How to Make a Difference: Part 1

0:00This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. You can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. It's an old saying, but it captures a fundamental truth about human nature. How often have you come by people who fail to seize the opportunities in front of them, who decline to make the most of the privileges they've been given? If you're a parent or a teacher, you may have sometimes felt like saying to a kid, I can't make you want it. If you're a manager, perhaps you've told an employee, there's a ladder over here, but you have to be the one to climb it. Sometimes the thing that needs to be seized is not an opportunity, but a lifeline.

0:42Do you know people stuck in bad situations, unhappy marriages, dead-end jobs, soul-crushing living conditions, who seem unwilling to escape, even when the chance presents itself? Does that describe you?

1:00Today on the show, and in a follow-up episode next week, why do some people act on the possibilities before them, while others believe that nothing they do can make a difference? How to discover, or rediscover, your ability to change things for the better, this week on Hidden Brain.

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2:53Every day, life presents us with small moments of possibility. A conversation that could change the course of a career. A relationship that could be repaired. A job posting that could become the start of something new. Some people step toward those moments almost instinctively. Others turn away without even trying. Today, we explore the hidden psychological forces that determine which path we take and why the stories we tell about ourselves can become self-fulfilling. At the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Martin Seligman has spent many years studying these questions. Marty Seligman, welcome to Hidden Brain.

3:33Thank you, Shankar. I'm happy to be here. Marty, I want to take you back to what might be your earliest memory. Tell me the story about a time when you saw your mother crying. I'm two and a half years old, and I think this really is my first memory. And I hear these heartbroken sobs and gasps coming from the next room. And I run in to see my mother. and there she is sitting on the second step of the stairs to the upstairs with her head in her hands and she's sobbing. Many years later, I tried to figure out what was really going on. It would have been mid-early 1945. I think the concentration camps had opened, and all of my mother's Hungarian relatives, her family that she abandoned in Hungary, were murdered.

4:48but something happened to me then shocker that actually fits with the hidden brain and that is when I look at the photos of me I'm a smiley uh hair down to my shoulders ebullient kid up until about age three. And then when I look at my photos up to my teenage and beyond, I'm tight-lipped, I'm unsmiling, I'm looking thoughtful. And when I look at my really early photographs of this smiley ebullient kid, I don't recognize myself.

5:41Marty, I want to skip forward to another experience a few years later when you were 13. Your dad was driving you in the car, and he shared something with you that was very disturbing. Describe for me what happened. it's now 1955 i'm 13 years old and i go to my second day of playing golf with my friend bob kaiser and when my father drops us off at the golf course He says, I can't feel my left arm. And that scared me. And it scared Bob also. I slept overnight at my best friend Jeff Albert's house, and I had this dreadful feeling that something was wrong. and I walked home probably nine in the morning the next day and there was my father being dragged out on a stretcher into an ambulance and he had had a small stroke and then within a couple of days Shankar my mother said my father had had massive strokes.

7:07And in the next couple of months I visited my father reluctantly. I was really afraid of this helplessness that I saw. And my father was paralyzed. He could speak and he basically said, I'm helpless. I don't want to die. I love you and your sister and your mother, and I don't want to die. And I think this is the major experience of my childhood. I'm wondering, Marty, if you can spend a minute talking about the helplessness that you had seen in your mother when she was crying, the helplessness that you saw in your father when he told you that he was afraid of dying. How did that make you feel? It's hard for me to remember, Shankar.

8:01I know my response was avoidance, not to visit my father, not to see more of it. But very interestingly, when I got to college, I found myself wearing black all the time and thinking all the time about death. I think those were the, if you will, the hidden brain consequences of whatever happened when I visited my father.

8:39Our experiences teach us lessons about the world. They also teach us lessons about ourselves, whether it's worth taking a risk, whether setbacks are temporary, and whether our actions can shape what happens next. Those lessons can be remarkably powerful. When we come back, Mari steps into a psych lab and starts to understand the true horror of helplessness. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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10:46This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. All of us carry around a private explanation for why things happen. When something goes wrong, we ask ourselves, was this just bad luck? Is it going to last? Does it say something about who I am? We usually don't notice ourselves asking these questions, but the answers can quietly shape the course of our lives. Martin Seligman is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the science of human flourishing.

11:21Marty, you told me about some personal encounters with hopelessness and helplessness that you had as a teenager. A few years later, as a 21-year-old entering graduate school in psychology, you had the opportunity to explore these same themes in a research context. Paint a picture for me of what you saw when you first entered the psychologist Richard Solomon's lab. What was he working on, and what did you see? Well, they were doing experiments that I actually felt were horrifying. I'm a dog lover, and psychologists were working with dogs at the time, and giving them mild to moderate electric shock.

12:01So these were very difficult experiments for me to participate in, but there was something very puzzling going on. And that is the primary puzzle that animal learning psychologists were working on was Pavlovian conditioning. A dog or a rat or a person gets a tone followed by a shock, and then the tone comes to elicit fear. And they were working on that. And indeed, in phase one of their experiments, dogs were put into a hammock and given Pavlovian conditioning with shock. But they were running into this enormous problem, is they wanted to see the next day, when dogs were put in a different situation, a shuttle box in which the dogs just needed to run from one side to the other to turn off shock, that the dogs didn't run.

13:25So in some ways, what you observed was that on day one, the dogs were essentially learning to associate the painful electric shock with the stone, but they could do nothing about it. They couldn't escape. On day two, the dogs were placed in a position where they were hearing these stones, and they could escape, but in fact, they were not doing so. And this was a puzzle for the people in your lab. You interpreted this in some ways as the dogs experiencing helplessness? I said, you know, there's something much more important in Pavlovian conditioning than learning the association of a tone with shock.

14:00The dogs are helpless. In Pavlovian conditioning, by definition, there's nothing you can do about it. The shock comes regardless of what you do. and their interest was, did you learn to be afraid of the tone? 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?

14:34And if that were so, it would make sense that the next day when you got shocked again, you just lay there and didn't do anything. So this began a major uphill battle between me and the behaviorists. And what was behind it was the notion that people and animals were cognitive, that they could think, that they could integrate experience across time. And we theorize that the animals has learned that nothing they did mattered. I understand that a psychologist named Donald Hiroto extended some of this work with a very interesting experiment involving human beings. Describe for me what Hiroto did, Marty.

15:26Yeah, so Don Hiroto said, let's try exactly the same thing with humans. So what Don did, and it became an entire field, he put for day one headphones on people and turned on a loud annoying noise. This is the equivalent of shock, nothing traumatic, but very annoying. And for one group, nothing you did mattered. For a second group, you got the tone, but you could press a button to turn off the noise. And then the next day, Don built a human shuttle box about four feet long. You put your hand on one side and noise went on. And all you had to do was move your hand to the other side of the shuttle box.

16:18And lo and behold, he found that the people who had had the helplessness experience, inescapable noise, just sat there with their hand in the shuttle box and didn't move. And that was the beginning of a vibrant field of learned helplessness, which went way beyond the animal laboratory to the question of human trauma and human depression.

16:58So you used this term, learned helplessness, a moment ago, and it's an important term to stop and ponder for a second. How would you describe the phenomenon of learned helplessness, Marty? What is it? Here are the basics of learned helplessness. First, the event is inescapable, the first event. Nothing you can do matters. And what we believed was that people learned that nothing they did mattered. And this had two consequences. The first consequence is you became passive later on, particularly when you faced a similar kind of annoying or traumatic event. And the second problem was that you had a lot of trouble learning that you could do something about it.

17:52So once you had learned that nothing you did mattered, it was very hard to unlearn it. But the most surprising thing we found, Shankar, was there was an emotional consequence as well, that people felt sad and anxious. So there was passivity, cognitive difficulty, and emotional sadness and anxiety. Importantly, this was not the result of trauma itself. We controlled for that. It was a result of not having any control over trauma. And so that was the operative variable that in many ways has been the arc of my entire life's work.

18:57And of course, you can think about so many groups of people who experience something like this in the real world. If you're a small child, for instance, your life is governed by people who are bigger than you, more powerful than you. And if they treat you badly, you might not have options to escape your circumstances. If you're trapped in poverty, for example, you might not have the ability to escape your circumstances. And you can quickly see how these experiments in the lab might have much, much bigger consequences in the real world. Exactly. And so I thought a great deal about poverty, about war, and in particular adult circumstances in which you're helpless.

19:40And there was a literature that I got very interested in about sudden death itself. I remember interviewing someone named Harold Kushner, who had just come back from being a prisoner of war in Hanoi. And Harold told me the story of his best friend Robert. They were down to about 95 pounds by then, but they kept Robert going by telling them that he was first on the list to be released, and that in December he was going to be released, particularly if he cooperated and told them about what he did during the war. Well, December 1st came around and he wasn't released. And Harold told me, Robert just shriveled up and within a few days was dead.

20:34So I was not only interested in early experiences of abuse, helplessness, systematic experiences like poverty, but adult experiences in which even though you've had a lifetime of doing well and you're deprived of control, what the consequences were.

21:11I understand that at one point, Marty, you spotted a connection between what you were seeing with learned helplessness and the pervasive phenomenon of depression. Talk about that connection that you made. when I was a graduate student one of my young professor was someone named Jim gear and uh Jim came up to look at the helpless dogs and he looked at me he said Marty that's depression I said well what's depression Jim and now if we go back to 1970 depression was not a category. So, if you looked at the diagnostic categories, there was something called manic depression. But by 1975, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association for the first time isolated a new disorder called unipolar depression.

22:17The unipolar depression had nine different symptoms, and if five of them were present for two weeks or more, you got the diagnosis. So the symptoms were passivity, cognitive difficulty, sadness anxiety trouble sleeping food not tasting good numbness lack of mirth and thoughts of death so huh i looked at those nine symptoms and then i looked at the very large literature i learned helplessness, which had accumulated by 1975, eight of the nine symptoms were present. The only one that wasn't present in the laboratory was thought to death, and that's probably because we're using things like loud noise.

23:16And so I proposed that learned helplessness was a model of depression, and indeed that went on to become the leading model of depression and it led to a vibrant neuroscience in which people tried out drugs that broke up helplessness in the laboratory in rats, for example, and then tried them in people and it turned out the drugs that worked to break up helplessness in the laboratory became the leading antidepressants Now, the research that you were conducting at this time was focused on the people who experienced adverse conditions. They became helpless and then perhaps even depressed. But there was also another group of subjects that at first you didn't pay so much attention to.

24:09Tell me about this group of subjects, Marty. Who were they and what did you notice? In the entire helplessness literature, both in animals and people, the helplessness effect was statistical. So when I described a person becoming passive and just sitting in the shuttle box and not doing anything, that was five out of eight people on average, or a helpless rat, that five out of eight of them were helpless. But about a third were not. And so starting in the 1970s, I began to ask, well, what is it about some people, some animals, that made them resilient or resistant to helplessness? What is it about some people that make you, in spite of the fact that your girlfriend has rejected you, your stocks have gone down, what is it that gives some people the courage to transcend helplessness?

25:21And this was the turning point in my career.

25:41So you started thinking about what might distinguish the people who become helpless and passive in the face of adversity from those who remain motivated and energetic. Were there differences between the groups in the stories they told about their experiences, Marty? Yes, and it led to nailing down what it was about the one-third of people who didn't become helpless. Optimism versus pessimism. These were vague terms to me at the time. But what we wondered was when you have a bad experience, a traumatic experience, you could believe there's nothing I can do and I'm helpless. But we postulated from the stories we heard that what protected people from helplessness, what made them resilient, was different dimensions of interpreting what happens to you when bad events occur.

26:51So first, you might believe that the bad event was going to last forever. Or you might believe it was temporary. And so, for example, if you fail an examination, you might say, I had a hangover. That's temporary. That means the next time you confront an examination, you'll be fine. On the other hand, you might say to yourself, I'm stupid. That's permanent. So the first thing we thought about was when bad events occur to you, Shankar, do you reflexively believe they're going to last forever? Or do you believe no? Just this one time. The second dimension we worried about was pervasive versus local, and that is you're rejected by your girlfriend.

27:50You could believe I'm unlovable. Well, unlovable is pervasive, and it means no matter who you come across, you're not going to find love. On the other hand, you might say that's her, and we postulated that people who believed that helplessness was pervasive would go on to generalize across situations. People who believed it was temporary would recover quickly. So we began to look at the way people interpreted the bad events in their lives. And this opened up an enormous literature on learned optimism, and it basically showed that the people who became helpless in the laboratory believed the helplessness was permanent, pervasive, and typically their fault.

28:52The third people who didn't become helpless believed it was temporary, it was just this one situation, and it wasn't their fault.

29:08So having established the importance of explanatory styles, Marty, you began to generate evidence that an optimistic or pessimistic explanatory style can significantly affect how people go about pursuing goals. One place you explored this was at the West Point Military Academy. Paint a picture for me of that study. So we not only asked the question about depression, So what we did was to take large groups of people at time one, measure their explanatory style, and then go on to predict who's going to become depressed. And it turned out the pessimists, the people who believed it's me, it's going to last forever, are between two and eight times as likely to become depressed.

29:56And so we then asked the question, let's test this in the real world. And so one thing we did is we went to West Point. And West Point at the time, and still does to some extent, had something called Beast Barracks. Well, West Point is one of the most selective schools in the United States. These are very highly qualified young men and women. But in the first six weeks, in mid-summer, in July, they arrive at West Point, and they're put through six weeks of helplessness experience in which the attempt is explicitly to break them. They're woken up at four in the morning, sent on a 10-mile run. They're systematically abused.

30:45And my memory is that about a third of the candidates drop out. So we asked the question, could you predict from day one in Beast Barracks who was going to drop out? And it turned out it was the pessimists who dropped out. We then looked at something very similar about the grades you get in college. We looked at the optimists and the pessimists, and we asked who does much better than their talent augurs. And it was the optimist. And who does much worse? And it was the pessimist. And then in selling insurance, exactly the same thing. I had been working on learned helplessness and optimism in Olympic swimming.

31:38And I had just come back from a day of looking at our Olympic swimming data. And the phone was ringing. I picked up the phone and it was an insurance salesman and I hung up on him.