His research focuses on the interdisciplinary study of moral and intellectual character, personality change in the wake of adversity, and flourishing. His awards include the 2023 Early Career Contributions Award from the International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology, the 2018 Faculty Excellence in Research Award from Wake Forest, and the 2015 Rising Star award from the Association for Psychological Science. He is currently editor-in-chief of Personality and Social Psychological Review.
Jayawickreme applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Is There Always Value to Adversity?: Looking Beyond "What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger", and reported the following:
Page 99 falls in Chapter 6, "Distilling the ‘Real Benefits’ of Adversity,” as I transition from a discussion of musician Nick Cave’s reflections on grief after his son Arthur’s death to a section examining whether adversity can reshape personality in measurable ways. The page opens:Learn more about Is There Always Value to Adversity? at the Oxford University Press website.Cave’s music and personal testimony together illustrate that confronting adversity and being spurred to change by it is messy, often incomplete, and not completely positive. As we will see, there is some evidence that other people can be similarly transformed by adversity to become more sensitive and compassionate toward the suffering of others.It then transitions into a section titled “Post-Traumatic Growth as Personality Change,” which argues that changes people report after adversity should show up in stable patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior in order to count as measurable change.
I’d say that the Page 99 Test works pretty well for this book. The summary of the Cave discussion captures the main tension I work through across the eight chapters of the book: our investment in the possibility that adversity can change people for the better, set against the recognition that our evidence for this is not particularly strong, and the fact that the reality of facing up to adversity is more complicated than we’d like to think. In this context, the phrase “messy, often incomplete, and not completely positive” is a good summary of my argument. I grew up in Sri Lanka in the 80s and 90s during a civil war and insurrection, and I have long been skeptical of the familiar cultural refrain, especially prevalent in the United States, that suffering can and should produce positive change. My book traces the idea that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (a famous paraphrase of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker” from Twilight of the Idols) through philosophy, religious traditions, cultural narratives, and several decades of psychological research, and finds that much of the scientific evidence for post-traumatic growth lacks credibility, as it rests on measures that conflate how people talk about their experiences with how they actually change.
However, my book is not purely skeptical of the possibility of growth, and page 99 sits at the point where I shift from critique to asking what genuine growth from adversity might look like if we study it more carefully. One of my goals in discussing Cave's unsentimental reflections on grief alongside the more technical question of valid assessment is to wrestle with a hard question: how do we accurately capture the complexity of human thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the wake of hardship, adversity, and trauma? In other words, growth may be possible in the wake of adversity, but likely not the type of simplistic, triumphant change that Nietzsche’s maxim implies, and our assessments need to be sensitive to this fact.
--Marshal Zeringue
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