World’s Most Influential Psychologist: The Hidden Force That Drives Human Progress | Dr. Martin Seligman – EP 817

0:00Have you ever reached a point where you stopped believing that anything you did would really make a difference? Maybe you kept trying. Maybe you worked harder. Maybe you kept showing up. But eventually, something inside you started to wonder, why bother? When I asked Dr. Martin Seligman what happens when people lose their sense of agency, his answer went to the heart of more than 60 years of his research. Take a listen. Individual action is where things start, but whether or not it modifies the world, that is, you have mastery and agency, or it falls flat and you're helpless and you're non-agentic, is crucial to the shaping of the self and to flourishing.

0:57And in general, the more reciprocity, the more our actions produce upward spirals in the world, the more agency, the more flourishing we have. John, and welcome to PassionStruck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters.

1:46Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

1:53Welcome back to PassionStruck. I'm so glad you're here. This is episode 817, and today we're continuing our new series, The Adaptive Human, How We Thrive in a Changing World. Over the past two episodes, we've been exploring an important question. How much control do we really have over the direction of our lives? Angela Duckworth challenged us to think about the power of the situations we're in. The people, the places, and the environments that quietly shape our behavior. And Jared Diamond took that question even further, asking when individual leaders can actually change the course of history.

2:31But today we come to the question underneath both of those conversations. Do we believe our actions can make a difference? Because there are moments in life when that belief gets tested. You try, you fail, you try again, Then, and eventually, especially when nothing seems to change, it's so easy to begin asking yourself, why bother? That's exactly why I wanted to have this conversation with Dr. Marty Slugman. Marty is one of the most influential psychologists of our time and one of the pioneers of positive psychology. For more than 60 years, his work has explored helplessness, optimism, flourishing, and one of the most important ideas we'll discuss today, agency.

3:18In his new book, Agency, Marty explores what happens when people, organizations, and even entire societies lose the belief that their actions can shape what comes next, and what it takes to reclaim it. In this conversation, we talk about why learned helplessness is about more than simply giving up, why agency begins with action, how hope differs from optimism, and why the way the world responds to our actions helps shape our sense of who we are. But here's what stayed with me long after we finished recording. This wasn't just a conversation about psychology. It was a conversation about what happens when we stop believing that we matter to the world around us.

4:02Because agency requires more than action. Somewhere along the way, we have to believe that what we do can create a response, that our choices can influence something beyond ourselves. And when we lose that belief, it's not just our motivation that disappears. Our sense of possibility can disappear with it. I think that's a conversation that all of us need right now. So let's dive into it. Here's my conversation with Dr. Marty Seligman. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

4:43I am absolutely honored and thrilled to welcome Professor Martin Seligman on PassionStruck. Marty, it is such an honor to have you on the show. Oh, thank you, John. I'm happy to be here. Marty, you probably don't even realize this, but PassionStruck has been in many ways completely built on your work. And I heard you recently on the Happiness Lab talking to Lori Santos, and she also mentioned that the Happiness Lab wouldn't exist without your work. The same thing goes with PassionStruck, because this whole podcast really goes into human flourishing. And I've tried to take the lessons I've learned from you and explore this every single way I possibly can, because I think today so many people are struggling with living their life in a flourishing way.

5:40Have you found that to be the case as well? Indeed, that's the theme of my last 40 years of work. I think if I did anything, I ushered in a new psychological age of looking at what was going right, flourishing, as opposed to looking at what was going wrong and trying to correct it. So I think that the examination of flourishing, as opposed to the examination of pathology, has been the theme of the last 40 years of my work. Today, we're going to be discussing your brand new book, which I have to say is incredible. It's titled Agency, the Psychological History of Human Progress. And I want to start out here.

6:29Your career began with a simple but a really profound question. If helplessness can be learned, can hope be learned too? Looking back now, was there a moment you first encountered what you now call agency? What surprises me about the trajectory of my work is how long it took me to realize that I was not working on pessimism, helplessness and hopelessness, but I was really working on the opposite, which is human agency. and the new book Agency is the culmination of 60 years of work and how I realized that the human future and the individual future for us is not correcting our weaknesses but finding out what we're good at and building flourishing on what we're good at.

7:30You write that psychology in the 1960s suffered from three blind spots that you saw at the time, happiness, freedom, and thinking itself. Which of those blind spots do you still think shapes our culture most powerfully today? I think psychology has changed to work on happiness, freedom, and cognition. But I think in many ways our society is still stuck on misery, on a lack of freedom, constraints, and I do think we take cognition seriously for a change. So the behaviorism that existed in the 50s and 60s I think is gone from psychology, and I think it's also gone from the society as a whole. So I think we take mental life and what we're feeling and thinking seriously, both in society generally and in psychology, finally.

8:36Marty, the book opens up with the story of a woman named Susan, and it's a deeply personal story for you and obviously has affected you for decades. When I was reading her story, it reminded me of my own mentor, a woman named Wendy Lawrence, who was my physics instructor when I was at the Naval Academy. And Wendy became the first female astronaut from the Naval Academy. And she and I, as we've had conversations over the years, her central message to children today, and it's been this way for decades, is that oftentimes the first time they run into any hardship, instead of trying harder, they give up.

9:22and it's something that you have studied as well. When did you realize that learned helplessness wasn't simply an individual phenomenon, but something entire institutions, cultures, even civilizations can experience? It took me a long time, John. So as a psychologist, what I worked on was individual helplessness. First, helplessness in animals, and then helplessness in individual human beings. The book opens with someone named Susan, who's actually a collage of two Susans, brilliant students of mine, that I had in my very first job teaching at Cornell. And both of them, when I gave them a really difficult research problem, their reaction was to give up and I can't do it.

10:21And they both turned out to be success stories. One went on to become the editor of the Journal of Animal Psychology. The other one went on to become the president of the American Psychological Association. Wow. So a lot of my mentoring of them had to do with breaking up individual helplessness. My thinking about individuals really went on for almost 40 years. And it began to dawn on me, first, that I wasn't really working on helplessness. I was working on mastery and agency. I was working on the opposite. But what psychology was all about was about pathology. And what getting grants was all about was curing pathology.

11:11So it took me almost 40 years to realize that I was not working on pathology, but its opposite, on flourishing and growth. the question of society as a whole of human history was a new one for me starting maybe 25 years ago mandy and i have seven children and we've homeschooled them mandy felt that i was incompetent for teaching psychology so i got consigned to teaching history okay i I'd never taught history before. And so I started to teach and taught five of our children American history. And it was reading American history starting 25 years ago that I began to think about helplessness, hopelessness, and agency as a historical societal situation and not just an individual situation.

12:19So I think it started with teaching my children about the history of the world, in which I had to begin to learn myself. This whole topic is so interesting to me because as I have leaned more into the research and what's happening in the world, I keep looking at the challenges that we're facing in society as more systemic in nature. So in order to fix some of the upcoming things that are going to need to be fixed, we're going to need overall systems change to happen. And so I think what you were discovering with learned helplessness long before me, I am now leaning into more and more on the changes that need to become part of civilization on a greater level.

13:13Marty, as I told you earlier, my podcast is built on the foundations of positive psychology, and your PERMA model has been one of the frameworks I've returned to over the years. Over the course of this podcast, I've had the opportunity to interview and get to know many of the people in your intellectual orbit. People like Rebecca Goldstein, Barry Schwartz, David Yadin and Gabriela Kellerman have all been on the show. And one thing that fascinates me was your collaboration in 2019 with Rebecca, Roy Bymaster, Barry, David, Gabriela, and others on mattering and significance. Where I'm going with this is when you first introduced PERMA, meaning occupied a central place in flourishing.

14:05But later in your work, the conversation has seemed to expand towards mattering. When did you come to understand that flourishing and meaning alone couldn't fully capture the M in the PERMA model and that mattering needed to take on a bigger role in the model? Meaning has always bothered me. It felt pointy-headed to me, the kind of discussions I had with my roommates when I was in college around meaning. But if I ask you, John, how meaningful is this conversation? That, for me, is a real head-scratcher. I don't have a good handle on meaning, even though there is a very substantial literature that when people feel a sense of meaning, they're more productive and they're happier.

14:59But the problem for me was its intellectual pointy-headedness. About seven years ago, Gabriella Kellerman and I with BetterUp called together a meeting of about 10 of us to ask the question about mattering. Is mattering a better notion? and what we found both in our meeting and then our subsequent research that if I asked you John how much do you matter to your family if you disappeared tomorrow vanish what would happen to your family how much do you matter to passion struck would it keep going people had a very good handle on how much they mattered. They could talk about it articulately, and they could rate it on a one to seven scale for their family, for their work, and for the world.

16:01And so for me, the fact that mattering was a psychologically more accessible notion and meaning has led me to work on M in PERMA being much more measurable about mattering. And I think we know more about how to change mattering than we do to change meaning. It's the specificity and accessibility of mattering that converted me away from meaning as a basic psychological notion. Thank you for answering that. I have a couple of follow-ons from it. I have really been putting a lot of my attention recently in studying reciprocity. And I've had some really intriguing conversations with people you would know, like Claude Steele, Harry Reese, Sonia Lieber-Mirsky, and others on this topic.

17:02And one thing I wanted to ask you about it, when you think about reciprocity, I kept wondering whether agency and mattering are reciprocal forces. What is your thought on that? I think the crucial thing is our in PERMA, which is other people and that relationships matter. And that so much of what we know about flourishing has to do with other people. So I don't think the individual is a fertile ground for happiness, for perma, or for accomplishment. And we are social creatures. And if there was one thing I had to say about flourishing that I'm certain of, is that anything that makes us happy, that increases flourishing, if it's done with someone else, it multiplies it.

18:07So what Chris Peterson said about the heart of positive psychology being other people matter is for me what reciprocity is about. I want to ask this to you a little bit differently because I understand where you're going. I was trying to ask, do we first believe we matter and therefore we act, or do we act and discover that we matter after our actions? Well, I think in development, we act and the way we learn what we are and who we are has to do with other people in the world's reactions to our acting. So I think individual action is where things start but whether or not it modifies the world that is you have mastery and agency or it falls flat and you're helpless and you're non-agentic is crucial to the shaping of the self and to flourishing and in general the more reciprocity the more our actions produce upward spirals in the world, the more agency, the more flourishing we have.

19:30If the world doesn't react and people don't react, that's exactly learned helplessness.

19:41We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Dr. Marty Slugman. As you're listening today, I want you to sit with one question. Where in your life have you started to believe that your actions won't make a difference? One of the most powerful ideas in this conversation is that agency doesn't begin when we're certain we'll succeed. It begins when we act and when we learn through our relationship with the world around us that our actions can create a response. That idea connects deeply with the research behind my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, coming this October 6th. Because one of the questions I've been exploring is what happens when people begin to feel that their contributions don't matter, that they can speak and not be heard, act and not make a difference, and show up and still feel invisible.

20:31Over time, those experiences can change not only how we see the world, but how much we believe we're capable of influencing it. If you'd like to go deeper into these ideas, you'll find a companion workbook inside the Ignited Life on Substack designed to help you put these conversations into practice. You'll find the links in today's show notes. Now, a quick break for today's sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

21:05You're listening to PassionStruck on the PassionStruck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Dr. Marty Seligman. So Marty, about 15 years ago, I took a 34-week class on the Bible called Discipleship One. And I had always, I grew up Catholic. I had always grown up around the Bible, but I had found that I had never really studied it end to end. And that's what this course was aimed to do. And during this course, I started to get this subliminal messaging. I feel it came from God himself that I was supposed to make a major career change. And that the words I was given was that I was supposed to help the helpless, the lonely, the hopeless, the disengaged, the burned out, et cetera.

21:56And for years, I studied and pondered and couldn't sleep because it seemed to me to be such a broad collection of people I was supposed to help. And as I leaned into this more and more, one of my central arguments that I started coming to, and you've brought up loneliness and helpless now a bunch of times. And this is a central argument that's in my forthcoming book. And before we came on today, you asked me about something that I call the great erasure. But the great erasure to me is that I have become more and more convinced that loneliness, helplessness, burnout, disengagement, hopelessness may not be separate epidemics, but symptoms of something deeper.

22:50And this something deeper is something I've been exploring with Rebecca Goldstein, and I've called it systemic unmattering. And what I define this as is the erosion of people's sense that they are consequential within the groups and the institutions that organize their lives. So school, their families, work environments, could be the military. From everything that you've learned over the past decades about helplessness, flourishing, loneliness, and now agency, does a society lose agency when people stop believing that they matter to one another? The short answer is yes, but I want to go back and resonate with you about epiphanies in your life, changing one's career.

23:41Because I had one, too, that was not dissimilar from yours. So let me just tell you the story, John, of one of the major changes in my thinking and my life, which may have paralleled yours. And generally, I've had several different careers, and almost each major change revolved around an epiphany. But the first big one was in the early 1970s. I was a young, became a well-known researcher, and got tenure very early in my life in the 1970s. And my mentor was someone named Aaron Beck. And Tim Beck and I worked together. And I was at least present at the founding of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. But the story I want to tell you, John, is the epiphany story.

24:39So Tim and I would meet once a week for lunch. I was now a tenured professor at Penn. He was a tenured professor of psychiatry, 25 years older than me. And we're having lunch together, and he says to me, Marty, if you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to waste your life. Now, I choked on my grilled Reuben, and I thought I was being pretty successful, and Tim was the most congenial, generous person. It was the first cruel thing he ever said to me. And about two weeks later, I had a dream which changed everything. In the dream, John, I'm walking, I'm at the Guggenheim Museum, and I'm walking up the ramp in the Guggenheim Museum.

25:31I don't know if you know the museum? I do. It's been years since I've been there, but yes. And I'm opening doors on the right-hand side, and in each room, there are people playing with cards. And so I say, I ask, why is everyone playing with cards? Whereupon the roof of the Guggenheim opens and the Godhead appears. and the god I saw actually had a white beard, very biblical, and in a loud voice said, Seligman, at least you're starting to ask the right questions. Well, that changed my life. I went from working on helplessness, individual pathology, to working on people and hopelessness and flourishing.

26:28Like you, I've felt called to my work, and it indeed has changed my work. I just wanted to start by saying the background here for me has been a science change by epiphany. It's eerily similar how much our two stories are separated by years, but have a lot of commonality in them because the version of God that appeared to me was a very similar individual who kept showing up and still shows up in my dreams guiding me. In general, with my MAP students, so MAP is the course I teach for pretty much adults, people your age, Masters of Applied Positive Psychology. And I have 50 new students every year at the graduate level.

27:25And I asked them, were you called to be here? and these are successful, smart adults doing well in the world and about 80 % of them echo what you and I are saying that they've been called to this work on flourishing. So it's a mysterious phenomenon for me but it's close to universal among the people I work with having been called to their work, having a vocation and not just a career. Marty, I wanted to return to the second part of that epiphany that I was telling you about, and that is when you look at all these things that are plaguing society today, the number of people who feel burned out, the number of people who increasingly report feeling numb, the disengaged workers we have, the rise in people who feel helpless, the people who feel invisible.

28:28Do you think there's something that sits at the core that is creating all these, what I think are symptoms to emerge? By coincidence, this is what I've been working on for the last week or so. So I'm first trying to find out, is it true? Now, for me, that means we don't have questionnaires over the last 100 years about agency, about optimism, and about hope. So what I've been doing with AI, with Claude and ChatGPT is assembling a vast data source, magazine articles, books, speeches, scholarly commentary, literally hundreds of millions of words. And I scan them for agency, for optimism, and for hope, because I now have mechanical ways of using AI to read whole passages and to make judgments about optimism, agency, and hope.

29:45And so far, as of this morning, John, I have not found much of a change across the last to ears in American rhetoric, speeches, songs, novels, in hope and agency. So the first thing I want to say is that I'm not convinced that we're in the middle of an endomic period in which people are feeling more helpless, less agentic, and more pessimistic. Before I can begin to answer the question of why what i've been trying to do is document whether or not it is actually true so i started where you were which is my impression from reading the newspapers and the depression statistics are that depression has gone up and anxiety has gone up in america But so far, I've not been able to find that agency has gone down and that pessimism has gone up.

30:55The big fact is depression is up. Now, the question is why, and I've always been interested in the history of depression. I did a horse race recently between John Haidt's theory and your and my theory. Okay, so I started with the theory, which is very much like yours, that agency, mattering, helplessness have all gone up. And that's why depression has gone up. And I think that's where we're both starting from. John Hite has a very different view. He says it's the social media and that participating in the social media, particularly with girls, females, and with young people, is the cause of more depression.

31:46because I've got a lot of data both on depression going up and a lot of data on agency changes helplessness changes over time what I did is created a statistical horse race between the increase in young people using social media and the increase in agency as predictors of more depression so is it clear what i was after here so what i found was that john won that once you canceled out the increase in social media statistically the changes in agency were no longer predictive of depression so i wrote john about three weeks ago i said john it looks like you're right here and that social media are having more of an effect on depression, particularly in young females, than any changes in agency and helplessness.

32:52So I've been disconfirming what both you and I intuitively believe, that we're seeing an increase in decrease in mattering, a decrease in agency and a decrease in optimism, and that those are the causes of more depression and anxiety. So as of June 30th, that's where I am statistically about this. Yeah, it's fascinating. Obviously, the court cases that have happened in New Mexico and Los Angeles with YouTube and Meta have really opened the ideas of how damaging this can be in addition to what John has written and others have talked about with social media. I guess what I keep coming back to is that might explain this for this next generation that's been coming up, but it's still not explaining it to me for the adults who are also feeling this way.

33:52So AI, John, has put us in a new world in which we can actually check our speculations. So I started out believing exactly what you believe, that the increase in depression has to do with a decrease in agency. and I was actually repelled because I'm a great fan of AI and the media. I was repelled by John's notion that it was the social media that was causal here. Ten years ago, you and I could speculate forever about this, but right now, because of the analytic power of Claude of ChatGPT, I can within a day statistically check whether or not you and I were right or John was right about the increase in depression.

34:46So one new age we're in is the kind of psychological speculations and biases that you and I share. We can actually check. And in this case, for me, disconfirm. So Marty, I want to take us back to the book. I had the unusual privilege of reading both an earlier version of the manuscript, which I received several months ago, and more recently, a different and updated draft. And what struck me was that the later version, as I was reading it, places much greater emphasis on collective agency and on the balance between quote-unquote I can and we can, and on meeting relationships and contribution as foundations for progress.