My understanding is that narcissism is a slightly different thing:
> Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a long-term pattern of abnormal
> behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an
> excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others' feelings.
Seligman claims that people who have the "optimistic" asymmetry are happier and more productive than those who have the "pessimistic" asymmetry. Unfortunately, he makes no claims about other aspects of people's personalities, such as whether they are ethical.
I think you can be optimistic without having an exaggerated feeling of self-importance, and certainly it has nothing to do with a need for admiration or lacking understanding for the feelings of others.
So... I think the answer as to where to draw the line is, "If you are aware enough to worry about the line, you don't need the line."
This is actually one of the strongest criticisms of Seligman's work. There's a clear example of this - after his work was published, the US Army adopted this as part of their training. After all, the results are fantastic - people become more psychologically robust in all sorts of ways if they're more optimistic, and soldiers are frequently in very stressful situations.
However the flip side of this is that it essentially trains people to disclaim any personal responsibility for bad events, and this has been mentioned in investigations into atrocities committed by the US military. Unfortunately the only citations I can find with a quick Google search are from pretty shady or biased sources, but I do remember seeing some more reliable-looking ones in the past.
It's also a common claim that CEOs tend to exhibit sociopathic tendencies, and it's not hard to see how this might apply there. I read Seligman's book several years ago (and like Reginald, I recommend that almost everyone reads it - it's fascinating) but when I took the test I only came out as mostly optimistic. On 4 of the 6 axes I was considered optimistic, but the other two could be colloquially translated as "when I do bad things I think it's my fault". Now according to Seligman, if I didn't think like that I'd be way better off, but I think I'm ok with maintaining the psychological equivalent of a moral compass there.
I don't know if this is what you're thinking of, but Dr. Seligman's other big research work was into "Learned Helplessness."
Seligman did some work with optimism and the forces, but the Learned Helplessness stuff was taken by two people unconnected with Seligman (James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen) who turned it into a manual for torturing people.
Seligman's name was dragged through the mud for this, but he didn't do the work on torture, and his research was into identifying the causes of Learned Helplessness precisely so people could avoid it. He openly discusses helping the forces apply his research to aiding captured soldiers resist torture:
Yes, I remember that as well - it was very unfortunate. It's not what I mean though, I would swear that I had also seen criticism of the optimism training in the armed forces with respect to its tendency to disclaim responsibility for, or otherwise minimise, negative outcomes from one's actions. I can't find a reference now though, although I haven't had time to Google it properly yet.
Sure it can. Happiness is orthogonal to ethicality or mental health. The line is not a line but rather a homeostatic balance subject to your own priorities and your culture's definition of those concepts.
postmortem culture -- when something goes wrong, it isn't your fault, and it isn't anyone else's fault, but it's an opportunity to build a better system.
A: I use an OS X presentation application called DeckSet. DeckSet uses markdown files as its persistence model. That is very convenient for a number of reasons, including the fact that I can manage my presentations with git/github, something that is inconvenient with apps that use a proprietary binary format.
This is an actual presentation given at a conference, so the pictures are actually the visuals. I did write up half of this talk as an essay, you'll find it here:
Thanks for another fantastic, thought-provoking piece of writing! As someone who has also dealt with periods of depression, this resonated with my experience and how I've learned to better manage my emotional state.
One reaction I had is that in my training to teach K-12, we were taught that our positive feedback should also be impersonal, specific, and temporal. This was to avoid falling into the trap of fixed mindset, even if it's more dangerous on the negative side.
And I think I personally appreciate praise that fits into that scheme. It makes me feel like the other person actually noticed and thought about the craft of what I've done, not just the outcome. The other side can feel a bit like flattery, which I distrust.
Not that I think the benefits of the other type of praise are unfounded. Just another point of view. Perhaps there's no shortcut to putting in the effort to learn the mix of styles that works for individual people and situations.
The discussion around Optimism vs Mindset is very interesting and I am constantly trying to use both methodologies in tandem.
There are a number of ways to reconcile the two approaches. For example, one can note that much of what Dweck describes is a kind of Impostor Syndrome, where people start out with a negative impression of themselves, and have a fixed mindset about their lack of skill.
If someone has a belief that they are a terrible programmer, telling them they are a good programmer doesn't help. They simply dispute it, a well-understood phenomenon. For them, you must provide evidence to shake their permanent belief about their own shortcomings, and being specific is the way to do it.
But what if they are not already mired in self-doubt? That is another matter entirely.
Now here is something I try to apply. Note the difference between a skill related to production, and a "meta-skill," something that enables or powers other skills. One person I know told me that they are terrible at X and Y and Z in their profession, but that they have "grit," the ability to grind it out and get results relentlessly.
Note that they have a positive, permanent, and general belief about a skill, "grit," that isn't a direct producer of results, but enables results.
Another person told me that they reject general praise outright, because they know that they make a lot of mistakes in programming. So they want very specific feedback about what they did well, not general praise. You can guess what came next: They told me that they were not instinctively good, but that they could learn from feedback.
Aha! Another fixed belief about a meta-skill, learning.
And in fact, what Dweck advocates is learning to adopt a fixed mindset about the growth mindset! Another meta-skill. So perhaps, what works is encouraging fixed beliefs about skills that empower or enable the directly productive skills.
But I don't know. Unlike Seligman and Dweck, I am not testing and measuring.
I like the idea of shaking permanent beliefs/attitudes. From reading your talk, it sounds like taking the optimistic mindset is partly as an antidote to a pessimistic attitude, or to the idea that a person can be reduced to a (negative) rule.
The thing I worry about, however, is that this further entrenches the idea that there is anything that is permanent! If someone tells me I am good/bad at something, I think "well, I am good/bad at this particular thing in this particular way right now." General, permanent praise can ring hollow for me because it doesn't seem like something which can even "actually" be true, but at least I'm symmetric about this with criticism. (I also can't discount the fact that I heard so much general praise growing up that my brain tends to automatically ignores it as being likely ungrounded.)
I suspect adopting the growth mindset has an underlying mindset of impermanence, since if things aren't guaranteed to remain fixed, changing for the better is always a possibility.
Here's an anecdote I find interesting about people and how they view themselves: I was teaching an introductory calculus course, which tends to be full of freshmen, people generally known to be exploring their identities. After a quiz early on in the semester, a student came up to me, pointing to the score, with disbelief "how could this be? I am a good student!" There was a strong cognitive dissonance, and they were blinded because, I suspect, they didn't want to believe they might have been someone else this whole time. Exams don't know whether or not you are a "good student." (The student was bright and creative, and I think went on to do architecture instead.) (This was my first semester as a graduate student. I tried to handle the situation as well as I could given my role, ability, and right to interfere, but I'm no psychologist.)
Sometimes thinking about believing something just because it is emotionally beneficial reminds me of the following exchange from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (by everyone's favorite pessimist):
Slartibartfast: I'd much rather be happy than right any day.
Arthur Dent: And are you?
Slartibartfast: Ah, no. (laughs)
But it doesn't seem to me that rejecting positive/negative impressions of yourself as being who you are is unhappiness-inducing. If anything, it might reduce cognitive dissonance. Here's a scenario where this might fall apart: there is a skill you know you have deficiencies in, someone asks you to do something which requires you to put that skill on display, so you are hesitant, because you don't want to signal to people that you thought this was good work, since you know people might take this as indication that you are "bad" because people have generally bought into the whole permanence mindset, and then you'd have to spend more effort to manage how people perceive you, otherwise people might take you less seriously overall for future things you would like to do. If you're fine with perception management, then there's no issue, but otherwise there is some unhappiness because of an effective insecurity derived from the interaction between the secure self and the social sphere.
Anyway, to steal your signoff: But I don't know. Unlike you I haven't read Seligman and Dweck, and unlike them I am not testing and measuring.
No questions, really. Just wanted to thank you for your writing.
It must have been about 10 years ago that I spent a full night reading your ruby essays. It must have been the most engaging writing on programming I've seen.
Q: Given how often people misunderstand what "optimism" means in Seligman's work, why do you think he repurposed an existing word instead of inventing a new one?
A: I don't know, but if I had to guess, I'd say that he is a data-driven man, and some simple A/B testing revealed that people were more likely to read a book purporting to be about "Optimism," than something they'd never heard of.
According to Seligman, people with the "optimistic" asymmetry are happier and more productive than people who are balanced, who again are happier and more productive than people who have the "pessimistic" asymmetry.
Personally, I think that if you're balanced and reasonably happy, there are better things to work on than trying to become "optimistically asymmetric."
But if you fit his "pessimism" model, working on becoming more optimistic may be vital to your health.
I've seen pessimism not work. Like "I don't have a good job because I'm a worthless and dumb", which is not temporary (being dumb is a state of being) and personal.
Or I've also seen "I don't have a good job because affirmative action keeps me down / I don't have a good job because employers are biased against me", which is also a permanent.
Probably the best combo for self improvement is personal/specific/temporary, which would be "I don't have a good job because I haven't studied enough for interviews", which suggests a solution.
Maybe the most important conjecture in the whole thing is the one that isn't backed up; that optimists are in fact more likely to be successful (in any sense of the term). Is there factual basis to that claim? A healthy sense of dread and paranoia can be useful (if not fun). Obviously demotivating depression isn't helping anyone, but I don't understand why, prima facie, optimists ought to be "better at stuff" than pessimists.
Also -- this is great and I really enjoyed it. As I have all stuff of yours that I've read. In particular anything related to trampolines and javascript.
> You analyze whether your explanations for good things are personal, general, and permanent.
What good things? I mean, not only can I not remember a good thing happening, but I have even forgotten how it is supposed to look like. For example, a good time? a good night of sleep? I kept the memory of these during a few years even though they were not happening any more, but for some time I have forgotten how they feel.
So the prerequisites for this method are not always present.
Why are optimistic asymmetry and pessimistic asymmetry presented as the only two choices? Why not a third, symmetric choice where everything is viewed as specific, impersonal, and impermanent? I think this world view is the closest to reality, and I also think seeing the world this way promotes good mental health. I don't have any research to back this up, though. Do you happen to know anything about this?
You stated that Dr. Seligman "measured their success in life" - I find that assertion to be rather suspect. How is it possible to measure success objectively?
It also sounds to me like a pessimistic attitude can be very useful, especially if it guards a person against taking unnecessary risks and trying to overreach beyond his or her capabilities.
Isn't it desirable to have a healthy mixture of both attitudes rather than just one?
Are you a strong believer in putting a caret in front of every point?
I understand the association with up and optimism, but in this document, I think that it could be distracting the reader from the content you are presenting.
The carets are part of DeckSet's markdown extensions. This is the source for a presentation, and lines prefaced with a caret are turned into speaker's notes.
I imagine the inspiration for them choosing a caret is that carets are used to signal footnotes in some markdown flavours.
How does this work for correcting actual systemic issues? If all the negative is temporary, impersonal and specific, how does one notice and correct things that are consistently and generally wrong with oneself?
Consider a salesperson. They make pitch after pitch, each one failing, a series of negative events. Being "pessimistic" does help identify the possibility that they are not selling effectively.
However, Being "optimistic" does not preclude change. The optimistic view is that each such event is driven by the prospective customer's choice (impersonal), is a stand-alone event (temporary), and is only a lost sale (specific).
The optimist is free to explore some options. For one thing, maybe they are selling to the wrong customers? Or perhaps their sales techniques don't fit those customers?
Since the optimist believes these are one-time events, the optimist believes it could go differently tomorrow. That doesn't mean it will magically go differently tomorrow! The optimist believes that they can make some changes and get different results tomorrow.
The pessimist believes that since they are permanently at fault, change is futile. The optimist believes that change is possible.
Now what about the idea that something is generally wrong with the optimist? For example, perhaps they don't listen in general, and this is why they are not selling. Well, "Stop being rude" is difficult to act on. "Listen more..." What does that mean exactly?
The optimist can drill down into specifics. What, specifically is going wrong? Ah, customers don't believe the product suits their needs. We can fix this, do more needs analysis in the qualifying portion of the sales process, and then write proposals in a "where-we-are-today, where=we-want-to-be, gap, how-the-product-forms-a-bridge" format.
So they fix listening in sales. And then they notice a problem in their personal relationships, and they fix listening there too. Lather, rinse, repeat. And perhaps they graduate to fixing a self-absorbption problem.
General problems need an accumulation of specific fixes to conquer, and learned optimism can help.
Have you looked at the similarities between this advice (broad, permanent, personal for good; narrow, temporary, impersonal for bad) and how recommendation algorithms (netflix, pandora, etc) work?
Since it's been 7+ years since you made this change personally, what has been your long term experience? Has the change stuck? Have you had periods of struggle?
First, there was a dramatic immediate improvement. I feel like some of that was the material, and some the "Hawthorne Effect:" Anything that forces you to inspect yourself has a short-term beneficial effect. For example, if you tell someone to count their calories, they usually eat better for a month or two simply because counting the calories forces awareness.
Second, I have slipped from time to time, and in each case, I was able to come back to health with some form of CBT.
Third, I find myself using this reasoning technique on an almost daily basis, especially on the Internet where it is easy to encounter negative people. If you look elsewhere in this discussion, you'll find me saying (somewhat flippantly) "That is your baggage, and I'm not going to carry it for you."
There is a touch of snark in that remark, but at it's root, I believe it is Seligman's theory again: I'm asserting that something negative is impersonal, and by refusing to carry it, I'm making it temporary.
Do you know if pessimism/optimism come naturally to people? Does the CBT strategy you described fully change your attitude or do you feel you have to rationally correct yourself when you experience something negative?
I'd like to help someone who I feel is overly pessimistic, but they are very skeptic of self-help books and therapies, did you feel that way? Do you have any tips to help overcome that?
