How to Make a Difference: Part 2

0:00This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. If you look down the history of the world, you see a pattern repeat itself over and over again. For lengthy periods of time, groups, communities, and even nations can find themselves stuck. Years go by, sometimes decades, even centuries, and nothing shifts. And then a small group of people, sometimes even just one or two, decide they've had enough and start to foment change. At first, it looks impossible. The odds are too steep, the opposition too strong. But then, the impossible happens. And soon after, the change that seemed impossible appears like it was inevitable.

0:52In our story last week, we explored the psychology of learned helplessness. When people are shown over and over that they cannot change their lives or circumstances, they eventually stop trying to bring about change in their lives and circumstances. If you missed that story, you can find it in our podcast feed or at hiddenbrain.org. It's titled, How to Make a Difference, Part 1.

1:21Today, we look at the psychology of people who bring about change in their own lives or at the level of groups and nations. What prompts these brave souls to attempt to change their circumstances, even when it looks difficult or impossible? The evidence suggests that these individuals possess a powerful weapon. They have an internal sense of agency. By believing that change is possible, by believing that they can be agents of change, they create a force field that actually makes change possible.

2:01Today on the show, we explore research that shows that a capacity for agency is not a personality trait, but a skill that can be taught and learned. If we can learn to be helpless, apathetic, and passive, we can also learn to be optimistic and agentic. The surprising signs of how people come to see opportunity where others see only roadblocks This week on Hidden Brain

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4:45When we think about success, we usually focus on ingredients like talent, intelligence, and opportunity. But psychologists have found that another factor matters just as much, or even more. Before we ever take action, we carry around assumptions about whether our actions can make a difference. Those assumptions can determine whether we persist and adapt or never make an attempt in the first place. At the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Martin Seligman studies how people can learn to be more agentic. Marty Seligman, welcome to Hidden Brain. I'm delighted to be here. Marty, in your early days as a professor, you had a brilliant student whom you call Suzanne.

5:27Describe her for me and tell me how she responded when you placed a significant challenge before her? In my earliest years as a professor, my policy with students generally has been, after they've shown they were A-plus students in my courses, is to treat them as a postdoc graduate student and give them really difficult problems. So this happened with one of my terrific students. I'll call her Suzanne. And she started to work on the problem. And eventually, I saw her with her head in her hands, crying, sobbing. She had given up. It was too hard for her. Well, my thinking at the time was, well, what did psychology tell us about giving up and how we can get rid of it.

6:26And this is indeed, in many ways, the start of the arc of my 60 years of work, which started with helplessness and giving up, but halfway through became the opposite question. How do we make people more agentic and happier?

6:56In many ways, Suzanne's example is not the example of someone who was lazy or incompetent, because in some ways she had demonstrated that she was a good student in your class previously. And so it must have been a little puzzling when you saw her suddenly throw up her hands and give up, because in some ways this was not the giving up of someone who truly was unable to do the problem. It was somebody who had given up almost before they started. If you have the talent of Mozart, but you don't believe you can compose music, the result is zero. But psychology at that time had three huge blind spots about human beings, which made it impossible to ask questions about helplessness and mastery.

7:49The first blind spot was misery versus happiness. So psychology was entirely about the relief of misery. But when you lie in bed at night, you're not thinking about how to go from minus 8 to minus 3. You're thinking about happiness, doing better, how to go from plus 2 to plus 5. Psychology didn't have a science of going from plus two to plus five. The second blind spot was determinism and that we were puppets of the environment and that notions like deliberation, choice and preference made no sense. And the third blind spot was thinking itself. So it wasn't until the 21st century with positive psychology and cognitive psychology that psychology began to work constructively on happiness, on freedom and choice, and on cognition.

9:05I couldn't deal with Suzanne in 1969, but now psychology can deal with a Mozart who has the talent but believes that he can't compose music.

9:29During that early part of Marty's career, he learned about a research project that had been carried out in a nursing home. The facility was planning to redecorate a floor that served patients with developmental disabilities. It moved the residents down to the first floor. The change made a striking difference for one particular resident. And they moved her down, and on the first floor, there were a lot of things you could do. And suddenly, for the first time, she started to blossom. She spoke for the first time. She helped in the cooking. About two weeks later, the third floor redecoration was complete.

10:08The woman and the other patients who had been moved to the first floor moved back to their original rooms. She immediately died within a few days. and this inspired Ellen Langer and Judy Roden to see what was really going on. Now in the background we had discovered learned helplessness in people and animals and we had the first indications that helplessness made you ill, that it took away from you physically. So here's what Judy and Ellen did. They went to one floor of a nursing home and they gave a speech to all the residents. And it was of the form, we want you to find out about all the things you can do for yourself at Shady Grove.

11:02You can choose whether or not to go to the movies on Tuesday night or Thursday night, you can choose whether or not to have lunch at 1 or 2. Here's a group of plants. Pick out a plant, but you take care of it and water it. On the first floor of the nursing home, they gave a different speech. We want you to know all the things we're going to do for you here at Shady Grove. Tuesday night is movie night. Lunch is at 1 o 'clock. and the nurse is going to pick out a plant which will be nice in your room, but she's going to water it. Then they did two things. This was back in the days when psychology was done with paper clips and rubber bands.

11:52We didn't have motion detectors. They put on white adhesive tape on the wheelchair. And over two weeks, they measured how dirty it got, which was the motion detector. measure. But most importantly, they measured death. And they found that a statistically larger sample of people died on the first floor than on the third floor. And they found that on the third floor, there was motion. People did things. The adhesive tape was black. And this opened the field of the positive psychology of health. I mean, in some ways it's striking because the options that people had at the nursing home on the third floor and the first floor were actually the same.

12:41I mean, people had plans, there were movies, there was food to eat, but the difference was that the people on the third floor had choice and they were told, you not only have choice, but you have responsibility. You have to take care of this plant and if you don't take care of the plant, the plant's going to die. And on the first floor, they had all the things. They had a beautiful plant in the room, But things were being done for them almost out of, you could argue, love. But you could argue that this love was misplaced because the people on the third floor ended up doing much better because they had agency, they had options, they had choice.

13:13Notice there are two things going on between the first floor and the third floor. Is it the presence of agency that increases well-being, health, and activity? Or is it the absence of agency, helplessness, that kills you? It's taken 60 years to unravel that puzzle. So what we thought for the first 40 years was that the crucial thing was that helplessness killed you. But could it have been the opposite, that it was mastery that saved your life and that helplessness is a default response? And the great work of Steve Mayer in the last 25 years discovered that we were wrong about learned helplessness.

14:10helplessness.

14:16And wrong in the sense that really it was the presence of agency that was making the difference, not the presence of helplessness that was making things worse. Yes. Steve was able to find out through a brilliant series of neuroscience experiments that the active force was the learning of agency, not alerting of helplessness.

14:50The most powerful obstacles are not always the ones we can see. The most dangerous oppressors are not the ones holding guns to our head. Sometimes the greatest barrier to change is our own conviction that nothing we do can alter the outcome. There is no battle to be won or lost because we've thrown in the towel before the battle even begins. When we come back, strategies for strengthening the belief that our actions can make a difference. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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17:48This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Many of us assume that when a discouraging thought pops into our minds, it's telling us the truth. This won't work. I'm not cut out for this. It's too hard. But what if those thoughts are less like facts and more like hypotheses, stories our minds have learned to tell? Martin Seligman is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies the science of human flourishing. Marty, in our companion episode last week, we talked about the power of our explanatory styles. Let's go over that one more time. What are explanatory styles? Explanatory styles are the reflexive automatic ways that you think about the causes of adversity that happens to you.

18:40And so, for example, if you're rejected by your girlfriend, you might think, I'm unlovable. On the other hand, you might think, she's a horrible b****. Well, the consequences are very different. of what you think. In both cases, you've been rejected by someone you love. But in one case, she's a horrible... You search for love again. In the other case, I'm unlovable, you give up and become helpless. And it was that observation that got me interested in optimism. And indeed, I spent 30 years of my life working on the question of how you build optimism.

19:41Marty, you say that one way to cultivate our sense of agency is to shift our explanatory style away from the tendency to catastrophize. Can you unpack that idea for me? Yes. Very importantly, for good evolutionary reason, we are catastrophizers. And here's the reason. The last major geological age was the Ice Ages, the Pius Sessene. and those of our ancestors who said, it's a gorgeous day in Philadelphia today. I'll bet it's going to be gorgeous tomorrow. Got crushed by the ice. Those of our ancestors who said, it's a nice day in Philadelphia today, but it's an illusion. The ice is coming. Drought is coming.

20:36Flood is coming. Disease is coming. lived and passed on their genes. So we inherited a brain that automatically goes to catastrophization. We are by nature catastrophizers and pessimists. So the question is, well, what can you do about a brain that is always telling you the most catastrophic interpretation? One of the potent exercises is put it in perspective. Noon on Friday, you get a message from your manager, please come see me at four o 'clock. What do you think? I'm going to get fired. I'm going to get fired. This is it. how do you counter that catastrophic explanation? So here's what we do systematically.

21:37First, we have people get in touch with their catastrophic brain. Tell me the very worst thing that could happen. Well, she read my memo about the marketing campaign. She hates it, and I'm going to be fired. okay now tell me the very best thing that could happen at four o 'clock she read the memo she loved it i'm going to be promoted i'm getting a raise okay now tell me the most realistic thing that's likely to happen well she read the memo she had reservations about my budget which was probably overly optimistic. And she's likely to say she likes the basic idea, but she's going to make major cuts in the budget.

22:37Okay, that's the most likely scenario. Now tell me how you're going to plan for the 4 o 'clock meeting. I'm going to go over the budget again. She's probably going to tell me it should be slashed by 40%. I'm going to show her the items that will keep it to 20%. So basically, by having people be in touch with catastrophizing, then countering it with the equally unrealistic, what's the best case, brings them to the average case. The voices that you hear, the catastrophization voices, are not voices of reality. They're voices that come from the ice ages that are analogous to someone who's a rival for your boyfriend and wants to make your life miserable.

23:34So you can't treat your automatic thoughts as if they were true. And that's one of the basic discoveries of positive psychology and agency. I understand, Marty, that you've spent much of your own life as a pessimist. Have you managed to shift your own explanatory style? Indeed, I have, and I'm still learning these days, Chankar. So, indeed, I'm very good at countering my four-in-the-morning pessimistic thoughts. And, indeed, I woke up at four in the morning last night. Oh, my God, I've got this three-hour interview with Chankar. I'm almost 84 years old. You know, he's up on the literature. I just remember the gist of the literature.

24:24Sure, I can't go through with this tomorrow. So I heard that voice at four in the morning. The voice is never going to go away, but I've gotten very good at arguing against it. And so I said, hey, wait a minute. I just did a major interview last week. I was the same age. It went beautifully. And I knew the stuff at least as well as my interviewer. And then you may not have noticed today, We had technical trouble before. In the technical trouble, you and I warmed up together. And I saw how friendly you were. So I argued against it even as we started. But very importantly, even at this age, I keep learning about the importance of positivity.

25:25So the strategy you just told me about, which is contesting our catastrophic thoughts about what might happen in the future, can help, of course, when we're thinking about things in the future. What do you advise we do when the catastrophic thing, so to speak, is behind us? Something has happened and we feel like we have already failed. The way we think about the present and the past has a lot to do about how active or passive we're going to be in the future. And this is what explanatory style is about. So the pessimist believes when a bad event occurs in the present or in the past, it's permanent.

26:09It's going to last forever. It's pervasive. it's going to ruin my life in many areas and it's personal that uh i made it happen so it's crucial to be on top of the way you explain bad events and your explanation about the future so crucially to the extent your reflexive beliefs are, it's me, it's going to last forever, it's going to undermine everything I do, that produces learned helplessness. It produces passivity, and it produces passivity over a long period of time, and it produces depression because it becomes general. So it's very important to learn to argue against your most catastrophic interpretations of the past so that you can flourish in the future.

27:22Marty, you say that another way we can nurture our sense of agency is to design a series of increasingly difficult tasks so that as we go along, we develop a sense of progress and a sense of confidence? You can increase your optimism and your efficacy by starting absurdly small and letting events cascade. So if you're depressed and you haven't done any housework lately and you get out of bed and you look at your kitchen, it's filthy, the sink is filled with dirty dishes, you go back to bed. Well, that's something you can really do something about. Take one small task, clean one cup, and put it in the cupboard.

28:22Okay, you were able to do that. It turns out when you do one thing and you gradually make it more and more difficult, that there's a domino effect. Starting gradually is important for efficacy. So agency has three components. The first component is optimism. That's the belief that you can succeed in the future. The second component is efficacy, and that's to believe you can succeed right now in a specific task in the here and now. And the third component is innovation and imagination, and that's the range of scenarios that you can believe you achieve in the future.

29:24I understand that you use this idea of getting small wins, what you call a graded task treatment, on a group of patients hospitalized with depression? Yes, we found in the very first study we ever did with depressed people, if we use graded task assignment, that we could lower the depression and increase what they did by graded task assignment. This came out of the breakthrough in phobias. And basically the breakthrough in phobias was graded task assignment. And so it turned out, and this is what inspired us, if you're a cat phobic, you're agrophobic, you can't go out of the house because the grass has grown high and you're going to be attacked by a cat.

30:16What you do with great success is graded task assignment. So you first teach people to bodily relax. Once they've learned relaxation, you start with the easy cat. Say, imagine a person whose name is Ada Katz, K-A-T-Z, but relax. And it turns out people do this well. Okay. Okay, second task, imagine the drawing of a cat and relax in its presence. And you build up all the way to encountering a real cat, usually in between six and ten graded things. And this is the best tool we have against specific phobias. Talk about the idea, Marty, that another way to develop our sense of agency is to adopt a growth mindset.