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