The flow experience and its significance for human psychology

In the ordinary course of events, psychologists observe human action either in clinical settings, where the “patient” is seeking therapeutic redress for some impairment, or in experimental settings, where the confines of the laboratory and the parameters of the experimental design allow only a tiny fraction of potential responses to be manifested. The theoretical models of human action that psychologists have constructed in the past half century reflect this poverty of observational data: They tend to be mechanistic, reductive, and biased in favor of pathology.