Speaker 1: Welcome to the Psychology Podcast, where we give you insights
Speaker 1: into the mind, brained behavior and creativity. I'm doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, and in each episode I have a conversation
Speaker 1: with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give
Speaker 1: you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world
Speaker 1: to live in. Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into
Speaker 1: human possibility. Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today.
Speaker 1: It's great to have doctor Martin Selgman on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Doctor Seligman is director of the PEN Positive Psychology Center,
Speaker 1: the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology, and the PEN Department
Speaker 1: of Psychology, and director of the PEN Master of Applied
Speaker 1: Positive Psychology Program. Commonly known as the Founder of positive Psychology,
Speaker 1: Doctor Seligman is a leading authority in the fields of
Speaker 1: positive psychology, resilience, learned how, helplessness, depression, optimism, and pessimism.
Speaker 1: He's also a recognized authority on interventions that prevent depression
Speaker 1: and that build strengths and well being. He has written
Speaker 1: more than two hundred and fifty scholarly publications and twenty books,
Speaker 1: including Flourish, Authentic Happiness, Learned Optimism, Character, Strengths and Virtues,
Speaker 1: which was co authored with Chris Peterson and his autobiography
Speaker 1: The Hope Circuit, a Psychologist's Journey from Helplessness to Optimism.
Speaker 1: Doctor Suliman, what an honor it is to chat with
Speaker 1: you today, Hey, Scott, it's good to see you again.
Speaker 1: I think it's been about two years since I saw
Speaker 1: you left, and it's a pleasure to be your guest here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been a moment. As they say, well, let me
Speaker 1: ask you, what are some of the things you are
Speaker 1: most excited about that you've worked on in the past
Speaker 1: few years. Well, I've been struggling to write a book
Speaker 1: on agency across all of human history. So when I
Speaker 1: looked over my work, it was basically about the fact
Speaker 1: that human beings, by exerting voluntary action, could have on
Speaker 1: the world. And it occurred to me that this might
Speaker 1: vary across time and culture, and particularly there are lots
Speaker 1: of times in human history which are stagnant, which really
Speaker 1: nothing happens. Medieval apologists notwithstanding four hundred AD to about
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred AD is a time in the West of
Speaker 1: great stagnation, and then starting around fifteen hundred AD, we
Speaker 1: have enormous human progress, which accelerates through the Industrial Revolution
Speaker 1: and is still accelerating. So I started to wonder if
Speaker 1: what could be driving this was different beliefs about human agency.
Speaker 1: And so I've tried to look at words, concepts, philosophical beliefs,
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to write on the notion going back
Speaker 1: to hunter gatherers, through the Bronze Age, through the Hellenic concepts,
Speaker 1: through Christianity and Judaism about agency, and it's waxing and waning.
Speaker 1: But the basic hypothesis is when human beings don't believe
Speaker 1: in free will and agency, there's no human progress. When
Speaker 1: human beings do believe in free will and an agency,
Speaker 1: that's when human progress occurs. So I've been struggling with
Speaker 1: this book. My oldest daughter is a historian, and I
Speaker 1: sent her a sixty page outline of it, and she
Speaker 1: said it was hopeless that knew I knew, I knew
Speaker 1: no history, and it was time I learned some. And
Speaker 1: so you assign me to read the nine volume, ten
Speaker 1: thousand page Cambridge History of the World, which basically talks
Speaker 1: about agency at least subtly across time and space. So
Speaker 1: I'm on volume three now, that's so interesting. Well, agency,
Speaker 1: so whether or not we actually have free will, it's
Speaker 1: the belief in free will. Is that right? Do you
Speaker 1: think we actually have free will? So this is not
Speaker 1: about whether or not we actually have free will, although
Speaker 1: I happen to believe we do. This is about the
Speaker 1: belief in free will. So the belief itself is a driver.
Speaker 1: And so when Augustine comes along in the fourth century
Speaker 1: and says that Pelagious is a heretic and that human
Speaker 1: beings cannot choose good or evil, it's all of God's grace,
Speaker 1: a gift from God that becomes a Christian doctors for
Speaker 1: almost a thousand years, and it coincides with almost no
Speaker 1: material progress, and then starting around fifteen hundred, Catholicism begins
Speaker 1: to change its view Erasmus Pico argue that human beings
Speaker 1: can participate in their own grace, that we're like toddlers,
Speaker 1: but when we fall down, God lifts us up. But
Speaker 1: we have to have motive power of our own. And
Speaker 1: that's when we see a human progress beginning again in
Speaker 1: the West, but it's stymied by the Reformation. The Reformation,
Speaker 1: contrary to what Protestants are talking about today, is Calvin
Speaker 1: and Luther's revolt from Erasmus claiming that we have no
Speaker 1: free will at all, and a lot of the burning
Speaker 1: of the stake in the battle from fifteen twenty five
Speaker 1: to about seventeen hundred is over this issue of free will,
Speaker 1: and it's the Dutch and the liberal Catholics who believe
Speaker 1: in it, the Calvinists, the Lutherans deny it. People are
Speaker 1: burnt at the stake over it. But basically the Dutch
Speaker 1: Protestants win and we get Methodism and modern Protestantism, which
Speaker 1: is very strongly believes in human efficacy and will. So
Speaker 1: that's more. That's more than you want to know about
Speaker 1: what I'm working on now. No, it's very interesting, and
Speaker 1: it's a lot I didn't know about it, you know.
Speaker 1: I try to look at through threads of your own research,
Speaker 1: and I think about your original work in grad school
Speaker 1: and learned Helplessness, and how far you've come from that research,
Speaker 1: so far that you argue recently that you got it backwards.
Speaker 1: Is that right? Yeah? But importantly learned helplessness was about
Speaker 1: human efficacy and not have human efficacy, and indeed its
Speaker 1: agency is the red thread that's run through my work Importantly,
Speaker 1: Steve Mayer has convinced me that we were wrong in
Speaker 1: our characterization of animals and humans in the original helplessness experiments.
Speaker 1: So what we believed was that rats, dogs, and people
Speaker 1: when they had inescapable events, learned that nothing they did
Speaker 1: mattered and that's why they did so badly. Mayor has
Speaker 1: convincing data that the dorsal rofe nucleus little fifty thousand
Speaker 1: cell structure in rats one hundred and fifty thousand cell
Speaker 1: structure in human beings is the default activity when we
Speaker 1: face averse of events, and that the default is helplessness.
Speaker 1: Helplessness is unlearned. But what we learned is that we
Speaker 1: can do something. And what makes human beings very special
Speaker 1: is we have a frontal cortex, which is all about learning, hope,
Speaker 1: learning that what we do matters, learning that the future
Speaker 1: can be better than the past. So we had it backwards.
Speaker 1: The action is in learning that you can do something.
Speaker 1: And if Steve is right, the default condition of mammals
Speaker 1: when bad things happen is to curl up and be helpless.
Speaker 1: Were they dogs that you originally did your research on?
Speaker 1: Were they dogs or rats? The very first experiments were dogs,
Speaker 1: but very soon it became rats, mice, cats, and most importantly,
Speaker 1: the human helplessness work started about three years after the
Speaker 1: first work in animals. I was worried in the animal
Speaker 1: research that it was some artifact about rats or dogs,
Speaker 1: but it turns out to be highly replicable across every
Speaker 1: mammalian species has been tried, and if they had a
Speaker 1: more developed pree from the cortex, some of your original
Speaker 1: conclusions might have been different. All mammals, as far as
Speaker 1: I understand, have some prefrontal cortex, but what humans have
Speaker 1: is massive of prefrontal cortex and a prefrontal cortex that's
Speaker 1: affected by words, and so that makes a big difference.
Speaker 1: We can learn hope, not just by doing things that succeed.
Speaker 1: We can be taught about hope. We can culturally accrue hope.
Speaker 1: So you know, since you went from warned helplessness to
Speaker 1: learned hopefulness. That's the way I would characterize first my
Speaker 1: own life, and that's what the hope circuit is about. Secondly,
Speaker 1: psychology as a whole. So when I started in psychology,
Speaker 1: it was all about fear, conflict, struggle, competition, and I
Speaker 1: was part of a movement that changed it to be
Speaker 1: also about meaning, control, love, engagement, accomplishment, success, and hope.
Speaker 1: And the third thing that happened in my lifetime was
Speaker 1: the world got better, So my life changed for the better.
Speaker 1: Psychology changed to include positive topics, and this was legitimized
Speaker 1: by massive changes in human progress. Hey everyone, if you
Speaker 1: find the themes we cover on the Psychology Podcast interesting
Speaker 1: and enlightening, you might be interested in my new book, Transcend,
Speaker 1: The New Science of Self Actualization. The book is the
Speaker 1: culmination of my journey to scientifically discover the factors that
Speaker 1: can lead us to optimal health, growth, creativity, peak experiences,
Speaker 1: and deep fulfillment. I believe we can still manage to
Speaker 1: have peak experiences, the most wondrous moments that make life
Speaker 1: worth living, regardless of our current life circumstances. We can
Speaker 1: choose growth for more. You can visit Transcend hyphenbook dot com.
Speaker 1: A's Transcend hyphenbook dot com with a hyphen between the
Speaker 1: word transcend and the word book. If you get a
Speaker 1: chance to read the book, it'd be great if you
Speaker 1: could leave a review on Amazon, tweet about it, or
Speaker 1: share the book with friends. I truly hope this book
Speaker 1: can help people get through these tough times. And realize
Speaker 1: that we all have greater resiliency, creativity, and potential within
Speaker 1: us than we ever realized. Okay, now back to the show. Well,
Speaker 1: so I want to go back a second here. So
Speaker 1: your age thirty, and you have this dream that changes
Speaker 1: the trajectory of your career and what you decide you
Speaker 1: want to do. Can you talk a little about that
Speaker 1: dream and how that impacted you. I'll give you one
Speaker 1: quote from that dream. Why is everyone playing with cards? Yeah? So,
Speaker 1: I've always paid attention to dreams. In fact, I think
Speaker 1: the best paper I ever wrote is a theory of
Speaker 1: dreaming that almost no one has ever read. In the
Speaker 1: early nineteen seventies, I had become a professor young professor
Speaker 1: at the University of Pennsylvania and the work on learned
Speaker 1: helplessness in animals and humans was becoming well known. And
Speaker 1: my mentor was a a middle aged psychiatrist named Aaron Beck,
Speaker 1: and he and I would have lunch about once a month.
Speaker 1: We still do. Beck is now ninety eight years old.
Speaker 1: I'm seventy seven. We still have great lunches. We're doing
Speaker 1: them now on Google Meet and Zoom. And so we
Speaker 1: met for lunch at Kelly and Cohns, and Tim, who's
Speaker 1: ordinarily a very gentle person, said to me, Marty, if
Speaker 1: you continue doing what you're doing, you're going to waste
Speaker 1: your life. And I choked on my grilled Reuben and
Speaker 1: thought that Tim must be wrong. But a few months
Speaker 1: later I had a dream that one would call a
Speaker 1: newmanous dream, a very salient dream, in which I was
Speaker 1: walking up the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum, and on
Speaker 1: my right there were rooms, and in the rooms people
Speaker 1: were playing with cards, and I asked the question, why
Speaker 1: is everyone playing with cards? Where Upon the roof of
Speaker 1: the Guggenheim opened and the guy had appeared. And you'll
Speaker 1: be interested to know, Scott, that God is a elderly
Speaker 1: male with a white beard and a booming voice. And
Speaker 1: what God said very loudly to me in this dream was, well, Seligman,
Speaker 1: at least you're starting to ask the right questions. And
Speaker 1: that coincided with what Beck had said, and it told
Speaker 1: me the time had come to change my research from
Speaker 1: animal models of psychopathology to what I now do, human research,
Speaker 1: longitudinal research, research not only on the bad stuff that
Speaker 1: cripples life, but research on what builds life as well.
Speaker 1: What makes life worth living? When I look back, the
Speaker 1: dream and the choking on my grilled Reuben with Tim
Speaker 1: Beck were turning points in my research. I was about
Speaker 1: thirty years old at the time. Wow, that's historic. Well
Speaker 1: you started working on optimism before you founded positive psychology.
Speaker 1: Now what was this, What was the research? Why did
Speaker 1: you get interest in optimism? How'd that happened? Well, I
Speaker 1: thought I was working on pessimism, So I'll tell you
Speaker 1: the story of how it happened. In our helplessness experiments,
Speaker 1: both in animals and people, we found that only about
Speaker 1: two thirds who got inescapable events, unsolvable problems, inescapable shock,
Speaker 1: inescapable noise, only about two thirds became helpless, and the
Speaker 1: other one third of people in animals didn't become helpless.
Speaker 1: So I began to wonder, what was it about some
Speaker 1: people that made them so resilient and so resistant to
Speaker 1: depression and to becoming helpless. So we did about ten
Speaker 1: years of research on this question, and we basically found
Speaker 1: that it was optimism that people who believed that when
Speaker 1: bad events occurred to them, the bad events were trangent,
Speaker 1: they're temporary, the bad events were local. Just as one
Speaker 1: situation the bad events were controllable. These were the optimists,
Speaker 1: and these were the people who we could not make
Speaker 1: helpless easily in the laboratory. Conversely, people who came to
Speaker 1: the laboratory with the belief that when bad events occur,
Speaker 1: they're permanent, they're pervasive, and there's nothing they can do
Speaker 1: about them. Where the people who became helpless at the
Speaker 1: drop of the hat. So the story was that pessimists
Speaker 1: become helpless easily. They get depressed at about twice the
Speaker 1: rate of optimistic people, and optimists are resilient when bad
Speaker 1: events occur, they recover and they don't become helpless in
Speaker 1: the laboratory easily at all. Oh, that must have been
Speaker 1: quite a stark contrast from the learned helplessness research. Just
Speaker 1: as a human being, to hear these dogs yelling in pain,
Speaker 1: that must have been hard for you, right as an experimenter,
Speaker 1: and hearing all that the suffering of those animals. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm a dog lover and very difficult experiments to do.
Speaker 1: I found myself in a laboratory at age twenty one
Speaker 1: that was doing shock experiments with dogs, and as soon
Speaker 1: as I could get out of it, I stopped doing
Speaker 1: experiments with dogs. Did experiments with rats for a while,
Speaker 1: also difficult to do much easier to do experiments with people.
Speaker 1: So the nineties, we're in the nineties now, and you
Speaker 1: decide I'm going to run for president of APA, the
Speaker 1: American Psychological Association, and people told you forget about it,
Speaker 1: kind of to aly lined up in vance. The order
Speaker 1: of succession is already designated. Why did you decide to
Speaker 1: run for AP president? Why persevere when people told you that. Well,
Speaker 1: in about nineteen ninety three, Consumer Reports contacted me and
Speaker 1: said they were going to do They usually do studies
Speaker 1: of washing machines and automobiles and get consumer ratings of them,
Speaker 1: and they said they wanted to do psychotherapy, and they
Speaker 1: asked me if I would become their main consultant for
Speaker 1: a Consumer reports study of whether or not people thought
Speaker 1: of psychotherapy was effective. Now, I had been a psychotherapy researcher,
Speaker 1: both drugs and psychotherapy, but I was involved in doing small,
Speaker 1: essentially laboratory and clinical studies of cognitive therapy and the like.
Speaker 1: But this was an opportunity to send a questionnaire out
Speaker 1: to one hundred thousand people, many of whom it had
Speaker 1: psychotherapy and asked them to rate it, and so we
Speaker 1: got back tens of thousands of responses and analyzed them,
Speaker 1: and I was shocked by the results. They're completely different
Speaker 1: from the results we found in essentially outcome studies of psychotherapy.
Speaker 1: The first big difference was that eighty to ninety percent
Speaker 1: of people in the Consumer Reports study thought that psychotherapy
Speaker 1: was very effective for them, whereas in the laboratory research
Speaker 1: on psychotherapy only about sixty percent of people are affected,
Speaker 1: markedly against the forty percent placebo rate generally. First thing,
Speaker 1: we found that people like psychotherapy much more than the
Speaker 1: laboratory told us they did. The second big difference was
Speaker 1: that with clinical outcome studies there's high specificity. So flooding
Speaker 1: works well on obsessive obsessive compulsive disorders, exposure works well
Speaker 1: on therapy, cognitive behavior therapy works well on depression. But
Speaker 1: in the Consumer Reports study everything worked about equally well.
Speaker 1: So once we had those results and published them, it
Speaker 1: occurred to me that these are results that would be
Speaker 1: very important to the main constituency of the American Psychological Association,
Speaker 1: and indeed I decided to run for president based on
Speaker 1: the Consumer Reports results, and in spite of the fact
Speaker 1: that everyone told me I couldn't possibly win, that the
Speaker 1: next three presidents had designated by the people who ran APA.
Speaker 1: I won by the largest margin in modern history. And
Speaker 1: it's not like you went into that saying I'm going
Speaker 1: to create a new field that revolutionizes the psychology and
Speaker 1: creates all these things. At what point did you think, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to make this my platform. Positive psychology didn't
Speaker 1: have something to do with your daughter, Nikki, Well, it
Speaker 1: wasn't my platform going in, but it was going out. Basically,
Speaker 1: I found myself asking the question, what did what was
Speaker 1: missing in psychology and what was present and something psychology
Speaker 1: could be proud of. Was it psychotherapy actually worked, that
Speaker 1: had helped a good number of people, and it was
Speaker 1: well liked. But what psychology was missing was what makes
Speaker 1: life worth living. Psychology was all about what cripples life
Speaker 1: and trying to get rid of the things that crippled life.
Speaker 1: But I think the belief that the best we can
Speaker 1: ever do in life, which is what Freud told us
Speaker 1: in Schopenhauer, is not to be miserable that that belief
Speaker 1: is empirically false, morally insidious, and a personal and political
Speaker 1: dead end. And so I began to think about the
Speaker 1: question of could there be an effective psychology of the
Speaker 1: good life, of what makes life worth living, not just
Speaker 1: getting rid of what cripples life, And so that became
Speaker 1: the driving force for my next twenty years of work.
Speaker 1: I see. And then when was this gardening incident that
Speaker 1: you talk about with Nikki. Oh, that was a emblematic
Speaker 1: turning point that occurred in I think about nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 1: I had just become president elect elect and was wondering
Speaker 1: what my theme might be. And Nicki had turned five
Speaker 1: years old. Nicki, by the way, is just getting her
Speaker 1: PhD from Fordham now in clinical psychology, so she's going
Speaker 1: into the family business in some ways. Nicky had just
Speaker 1: turned five and we were gardening together, and Nicky was
Speaker 1: throwing weeds in the air and dancing and singing and
Speaker 1: having a great time, and I'm a worker being I
Speaker 1: shouted at her and I said, get to work, Nicki,
Speaker 1: And she looked at me, and she walked away, and
Speaker 1: she came back and she said, Daddy, can I talk
Speaker 1: to you? And I said sure, he said, Daddy, Do
Speaker 1: you remember that was my fifth birthday was about two
Speaker 1: weeks ago, so this must have been in early September
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety six. I would have to guess then
Speaker 1: from that counting backwards, do you remember before my fifth
Speaker 1: birthday that I was a whiner, that I whined all
Speaker 1: the time? And I said yeah, I said, well, have
Speaker 1: you noticed in the last two weeks I haven't whined once?
Speaker 1: And I said, yeah, yeah, You've really been a pleasure.
Speaker 1: And he said, well, Daddy, I decided on my fifth
Speaker 1: birthday that I wasn't going to whine anymore. And that
Speaker 1: was the hardest thing I've ever done, and it succeeded.
Speaker 1: And if I can stop whining, you can stop being
Speaker 1: such a grouch. And indeed that was the emblematic inspiration
Speaker 1: for me of founding a movement which was not about
Speaker 1: what was wrong, but a movement about what was right
Speaker 1: in life. To take the spirit of positive psychology and
Speaker 1: ask you, what are your top character strengths? What are
Speaker 1: your top three character strengths? Last time I looked, they
Speaker 1: were leadership, critical intelligence, and love of love of beauty.
Speaker 1: Bravery might have been up there, but I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: But importantly it was leadership, creativity, critical intelligence, and love
Speaker 1: of beauty. Yeah, I would after spending four years with you,
Speaker 1: I'd say that makes a lot of sense. You often
Speaker 1: got touched by beautiful things. Even just listening to classical
Speaker 1: music I know, really drabs you bad. Day to day.
Speaker 1: I haven't listened to any music. I think when this
Speaker 1: is done, I'll go for a walk and listen to music.
Speaker 1: You should. You should, I highly recommend it. Well, it's
Speaker 1: a positive psychology right now, a lot of people in
Speaker 1: the age of this coronavirus certainty. What can positive psychology
Speaker 1: offer people? This is partly why I reached out to
Speaker 1: you to have you on my podcast, because I heard
Speaker 1: you do this thing for the Mapsters with Aaron Beck
Speaker 1: and what you said inspired me. So I want you
Speaker 1: to be able to inspire the thousand thousands of people
Speaker 1: listening to you right now as well. Well. I have
Speaker 1: some pretty firm hypothesis about what positive psychology says, both
Speaker 1: about what you should do during the pandemic and then
Speaker 1: the way out what you should do after. So the
Speaker 1: background for this is to split different aspects of positive psychology.
Speaker 1: So I'm going to split here between positive emotion, which
Speaker 1: is being cheerful, merry, having fun and smiling a lot,
Speaker 1: having a good time, and optimism, which is not a
Speaker 1: feeling state. Optimism is a belief about the future, a
Speaker 1: belief that the future will be better. Now, let's take
Speaker 1: a look at what we know about the effects of
Speaker 1: those two different aspects of positive psychology. Well, on the
Speaker 1: first positive emotion and the jargon here is positive affectivity.
Speaker 1: That is, there are some people who are highly positively effective.
Speaker 1: Scott and I are not among them. These are people
Speaker 1: who smile a lot, who are merry, who laugh a lot,
Speaker 1: and have a good time. Sheldon Cohne decided about fifteen
Speaker 1: years ago to ask the question about the relationship of
Speaker 1: positive effectivity and of optimism to viral infection, and he did.
Speaker 1: He used three different kinds of rhinoviruses. I think two
Speaker 1: of them are coronaviruses, if I'm not mistaken, and he
Speaker 1: took I think a couple hundred volunteers, paid them three
Speaker 1: hundred dollars apiece and squirted viruses into their nose and
Speaker 1: asked who got a bad cold and who didn't, and
Speaker 1: how long did the cold last? And interestingly, the main
Speaker 1: variable that worked was positive affectivity. People who were high
Speaker 1: positive affect who smiled a lot, laughed or merry people
Speaker 1: got shorter colds and less severe colds. And he measured this,
Speaker 1: by the way, by the weight of the mucus, so
Speaker 1: this is not self report. Interestingly, optimism had no effect,
Speaker 1: So optimistic people got colds at the same rate as
Speaker 1: pessimistic people. So the first lesson from Sheldon Cone is
Speaker 1: that if you want to avoid the infection during the pandemic,
Speaker 1: the hypothesis is, as hard as it sounds, you should
Speaker 1: have a lot of fun. We bought a puppy, for example,
Speaker 1: listening to music, having sex, having good food, finding all
Speaker 1: the things that give you joy and make you smile.
Speaker 1: So that's part one. If I had to make a guess,
Speaker 1: the formulation from positive psychology, have as much fun as
Speaker 1: you possibly can during this difficult time. Then the question
Speaker 1: is this pandemic will wane. It's probably the first wave
Speaker 1: of it is probably waning now in the United States.
Speaker 1: And then the question is who will recover, who will
Speaker 1: lead us? What kind of personality is needed for resilience,
Speaker 1: And the answer there is not merry, smiling, laughing people.
Speaker 1: It's people with hope and optimism. So the massive literature
Speaker 1: on optimism says these are the people who rebuild. So
Speaker 1: Scott The underlying lesson here is during the pandemic, have
Speaker 1: as much fun as you possibly can. As difficult as
Speaker 1: it sounds, but as the pandemic wanes, it's optimism and
Speaker 1: hope that's going to matter. You've criticized this happyology of
Speaker 1: positive psychology, but you're saying, let's allow ourselves. Let's give
Speaker 1: ourselves permission to have some happyology. Right now. This is
Speaker 1: the very first time I've ever endorsed the smiley face. So,
Speaker 1: as you know, whenever I speak to journalists about positive psychology,
Speaker 1: the first thing I say is, don't put the smiley
Speaker 1: face on the cover. Well, I think the smiley face
Speaker 1: matters right now. I agreed. So you made a comment,
Speaker 1: and maybe I misunderstood. You said me and you are
Speaker 1: not the smiley have fun kind of got people. Is
Speaker 1: that right? I'm low positive effective, and I have to
Speaker 1: go out of my way. Listen listening to meatloaf, having
Speaker 1: a puppy, cooking good food, gardening during the pandemic. So
Speaker 1: I'm massively trying, as hard as it is to have
Speaker 1: fun during the pandemic. Some people have fun more easily
Speaker 1: than I do. But that's what I'm working on. I've
Speaker 1: even been dancing a little. That's awesome. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: is your perception your perception of me as well positive
Speaker 1: affective as well. Yeah. So I've always seen you as
Speaker 1: a sort of like me, basically glum, and that we
Speaker 1: had to work at positive affectivity. Am I wrong about you?
Speaker 1: I think so, I think you are wrong about me.
Speaker 1: Maybe we've never partied together. No, No, I've partied with
Speaker 1: almost none of my students and postdocs and coworkers. Ever,
Speaker 1: So you're you're you must have taken some of the
Speaker 1: positive affectivity tests. How do you come out? I'm pretty high.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty high in positive affect But I want to
Speaker 1: just comment on something I noted about you, because I
Speaker 1: think that you know your your personality has changed. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know throughout your whole course of your whole life.
Speaker 1: But I can only speak the past four years or so.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would almost characterize you these days as
Speaker 1: naturally positive affect you. You don't you know, I don't
Speaker 1: know if you if you think that you've had quite
Speaker 1: a transformation over the years. But my own perception of
Speaker 1: you is your default state now is quite seems quite
Speaker 1: friendly and positive affect I've measured it over the years
Speaker 1: both optimism and positive affect. And you're right, So I've
Speaker 1: gone from being pessimistic and negatively effective to being quite
Speaker 1: optimistic and not particularly negatively affective anymore. So I am
Speaker 1: better at having fun than I used to be. So
Speaker 1: I think that it'd be helpful in this kind of
Speaker 1: restless conversation talk a little bit about what are some
Speaker 1: critiques of positive psychology that you've addressed. You know, you've
Speaker 1: talked about strong criticisms and weak criticisms. What's a strong
Speaker 1: criticism of the field that people have leveled against positive psychology. Well,
Speaker 1: I think the best criticism is that it positive psychology
Speaker 1: says that it's in the head, And the best criticism
Speaker 1: is that a good world is not in people's head.
Speaker 1: A good world is in the world, and that if
Speaker 1: we want to allocate money to make people happier, it's
Speaker 1: not doing positive psychology things. It's rather more income and
Speaker 1: the like. And so that's a good criticism and the
Speaker 1: answer to it is, interestingly that more and more income,
Speaker 1: both for individuals and fors asymptotes quickly, and that in
Speaker 1: the United States that between eighty and one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year increases in income don't produce increases in
Speaker 1: life satisfaction. So that's a good criticism, and I think
Speaker 1: the answer to it is that below the safety net,
Speaker 1: what we really want to care about is increasing people's income,
Speaker 1: and the world above the safety net, more and more
Speaker 1: we want to ask the question of perma engagement, good relationships, meaning,
Speaker 1: and accomplishment rather than more money. So that's the best
Speaker 1: critique I know. The second good critique, which I think
Speaker 1: really is insidious and false, but it's catchy, is that
Speaker 1: happy people don't care about the world. That happy people
Speaker 1: are blithe and they care about themselves. And Barbara this
Speaker 1: is basically Barbara Ehrenreich's main critique of positive psychology, that
Speaker 1: happy We don't want to make people happy, we want
Speaker 1: to make them realistic rather than happy. And the answer
Speaker 1: to that is there are quite a few studies now
Speaker 1: of altruism, who volunteers, who contributes money, who works hard
Speaker 1: for other people, and the strong weight of that evidence
Speaker 1: is that it's happy people. Depressed people turn inward. They
Speaker 1: tend to be less altruistic, they tend not to volunteer.
Speaker 1: And you know, almost all of your listeners who have
Speaker 1: been depressed at one time or another another. When you're depressed,
Speaker 1: you turn to yourself and you become number one. And
Speaker 1: so the second criticism that making people happy will make
Speaker 1: them bad citizens is one hundred and eighty degrees wrong.
Speaker 1: So those are those are my two favorite criticisms. What's
Speaker 1: your favorite criticism? My favorite is that the field ignores suffering.
Speaker 1: So maybe it went in the opposite direction and trying
Speaker 1: to correct the record that the focused too much in suffering,
Speaker 1: but it ignores those that the most vulnerable in our society,
Speaker 1: those in the lower rungs that really just what their
Speaker 1: most basic needs met. How do you respond to that? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I agree with that, And by definition, the field came
Speaker 1: out of clinical psychology, and thirty years of my life
Speaker 1: had to do with the relief of suffering. So I
Speaker 1: take relief of suffering very seriously. But the field, by definition,
Speaker 1: is not about the relief of suffering. It's not about
Speaker 1: removing what cripples life, and I definitely think we should
Speaker 1: be doing that. Positive psychology is not a replacement for
Speaker 1: clinical psychology or for negative psychology, but rather positive psychology says,
Speaker 1: in addition to caring about relief of suffering, let's ask
Speaker 1: the question what builds the good life? And part of
Speaker 1: that is certainly removing suffering, and that's what psychology has
Speaker 1: traditionally done. Positive psychology says, in addition, we need to
Speaker 1: ask about more than just the relief of suffering. Right,
Speaker 1: what do you think of humanistic psychology? You knew I
Speaker 1: was going to ask you that question. It hasn't played
Speaker 1: much of a role in my life. So when I
Speaker 1: was an undergraduate, I read Frome, and I remember meeting
Speaker 1: al Ellis, and then I went through laboratory psychology and
Speaker 1: clinical psychology, and in the of positive psychology, I was
Speaker 1: reminded of humanistic psychology, but hadn't read much of it.
Speaker 1: So most of the humanistic psychology I read was kind
Speaker 1: of in response to the critique of humanists humanistic psychology
Speaker 1: is of positive psychology, which basically just said it was
Speaker 1: old wine in new bottles. I went back and read
Speaker 1: more and more Maslow and Rogers and the like, and
Speaker 1: I liked them a lot. I think the difference between
Speaker 1: positive psychology and humanistic psychology is that it's more rigorous,
Speaker 1: and so positive psychology for me, arose out of laboratory
Speaker 1: and longitudinal, experimental and social psychology and it would have
Speaker 1: been dishonest of me to cite humanistic psychology, since that
Speaker 1: played almost no role when I was pretty much ignorant
Speaker 1: of it in the founding of positive psychology. But in retrospect,
Speaker 1: Maslow and Rogers were deeply onto very much the same
Speaker 1: thing long before I was. But they weren't scientists essentially.
Speaker 1: And I guess we added seven point scales and laboratory
Speaker 1: experiments and rigor to many of the premises that Maslow
Speaker 1: began with. That's a very fair answer. And I assume
Speaker 1: you didn't. You didn't read a lot of Maslow then
Speaker 1: in the fifties and sixties. Yeah. By the way, you
Speaker 1: did a great job in your book of characterizing Maslow's life,
Speaker 1: and I found I just learned a lot more about
Speaker 1: Maslow from your book. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm
Speaker 1: trying to I'm trying to put some of those ideas
Speaker 1: on a firm scientific foundation. So I really appreciate that.
Speaker 1: And there's no reason for human modern dy humanistic psychologist
Speaker 1: and positive psychologists not work together on a scientific foundation.
Speaker 1: There's no reason why we can't work together. I love it.
Speaker 1: I agree completely. I think it's a historic accident partly
Speaker 1: due to my own ignorance, but also partly due to
Speaker 1: the insolarity and the strained scientific methods that some of
Speaker 1: the humanistic psychologies advocated that the two disciplines were so
Speaker 1: far apart. Yeah, I agree, I agree. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of just words, you know, put forth that were
Speaker 1: beautiful words. Beautiful words, you know, like in the Art
Speaker 1: of Loving Eric Fromner. Loving is a beautiful book, but
Speaker 1: there's no not a lot of scientific rigor in it.
Speaker 1: So I'm trying to resurrect it and put some of
Speaker 1: that on a scientific foundation. So would you say that
Speaker 1: you are a natural in psychology in the sense because
Speaker 1: you play bridge as well? Is that right? Can you
Speaker 1: compare and contrast your bridge talent to your psychology talent.
Speaker 1: I can answer that pretty definitively, since I spend about
Speaker 1: half my time playing bridge and about half my time
Speaker 1: doing psychology. Doing psychology is easy for me. The cards
Speaker 1: just fly off my hands. You know. When I hear
Speaker 1: you talking about creativity, I really understand what you're saying,
Speaker 1: and I can often see to the bottom of it.
Speaker 1: Psychological questions become our naturals for me. Playing bridge, however,
Speaker 1: is labor I have to sit there and sweat and
Speaker 1: reason it out and calculate probabilities, whereas some of the
Speaker 1: great partners I play with in Bridge, the cards just
Speaker 1: fly off their hands. They just know what the right
Speaker 1: move is without being able to explain it. So in
Speaker 1: Bridge there are clearly naturals, and I've been privileged to
Speaker 1: partner quite a few of them. And then there are
Speaker 1: students like me for whom it's sweat. In psychology, I'm
Speaker 1: a natural. I love it. It's easy, but many of
Speaker 1: my students are students. It's hard for them. So that's
Speaker 1: the distinction that I think is a real one. By
Speaker 1: the way, it's not about not about success. So in Bridge,
Speaker 1: some of the students who sweat it out are just
Speaker 1: as successful as the naturals, And in psychology some of
Speaker 1: the students are just as successful as the naturals, and
Speaker 1: naturals are often failures. Grit matters a bit as well.
Speaker 1: In addition, time on task matters. For me, the operative
Speaker 1: part of grit is how much time you spend at it.
Speaker 1: And indeed there's a lot to be said for time
Speaker 1: on task, particularly if you're a student, as in Bridge,
Speaker 1: so I play about four hours of Bridge to day
Speaker 1: and over sixty years it's become easier for me, but
Speaker 1: it's still hard. Psychology, which I spend about the same
Speaker 1: amount of time on, has always been easy for me.
Speaker 1: So talent and natural being and achurl that's different than creativity.
Speaker 1: What is creativity? I'm asking this to you because I
Speaker 1: know you have a new theory, a new paper. I'd
Speaker 1: much rather know what you think about it, since you
Speaker 1: know and have written more deeply than I have about creativity.
Speaker 1: I like your new paper. I want to say, I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've published yet, but no, it's still
Speaker 1: you know, it's dormant, and it's dormant because I want
Speaker 1: to create, essentially courses to see if it works. So
Speaker 1: it's just an idea. It basically says that in science
Speaker 1: and maybe in art, but only in science I'm hypothesizing about.
Speaker 1: There are five different kinds of creative ideas, not just one.
Speaker 1: The first is integration. That's seeing that two things look
Speaker 1: like they're different are really the same. Basically, Newton in
Speaker 1: the Apples story is Newton. The real part of the
Speaker 1: story is that when he was back at the farm
Speaker 1: during the plague, this moon was rising behind the family
Speaker 1: apple tree, and one of the apples secluded the moon perfectly,
Speaker 1: and Newton thought that could it be that what draws
Speaker 1: the apple to the Earth is the same thing that
Speaker 1: keeps the moon in orbit. What Newton was really great
Speaker 1: at was integration, seeing that two things that looked different
Speaker 1: were the same. He did the same thing with the
Speaker 1: fundamental colors. The second kind of creativity is differentiation, That
Speaker 1: is seeing that two things that look like they're the
Speaker 1: same are really different. And so dividing smallpox into Variola major,
Speaker 1: which was deadly and Variola minor, which had the same
Speaker 1: symptoms but was not deadly, was an example of that.
Speaker 1: The periodic table of the elements is an example of differentiation.
Speaker 1: The third kind is figure ground reversal, and that is
Speaker 1: taking the basic premise of the science and reversing it
Speaker 1: and asking what's the case. And the Compernician revolution putting
Speaker 1: the Sun at the center of the Solar system not
Speaker 1: the Earth, was an example of that. Positive psychology is
Speaker 1: an example of that, which says, hey, the answer is
Speaker 1: not in the clinic, but it's in normality. The fourth
Speaker 1: kind is distality, and that's being able to imagine things
Speaker 1: that are very different from the here and now. So
Speaker 1: Einstein and Tesla were wonderful imaginers of space and time
Speaker 1: and machines. And the fifth kind for me is creative
Speaker 1: accidents itself, like the discovery of antibacterials, in which you
Speaker 1: just come upon something. Discovery of radiation was similar. So Scott,
Speaker 1: that's kind of where I am about it. But for me,
Speaker 1: this is just idle thought. And so I'm beginning to
Speaker 1: ask the question with a company called Better Up, giving
Speaker 1: courses on each of these five different kinds of creativity
Speaker 1: within the business setting, depending on what the company needs integration, differentiation,
Speaker 1: figured ground reversal, and seeing if that helps creativity. So
Speaker 1: I'm probably not going to really do much with this
Speaker 1: theory until I can find that you can actually change
Speaker 1: these things for the better, fair enough. But what I
Speaker 1: like about it, and what I think that we both
Speaker 1: criticize about some of the field, is that there's a
Speaker 1: lot more to creativity than what's measured by the existing
Speaker 1: creativity tests that exists, Like tests of divergent thinking. Divergent
Speaker 1: thinking tests don't get at the quality of the thought, right,
Speaker 1: so it might measure the quantity, but not the extent
Speaker 1: to which you have I've looked at. So it's cool stuff.
Speaker 1: And you've also talked about the importance. This is something
Speaker 1: you stressed all four years I worked with you, the
Speaker 1: importance of the sense of the audience that's not picked
Speaker 1: up by existing tests of creativity. Are they right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: although the third criteria of creativity, that is usefulness, seems
Speaker 1: to me really quite important. That there really is a
Speaker 1: market and an audience, and it's a part of creativity,
Speaker 1: is not just originality, but that there's an audience for
Speaker 1: the originality. I think surprisingness. What do you think of
Speaker 1: I think surprisingness, counterintuitive counterintuitivity is really another important thing
Speaker 1: that Simonson points to. What's your view on surprisingness? How
Speaker 1: do you separate that from the ability to connect dots
Speaker 1: that other people don't connect? Is that similar to it? Well,
Speaker 1: that's one kind of surprisingness. Another kind is figure ground reversal,
Speaker 1: which says people, hey, your basic premise is wrong. So
Speaker 1: it's not the connecting of dots, it's rather the shock value.
Speaker 1: We were working together on prospection, saying to people that
Speaker 1: it's not enough just to know about the past and
Speaker 1: the present, that we should start with thinking about the future.
Speaker 1: Has shock value, and I don't think that's really the
Speaker 1: connection of dots. I don't think so either. It doesn't
Speaker 1: seem like quite the same thing. Yeah, you know, there's
Speaker 1: a term of disruptors. A lot of creativity creative people
Speaker 1: are disruptors, and they disrupt this sort of status quote ideas.
Speaker 1: It's not a formula for being popular, but it is
Speaker 1: a formula for getting work done. That asks about the
Speaker 1: basic premises. You know, you've said in your career that
Speaker 1: you're one of your ambitions is to not be boring,
Speaker 1: right quote, not be boring? Do you think creative that's
Speaker 1: also a prerequisite for being a creative human being. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a good question. So creativity is almost by definition
Speaker 1: not boring. So surprisingness is part of not being boring.
Speaker 1: It's a good question. So not being boring may be
Speaker 1: very similar to being surprising. Yeah, I think so. I
Speaker 1: think so. So to be a disruptor for a second.
Speaker 1: And the future of psychotherapy, you see perspection as being
Speaker 1: perhaps a future of psychotherapy and not focusing so much
Speaker 1: in the past, but helping people focus more in the future.
Speaker 1: One of the privileges of having lunch with Beck once
Speaker 1: a month at age ninety eight is that he's come
Speaker 1: around I think to the view of the importance of
Speaker 1: perspection and positivity in psychotherapy. So I think anxiety and
Speaker 1: depression are right on their surface, not about the past
Speaker 1: or the present, about the future. You're anxious about what
Speaker 1: might happen, and you're depressed about that the future is bleak.
Speaker 1: So it's so bizarre that the psychotherapy is for anxiety
Speaker 1: and depression of neglected the future orientation of them and
Speaker 1: concentrated on the past and the present. Beautiful, Okay, So
Speaker 1: last to end here, is there anything you want to
Speaker 1: bring up, anything you want to tell people to set
Speaker 1: records straight. I know there was some controversy with APA
Speaker 1: and applications of your work, and is there anything at
Speaker 1: all you want to address or to talk about here
Speaker 1: at the end? Well, to the extent this conversation has
Speaker 1: intrigued people. I have the satisfaction of having written an autobiography,
Speaker 1: The Hope Circuit, which words and all tells the story
Speaker 1: of the trajectory in my life, and Scott was a
Speaker 1: reviewer of it, and I recommend it to you. Thank you.
Speaker 1: I also, by the way, recommend Scott's excellent book to you,
Speaker 1: particularly the Sailboat in this book, Thanks Marty. I just
Speaker 1: want to personally thank you for giving me the chance
Speaker 1: that you gave me to work at the Positive Psychology
Speaker 1: Center to teach positive psychology at Penn and those are
Speaker 1: four of the most meaningful years of my entire existence
Speaker 1: so far in life. So I just want to really
Speaker 1: thank you and thank you to all the work you've
Speaker 1: done for everyone else. You're welcome, Scott. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to react in some way to something you heard, I
Speaker 1: encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology
Speaker 1: Podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also,
Speaker 1: please add a reading and review of the podcast on
Speaker 1: iTunes and subscribe to the Psychology Podcast YouTube channels. Were
Speaker 1: really trying to increase our viewership on YouTube. In fact,
Speaker 1: many of these episodes are in video format on YouTube,
Speaker 1: so you'll definitely want to check out that channel. Thanks
Speaker 1: for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and
Speaker 1: tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior,
Speaker 1: and creativity.