>>Martin Seligman: It falls to me to articulate
a positive vision of the human future. I don't
know if I can do that, but I think I can talk
about what the prologue has to be to a positive
human future. I don't think we can have one
unless we envision it.
So what I'm going to do is talk about what
is positive psychology, what is well-being
and positive interventions that build these
things. And, finally, I want to talk about
the relationship of flourishing in individuals,
to nations, to corporations.
Let's start with, "What is positive psychology?"
Where I came from and psychology came from,
I came from working on misery. I spent my
life working on helplessness, depression,
suicide. And as Jim mentioned, when I became
president of my association, I looked around
over a decade ago and asked, "What do psychologists
do well?" We do misery and suffering well.
And what don't we do at all? We don't ask
what makes life worth living and can there
be a science of the positive side of life.
So my mission for the last 12 years has been
to shepherd the science, the funding, the
practice, the possibility that there could
be a rigorous science and useful practice
of what makes life worth living. So that's
what the next 18 minutes are about.
And in this view, it says that positive psychology
should be just as concerned with human strength
as it is with weakness, to quantify it and
to ask how to build it.
It should be just as interested in making
what is best in life as with repairing pathology.
It should be just as concerned with your lives
and the lives of your children as it is with
people in great trouble.
And, by the way, I don't mean this as a displacement
of social science as usual but rather as a
supplement.
And, finally, psychology and psychiatry have
to develop interventions, not just to decrease
suffering but to increase well-being and flourishing.
It turns out that's different, as you probably
know, Schopenhauer and Freud both believed
the best we could ever do was to minimize
our misery. I think that's profoundly incorrect.
And I will talk about evidence against that.
We want to reduce misery, but we want to build
flourishing.
So what is "well-being" in this model? In
this model, there is an acronym for it, PERMA.
The claim -- In many ways Ted Turner gave
my speech. And it falls to me to say what
he might mean and how if one can't afford
dire pessimism, what are the elements that
one should think about in building?
So PERMA says there are four components, each
one of which is measurable and each one of
which there's reason to think is buildable.
The first is positive emotion, what generally
is called happiness, the subjective hedonics
of life.
The second is positive relationships. The
third is meaning and purpose in life. And
the fourth is accomplishment.
So flourishing from my point of view asks
the question, "How do you measure those things
with rigor? How do you measure them in individuals?
How do you measure them in nations? How can
you measure them globally?" And ask how to
build them, what do we know about the building
of these matters.
So there's too short a time to take you through
the science underlying this, but what I'll
do is take you through just three representative
kinds of scientific endeavors that people
in positive psychology do. And I'll do it
for individuals, since that's mostly what
I have spent my life working on.
So I spent a lot of time -- 40 years ago I
discovered a phenomenon called "learned helplessness."
That was basically when animals and people
confront events that they can't control, they
collapse. They become passive, they become
stupid, their brain changes, they become more
susceptible to illness and the like.
And research on this went on for about 15
years, probably about 1,000 articles in the
literature on the phenomenon.
But what no one ever pointed out is when I
brought people and animals to my laboratory
and I gave them unsolvable problems, inescapable
noise, only about two-thirds of them became
helpless. One-third I could not make helpless.
So I asked the question, "What was it about
the third of you who even though you face
adversity allows you to bounce back and not
become helpless?"
So a field grew up called "learned optimism."
And what people looked at is before going
to the laboratory or before a divorce, what's
your theory of setbacks in life? And it turned
out those people who believed that setbacks
in life were temporary as opposed to permanent,
were controllable as opposed to uncontrollable,
and were local -- and I'm just bad at math,
I'm not stupid -- rather than pervasive, that
was the third who never became helpless.
So let's kind of -- I am going to do optimism
for all three examples. So we now have a pretty
good handle on picking out in advance people
who don't become helpless.
So we then went on to ask in high-level athletics,
"Could you predict what athletes were going
to do after defeat?" So we took our whole
1988 Olympic swimming team.
And, by the way, the reason that it's important
to do it in athletics and in swimming in particular,
the relay events follow the individual events.
And so if a great swimmer does badly, you
want to know whether or not he's going to
be deflated or inflated, whether or not to
put him in the relays.
So what we did is -- here's what we did with
Matt Biondi. We did it with all of the swimmers.
The coach said, "Matt, into the pool, swim
100 fly." Biondi swam it in 50.1. He came
out and Nort said, "52.5, terrible time."
Rest up for 20 minutes and swim it again.
Biondi is in the upper quartile of optimism
and the way I defined it. It's temporary.
It's local. And it's controllable. He swam
it the second time in 49.9.
What we find in general in Major League Baseball,
in basketball, in Olympic swimming is that
the optimists get better after defeat and
the pessimists get slower. So that's the second
kind of study that emerges from the literature.
And third kind is physical health itself.
And there is -- looking around how male and
what your age is, most of you are going to
die of cardiovascular stuff.
[ Laughter ]
So we're quite interested in quantifying risk
factors for cardiovascular death. So we measure
cholesterol, blood pressure, all the usual
risk factors. But we also measure optimism.
And you statistically can hold traditional
risk factors constant and ask to quantify
what is the effect of optimism relative to
other risk factors.
In a recent study of 1,000 Dutch 65-year-olds,
we measured all these things. We followed
them for 10 years. 350 died of cardiovascular
stuff. Holding constant all traditional risk
factors, the upper quartile of Ted Turnerisms
in optimism has one quarter the risk of cardiovascular
death of the rest of the population.
And this has been replicated quite a number
of times. We're fascinated by the cardiovascular
mechanisms that might produce that. So those
are three examples of the kind of thing that
science does. Less depression, more achievement,
particularly under adversity, better physical
health are three well-documented consequences
of optimism.
So in the well-being formulation, PERMA basically
says what we want to measure rigorously and
then intervene on if we can and what a positive
human future is about is this question of
building well-being: Building positive emotion,
building positive relationships, building
meaning and purpose and building accomplishment.
So, are these things like your waistline?
I'm going to offend some of you. There is
a $50 billion American diet industry. It is
a scam. The reason it is a scam is that any
of you can lose 5% of your body weight in
about three weeks by following any diet on
the best seller list. I did the watermelon
diet and lost 20 pounds. I had diarrhea for
a month.
[ Laughter ]
The problem is 85 to 95% of people regain
all that weight or more in the next three
to five years. The question about interventions
is whether or not building positive emotion
relationships, meaning, accomplishment is
like dieting, boosterism or you get it back.
So let me take through the kind of things
people who do intervention in this area.
I'm a naughty thumb of science person. I spend
a lot of my life testing drugs and psychotherapies
in randomness assignment, placebo-controlled
tests.
When I started working on the positive side
of life, I began to say, Can you ask what
makes people happier in random assignment,
placebo-controlled testing? From the Buddha
to modern pop psychology, there has been about
200 suggestions about what makes people flourish.
A lot of what we do is we take those suggestions,
we put them on the Web. We do random assignment,
placebo-controlled. We found about 12 to 18
of them seem to lastingly increase these variables.
And so let me see. So with individuals, here's
an example of something that lasts if you
put it on the Web with no human hands. If
this was -- I think you are getting a copy
of my book "Authentic Happiness," so you can
actually do this.
In that book, there is something called "signature
strength tests," which asks kindness, fairness,
gratitude, what are your highest strengths.
So we have people take the signature strengths
test. And then we say, Take something you
have to do at work every week that you don't
like doing and figure out how to do that tedious
task using your highest strength. So, for
example, one of my -- one of the people I
work with was a bagger at the Acme and she
hated bagging.
Her highest strength was social intelligence.
So what she had to do was to figure out a
way to bag using social intelligence. So she
resolved to make the encounter with her the
social highlight of every customer's day.
Now, notice she failed at this all the time
but she put what was best in her on all the
time. Basically, when you do random assignment,
placebo-controlled tests, you find people
who do this six months later are less depressed
and happier. So that's the kind of individual
thing we do.
For the last decade, we have been taking these
12 to 18 techniques, none of which are terribly
hard to do, to schools around the world. And
we train teachers in these principles and
techniques. And then we measure for the next
couple of years versus controls, the depression,
the happiness, the anxiety, the conduct of
their students.
And, basically, we found in 21 replications
around the world that when you teach teachers
these techniques of positive education, that
the students are less depressed, less anxious
and have better conduct.
So I found myself to my great surprise at
the Pentagon two years ago with the chief
of staff. And he said to me, suicide, post-traumatic
stress disorder, divorce, substance abuse,
depression, what does positive psychology
say about that, Dr. Seligman? And I said,
Sir, the reaction -- Post-traumatic stress
disorder is a particularly nasty combination
of anxiety and depression. And the reaction
of human beings to extreme adversity is Gaussian.
On the left-hand side, you have people who
fall apart. I understand you are spending
$10 billion a year treating them and you should
continue to do that.
In the middle, you have resilience, and that's
most people. And what that means operationally
is that people go through a very hard time
but three months later by psychological and
physical measures, they're back where they
were. And then, most interestingly, there's
this huge group on the right-hand side that
Nietzsche was right about, "if it doesn't
kill me, it makes me stronger." These are
people who showed post-traumatic growth. People
who by our measures a year later after going
through terrible times by physical and psychological
measures are stronger.
Whereupon, I watched something I have never
seen in my life happen unlike you. General
Casey ordered that from this day forward,
positive psychology and resilience will be
taught in the entire United States Army and
measured. And so that's what I have been doing
for the last two years. Every month -- oh,
and he said to me, The general staff has read
your stuff about teachers. We see you teach
teachers. You measure the students. That's
the Army model. I said, it is? He said, yeah,
we have 40,000 teachers in the Army. I said,
You do? He said, Yeah, the drill sergeants.
[ Laughter ]
So your job, Marty, will be to take all 40,000
drill sergeants to teach them. Every month
now 150 drill sergeants come to the University
of Pennsylvania for ten days and we take them
through a course on flourishing and these
principles. And this is a work in progress,
but it is the most important work I've ever
been involved in.
So flourishing individuals, flourishing schools,
can make the Army flourish.
How about nations? Does that make -- and does
it make any sense to ask -- and this is where
we're starting to talk about a positive human
future.
Usually when we measure nations, when we measure
GDP or unemployment or illness statistics,
we're measuring what's wrong.
Now, if you're following what I'm saying,
I'm saying that the downstream effects of
flourishing not only involve more positive
emotion, better relations, more meaning, more
accomplishment, but it turns out people who
are flourishing are more productive at work,
they're physically healthier, and they're
at peace.
And so there is the beginning, both in France
and the U.K., of the measurement of flourishing
by entire nations.
So this is a new study by Felicia Huppert
of the Well-Being Institute of Cambridge.
What she does is ask the kinds of questions
we look at to 2,000 people in each of 23 European
Union nations, and what you can see here is
33% of Danish adults are flourishing by the
criteria I'm talking about, 18% of Brits,
and 6% of Russians.
So it's -- we believe it's measurable. The
measure -- you know, you have measurement
errors and the like, but the measurement of
these dependent variables is becoming more
and more sophisticated.
So one wants to ask the question -- and I
know David Cameron and Sarkozy both take this
seriously -- if your economy -- if the best
you can do in leading a nation is to stop
the hemorrhaging economically, will that get
you reelected?
Well, I don't think so.
But if you change the nature of the game so
what government is about is the increase in
well-being of a nation, then you might ask
the question: Does the policy you institute
increase well-being as well as does it increase
economics?
So that's what's going on nationally.
And the moonshot of this.
So -- and this is why I'm excited to talk
to a powerful group like this.
So I've argued that when individuals are flourishing
 -- when they have positive emotion, engagement,
meaning, good relationships and accomplishment
 -- that health problems are less and aggression
is less and productivity is higher.
So imagine 51%. That in the year 2051, 51%
of the world's population will be flourishing.
That's the moonshot of this. And sort of let
me conclude with some thoughts about that.
So this says that by measures of positive
emotion, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment,
is it possible that in 40 years half the world's
population can be flourishing?
So what is the relationship of that to the
technology that you are the leaders of?
Well, one of the fascinating things we were
talking about this morning with Google Earth
is, given that there -- so it turns out every
 -- positive emotion, relationships, meaning,
accomplishment all have an lexicon. Turns
out there are 80 positive emotion words and
there are about 80 positive relation words.
So if you think about what's going out every
moment on the web is words, you can actually
measure the lexicon, the use of these words.
So you can do -- mapping onto Google Earth
and using time scale and looking at events,
you can ask the question: To what extent does
flourishing -- how much flourishing is there
in the world? How quickly does positive emotion
damp after the Phillies within the World Series,
if you're mapping this locally over time?
How quickly does hate damp?
So you can actually ask the question globally:
How flourishing is a city and nation at any
given moment?
And so I believe that is an important possibility
here.
And very importantly, public policy follows
from what you measure. And what we've measured
in public policy for more than 100 years is
GDP and unemployment, and so that's what policy
is driven around.
But if you believe, as I do, Jim, that what
is GDP for?
So one possible answer to that: GDP is a surrogate
variable for human flourishing.
On that grounds, you say, "Well, let's measure
the real thing and ask the extent to which
public policy changes human flourishing."
And another great possibility is actually
viral gaming. That is, most of our gaming
is shoot-em-up games now, but there is reason
to believe that you can use the principles
of shoot-em-up games to build strength and
to become the grand master of positive relationships
and the like. And indeed there are gamers
who work on this.
So the final thing I want to say is, I've
said that there is good reason to think that
when individuals are flourishing, you can
measure it, and that when they're flourishing,
health problems are fewer, they're more productive,
and the like.
The same may be true of nations.
But what is a flourishing corporation?
And so an individual is flourishing if PERMA
is large. A nation is flourishing if PERMA
is large.
Can we expand the definition of what the bottom
line is?
So I know all of you will be forever tied
to shareholder equity, but one can also ask,
in the same way one asks of GDP: To what extent
is this corporation increasing positive emotion
in the people who work for it? How good are
the relationships?
And you can quantify that.
How much meaning do people who work in your
corporation have?
So on this notion, a flourishing corporation
has a different bottom line from the traditional
bottom line. It's a combination of achievement,
accomplishment, and of flourishing.
Now, I want to close by asking historically
something about is this possible. Is this
just a nice positive vision that could never
take hold in realpolitik.
Florence, in 1450, as you know, became enormously
wealthy based on Medici banking genius, essentially,
and under the leadership of Cosimo the Elder,
it asked the question, "What should we" -- Florence
was at peace. It was in surplus. It was not
in civil turmoil. It was not in famine, not
in plague. It asked the question: "What should
we do with this surplus?"
And the general said, "We should conquer the
peninsula."
And indeed, Florence could have done that.
But what Florence decided to do with its surplus
was to invest it in beauty. In beauty. And
they gave us what 200 years later was called
the Renaissance.
Now, I'm not suggesting that the positive
human future is about our taking up sculpture.
Rather, what I've tried to define is the elements
of a positive human future.
I believe the United States and the wealthy
nations of the world stand at a Florentine
moment, and it is doubt-safe to us to decide
that the human future will be about the building
in our citizens of positive emotion, of relations,
of meaning, and accomplishment.
Thank you.
[Applause]
