Optimism Is Not a Personality Trait, It's an Explanatory Style You Can Train
Helplessness is learned, and so is optimism. What decides whether a person gives up is not the blow itself but whether he explains it as permanent, pervasive, or his own fault.
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The dog doesn't run, and it isn't because it never learned to run
In Solomon's lab, on day one the dog was strapped into a hammock and given Pavlovian shocks it could not escape no matter what it did; on day two it was put in a shuttle box where running to the other side would shut off the shock, and the dog just lay there. Seligman's judgment was that what the animal actually learned was not "the tone predicts the shock" but "nothing I do matters." That reading collided head-on with behaviorism at the time, because it required the animal to be a cognitive subject capable of thinking and of integrating experience across time.
— Martin SeligmanPeople can be taught to give up by noise, too
Hiroto moved the same design onto humans: on day one, headphones playing an unpleasant noise, with one group unable to turn it off no matter what they pressed and another group able to stop it with a button. On day two they got a four-foot "human shuttle box" — hand on one side, the noise sounds; move it to the other side, it stops. People who had been through uncontrollable noise the day before left their hand sitting in the box. Seligman stresses that the variable doing the work is not the trauma itself but whether there was control over the trauma — and they ran control experiments on exactly this point.
— Martin SeligmanHelplessness became the model for depression
In 1970 depression was not yet a diagnostic category; there was only "manic-depressive illness." By 1975 the American Psychiatric Association's DSM had for the first time split out "unipolar depression," listing nine symptoms: passivity, cognitive difficulty, sadness, anxiety, sleep problems, food losing its taste, numbness, loss of pleasure, thoughts of death. Seligman compared the nine symptoms against the learned-helplessness literature that had accumulated by then and found that eight of them could be reproduced in the lab; the only one missing was thoughts of death — presumably because the experiments used noise rather than something more severe. That model went on to become the dominant model of depression, and the drugs that could break helplessness in the lab became the mainstream antidepressants.
— Martin SeligmanFive out of eight give up, and a third never do
Across the whole helplessness literature the effect is statistical: on average five out of eight people or eight rats become helpless, and about a third do not. From the 1970s on, Seligman kept asking what was different about that third, and it became the turning point of his career. The answer landed on explanatory style: people who explain bad events as permanent ("I'm stupid"), pervasive ("I'm unlovable"), and their own fault become helpless; people who explain them as temporary, local, and not their fault recover quickly.
— Martin SeligmanWest Point's first week already predicts who drops out
The first six weeks after entering West Point are called Beast Barracks: woken at four in the morning to run ten miles, systematically put through the wringer, with the stated purpose being to "break them," and roughly a third of candidates quit. Seligman's team measured explanatory style on day one, and the ones who dropped out were the pessimists. The same pattern shows up in college grades (optimists outperform their talent, pessimists underperform it) and in insurance sales: MetLife lost 50% of new hires within a year and 90% within four years; they hired 140 "special forces" whose optimism-scale scores were off the charts, and this cohort outsold the whole company and still had 75% on the job after four years, while the ordinary group was down to 10%.
— Martin SeligmanAgency breaks apart into three beliefs
Seligman defines agency as the opposite of learned helplessness, made up of three parts: efficacy, the belief that you can accomplish a specific goal right here and now; optimism, the belief that you can accomplish it not only now but in the future and the further future; and imagination, the range of possible goals you can picture — the wider the range, the stronger the agency. Full agency is: I can do it now, I can do it in the future, and I can innovate across many different situations.
— Martin SeligmanThe Axial Age's answer may have been "I can do it"
Between 1000 and 500 BC, Greece, the Hebrew world, China, India, and Persia all underwent upheaval: the Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates appeared, and technology, medicine, art, literature, and the first political freedoms all erupted together. Seligman's hypothesis is that over those five centuries humanity discovered the concept of agency. The evidence is vocabulary: in the Iliad, Achilles does not decide to act on his own — Athena tells him to act; a hundred years later, in the Odyssey, Odysseus is already a wily, resourceful man who makes his own decisions, and the gods begin to exit the stage. By 500 BC, every culture had produced a large vocabulary of human agency.
— Martin SeligmanIn the Old Testament, the verbs God commands with are dwindling
Seligman took the entire Old Testament and counted agency verbs: broadly, in the Pentateuch God commands and people obey, with only a few exceptions like "choose life"; the further you go, into the Prophets and the Writings, the more words of human agency appear and the fewer words of divine agency. You can now have AI score each book for agency volume by book, and plotted against time it comes out linear — from the Pentateuch to the Babylonian exile around 300 BC, agency increases, and it correlates linearly with human innovation, population, living standards, political freedom, and technology.
— Martin SeligmanAfter Augustine, progress stalled for a thousand years
Progress and agency have not risen in a straight line through human history. Early Christianity was highly agentic and highly optimistic, but in 383 AD Augustine argued that grace is given arbitrarily by God, that predestination exists, and that there is no human will independent of grace — and this became the theology of the Middle Ages. Seligman says the Middle Ages believed "God acts, man does not," progress stalled accordingly, and only when the Renaissance overturned Augustine's view did progress erupt again. He adds the China side: Western agency is "I can do it," whereas China requires quantifying both "we" agency and "I" agency, and what predicts population, innovation, and GDP is the balance between the two — when state-form "we" agency is extremely high and crushes individual agency, you get stagnation and regression.
— Martin SeligmanIn their own words · checked verbatim
But could it be that more important to an animal or person is the fact that you're helpless in this situation and that you might be learning that nothing you do matters.
Martin Seligman11:45
Importantly, this was not the result of trauma itself. We controlled for that. It was a result of not having any control over trauma.
Martin Seligman15:57
And it basically showed that the people who became helpless in the laboratory believed the helplessness was permanent, pervasive, and typically their fault.
Martin Seligman25:45
First, they found that the pessimistic life insurance salesman is more optimistic than you or me.
Martin Seligman30:54
Agency is the opposite of learned helplessness.
Martin Seligman34:17
And when we agency in the form of the state is very high and crushes individual agency, that's when you get stagnation and regression.
Martin Seligman42:44
And it occurred to me for the first time in my life, that maybe any success I had had in life was not because I was a grouch, but in spite of it.
Martin Seligman45:48
Figures
| Share who become helpless in the lab | on average five out of eight | 22:19 |
| Relative risk of depression for pessimists | 2 to 8 times that of optimists | 26:50 |
| West Point Beast Barracks dropout rate | about one third | 27:50 |
| MetLife new-hire attrition | 50% after one year, 90% after four years | 29:53 |
| Size and retention of MetLife's optimistic "special forces" | 140 people, 75% still on the job after four years (ordinary group 10%) | 30:54 |
| Symptoms needed for a unipolar depression diagnosis | five of nine, lasting more than two weeks | 20:00 |
| Span of the Axial Age | 1000 BC to 500 BC | 36:22 |
| When Augustine proposed predestination | 383 AD | 40:36 |
Glossary
- learned helplessness
- After experiencing uncontrollable bad events, learning that "nothing I do matters," so that even in escapable situations afterward you stop trying.
- explanatory style
- A person's default way of explaining bad events: permanent or temporary, pervasive or local, their own fault or not.
- learned optimism
- Treating optimism as a trainable explanatory habit rather than an inborn personality trait.
- agency
- Seligman defines it as the composite of three beliefs: efficacy, optimism, and imagination.
- axial age
- The period from 1000 to 500 BC, when Greece, China, India, Persia, and elsewhere saw simultaneous intellectual and technological advances.
How to listen
For founders and managers in the middle of a long stretch of failure who want to understand why they stopped trying, and for anyone leading a team who wants to understand the link between optimism and performance.
The first two minutes of personal recollection about his mother crying and his father's stroke can be fast-forwarded.