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The new era of positive psychology | Martin Seligman — Transcript

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0:12When I was President of the American Psychological Association,
0:15they tried to media-train me.
0:17And an encounter I had with CNN summarizes
0:23what I'm going to be talking about today,
0:25which is the eleventh reason to be optimistic.
0:28The editor of Discover told us 10 of them;
0:34I'm going to give you the eleventh.
0:36So they came to me, CNN, and they said, "Professor Seligman --
0:41would you tell us about the state of psychology today?
0:44We'd like to interview you about that."
0:46And I said, "Great."
0:48And she said, "But this is CNN, so you only get a sound bite."
0:53I said, "Well, how many words do I get?"
0:56And she said, "Well, one."
0:58(Laughter)
1:00And the cameras rolled, and she said,
1:02"Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?"
1:07"Good."
1:08(Laughter)
1:10"Cut! Cut. That won't do.
1:15We'd really better give you a longer sound bite."
1:17"How many words do I get this time?"
1:19"Well, you get two."
1:21(Laughter)
1:22"Doctor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?"
1:27"Not good."
1:28(Laughter)
1:40"Look, Doctor Seligman,
1:41we can see you're really not comfortable in this medium.
1:44We'd better give you a real sound bite.
1:47This time you can have three words.
1:50Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?"
1:55"Not good enough."
1:58That's what I'm going to be talking about.
2:00I want to say why psychology was good, why it was not good,
2:04and how it may become, in the next 10 years, good enough.
2:08And by parallel summary, I want to say the same thing about technology,
2:13about entertainment and design,
2:14because I think the issues are very similar.
2:17So, why was psychology good?
2:20Well, for more than 60 years, psychology worked within the disease model.
2:25Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane
2:27and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them what I did,
2:31they'd move away from me,
2:34because, quite rightly, they were saying
2:36psychology is about finding what's wrong with you.
2:39Spot the loony.
2:40And now, when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.
2:44What was good about psychology --
2:49about the $30 billion investment NIMH made,
2:52about working in the disease model,
2:54about what you mean by psychology --
2:56is that, 60 years ago, none of the disorders were treatable;
3:01it was entirely smoke and mirrors.
3:02And now, 14 of the disorders are treatable,
3:05two of them actually curable.
3:07And the other thing that happened is that a science developed,
3:12a science of mental illness.
3:14We found out we could take fuzzy concepts
3:19like depression, alcoholism,
3:22and measure them with rigor;
3:24that we could create a classification of the mental illnesses;
3:28that we could understand the causality of the mental illnesses.
3:33We could look across time at the same people --
3:37people, for example, who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia --
3:41and ask what the contribution of mothering, of genetics are,
3:46and we could isolate third variables
3:48by doing experiments on the mental illnesses.
3:51And best of all, we were able, in the last 50 years,
3:55to invent drug treatments and psychological treatments.
3:59And then we were able to test them rigorously,
4:03in random-assignment, placebo-controlled designs,
4:06throw out the things that didn't work,
4:08keep the things that actively did.
4:10The conclusion of that is,
4:14psychology and psychiatry of the last 60 years
4:17can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable.
4:22And I think that's terrific.
4:24I'm proud of it.
4:29But what was not good, the consequences of that,
4:33were three things.
4:35The first was moral;
4:36that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologists, pathologizers;
4:41that our view of human nature was that if you were in trouble,
4:44bricks fell on you.
4:46And we forgot that people made choices and decisions.
4:49We forgot responsibility.
4:51That was the first cost.
4:53The second cost was that we forgot about you people.
4:57We forgot about improving normal lives.
5:01We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier,
5:07more fulfilled, more productive.
5:09And "genius," "high-talent," became a dirty word.
5:13No one works on that.
5:15And the third problem about the disease model is,
5:19in our rush to do something about people in trouble,
5:22in our rush to do something about repairing damage,
5:27it never occurred to us to develop interventions
5:30to make people happier -- positive interventions.
5:34So that was not good.
5:36And so that's what led people like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert,
5:41Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself
5:43to work in something I call, "positive psychology,"
5:46which has three aims.
5:47The first is that psychology should be just as concerned
5:52with human strength as it is with weakness.
5:56It should be just as concerned with building strength
6:00as with repairing damage.
6:02It should be interested in the best things in life.
6:05And it should be just as concerned
6:07with making the lives of normal people fulfilling,
6:11and with genius, with nurturing high talent.
6:16So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future,
6:20we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology,
6:24a science of what makes life worth living.
6:26It turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness.
6:31And any of you, for free, can go to that website --
6:34[www.authentichappiness.org]
6:36and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness.
6:38You can ask, how do you stack up for positive emotion, for meaning,
6:43for flow, against literally tens of thousands of other people?
6:47We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities:
6:53a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio,
6:58how they're defined, how to diagnose them,
7:00what builds them and what gets in their way.
7:05We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states,
7:09the relationship between left hemispheric activity
7:13and right hemispheric activity, as a cause of happiness.
7:20I've spent my life working on extremely miserable people,
7:23and I've asked the question:
7:25How do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you?
7:28And starting about six years ago, we asked about extremely happy people.
7:33How do they differ from the rest of us?
7:35It turns out there's one way, very surprising --
7:39they're not more religious, they're not in better shape,
7:41they don't have more money, they're not better looking,
7:45they don't have more good events and fewer bad events.
7:47The one way in which they differ: they're extremely social.
7:52They don't sit in seminars on Saturday morning.
7:55(Laughter)
8:00They don't spend time alone.
8:01Each of them is in a romantic relationship
8:03and each has a rich repertoire of friends.
8:07But watch out here -- this is merely correlational data, not causal,
8:11and it's about happiness in the first, "Hollywood" sense,
8:15I'm going to talk about,
8:16happiness of ebullience and giggling and good cheer.
8:20And I'm going to suggest to you that's not nearly enough,
8:23in just a moment.
8:25We found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries,
8:29from the Buddha to Tony Robbins.
8:31About 120 interventions have been proposed that allegedly make people happy.
8:37And we find that we've been able to manualize many of them,
8:41and we actually carry out
8:43random-assignment efficacy and effectiveness studies.
8:47That is, which ones actually make people lastingly happier?
8:51In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you about some of those results.
8:54But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have,
9:01in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill,
9:04and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable,
9:08is, can psychology actually make people happier?
9:12And to ask that question -- "happy" is not a word I use very much --
9:17we've had to break it down
9:19into what I think is askable about "happy."
9:21And I believe there are three different --
9:25I call them "different" because different interventions build them,
9:28it's possible to have one rather than the other --
9:31three different happy lives.
9:33The first happy life is the pleasant life.
9:36This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion
9:39as you possibly can,
9:41and the skills to amplify it.
9:43The second is a life of engagement:
9:45a life in your work, your parenting, your love, your leisure;
9:50time stops for you.
9:53That's what Aristotle was talking about.
9:55And third, the meaningful life.
9:57I want to say a little bit about each of those lives
10:00and what we know about them.
10:02The first life is the pleasant life, and it's simply, as best we can find it,
10:07it's having as many of the pleasures as you can,
10:09as much positive emotion as you can,
10:11and learning the skills -- savoring, mindfulness -- that amplify them,
10:18that stretch them over time and space.
10:21But the pleasant life has three drawbacks,
10:25and it's why positive psychology is not happy-ology,
10:28and why it doesn't end here.
10:31The first drawback is, it turns out the pleasant life,
10:34your experience of positive emotion,
10:36is about 50 percent heritable,
10:41and, in fact, not very modifiable.
10:45So the different tricks that Matthieu and I and others know
10:49about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life
10:53are 15 to 20 percent tricks, getting more of it.
10:57Second is that positive emotion habituates.
11:01It habituates rapidly, indeed.
11:05It's all like French vanilla ice cream:
11:08the first taste is 100 percent;
11:10by the time you're down to the sixth taste,
11:12it's gone.
11:15And, as I said, it's not particularly malleable.
11:20And this leads to the second life.
11:22I have to tell you about my friend Len,
11:24to talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion,
11:30more than building pleasure.
11:32In two of the three great arenas of life, by the time Len was 30,
11:36Len was enormously successful.
11:38The first arena was work.
11:42By the time he was 20, he was an options trader.
11:44By the time he was 25, he was a multimillionaire
11:47and the head of an options trading company.
11:50Second, in play, he's a national champion bridge player.
11:57But in the third great arena of life, love, Len is an abysmal failure.
12:02And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish.
12:08(Laughter)
12:10Len is an introvert.
12:14American women said to Len, when he dated them,
12:18"You're no fun. You don't have positive emotion. Get lost."
12:22And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst,
12:28who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma
12:31that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him.
12:35But it turned out there wasn't any sexual trauma.
12:39It turned out that --
12:41Len grew up in Long Island
12:43and he played football and watched football, and played bridge.
12:50Len is in the bottom five percent of what we call positive affectivities.
12:54The question is: Is Len unhappy?
12:56And I want to say, not.
12:58Contrary to what psychology told us
13:01about the bottom 50 percent of the human race in positive affectivity,
13:05I think Len is one of the happiest people I know.
13:08He's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness,
13:11and that's because Len, like most of you,
13:14is enormously capable of flow.
13:17When he walks onto the floor of the American Exchange
13:20at 9:30 in the morning,
13:22time stops for him.
13:23And it stops till the closing bell.
13:25When the first card is played till 10 days later,
13:28when the tournament is over,
13:29time stops for Len.
13:31And this is indeed what Mike Csikszentmihalyi
13:35has been talking about, about flow.
13:37And it's distinct from pleasure in a very important way:
13:40pleasure has raw feel -- you know it's happening; it's thought and feeling.
13:45But what Mike told you yesterday -- during flow ...
13:51you can't feel anything.
13:54You're one with the music.
13:56Time stops.
13:58You have intense concentration.
14:00And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life.
14:05And we think there's a recipe for it,
14:08and it's knowing what your highest strengths are --
14:10again, there's a valid test
14:13of what your five highest strengths are --
14:15and then re-crafting your life
14:18to use them as much as you possibly can.
14:21Re-crafting your work, your love,
14:24your play, your friendship, your parenting.
14:26Just one example.
14:29One person I worked with was a bagger at Genuardi's.
14:33Hated the job.
14:34She's working her way through college.
14:36Her highest strength was social intelligence.
14:40So she re-crafted bagging to make the encounter with her
14:44the social highlight of every customer's day.
14:48Now, obviously she failed.
14:49But what she did was to take her highest strengths,
14:53and re-craft work to use them as much as possible.
14:57What you get out of that is not smiley-ness.
14:59You don't look like Debbie Reynolds.
15:01You don't giggle a lot.
15:02What you get is more absorption.
15:06So, that's the second path.
15:08The first path, positive emotion;
15:10the second path is eudaemonian flow;
15:13and the third path is meaning.
15:16This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally.
15:20And meaning, in this view, consists of --
15:23very parallel to eudaemonia --
15:26it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are,
15:30and using them to belong to and in the service of
15:34something larger than you are.
15:39I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives --
15:43the pleasant life, the good life, the meaningful life --
15:46people are now hard at work on the question:
15:48Are there things that lastingly change those lives?
15:53And the answer seems to be yes.
15:56And I'll just give you some samples of it.
15:59It's being done in a rigorous manner.
16:01It's being done in the same way that we test drugs
16:04to see what really works.
16:06So we do random-assignment, placebo-controlled,
16:11long-term studies of different interventions.
16:14Just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect:
16:18when we teach people about the pleasant life,
16:22how to have more pleasure in your life,
16:24one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills,
16:28the savoring skills,
16:30and you're assigned to design a beautiful day.
16:34Next Saturday, set a day aside, design yourself a beautiful day,
16:39and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures.
16:43And we can show in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced.
16:49Gratitude visit.
16:53I want you all to do this with me now, if you would.
16:55Close your eyes.
16:58I'd like you to remember someone
17:03who did something enormously important
17:06that changed your life in a good direction,
17:10and who you never properly thanked.
17:13The person has to be alive.
17:16Now, OK, you can open your eyes.
17:18I hope all of you have such a person.
17:20Your assignment, when you're learning the gratitude visit,
17:24is to write a 300-word testimonial to that person,
17:28call them on the phone in Phoenix,
17:31ask if you can visit, don't tell them why.
17:33Show up at their door,
17:36you read the testimonial -- everyone weeps when this happens.
17:41And what happens is, when we test people
17:44one week later, a month later, three months later,
17:47they're both happier and less depressed.
17:51Another example is a strengths date,
17:54in which we get couples to identify their highest strengths
17:58on the strengths test,
17:59and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths.
18:04We find this is a strengthener of relationships.
18:08And fun versus philanthropy.
18:10It's so heartening to be in a group like this,
18:13in which so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy.
18:17Well, my undergraduates and the people I work with haven't discovered this,
18:21so we actually have people do something altruistic
18:24and do something fun,
18:26and contrast it.
18:27And what you find is when you do something fun,
18:30it has a square wave walk set.
18:32When you do something philanthropic to help another person,
18:35it lasts and it lasts.
18:38So those are examples of positive interventions.
18:42So the next to last thing I want to say is:
18:47we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have.
18:50This is really what you're about.
18:52And that's our target variable.
18:54And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives,
18:58how much life satisfaction do you get?
19:00So we ask -- and we've done this in 15 replications,
19:04involving thousands of people:
19:06To what extent does the pursuit of pleasure,
19:08the pursuit of positive emotion,
19:11the pleasant life,
19:12the pursuit of engagement, time stopping for you,
19:15and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction?
19:19And our results surprised us; they were backward of what we thought.
19:22It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution
19:26to life satisfaction.
19:28The pursuit of meaning is the strongest.
19:30The pursuit of engagement is also very strong.
19:35Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement
19:39and you have meaning,
19:41then pleasure's the whipped cream and the cherry.
19:43Which is to say, the full life -- the sum is greater than the parts,
19:50if you've got all three.
19:51Conversely, if you have none of the three, the empty life,
19:55the sum is less than the parts.
19:56And what we're asking now is: Does the very same relationship --
20:00physical health, morbidity, how long you live and productivity --
20:05follow the same relationship?
20:07That is, in a corporation,
20:09is productivity a function of positive emotion, engagement and meaning?
20:15Is health a function of positive engagement,
20:18of pleasure, and of meaning in life?
20:21And there is reason to think the answer to both of those may well be yes.
20:28So, Chris said that the last speaker had a chance
20:32to try to integrate what he heard,
20:35and so this was amazing for me.
20:36I've never been in a gathering like this.
20:40I've never seen speakers stretch beyond themselves so much,
20:44which was one of the remarkable things.
20:47But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel
20:51to the problems of technology, entertainment and design
20:55in the following way:
20:56we all know that technology, entertainment and design
21:00have been and can be used for destructive purposes.
21:06We also know that technology, entertainment and design
21:10can be used to relieve misery.
21:13And by the way, the distinction between relieving misery
21:17and building happiness is extremely important.
21:20I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago,
21:23that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed,
21:29not anxious, not angry,
21:33that I'd make them happy.
21:35And I never found that;
21:36I found the best you could ever do
21:38was to get to zero;
21:40that they were empty.
21:41And it turns out the skills of happiness, the skills of the pleasant life,
21:47the skills of engagement, the skills of meaning,
21:49are different from the skills of relieving misery.
21:54And so, the parallel thing holds with technology, entertainment
21:59and design, I believe.
22:01That is, it is possible for these three drivers of our world
22:08to increase happiness,
22:10to increase positive emotion.
22:13And that's typically how they've been used.
22:16But once you fractionate happiness the way I do --
22:19not just positive emotion, that's not nearly enough --
22:22there's flow in life, and there's meaning in life.
22:25As Laura Lee told us,
22:27design and, I believe, entertainment and technology,
22:30can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well.
22:35So in conclusion,
22:37the eleventh reason for optimism,
22:39in addition to the space elevator,
22:42is that I think with technology, entertainment and design,
22:48we can actually increase the amount of tonnage
22:51of human happiness on the planet.
22:54And if technology can, in the next decade or two,
22:58increase the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life,
23:02it will be good enough.
23:04If entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion,
23:10meaning eudaemonia,
23:13it will be good enough.
23:14And if design can increase positive emotion,
23:20eudaemonia, and flow and meaning,
23:23what we're all doing together will become good enough.
23:27Thank you.
23:28(Applause)

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