On positive psychology Martin Seligman

when I was president of the American

Psychological Association they tried to

media train me and may an encounter I

had with CNN summarizes what I’m going

to be talking about today which is the

11th reason to be optimistic the editor

of discover told us ten of them I’m

going to give you the 11 so they came to

me CNN and they said professor Seligman

a would you tell us about the the state

of psychology today we’d like to

interview you about that that’s it

great you said but this is CNN so you

only get a soundbite so will how many

words do I get

I said well one cameras rolled and she

said professor Seligman what is the

state of psychology today good cut cut

that one too

we’d really better give you a longer

soundbite well how many words do I get

this time when you get to dr. Seligman

what is the state of psychology today

not good

look dr. Salim can see you’re really not

comfortable in this medium we’d better

give you a real sound bite this time you

can have three words professor Seligman

what is the state of psychology today

not good enough and that’s what I’m

going to be talking about I want to say

why psychology was good why it was not

good and how it may become in the next

ten years good enough and by parallel

summary I want to say the same thing

about technology about entertainment and

design because I think the issues are

very similar

so why was psychology good well for more

than 60 years psychology worked within

the disease model ten years ago when I

was on an airplane and I introduced

myself to my seatmate and told him what

I did they’d move away from me

and because quite rightly they were

saying psychology is about finding

what’s wrong with you spot the loony and

now when I tell people what I do they

move toward me and what was good about

psychology about the thirty billion

dollar investment NIH made about working

in the disease model about what you mean

by psychology is that it 60 years ago

none of the disorders were treatable is

entirely smoke and mirrors and now 14 of

the disorders are treatable two of them

actually curable and the other thing

that happened is that a science

developed a science of mental illness

that we found out that we could take

fuzzy concepts like depression

alcoholism and measure them with rigor

that we could create a classification of

the mental illnesses that we could

understand the causality of the mental

illnesses we could look across time at

the same people people for example who

are genetically vulnerable to

schizophrenia and ask what the

contribution of mothering of genetics

are and we could isolate third variables

by doing experiments

mental illnesses and best of all we were

able in the last 50 years to invent drug

treatments and psychological treatments

and then we were able to test them

rigorously in random assignment

placebo-controlled designs throw out the

things that didn’t work keep the things

that actively did and the conclusion of

that is that psychology and psychiatry

of the last 60 years can actually claim

that we can make miserable people less

miserable and I think that’s terrific

I’m proud of it but what was not good

the consequences of that were three

things the first was moral that

psychologists and psychiatrists became

victimology pathologize errs that our

view of human nature was that if you

were in trouble

bricks fell on you and we forgot that

people made choices and decisions we

forgot responsibility that was the first

cost the second cost was that we forgot

about you people we forgot about

improving normal lives we forgot about a

mission to make a relatively untroubled

people happier more fulfilled more

productive and genius high talent became

a dirty word no one works on that and

the third problem about the disease

model is you know our rush to do

something about people in trouble in our

rush to do something about repairing

damage we never occurred to us to

develop interventions to make people

happier positive interventions so that

was not good and so that’s what led

people like nancy at cough dan gilbert

mike chick sent my behind myself to work

in something i call positive psychology

which has three aims the first is that

psychology should be just as concerned

with human strength as it is with

weakness it should be just as concerned

with building strength as

repairing damage it should be interested

in the best things in life and it should

be just as concerned with making the

lives of normal people fulfilling and

with genius with nurturing high talent

so in the last 10 years and the hope for

the future we’ve seen the beginnings of

a science of positive psychology a

science of what makes life worth living

it turns out that we can measure

different forms of happiness and any of

you for free can go to that website and

take the entire panoply of tests of

happiness you can ask how do you stack

up for positive emotion for meaning for

flow against literally tens of thousands

of other people we we created the

opposite of the diagnostic manual of the

insanities a classification of the

strengths and virtues that looks at the

sex ratio how they’re defined how to

diagnose them what what builds them and

what gets in their way

we found that we could discover the

causation of the positive states the

relationship between left hemispheric

activity and right hemispheric activity

as a cause of happiness I’ve spent my

life working on extremely miserable

people and I’ve asked the question how

do extremely miserable people differ

from the rest of you and starting about

six years ago we asked about extremely

happy people and how do they differ from

the rest of us and it turns out there’s

one way very surprised that they’re not

more religious they’re not in better

shape they don’t have more money they’re

not better looking they don’t have more

good events and fewer bad events the one

way in which they differ they’re

extremely social they don’t sit in

seminars on Saturday morning they

they don’t spend time alone each of them

is in a romantic relationship and each

has a rich repertoire of friends but

watch out here this is merely

correlational data not causal and it’s

about happiness in the first Hollywood

sense I’m going to talk about happiness

of ebullience and giggling and good

cheer and I’m going to suggest to you

that’s not nearly enough in just a

moment we found we could begin to look

at interventions over the centuries from

the Buddha to Tony Robbins about 120

interventions have been proposed that

allegedly make people happy and we find

that we’ve been able to manual eyes many

of them and we actually carry out random

assignment efficacy and effectiveness

studies that is which ones actually make

people lastingly happier in a couple of

minutes I’ll tell you about some of

those results but the upshot of this is

that the mission I want psychology to

have in addition to its mission of

curing the mentally ill in addition to

its mission of making miserable people

less miserable is kin psychology

actually make people happier and to ask

that question happy is not a word I use

very much that we’ve had to break it

down into what I think is askable about

happy and I believe there are three

different and I call them different

because different interventions build

them it’s possible that one rather than

the other three different happy lives

the first happy life is the pleasant

life this is a life in which you have as

much positive emotion as you possibly

can and the skills to amplify it the

second is a life of engagement a life in

your work your parenting your love your

leisure time stops for you that’s what

Aristotle was talking about and third

the meaningful life so I want to say a

little bit about each of those lives and

what we know about them the first life

is the pleasant life and it’s simply as

best we can find it it’s having as many

of the pleasures as you can as much

positive emotion

ken and learning the skills savoring

mindfulness that amplify them that

stretch them over time in space but the

pleasant life has three drawbacks and

it’s why positive psychology is not

happy ology and why it doesn’t end here

the first drawback is that it turns out

the pleasant life your experience a

positive motion is heritable at 50%

heritable and in fact not very

modifiable so the different tricks that

mature and I and others know about

increasing the amount of positive

emotion in your life are 15 to 20

percent tricks getting more of it second

is that positive emotion habituates it

habituates rapidly indeed it’s all like

french vanilla ice cream the first taste

is a hundred percent by the time you’re

down to the sixth taste it’s gone and as

I said it’s not particularly malleable

and this leads to the second life I have

to say about my friend Len to talk about

why positive psychology is more than

positive emotion more than building

pleasure in two of the three great

arenas of life by the time Len was 30

Len was enormous ly successful the first

arena was work by the time he was 20

he’s an options trader by the time he

was 25 years a multi-millionaire and

they have an options trading company a

second in play is a national champion

bridge player and but in the third great

arena of life love Len is an abysmal

failure and the reason he was was that

Len is a cold fish

Len is an introvert American women said

to LEM when he dated them you’re no fun

you don’t have positive emotion get lost

and Len was wealthy enough to be able to

afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst who

for five years tried to find the sexual

trauma that had somehow locked positive

emotion inside of him but it turned out

there wasn’t any sexual trauma it turned

out that Ling grew up in Long Island he

played football and watched football and

played bridge Len is in the bottom 5% of

what we call positive affectivity the

question is is Len unhappy and I want to

say not contrary to what psychology told

us about the bottom 50% of the human

race and positive affectivity I think

Len is one of the happiest people I know

he’s not consigned to the hell of

unhappiness and that’s because Len like

most of you are is enormous ly capable

of flow when he walks onto the floor of

the American exchange at 9:30 in the

morning time stops for him and it stops

till the closing bell when the first

card is played until 10 days later the

tournament is over time stops for Len

and this is indeed what mike

csikszentmihalyi’s been talking about

about flow and it’s distinct from

pleasure in a very important way

pleasure has raw feels you know it’s

happening it’s thought and feeling but

what mike told you yesterday during flow

you can’t feel anything you’re one with

the music time stops you have intense

concentration and this is indeed the

characteristic of what we think of as

the good life and we think there’s a

recipe for it and it’s knowing what your

highest strengths are and again there’s

a valid test of what your 5 highest

strengths are and then re-crafting your

life to use

as much as you possibly can wreak

rafting your work your love your play

your friendship your parenting at just

one example one person I worked with was

a bagger at gene Ortiz hated the job

she’s working away through college her

highest strength was social intelligence

so shiri crafted bagging to make the

encounter with her the social highlight

of every customer’s day now obviously

she failed but what she did was to take

her highest strengths and recraft work

to use them as much as possible what you

get out of that is not smiling this you

don’t look like Debbie Reynolds you

don’t giggle a lot what you get is more

absorption so that’s the second path

first path positive emotion the second

path is eudaimonia and flow and the

third path is meaning this is the most

venerable of all the happiness’s

traditionally and meaning in this view

consists of very parallel two eudaimonia

it consists of knowing what your highest

strengths are and using them to belong

to and in the service of something

larger than you are well I mentioned

that for all three kinds of lives the

pleasant life the good life the

meaningful life people are now hard at

work on the question are there things

that lastingly change those lives and

the answer seems to be yes and I’ll just

give you some samples of it it’s being

done in a rigorous manner it’s being

done in the same way that we test drugs

to see what really works so we do random

assignment placebo-controlled long term

studies of different interventions and

just to sample the kind of interventions

that we find have an effect when we

teach people about the pleasant life how

to have more pleasure in your life one

of your assignments is to take the

mindfulness skills the savoring skills

and you’re assigned to design a

beautiful day next Saturday set a day

aside design yourself a beautiful day

and use savoring and mindfulness to

enhance those pleasures and we can show

in that way that the pleasant life is

enhanced gratitude is it I want you all

to do this with me now if you would

close your eyes I’d like you to remember

someone who did something enormous ly

important that changed your life in a

good direction who you never properly

thanked person has to be alive okay now

okay you can open your eyes I hope all

of you have such a person your

assignment when you’re learning the

gratitude visit is to write a 300 word

testimonial to that person call them on

the phone in Phoenix

ask if you can visit don’t tell them why

show up at their door you read the

testimonial everyone weeps when this

happens and what happens is when we test

people one week later a month later

three months later they’re both happier

and less depressed another example is a

strength state in which we get couples

to identify their highest strengths on

the strengths test and then to design an

evening in which they both use their

strengths and we find this is a

strengthener of relationships and fun

versus philanthropy by that so

heartening to be in a group like this in

which so many of you have turned your

lives to philanthropy

well my undergraduates and the people I

work with haven’t discovered this so we

actually have people do something

altruistic and do something fun and to

contrast it and what you find is when

you do something fun it has a square

wave walk set when you do something

philanthropic to help another person it

lasts and it lasts so those are examples

of positive interventions so the next

the last thing I want to say

we’re interested in how much life

satisfaction people have this is really

what you’re about and that’s our target

variable and we ask the question as a

function of the three different lives

how much life satisfaction do you get so

we ask and we’ve done this in 15

replications involving thousands of

people to what extent does the pursuit

of pleasure the pursuit of positive

emotion the pleasant life the pursuit of

engagement time stopping for you and the

pursuit of meaning contribute to life

satisfaction and our results surprised

us they were backward of what we thought

it turns out the pursuit of pleasure has

almost no contribution to life

satisfaction the pursuit of meaning is

the strongest and the premises the

pursuit of engagement is also very

strong where pleasure matters is if you

have both engagement and you have

meaning then pleasures the whipped cream

and the cherry which is to say the full

life the sum is greater than then the

parts if you’ve got all three conversely

if you have none of the three the empty

life the sum is less than parts and what

we’re asking now is does the very same

relationship physical health morbidity

how long you live and productivity

follow the same relationship that is in

a corporation is productivity a function

of positive emotion engagement and

meaning is health a function of positive

engagement of pleasure and of meaning in

life and there is reason to think the

answer to both of those may well be yes

so Chris said that the last speaker had

a chance to try to integrate what he

heard and said this was amazing for me

I’ve never been in a gathering like this

I’ve never seen speakers stretch beyond

themselves so much which was one of the

remarkable things but I found that the

problems of psychology seemed to be

parallel to the problems of Technology

Entertainment and design in the

following way we all know that

technology entertainment and design have

been and can be used for destructive

purposes we also know that technology

entertainment and design can be used to

relieve misery and by the way the

distinction between relieving misery and

building happiness is extremely

important I thought when I first became

a therapist 30 years ago that if I could

make someone

fyz good enough to make someone not

depressed

not at anxious not angry that I’d make

them happy and I never found that I

found the best you could ever do was to

get to zero that they were empty and it

turns out the skills of happiness the

skills of the pleasant wife the skills

of engagement the skills of meaning are

different from the skills of relieving

misery and so the parallel thing holds

with Technology Entertainment and design

I believe that is it is possible for

these three drivers of our world to

increase happiness to increase positive

emotion and that’s typically how they’ve

been used but once your fraction 8

happiness the way I do not just positive

emotion that’s not nearly enough there’s

flow in life and there’s meaning in life

as Laura Lee told us design and I

believe entertainment and technology can

be used to increase meaning engagement

in life as well so in conclusion are the

11th reason for optimism in addition to

to the space elevator is that only think

with technology entertainment and design

we can actually increase the amount of

tonnage of human happiness on the planet

and if technology can in the next decade

or two increase the pleasant life the

good life and the meaningful life it

would be good enough if entertainment

can be diverted to also increase

positive emotion

meaning eudaimonia it will be good

enough and if design can increase

positive emotion eudaimonia and flow and

meaning what we’re all doing together

we’ll become good enough thank

you