The Power of Positive Thinking Peale's work in an article in "The Nation" dated May 7, 1955. He compares Peale's message in "The Power of Positive Thinking" to that of hypnosis, writing that "self knowledge, in Mr. Peale's understanding, is unequivocally bad; self hypnosis is good." Murphy explains that such repeated hypnosis defeats an individual's self-motivation, sense of reality, and ability to think critically. He describes Peale's understanding of the mind as inaccurate and his description of the workings of the mind as deceptively simplistic and false. Murphy states that if man's unconscious “can be conceptualized merely as a container for a small number of
Convergent thinking with complex problems, other variables such as one’s gut feeling or instinctive problem solving abilities also have a role in determining a solution to a given problem. Furthermore, convergent thinking has also been said to devalue minority arguments. In a study where experimental manipulations were used to motivate subjects to engage in convergent or divergent thinking when presented with either majority or minority support for persuasive arguments, a pattern emerged under the convergent thinking condition where majority support produced more positive attitudes on the focal issue. Conversely, minority support for the argument had no effect on the subjects. The convergent