize wellbeing via problem solving and suppressive strategies. At best it realized survival; more realistically it realizes a situation that one can call pathological normality.

Conversely, the theory of psychological safety is rooted in the co-creation mode of cognition and it focuses on creating a situation that promote full self-development — self-actualization — and thriving.

This paper is important because many forces in society operate along a logic similar to ontological security and we demonstrate, from first principles, this imposes limits on wellbeing which the psychological safety framework does not have since it allows, and relies on, full self-development.