And I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. – King Solomon[1], Ecclesiastes 4:4 (NIV)
This Old Testament verse reminds us that our tendency to compare ourselves with others goes back a long way, and, even very early on, was found to be unprofitable. For most of us, it leads to jealousy. For the few who find themselves on top, it leads to obsessive worry and fear about losing that special standing.
So, of course, being human, we have busily occupied ourselves with such comparisons 24/7 for millennia.
Fast forward to 1964. I’d just graduated from college and was headed for graduate school. My father, a Ph.D. mathematician (Princeton), was already an established scientist (then 46, he would be elected a AAAS Fellow one year later). We had a conversation about comparative success and failure in science (the subject of the previous two LOTRW posts). Dad said something like this:
When I was young, it was possible to realize that you were, say, the best mathematician in Greensboro, North Carolina [where he grew up and where his family still lived], and that meant something. But post World-War-II, scientists now compare themselves against the best in the world – and that means almost everybody feels like a failure.
This in 1964 – six decades ago. I know the time precisely because my dad subscribed to the AAAS journal Science; we were discussing a recent article on the topic. Through the magic of today’s archival, search and retrieval systems, I succeeded just now in tracking down the original. It took only a minute or two.
The full title? Comparative Failure in Science: A recent study shows that this is not incompatible with stable careers for basic research scientists, (Science, Volume 143, pp 1012-1014). The author was Barney G. Glaser, a Ph.D. sociologist who would later become well-known as one of the founders of social scientists know as grounded theory.
Here is an extended excerpt, to give you the flavor. They show the paper’s age (for example, the paper makes several assertions that might not be accepted at face value today. As well, the article universally refers to scientists as male, despite the fact that the only scientist cited in the opening is a woman. Sigh):
A perennial problem for some scientists is their feeling of comparative failure as scientists. This problem becomes clearer if we consider two major sources of this feeling that are inherent in the very nature of scientific work. (i) In science, strong emphasis is placed on the achievement of recognition (1); (ii) the typical basic scientist works in a community filled with “great men” who have made important and decisive discoveries in their respective fields; they are the acknowledged guiding lights. These esteemed scientists, who have attained honors beyond the reach of most of their colleagues, tend to become models for those who have been trained by them or who haveworked under them. As Eiduson has put it in her recent psychological study of basic research scientists (2, p. 167):”Scientists are idols-oriented.” To take these honored men as models is important for training as well as for a life in research. During training, one learns to think creatively. Emulation of these models results in the internalization of values, beliefs, and norms of the highest standard. This emulation of the great continues and guides the scientist in his research work, however individual in style his work may be. But it is precisely here that a feeling of comparative failure may arise. In emulating a great man the scientist tends to compare himself with the model. He estimates how closely he has equaled his model in ability to adhere to high standards of research, to think of relevant problems, to create “elegant” research designs, to devise new methods, to write clearly, to analyze data. In addition, because of the strong emphasis on attaining recognition for research contributions, the scientist perhaps will compare his own degree of success with his model’s to gauge how he himself is doing. In using the great man’s achievements and the recognition accorded him as criteria, the scientist may be motivated to strive continually and unremittingly toward greater heights (3). On the other hand, he may see himself, over time, as a comparative failure for not having attained a comparable amount of recognition (4).”The model, then, is the ego ideal figure, who represents the ultimate position, and in fact, defines what a scientist should do, how he should think, how he should act. By comparison, everything else is inevitably of lesser worth. We have seen the way the scientists in this group rebuke themselves as they become old, distracted, sit on committees or government advisory boards, or become administrators-and thus move away from the ideal. From this picture it is obvious that the scientist is hard on himself. He has a built-in, clearly marked scalar system, along which attitudes and kinds of performances are measured. When he moves away and deviates from the pattern, he becomes a maverick, or a person who has tossed aside the flaming torch.”
Glaser then outlines his thoughts about some more attainable vision:
Average Success.
With this problem in mind, I recently made a study of the organizational careers of basic research scientists, one purpose of which was to ascertain the consequences, for the scientist’s career, of receiving or not receiving an average amount of recognition (5). At the time of the study, these scientists were employed in a government medical research organization devoted to basic research. This was a high-prestige organization from the standpoint of scientists and was run much as though it were a series of university departments. The study is relevant to this discussion in showing something of the career history of basic research scientists, who are today in increasing proportions leaving the university setting to become affiliated with high-prestige organizations devoted to basic research. In these contexts organizational scientific careers are still primarily dependent on professional (not organizational) recognition (6). By “average amount of professional recognition” I mean supervisor’s favorable evaluation of the quality of the scientist’s current research, and, through publication and through acknowledgment in the publications of others, for his contribution to the cumulative knowledge in his field. This definition gives the three major sources of recognition within reach of the typical scientist: references from superordinate colleagues, publication, and publication acknowledgments in the work of others. This “average” degree of professional recognition is attained by most of the country’s scientists at any one time and by practically all scientists at one time or another. This degree of recognition is in marked contrast to the highly regarded, and restricted, high-prestige honors (in the form of awards, prizes, grants, lectureships, professorships, and so on) that are part of the professional recognition accorded those scientists who make great and decisive discoveries-the “great men.
The author goes on to cite the writings of a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of considerable repute at that time, Lawrence S. Kubie, who also has a Wikipedia entry of his own. Kubie’s celebrity patients included Tennessee Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Moss Hart, Kurt Weill, Vivien Leigh and Sid Caesar. Here’s a bit of Glaser on Kubie:
Comparisons with great men are, however, taken not as comparative but as absolute failure by Kubie in his famous article “Some unsolved problems of the scientific career” (7). Kubie warns future scientists of the perils ahead when devoting themselves to that “carnivorous god, the scientific career.” His criteria in warning of potential failure, are absolute (not comparative) judgments, based on the careers of the more notable great men of science. For example, he talks of the “ultimate gamble which the scientist takes when he stakes his all on professional achievement and recognition, sacrificing to his scientific career recreation, family, and sometimes even instinctual needs, as well as the practical security of money.” Implying again that the scientist whose success falls short of the great man’s is an absolute failure, he characterizes the young scientist as having “a self deceiving fantasy: -that a life of science well may be tough for everyone else, but that it will not be for him,” and as having “ambitious dreams; unspoken hopes of making great scientific discoveries; dreams of solving the great riddles of the universe.”
Glaser closes in this vein:
Perhaps my discussion draws the kind of “implication” from “statistics” that Kubie is looking for in future re-search when he says in his article on the scientific career: “It is the . . .duty of scientists and educators to gather such vital statistics on the life struggles of a few generations of scientists and would-be scientists and to make sure that every graduate student of the sciences will be exposed repeatedly to the implications such data may have for his own future.”
A bit of a downer? You think? I’m thinking Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings should have recorded their hit song as, Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be scientists.
This is often the point in LOTRW posts where I encourage people to “read the original article in its entirety.” I. am. not. going. to. do. that. here. However, I will admit that I couldn’t take my eyes away. Equal parts of a trip down memory lane and horrified fascination.
But I will share this. In assembling this post I got to thinking that my ideas on this topic had been pretty much in cold storage for the last sixty years and wondering what current literature if any might update social-scientists’ views. Turns out there’s a ton of stuff. I’m already over my usual word-limit for a post. Instead of a dive here, I’m suggest you google either or both of these two phrases: The first, recent posts on scientists’ feelings of failure, will take you to links suggesting this remains a serious problem for people in STEM fields. The second, recent posts on feelings of comparative failure in science, takes you links carrying a new thought – that when scientists open up about failures and failing in science, it humanizes us in the eyes of non-scientists. We can certainly use more of that.
So, I will encourage you to sample some of those links more fully. Enjoy the reads!
Next time: back to emergency management.