00:00:12
When I was President of the American
Psychological Association,
00:00:15
they tried to media-train me.
00:00:17
And an encounter I had with CNN summarizes
00:00:23
what I'm going to be talking about today,
00:00:25
which is the eleventh reason
to be optimistic.
00:00:28
The editor of Discover told us 10 of them;
00:00:34
I'm going to give you the eleventh.
00:00:36
So they came to me, CNN,
and they said, "Professor Seligman --
00:00:41
would you tell us about the state
of psychology today?
00:00:44
We'd like to interview you about that."
00:00:46
And I said, "Great."
00:00:48
And she said, "But this is CNN,
so you only get a sound bite."
00:00:53
I said, "Well, how many words do I get?"
00:00:56
And she said, "Well, one."
00:00:58
(Laughter)
00:01:00
And the cameras rolled, and she said,
00:01:02
"Professor Seligman,
what is the state of psychology today?"
00:01:07
"Good."
00:01:08
(Laughter)
00:01:10
"Cut! Cut. That won't do.
00:01:15
We'd really better give
you a longer sound bite."
00:01:17
"How many words do I get this time?"
00:01:19
"Well, you get two."
00:01:21
(Laughter)
00:01:22
"Doctor Seligman, what is the state
of psychology today?"
00:01:27
"Not good."
00:01:28
(Laughter)
00:01:40
"Look, Doctor Seligman,
00:01:41
we can see you're really
not comfortable in this medium.
00:01:44
We'd better give you a real sound bite.
00:01:47
This time you can have three words.
00:01:50
Professor Seligman, what is the state
of psychology today?"
00:01:55
"Not good enough."
00:01:58
That's what I'm going to be talking about.
00:02:00
I want to say why psychology
was good, why it was not good,
00:02:04
and how it may become,
in the next 10 years, good enough.
00:02:08
And by parallel summary, I want to say
the same thing about technology,
00:02:13
about entertainment and design,
00:02:14
because I think the issues
are very similar.
00:02:17
So, why was psychology good?
00:02:20
Well, for more than 60 years, psychology
worked within the disease model.
00:02:25
Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane
00:02:27
and I introduced myself to my seatmate,
and told them what I did,
00:02:31
they'd move away from me,
00:02:34
because, quite rightly, they were saying
00:02:36
psychology is about finding
what's wrong with you.
00:02:39
Spot the loony.
00:02:40
And now, when I tell people
what I do, they move toward me.
00:02:44
What was good about psychology --
00:02:49
about the $30 billion
investment NIMH made,
00:02:52
about working in the disease model,
00:02:54
about what you mean by psychology --
00:02:56
is that, 60 years ago,
none of the disorders were treatable;
00:03:01
it was entirely smoke and mirrors.
00:03:02
And now, 14 of the disorders
are treatable,
00:03:05
two of them actually curable.
00:03:07
And the other thing that happened
is that a science developed,
00:03:12
a science of mental illness.
00:03:14
We found out we could take fuzzy concepts
00:03:19
like depression, alcoholism,
00:03:22
and measure them with rigor;
00:03:24
that we could create a classification
of the mental illnesses;
00:03:28
that we could understand
the causality of the mental illnesses.
00:03:33
We could look across time
at the same people --
00:03:37
people, for example, who were genetically
vulnerable to schizophrenia --
00:03:41
and ask what the contribution
of mothering, of genetics are,
00:03:46
and we could isolate third variables
00:03:48
by doing experiments
on the mental illnesses.
00:03:51
And best of all, we were able,
in the last 50 years,
00:03:55
to invent drug treatments
and psychological treatments.
00:03:59
And then we were able
to test them rigorously,
00:04:03
in random-assignment,
placebo-controlled designs,
00:04:06
throw out the things that didn't work,
00:04:08
keep the things that actively did.
00:04:10
The conclusion of that is,
00:04:14
psychology and psychiatry
of the last 60 years
00:04:17
can actually claim that we can make
miserable people less miserable.
00:04:22
And I think that's terrific.
00:04:24
I'm proud of it.
00:04:29
But what was not good,
the consequences of that,
00:04:33
were three things.
00:04:35
The first was moral;
00:04:36
that psychologists and psychiatrists
became victimologists, pathologizers;
00:04:41
that our view of human nature
was that if you were in trouble,
00:04:44
bricks fell on you.
00:04:46
And we forgot that people
made choices and decisions.
00:04:49
We forgot responsibility.
00:04:51
That was the first cost.
00:04:53
The second cost was
that we forgot about you people.
00:04:57
We forgot about improving normal lives.
00:05:01
We forgot about a mission to make
relatively untroubled people happier,
00:05:07
more fulfilled, more productive.
00:05:09
And "genius," "high-talent,"
became a dirty word.
00:05:13
No one works on that.
00:05:15
And the third problem
about the disease model is,
00:05:19
in our rush to do something
about people in trouble,
00:05:22
in our rush to do something
about repairing damage,
00:05:27
it never occurred to us
to develop interventions
00:05:30
to make people happier --
positive interventions.
00:05:34
So that was not good.
00:05:36
And so that's what led people
like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert,
00:05:41
Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself
00:05:43
to work in something I call,
"positive psychology,"
00:05:46
which has three aims.
00:05:47
The first is that psychology
should be just as concerned
00:05:52
with human strength
as it is with weakness.
00:05:56
It should be just as concerned
with building strength
00:06:00
as with repairing damage.
00:06:02
It should be interested
in the best things in life.
00:06:05
And it should be just as concerned
00:06:07
with making the lives
of normal people fulfilling,
00:06:11
and with genius,
with nurturing high talent.
00:06:16
So in the last 10 years
and the hope for the future,
00:06:20
we've seen the beginnings
of a science of positive psychology,
00:06:24
a science of what makes life worth living.
00:06:26
It turns out that we can measure
different forms of happiness.
00:06:31
And any of you, for free,
can go to that website --
00:06:34
[www.authentichappiness.org]
00:06:36
and take the entire panoply
of tests of happiness.
00:06:38
You can ask, how do you stack
up for positive emotion, for meaning,
00:06:43
for flow, against literally tens
of thousands of other people?
00:06:47
We created the opposite of the diagnostic
manual of the insanities:
00:06:53
a classification of the strengths
and virtues that looks at the sex ratio,
00:06:58
how they're defined, how to diagnose them,
00:07:00
what builds them
and what gets in their way.
00:07:05
We found that we could discover
the causation of the positive states,
00:07:09
the relationship between left
hemispheric activity
00:07:13
and right hemispheric activity,
as a cause of happiness.
00:07:20
I've spent my life working
on extremely miserable people,
00:07:23
and I've asked the question:
00:07:25
How do extremely miserable people
differ from the rest of you?
00:07:28
And starting about six years ago,
we asked about extremely happy people.
00:07:33
How do they differ from the rest of us?
00:07:35
It turns out there's one way,
very surprising --
00:07:39
they're not more religious,
they're not in better shape,
00:07:41
they don't have more money,
they're not better looking,
00:07:45
they don't have more good events
and fewer bad events.
00:07:47
The one way in which they differ:
they're extremely social.
00:07:52
They don't sit in seminars
on Saturday morning.
00:07:55
(Laughter)
00:08:00
They don't spend time alone.
00:08:01
Each of them is in a romantic relationship
00:08:03
and each has a rich repertoire of friends.
00:08:07
But watch out here -- this is merely
correlational data, not causal,
00:08:11
and it's about happiness
in the first, "Hollywood" sense,
00:08:15
I'm going to talk about,
00:08:16
happiness of ebullience
and giggling and good cheer.
00:08:20
And I'm going to suggest to you
that's not nearly enough,
00:08:23
in just a moment.
00:08:25
We found we could begin to look
at interventions over the centuries,
00:08:29
from the Buddha to Tony Robbins.
00:08:31
About 120 interventions have been proposed
that allegedly make people happy.
00:08:37
And we find that we've been able
to manualize many of them,
00:08:41
and we actually carry out
00:08:43
random-assignment efficacy
and effectiveness studies.
00:08:47
That is, which ones actually
make people lastingly happier?
00:08:51
In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you
about some of those results.
00:08:54
But the upshot of this is that the mission
I want psychology to have,
00:09:01
in addition to its mission
of curing the mentally ill,
00:09:04
and in addition to its mission of making
miserable people less miserable,
00:09:08
is, can psychology actually
make people happier?
00:09:12
And to ask that question -- "happy"
is not a word I use very much --
00:09:17
we've had to break it down
00:09:19
into what I think
is askable about "happy."
00:09:21
And I believe there are three different --
00:09:25
I call them "different" because different
interventions build them,
00:09:28
it's possible to have one
rather than the other --
00:09:31
three different happy lives.
00:09:33
The first happy life is the pleasant life.
00:09:36
This is a life in which you have
as much positive emotion
00:09:39
as you possibly can,
00:09:41
and the skills to amplify it.
00:09:43
The second is a life of engagement:
00:09:45
a life in your work, your parenting,
your love, your leisure;
00:09:50
time stops for you.
00:09:53
That's what Aristotle was talking about.
00:09:55
And third, the meaningful life.
00:09:57
I want to say a little bit
about each of those lives
00:10:00
and what we know about them.
00:10:02
The first life is the pleasant life,
and it's simply, as best we can find it,
00:10:07
it's having as many
of the pleasures as you can,
00:10:09
as much positive emotion as you can,
00:10:11
and learning the skills -- savoring,
mindfulness -- that amplify them,
00:10:18
that stretch them over time and space.
00:10:21
But the pleasant life has three drawbacks,
00:10:25
and it's why positive psychology
is not happy-ology,
00:10:28
and why it doesn't end here.
00:10:31
The first drawback is,
it turns out the pleasant life,
00:10:34
your experience of positive emotion,
00:10:36
is about 50 percent heritable,
00:10:41
and, in fact, not very modifiable.
00:10:45
So the different tricks
that Matthieu and I and others know
00:10:49
about increasing the amount
of positive emotion in your life
00:10:53
are 15 to 20 percent tricks,
getting more of it.
00:10:57
Second is that positive
emotion habituates.
00:11:01
It habituates rapidly, indeed.
00:11:05
It's all like French vanilla ice cream:
00:11:08
the first taste is 100 percent;
00:11:10
by the time you're down
to the sixth taste,
00:11:12
it's gone.
00:11:15
And, as I said,
it's not particularly malleable.
00:11:20
And this leads to the second life.
00:11:22
I have to tell you about my friend Len,
00:11:24
to talk about why positive psychology
is more than positive emotion,
00:11:30
more than building pleasure.
00:11:32
In two of the three great arenas
of life, by the time Len was 30,
00:11:36
Len was enormously successful.
00:11:38
The first arena was work.
00:11:42
By the time he was 20,
he was an options trader.
00:11:44
By the time he was 25,
he was a multimillionaire
00:11:47
and the head of an options
trading company.
00:11:50
Second, in play, he's a national
champion bridge player.
00:11:57
But in the third great arena of life,
love, Len is an abysmal failure.
00:12:02
And the reason he was,
was that Len is a cold fish.
00:12:08
(Laughter)
00:12:10
Len is an introvert.
00:12:14
American women said to Len,
when he dated them,
00:12:18
"You're no fun. You don't have
positive emotion. Get lost."
00:12:22
And Len was wealthy enough to be able
to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst,
00:12:28
who for five years tried
to find the sexual trauma
00:12:31
that had somehow locked
positive emotion inside of him.
00:12:35
But it turned out there wasn't
any sexual trauma.
00:12:39
It turned out that --
00:12:41
Len grew up in Long Island
00:12:43
and he played football
and watched football, and played bridge.
00:12:50
Len is in the bottom five percent
of what we call positive affectivities.
00:12:54
The question is: Is Len unhappy?
00:12:56
And I want to say, not.
00:12:58
Contrary to what psychology told us
00:13:01
about the bottom 50 percent
of the human race in positive affectivity,
00:13:05
I think Len is one
of the happiest people I know.
00:13:08
He's not consigned
to the hell of unhappiness,
00:13:11
and that's because Len, like most of you,
00:13:14
is enormously capable of flow.
00:13:17
When he walks onto the floor
of the American Exchange
00:13:20
at 9:30 in the morning,
00:13:22
time stops for him.
00:13:23
And it stops till the closing bell.
00:13:25
When the first card is played
till 10 days later,
00:13:28
when the tournament is over,
00:13:29
time stops for Len.
00:13:31
And this is indeed
what Mike Csikszentmihalyi
00:13:35
has been talking about, about flow.
00:13:36
And it's distinct from pleasure
in a very important way:
00:13:40
pleasure has raw feel -- you know
it's happening; it's thought and feeling.
00:13:45
But what Mike told you
yesterday -- during flow ...
00:13:51
you can't feel anything.
00:13:54
You're one with the music.
00:13:56
Time stops.
00:13:58
You have intense concentration.
00:14:00
And this is indeed the characteristic
of what we think of as the good life.
00:14:05
And we think there's a recipe for it,
00:14:08
and it's knowing what
your highest strengths are --
00:14:10
again, there's a valid test
00:14:13
of what your five highest strengths are --
00:14:15
and then re-crafting your life
00:14:18
to use them as much as you possibly can.
00:14:21
Re-crafting your work, your love,
00:14:24
your play, your friendship,
your parenting.
00:14:26
Just one example.
00:14:29
One person I worked with
was a bagger at Genuardi's.
00:14:33
Hated the job.
00:14:34
She's working her way through college.
00:14:36
Her highest strength
was social intelligence.
00:14:40
So she re-crafted bagging
to make the encounter with her
00:14:44
the social highlight
of every customer's day.
00:14:48
Now, obviously she failed.
00:14:49
But what she did was to take
her highest strengths,
00:14:53
and re-craft work to use them
as much as possible.
00:14:57
What you get out of that
is not smiley-ness.
00:14:59
You don't look like Debbie Reynolds.
00:15:01
You don't giggle a lot.
00:15:02
What you get is more absorption.
00:15:06
So, that's the second path.
00:15:08
The first path, positive emotion;
00:15:10
the second path is eudaemonian flow;
00:15:13
and the third path is meaning.
00:15:16
This is the most venerable
of the happinesses, traditionally.
00:15:20
And meaning, in this view, consists of --
00:15:23
very parallel to eudaemonia --
00:15:26
it consists of knowing
what your highest strengths are,
00:15:30
and using them to belong to
and in the service of
00:15:34
something larger than you are.
00:15:39
I mentioned that for all three
kinds of lives --
00:15:43
the pleasant life, the good life,
the meaningful life --
00:15:46
people are now
hard at work on the question:
00:15:48
Are there things that lastingly
change those lives?
00:15:53
And the answer seems to be yes.
00:15:56
And I'll just give you some samples of it.
00:15:59
It's being done in a rigorous manner.
00:16:01
It's being done in the same way
that we test drugs
00:16:04
to see what really works.
00:16:06
So we do random-assignment,
placebo-controlled,
00:16:11
long-term studies
of different interventions.
00:16:14
Just to sample the kind of interventions
that we find have an effect:
00:16:18
when we teach people
about the pleasant life,
00:16:22
how to have more pleasure in your life,
00:16:24
one of your assignments
is to take the mindfulness skills,
00:16:28
the savoring skills,
00:16:30
and you're assigned
to design a beautiful day.
00:16:34
Next Saturday, set a day aside,
design yourself a beautiful day,
00:16:39
and use savoring and mindfulness
to enhance those pleasures.
00:16:43
And we can show in that way
that the pleasant life is enhanced.
00:16:49
Gratitude visit.
00:16:53
I want you all to do this
with me now, if you would.
00:16:55
Close your eyes.
00:16:58
I'd like you to remember someone
00:17:03
who did something enormously important
00:17:06
that changed your life
in a good direction,
00:17:10
and who you never properly thanked.
00:17:13
The person has to be alive.
00:17:16
Now, OK, you can open your eyes.
00:17:18
I hope all of you have such a person.
00:17:20
Your assignment, when you're learning
the gratitude visit,
00:17:24
is to write a 300-word
testimonial to that person,
00:17:28
call them on the phone in Phoenix,
00:17:31
ask if you can visit, don't tell them why.
00:17:33
Show up at their door,
00:17:36
you read the testimonial --
everyone weeps when this happens.
00:17:41
And what happens is, when we test people
00:17:44
one week later, a month later,
three months later,
00:17:47
they're both happier and less depressed.
00:17:51
Another example is a strengths date,
00:17:54
in which we get couples to identify
their highest strengths
00:17:58
on the strengths test,
00:17:59
and then to design an evening
in which they both use their strengths.
00:18:04
We find this is a strengthener
of relationships.
00:18:08
And fun versus philanthropy.
00:18:10
It's so heartening
to be in a group like this,
00:18:13
in which so many of you have turned
your lives to philanthropy.
00:18:17
Well, my undergraduates and the people
I work with haven't discovered this,
00:18:20
so we actually have people
do something altruistic
00:18:24
and do something fun,
00:18:26
and contrast it.
00:18:27
And what you find
is when you do something fun,
00:18:30
it has a square wave walk set.
00:18:32
When you do something philanthropic
to help another person,
00:18:35
it lasts and it lasts.
00:18:38
So those are examples
of positive interventions.
00:18:42
So the next to last thing
I want to say is:
00:18:47
we're interested in how much
life satisfaction people have.
00:18:50
This is really what you're about.
00:18:52
And that's our target variable.
00:18:54
And we ask the question as a function
of the three different lives,
00:18:58
how much life satisfaction do you get?
00:19:00
So we ask -- and we've done this
in 15 replications,
00:19:04
involving thousands of people:
00:19:06
To what extent does
the pursuit of pleasure,
00:19:08
the pursuit of positive emotion,
00:19:11
the pleasant life,
00:19:12
the pursuit of engagement,
time stopping for you,
00:19:15
and the pursuit of meaning
contribute to life satisfaction?
00:19:19
And our results surprised us;
they were backward of what we thought.
00:19:22
It turns out the pursuit of pleasure
has almost no contribution
00:19:26
to life satisfaction.
00:19:28
The pursuit of meaning is the strongest.
00:19:30
The pursuit of engagement
is also very strong.
00:19:35
Where pleasure matters
is if you have both engagement
00:19:39
and you have meaning,
00:19:41
then pleasure's the whipped
cream and the cherry.
00:19:43
Which is to say, the full life --
the sum is greater than the parts,
00:19:50
if you've got all three.
00:19:51
Conversely, if you have none
of the three, the empty life,
00:19:55
the sum is less than the parts.
00:19:56
And what we're asking now is:
Does the very same relationship --
00:20:00
physical health, morbidity,
how long you live and productivity --
00:20:05
follow the same relationship?
00:20:07
That is, in a corporation,
00:20:09
is productivity a function of positive
emotion, engagement and meaning?
00:20:15
Is health a function
of positive engagement,
00:20:18
of pleasure, and of meaning in life?
00:20:21
And there is reason to think the answer
to both of those may well be yes.
00:20:28
So, Chris said that the last
speaker had a chance
00:20:32
to try to integrate what he heard,
00:20:35
and so this was amazing for me.
00:20:36
I've never been in a gathering like this.
00:20:40
I've never seen speakers stretch
beyond themselves so much,
00:20:44
which was one of the remarkable things.
00:20:47
But I found that the problems
of psychology seemed to be parallel
00:20:51
to the problems of technology,
entertainment and design
00:20:55
in the following way:
00:20:56
we all know that technology,
entertainment and design
00:21:00
have been and can be used
for destructive purposes.
00:21:06
We also know that technology,
entertainment and design
00:21:10
can be used to relieve misery.
00:21:13
And by the way, the distinction
between relieving misery
00:21:17
and building happiness
is extremely important.
00:21:20
I thought, when I first became
a therapist 30 years ago,
00:21:23
that if I was good enough
to make someone not depressed,
00:21:29
not anxious, not angry,
00:21:33
that I'd make them happy.
00:21:35
And I never found that;
00:21:36
I found the best you could ever do
00:21:38
was to get to zero;
00:21:40
that they were empty.
00:21:41
And it turns out the skills of happiness,
the skills of the pleasant life,
00:21:47
the skills of engagement,
the skills of meaning,
00:21:49
are different from the skills
of relieving misery.
00:21:54
And so, the parallel thing holds
with technology, entertainment
00:21:59
and design, I believe.
00:22:01
That is, it is possible
for these three drivers of our world
00:22:08
to increase happiness,
00:22:10
to increase positive emotion.
00:22:13
And that's typically
how they've been used.
00:22:16
But once you fractionate
happiness the way I do --
00:22:19
not just positive emotion,
that's not nearly enough --
00:22:22
there's flow in life,
and there's meaning in life.
00:22:25
As Laura Lee told us,
00:22:27
design and, I believe,
entertainment and technology,
00:22:30
can be used to increase meaning
engagement in life as well.
00:22:35
So in conclusion,
00:22:37
the eleventh reason for optimism,
00:22:39
in addition to the space elevator,
00:22:42
is that I think with technology,
entertainment and design,
00:22:48
we can actually increase
the amount of tonnage
00:22:51
of human happiness on the planet.
00:22:54
And if technology can,
in the next decade or two,
00:22:58
increase the pleasant life,
the good life and the meaningful life,
00:23:02
it will be good enough.
00:23:04
If entertainment can be diverted
to also increase positive emotion,
00:23:10
meaning eudaemonia,
00:23:13
it will be good enough.
00:23:14
And if design can increase
positive emotion,
00:23:20
eudaemonia, and flow and meaning,
00:23:23
what we're all doing together
will become good enough.
00:23:27
Thank you.
00:23:28
(Applause)
