Speaking of Psychology: Positive psychology in a pandemic, with Martin Seligman, PhD

Over the past 20 years, the field of positive psychology has grown from a fledgling idea to a worldwide movement. Positive psychology is the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive. Former APA president Martin Seligman, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder of positive psychology, joins us to discuss what positive psychology has to say about flourishing in tough times, such as a pandemic.

Martin Seligman, PhD, is the director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania and Zellerbach Family Foundation professor of psychology in the Penn department of psychology. He is also director of the Penn master of applied positive psychology program. He is a leading authority in the fields of positive psychology, resilience, learned helplessness, depression, optimism and pessimism. He is also a recognized authority on interventions that prevent depression and build strengths and well-being. He has written more than 350 scholarly publications and 30 books. He was also president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, during which time one of his presidential initiatives was the promotion of positive psychology as a field of scientific study.

Kim Mills: Over the past 20 years, the field of positive psychology has grown from a fledgling idea to a worldwide movement. Positive psychology is the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive. It is based on the idea that psychological research can help us understand the characteristics and qualities that allow people to leave more meaningful and fulfilling lives and then design techniques to help them do that. After a year, when many of us have had a hard time staying optimistic, most of us would welcome any tips on how to become more positive.

What does positive psychology have to say about flourishing in tough times, such as a pandemic? And for people who are not optimistic by nature, is there anything they can do to become more positive? Does being positive offer particular benefits such as perhaps greater resistance to viruses? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American psychological association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

Our guest today is Dr. Martin Seligman, professor of psychology at the university of Pennsylvania and director of the Penn Positive Psychology Center. He’s been called the founder of positive psychology and has published more than 350 scholarly publications and 30 books, including his latest, an autobiography called The Hope Circuit, which you can find on Amazon. He was also president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, during which one of his presidential initiatives was the promotion of positive psychology as a field of scientific study. He is also a leading authority in the fields of resilience, learned helplessness, depression, optimism, and pessimism. And he is a recognized authority on interventions that prevent depression and build strengths and well-being. Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, Dr. Seligman.

Dr. Martin Seligman: Oh, thank you Kim. Thanks for having me.

Mills: Let’s start with one of the questions that I posted in the introduction. It’s been more than a year since the SARS-CoV-2 Virus was identified. And while vaccines are providing a good deal of hope, there’s still a long winter ahead of us. What lessons can people take from positive psychology that they can use to get through the next few months?

Seligman: Well, positive psychology has a lot to say about COVID and what we should be doing. And I should say Kim, that personally, this is quite a tale for me. We made the mistake of having Thanksgiving with all of our five kids. Good thing to do, we all got tested before my son came in from Chicago. All of a sudden he had it. And all five of my kids and my wife came down with COVID. Whereupon, they kicked me out of the house and I evacuated to a hotel for 17 days until they were past the period of recovery. And I’ve just returned about a week ago. And I’ve been in quarantine since March 1st. And so COVID has been quite an experience for this family and I expect it to be going on through about the spring. So my task is to hold out until I can get the jab. I hope that’ll be in March and then we can resume life.

But let me say what positive psychology has told us. And I think the science tells people about COVID. Well, first, I think when one talks about positive psychology, it’s important to make nuanced distinctions about different kinds of well-being. And the one I’m about to make is the difference between smiling, merry, cheerful, being happy, called positive affective, and optimistic forward-looking, which is not a feeling, it’s a cognition about the future. It’s about hope. Now, those are both positive, but they have different effects, particularly with respect to different illnesses. So, there is a literature on protection from rhinovirus. A rhinovirus as you know is a coronavirus. It’s the common cold virus. And Sheldon Cohen in Pittsburgh took a large number of volunteers, paid them each $300 and put rhinoviruses in their nose and then isolated them for two weeks and asked, could he predict who would get a cold and how severe would be.

And before they’re isolated, he gives them a whole battery of tests. Optimism, cheerfulness, positive emotion, negative emotion, and the like. Results are quite remarkable and they’re substantial. First, interesting to me, since I’ve spent my life working on optimism, optimism had no effect on whether or not you get a cold and how long it lasted. The big effect was being cheerful, merry, high-positive affective before the rhinovirus is put in the nose. Happy people in the subjective well-being sense got about half the colds and they were shorter and less severe. And by the way, this was not about complaining since he actually weighed the mucus, rigorous measure of getting a cold.

So the first lesson is during the pandemic, if you’re in a situation like mine, in which what you’re trying to do for the next three months is just avoid getting it, in addition to wearing a mask and social distancing, you should have as much fun as you possibly can. Now, of course, it’s difficult in a pandemic to have a lot of fun, but let me tell you my advice and what we’ve done. First, we bought a puppy and the puppy brought us, until it’s now 10 months old, enormous joy of dancing, singing, sex, making love, good food, all the things that you can do in a pandemic in quarantine to have fun, even how difficult it is. So I have Zoom sessions with my students and we dance. And a lot of the positive psychology website people have created COVID exercises to have fun. So, that’s part one. The science tells us as hard as it is, have as much fun as you can. And that may indeed be a protective factor.

Part two is the question, when this is over and this too will pass, what characteristics matter? Who recovers? Who is a better leader? Who is more productive? And there, the data are, that being cheerful and merry doesn’t do anything at all. It’s being optimistic and hopeful. It’s the people who interpret the future as they’re going to be good events, bad events, they’re going to fade. Bad events are only just this one situation. And I can do something about it. These are the people who go on to be more productive, healthier, and better leaders. So the bottom line here is, during the pandemic, have a great time as best you can. After the pandemic and as it ends, it’s hope and optimism that are going to predict recovery, leadership and our future.

Mills: That leads me to wonder a little bit about, you might call it stickiness. If people are not naturally optimistic but they go through the actions of trying to behave in an optimistic way, does that measurably change their personality? Can you learn to be optimistic if that’s not your natural bent?

Seligman: Yeah. And I’m a good example of that. So I’m naturally a depressive and a pessimist. And I take my own medicine. Everything I’m about to say, I do, and my family does. So, when we have a good idea about an intervention in positive psychology, I first do it on myself. If it works on me, I give it to my wife and seven children to do. If it works on them, I give it to my graduate students and postdocs, and we start to do outcome studies on it. So one thing we have learned is that pessimism is changeable. You can change it to optimism. And the key to this is first tuning in to the most pessimistic and the most catastrophic thoughts you say to yourself. And that’s something people are pretty good at doing. It’s the main move in cognitive behavioral therapy.

And then having identified your most catastrophic thoughts, treat them as if they were said to you by someone whose mission in life was to make you miserable. And argue rationally against them. So let me give you an example that I use and I’ve used during this pandemic. So, my first thought when I came back home after 17 days of isolation was, this medical stuff is nonsense. They’re still infectious. I’m going to be down with this in four days and I’m 78 years old. So I’m dead. And the statistics are indeed that, compared to the young population I’m 222 times more likely to die. So I had my first thought, okay? My most catastrophic thought. And then, I argued against it rationally. So what I said to myself is called, the put it in perspective exercise.

That says first, go through the most catastrophic scenario possible. I just did it. The second part is, go through the least catastrophic. What’s the best thing that could happen? And so I said to myself, well, the best thing that can happen is they’re not infectious. And indeed these two wonderful vaccines are out. And I’m just going to be just fine. And I’ll get a vaccine first thing in January. Okay. Then the third thing to do is having done the worst possible scenario and the best possible scenario. What’s the most realistic scenario?

Well, the most realistic scenario is, I’m going to be very limited between now and the time a jab occurs, and I’m not going to get this in January. The president and the vice-president got it yesterday, but I’m not going to get it until the spring. So what I have to do is plan for the future. I have to find a way to be at home most of the time to teach my classes and to minimize my exposure. So the most likely scenario is the next three months are going to be difficult and there is a pretty good chance if I’m careful, I’ll be able to avoid the infection. [Cough] And that’s not an infection. That’s my early morning stuffiness. The catastrophic interpretation would be, there it is. I’ve got COVID. Most realistic explanation is early morning stuffiness.

Mills: That’s a good exercise that any one of our listeners could do and could benefit from. Let me change gears and talk a little bit about the effects of the pandemic on children and how disruptions to school and socializing and other life experiences may affect them in the long run. What kind of advice might you have for parents, educators, or others on how to help children’s well-being right now? What can we do to help make them more optimistic?

Seligman: Well, the same things work with children is working with adults and that is recognizing catastrophic floats and disputing them. But there’s no doubt that a year away from school and away from friends is going to make things more difficult. And so there, it’s optimism that’s going to matter and what we do when we come out of a pandemic. But I think I want to say something general Kim, about my view of the future given the pandemic. I think the world is in labor and something is being born and that we will learn from this pandemic what to keep and what to throw away. But importantly, there are two views of children and our future given this pandemic. I’m going to call it Yeats versus Juliana.

Yeats a hundred years ago in his poem about, The Trouble, asked “What rough beast is slouching its way to Bethlehem now to be born?” This is the pessimistic view that the labor that the world is in now, is going to result in something worse than what we have. So the Yeats view, highly pessimistic, and all you need to do is pick up the New York Times to hear the Yeats view one way or another.

Juliana of Norwich is the one I lean to. Juliana, as you may remember, was a monk. You had to take a male name to be a monk. She’s called Julian of Norwich. And she wrote in the middle of The Black Plague. And by the way, The Black Plague is 100 times worse than what we’re going through now. Humans have gone through plagues for time immemorial. The Black Plague killed one third of the European population. There was no safety net at all. There was no Zoom. It was in many ways, the worst of times. And Juliana Neoplatonist Mystic wrote the following about what was being born.

“He said not, thou shall not be travailed. He said not, thou shall not be Tempest. He said not, there shall not be diseases. He said, thou shall not be overcome and all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.” This is the dilemma we’re in now about our future. Will there be a beast slouching its way to Bethlehem to be born, to take over the world or will all things be well? And for me, the Juliana view is and the Yeats view are both self-fulfilling. So what we need here is optimism, planning, and hope for the future.

Mills: Let’s talk for a moment about some of your earliest research into learned helplessness. You studied dogs and other mammals, and I’m wondering how in the intervening years you’ve changed your thinking around learned helplessness. And now you talk more about the idea of learn hopefulness. Can you explain for our listeners first what is meant by learn helplessness, which they might not be familiar with. And then tell us how and why your thinking and research in this area evolved.

Seligman: Yes, learned helplessness has been flipped on its head in the last 20 years. So 50 years ago, Steve Mayer, Bruce Overman, and I found that when animals and people experienced bad events, that they couldn’t do anything about, that they collapsed, became passive and became helpless. And we called it “learned helplessness.” And what we found that people and animals who got the very same events, but they could do something about them, did not become helpless. Well, Steve Mayer went off and became a neuroscientist. And starting around 1990, 1995, we began to get a pretty good tool for looking at the brain. And Steve wanted to know what was happening in the brain of rats when they became helpless. And the findings were astonishing. And they flipped the field on its head.

What Steve found is that both in animals and human, there’s a structure sort of up the nose. It’s 50,000 cells in a rat and 150,000 cells in a human, called the dorsal raphe nucleus. And the dorsal raphe nucleus, it’s activity produces helplessness. It’s necessary and sufficient for producing helplessness. Now, very interesting, it turns out there is a circuit from up here in the forebrain, the medial frontal lobes, there’s a specific circuit that goes down to the dorsal raphe nucleus and turns it off. And it turns it off when you learn mastery, when you have hope.

So it turns out that contrary to what we thought 50 years ago, and this is one of the great things about being in a science for 50 years, you can find out you’re wrong. We found out we were wrong. Being helpless is the default mammalian reaction to troubles. We’re born helpless. The default reaction is to give up. What we have, however, what humans have is a circuit, which I call the hope circuit, which when it’s ignited by mastery and hope, turns off helplessness. So it turns out, what’s learned in helpless as experiments is hope and mastery, and that’s the protective factor. So it’s a great story. And there was a lead article in The Psych Review a couple of years ago, which tells the whole story. And it’s told in my book, The Hope Circuit. That’s why I called it The Hope Circuit.

Mills: You’ve described several Eureka moments in your life that has led you to change the direction of your thinking and your research. One happened many years ago when you were gardening with your daughter who was then five years old and another came when you had an extraordinary dream that involved the Guggenheim Museum and a sort of celestial message you received. Could you talk about those incidents and how they influenced your work and your life?

Seligman: Yeah, I’ve been the fortunate recipient of at least two life-changing epiphanies. One occurred in what is called a numinous dream. And the other occurred in my garden right after I’d been elected president of the American Psychological Association. So I’ll narrate each of them, Kim. The dream one occurred about two weeks after quite an extraordinary lunch with my mentor, Aaron Beck. Tim is now 99 and a half years old. He and I still meet once a week. He’s in great shape mentally. And back then, this is now almost 50 years ago, we would have lunch once a week. And he’s a very kindly gentle soul. And 50 years ago, I was a tenured professor at Penn, doing animal experimental psychology. And over lunch, Tim said, “Marty, if you continue to do what you’re doing, you’re going to waste your life.”

And I kind of trucked on my grilled Reuben and took it under advisement. And about two weeks later, I had the following dream. In this dream, and dreaming is something I’ve worked on much of my life. And in fact, I think the best paper I ever wrote, which no one has read is called What Is A Dream? And for me, this nails the process of what dreaming is, but without going through the theory of dreaming. Here was the dream. I’m walking up the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum. And I noticed that on the right there doors and I open each of the doors and there are people playing with cards. And I’m very puzzled about this. So I ask the question, “Why is everyone playing with cards?” Where upon the roof of the Guggenheim opens and the Godhead appears. And God, Kim you’ll be happy to hear, is an elderly male look, white beard, gray with a booming voice.

And God says to me, “Seligman, at least you’re starting to ask the right questions.” And that changed my life, actually. So it’s what moved me from being an experimental psychologist to a clinical psychologist, from experimental researcher to a longitudinal researcher and from animals to humans. So it’s a dream that moved me and has stayed with me. Fast forward now 30 years, I’m elected president of the American Psychological Association. And I’m told that presidents are supposed to have initiatives, and I didn’t really know what mine was going to be. I’ve worked in a lot of different areas and as I was mulling this taking office I was in my garden. I’m a gardener. And with my five-year-old daughter Nicki. Nicki is now a clinical psychologist by the way, getting her PhD from Fordham, doing her internship. But she founded positive psychology in the following way.

She had just had her fifth birthday about maybe two weeks before this incident in the garden. And we’re in the garden together. I’m weeding. And Nicki is having a great time. She’s singing, dancing and throwing weeds in the air. I yelled at her and I said, “Get to work, Nikki, damn it. we’re weeding.” And Nikki walks away and she comes back. She says, “Daddy, can I talk to you?” And I said, “Sure, Nikki. what is it?” She said, “Daddy, have you noticed, I used to be a whiner, and have you noticed that since my fifth birthday I haven’t whined once?” I said, “Oh, yeah Nikki, that’s right.” She said, “Well, daddy, on my fifth birthday I decided that I wasn’t going to whine anymore. And that was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.”

And she hit the nail on the head this in three different ways. All of a sudden I realized three different things. First, that she was right and that I was a grouch. And indeed, what I was so proud about was my ability to see what was wrong with everything. And I realized for the first time, maybe any success I had in life was not because of being a pessimist and a grouch and a critic, but maybe it was because I could sometimes see what was right rather than what was wrong. And I decided to change. And indeed I have. I measure these things in not only in the general population, but in myself. So the first thing was Nikki was right. And I was a grouch and maybe being a grouch got in the way of doing what I wanted in life.

And the second thing I realized, was that my theory of child rearing was wrong. So my theory of child rearing and education was remedial. It basically said that what our job as teachers and parents to do, was to find out what our kids were doing wrong and correct them. And somehow if we corrected all of their errors, we get an exemplary child. Well, it struck me that that’s nonsense. What you get then, is a child that’s not doing anything wrong, but your job as a parent and a teacher is to find out what the kid does right. What they’re strong at. And what I saw on Nikki now, was her ability to talk sense to adults. And to identify that strength and to get your child or your student to live their life around what they do well, not to spend their life avoiding what they do badly. So, that was the second thing I learned.

And I changed my child rearing and my teacher. My teaching used to be all full of red marks on papers. And now it’s full of glue marks, which says, Hey, that’s a really perfect sentence. You got that word exactly right. And the third thing I realized was about psychology, about APA, for that matter. That psychology had been all about what was wrong, pathology, weakness, the things that were going wrong in the world. Indeed, I had worked on that for 30 years. Depression, schizophrenia, drug addiction, suicide and the like, but that’s only half the battle. The other half of the battle is recognizing what’s going well in life, building it and leading your life around it. So it occurred to me in that epiphany that there could be a movement, positive psychology, whose mission in life would be to recognize not just the troubles and do something about it, not just what cripples life, but what makes life worth living and teaches people the skills that make life worth living.

Mills: From that, I think you’ve distilled your research into positive psychology, into something that you call the PERMA model. What is that?

Seligman: So, once you decide that you want to work on well-being and you want to work on what enables a good life as opposed to what cripples life, you essentially need the opposite of DSM. You need a definition of the sanities, not just the definition of the craziness. And so what are the elements? What are the pillars of a good life? And PERMA says there are five of them. There are five things that are non suffering free people choose. The first is P, positive emotion, being happy, feeling good, high subjective well-Being. The second is E, engagement, being one with the music, being completely wrapped up in your work or with someone you love. And it’s always my hope when I’m lecturing that the people who are listening to this are at E. They’re completely engaged. We find, by the way, that about 60% of you are in E right now, the other 40% of you are having sexual fantasies right now. That’s okay, I guess.

R, P-E-R is good relationships. So people pursue relationships. We’re not only individuals, but we’re hive creatures. We’re like the bees, the wasps and the termites. We want to be part of something. And that leads to M, which is meaning in life. And that’s meaning and purpose, latching on to something that you believe in that’s larger than you, that you can belong to and serve. That’s what meaning is. And finally, there’s A, achievement, accomplishment, mastery, and competence. So for me, the ingredients of a positive life come down to a dashboard of PERMA, how much positive emotion, how much engagement, how good are your relationships, how much meaning do you have in life and how much accomplishment do you have in life? Those are the five elements of positive psychology for me.

Mills: Over the past year or so, I’ve talked to several psychologists on this podcast about how the pandemic has been a giant natural experiment for them. It’s led to research in areas as varied as telework, boredom, ritual, things like that. I noticed on the Penn Positive Psychology Center website, that there’s a link to a COVID-19 study. What are you looking at and what are you hoping to learn?

Seligman: Well, I’m not sure what you’re referring to here, Kim. So, we have a website called authentichappiness.org and about 2000 new people a day come to it and they take the tests on it. So we have across the whole pandemic, a naturally occurring experiment in which we’re able to look at increases and decreases in well-being and strengths in depression and anxiety. And so, we will eventually try to put this all together, very large groups of people and ask the question about the course of the pandemic. And this allows us to predict things like who gets infection, who recovers rapidly on the like. But I’m not ready to discuss any data yet at this point.

Mills: Sure. Yeah. We’re still in the middle of this so,

Seligman: Yeah, but we’ve got a very good database.

Mills: And this is something you were looking at anyway. And now, because of the pandemic, you’re saying that you’re going to be asking, evaluating.

Seligman: We look at it all the time. So for example, this was going on before 9/11. And so, we had hundreds of people at that time, now thousands coming every day. And what we found after 9/11, we looked for the next three months at changes in the strengths. And what we found in the United States was that hope, love, and faith increased forgiveness over the next three months in America, but not in any other country. And then by about three months later, that had gone back to baseline. So events like 9/11, and we haven’t yet looked for the pandemic, actually increase strengths like hope and love.

Mills: But the increases don’t necessarily endure apparently.

Seligman: And they don’t last. Yeah.

Mills: Yeah.

Seligman: And at very, very large numbers of people. So these are pretty reliable statistics. So we’ve, for more than 20 years now, done mapping the world or the English speaking world that comes every day to the website and takes questionnaires.

Mills: Changing gears a little bit, positive psychology has become accepted within the discipline over the last several decades, but it’s also inspired some pushback. Where I work at APA, we answer a lot of calls from reporters, and recently we fielded a number on toxic positivity, the idea that feeling forced to try to be happy and positive all the time can actually be bad for our well-being. What are your thoughts on this?

Seligman: I think trying to force anyone to do something is bad for our well-being. And so trying to force people to be positive can be toxic. So one has to weigh the consequences of becoming more positive, that is of going through the work of disputing your most pessimistic thoughts, which is not easy, particularly during a pandemic against its benefits. Which are things like reemployment, recovery, and resilience. So, people who don’t who adopt optimism and good cheer naturally are very lucky. People like me who have to learn optimism run into the danger of, well, this is a task and this is difficult and there’s a literature on this.

And so for example, one of the reliable exercises in positive psychology is to do acts of kindness for other people. And indeed, we find that if you’re assigned to do a random act of kindness next Wednesday, and you do it, your depression goes down and your life satisfaction goes up. But if you’re assigned to do it every day, then you get the reverse effect. So you have to find a way not to overtax people. And so that’s my reaction to notion. But on the whole, I think the benefits of learning optimism and learning per promo quite outweigh the drawbacks. But it’s a clinical skill and you have to do it with a light touch and at the right time, and you can’t overdo it.

Mills: Another criticism I’ve seen is that positive psychology puts the onus for human flourishing too much on the individual. And that it takes attention away from some of the societal factors such as racism and poverty, that limit people’s ability to live a meaningful life. Is that a legitimate critique?

Seligman: Yeah, this is a very important kind of question. And legitimate is the wrong word, but here’s the way I think about it. If you’re interested in the world and you want a better world, what is the right balance between building individual happiness and building a collective happiness in the world? And these are often intention with one another. And so, for example, I just gave a lecture to Nordic young students on this issue. And many of them want to become politicians and change the basic things that are wrong with Nordic government. And others of them want to become psychologists and change individuals. And Aristotle told us by the way, that the two most noble professions were teaching and politics.

Well, politics, I think, is about changing the institutions that have gone wrong. And I’m all for that. And psychology is by and large about changing the minds, the thinking of individuals. Now you can do both. Some heads do it better than others. So I’m not a politician. I’m better at helping individuals find happiness. The art of politics is helping the society find happiness and these two marry pretty well. They’re not intention. So let me give you an example of something that I work on. So I’m interested in the question of whether or not politically government should measure GDP or happiness in a culture. So is the goal of good government more wealth, which is what my economist friends tell me, or is it more happiness? Okay? So that’s an important political issue. And politicians argue about this. It’s a major issue in England right now, major issue in New Zealand, a major issue in the Emirates.

Mills: Shouldn’t we study both? Don’t they go hand in hand?

Seligman: Yes. And so, what the politicians do is they ask, “Which of these things should we [inaudible 00:02:03]?” What the psychologist says is, “Well, let’s work on good measures of happiness.” And indeed that compliments the political life. So to think there’s a tension between the psychology of improving happiness individuals and the psychology of improving a society is often a strong map. And by the way, it’s very important within positive psychology, that most of the exercises that actually work and produce more individual happiness are exercises like helping another person.

So the single most effective antidepressant short exercise we have is, if you’re depressed right now, turn this blog off, go out, find someone who needs help and help them. That’s the single best antidepressant we know. So very often, Chris Peterson’s theme, Other People matter, as the heart of positive psychology is indeed at the heart of building individual happiness as well. So I think there’s a straw man here. I think we can both build individual happiness and we can build the best institutions and correct the institutions that have gone wrong in our society.

Mills: After all these years of studying positive psychology, what’s left? Are there still some unanswered questions?

Seligman: Well, there’s a huge one and it’s the one I’m working on now. So I’ve bitten off a lot more than I can chew, Kim. Let me tell you what I’ve been writing for the last couple of years. And it will probably go on for a few more years. The theme of my life’s work has been agency. And for me, agency has three components. The first is what Al Bandura called, self-efficacy. And that’s the belief I can achieve a goal. The second element of agency is optimism and future mindedness. That I can achieve this goal well into the future. And the third element of agency is imagination. And that’s the belief that there are a whole lot of good goals, a whole lot of scenarios that I can achieve well into the future.

So I’ve asked the question, what is the world history of agency? And the hypothesis is that when societies, religions and [inaudible 00:41:33] are highly agentic, that they have beliefs in human efficacy, optimism and imagination, that’s when progress occurs. And by progress, by the way, this is not an arbitrary term. I mean progress in thinking progress, in technology progress, in medicine progress, in the arts progress, in literature progress in the quality of human life and progress in human freedom. So, when in history does progress occur? And the hypothesis is that when the culture believes in agency, that’s when progress occurs. When the culture, when the religion believes in lack of agency, that’s when stagnation occurs. And so what I’m doing is going through a human history from Hunter, fishers and gathers up in the West and in China trying to measure the culture’s belief in human agency and progress.

And just for example, I’ve just published a paper on Greco-Roman thought for an agency. And basically, if you go back to the Iliad, the Iliad, the gods have at all and there’s no human agency. By the Odyssey, a human start to have it and by the golden age of Greek philosophy, it’s hugely agentic, it’s optimistic, it’s efficacious and an imaginative. And to map into that trend, there’s enormous progress in Greco-Roman area. And this goes on till about three 80 AD, and when Rome was falling apart. And at the time the early Christian philosophers are enormously agentic and St. Augustine comes along in pre 84 and says, no, it’s all God’s agency. If you happen to do something good, happen to avoid evil, it’s entirely God’s grace. And it is my view that Agustin’s view of Christianity, which becomes Catholic doctrine for almost a thousand years, produces the stagnation of the middle ages.

So, and indeed, my colleagues in China have just done the same analysis for Chinese culture through the Greco-Roman period. And again, the same kind of things occur. So what I’m working on right now, and for me the big question in positive psychology, is this just a peculiar Western idea of the 21st century in which it’s a good idea to be positive, or is there a human history of this? And I think there is a human history. It translates into agency, and I think it’s the controlling engine of human progress. Just to say, one more thing came about what I’m working on here.

Many different fields have tried to do the history of the world. And so the greatest one recently is Jared Diamond, in which diamond basically argues that ecology is at the center of human progress. And what I’m trying to do right now is to say, no, the center of human progress is a mental process called agency. It’s that agency that has produced human progress. So I want to do for psychology what Jared diamond did for ecology. But one of the important differences, if you believe just Diamonds theory, it doesn’t leave you with any interventions for children and for the future. So we can’t change the climate very much. We can’t change the direction in which the rivers flow, but we can change the belief in agency.

Mills: That Sounds like an absolutely astonishing project. And I look forward to seeing you complete that. It sounds like a lifetime of work. My hat is off to you, Dr. Seligman. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Seligman. You’ve given our listeners a great deal of good information to think about and to work on, things that they can take into their lives and act upon.

Seligman: Oh, thanks for having me, Kim.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, email us at [email protected]. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condign. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.