Little did I know when I was foundering in my neurobiology class that I was re-creating the conditions of a famous psychology experiment.
Let me wind back the clock to 1964. Two first-year psychology doctoral students named Marty Seligman and Steve Maier are in a windowless laboratory, watching a caged dog receive electric shocks to its back paws. The shocks come randomly and without warning. If the dog does nothing, the shock lasts five seconds, but if the dog pushes its nose against a panel at the front of the cage, the shock ends early. In a separate cage, another dog is receiving the same shocks at exactly the same intervals, but there’s no panel to push on. In other words, both dogs get the exact same dosage of shock at the exact same times, but only the first dog is in control of how long each shock lasts. After sixty-four shocks, both dogs go back to their home cages, and new dogs are brought in for the same procedure.
The next day, one by one, all the dogs are placed in a different cage called a shuttle box. In the middle, there’s a low wall, just high enough that the dogs can leap the barrier if they try. A high-pitched tone plays, heralding an impending shock, which comes through the floor of the half of the shuttle box where the dog is standing. Nearly all the dogs who had control over the shocks the previous day learn to leap the barrier. They hear the tone and jump over the wall to safety. In contrast, two-thirds of the dogs who had no control over the shocks the previous day just lie down whimpering, passively waiting for the punishments to stop.
This seminal experiment proved for the first time that it isn’t suffering that leads to hopelessness. It’s suffering you think you can’t control.
Many years after deciding to major in the subject I was failing, I sat in a graduate student cubicle a few doors down from Marty’s office, reading about this experiment on learned helplessness. I quickly saw the parallels to my earlier experience. The first neurobiology quiz brought unexpected pain. I struggled to improve my situation, but when the midterm came, I got shocked again. The shuttle box was the rest of the semester. Would I conclude from my earlier experience that I was helpless to change my situation? After all, my immediate experience suggested that two disastrous outcomes would be followed by a third.
Or would I be like the few dogs who, despite recent memories of uncontrollable pain, held fast to hope? Would I consider my earlier suffering to be the result of particular mistakes I could avoid in the future? Would I expand my focus beyond the recent past, remembering the many times I’d shrugged off failure and eventually prevailed?
As it turns out, I behaved like the one-third of dogs in Marty and Steve’s study that persevered. I got up again and kept fighting.
* * *
In the decade following that 1964 experiment, additional experiments revealed that suffering without control reliably produces symptoms of clinical depression, including changes in appetite and physical activity, sleep problems, and poor concentration.
When Marty and Steve first proposed that animals and people can learn that they are helpless, their theory was considered downright absurd by fellow researchers. Nobody at the time took seriously the possibility that dogs could have thoughts that then influenced their behavior. In fact, few psychologists entertained the possibility that people had thoughts that influenced their behavior. Instead, the received wisdom was that all living animals simply respond mechanically to punishments and rewards.
After a mountain of data had accumulated, ruling out every conceivable alternative explanation, the scientific community was, at long last, convinced.
Having thoroughly plumbed the disastrous consequences of uncontrollable stress in the laboratory, Marty grew more and more interested in what could be done about it. He decided to retrain as a clinical psychologist. Wisely, he chose to do so under the wing of Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist and fellow pioneer in understanding the root causes and practical antidotes for depression.
What followed was a vigorous exploration of the flip side of learned helplessness, which Marty later dubbed learned optimism. The crucial insight that seeded Marty’s new work was available from the very beginning: While two-thirds of the dogs that had experienced uncontrollable shock later gave up trying to help themselves, about a third remained resilient. Despite their earlier trauma, they kept trying maneuvers that would bring relief from pain.
It was those resilient dogs that led Marty to study the analogous I won’t quit response to adversity in people. Optimists, Marty soon discovered, are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. Where they diverge is in their explanations: optimists habitually search for temporary and specific causes of their suffering, whereas pessimists assume permanent and pervasive causes are to blame.
Here’s an example from the test Marty and his students developed to distinguish optimists from pessimists: Imagine: You can’t get all the work done that others expect of you. Now imagine one major cause for this event. What leaps to mind? After you read that hypothetical scenario, you write down your response, and then, after you’re offered more scenarios, your responses are rated for how temporary (versus permanent) and how specific (versus pervasive) they are.
If you’re a pessimist, you might say, I screw up everything. Or: I’m a loser. These explanations are all permanent; there’s not much you can do to change them. They’re also pervasive; they’re likely to influence lots of life situations, not just your job performance. Permanent and pervasive explanations for adversity turn minor complications into major catastrophes. They make it seem logical to give up. If, on the other hand, you’re an optimist, you might say, I mismanaged my time. Or: I didn’t work efficiently because of distractions. These explanations are all temporary and specific; their “fixability” motivates you to start clearing them away as problems.
Using this test, Marty confirmed that, compared to optimists, pessimists are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. What’s more, optimists fare better in domains not directly related to mental health. For instance, optimistic undergraduates tend to earn higher grades and are less likely to drop out of school. Optimistic young adults stay healthier throughout middle age and, ultimately, live longer than pessimists. Optimists are more satisfied with their marriages. A one-year field study of MetLife insurance agents found that optimists are twice as likely to stay in their jobs, and that they sell about 25 percent more insurance than their pessimistic colleagues. Likewise, studies of salespeople in telecommunications, real estate, office products, car sales, banking, and other industries have shown that optimists outsell pessimists by 20 to 40 percent.
In one study, elite swimmers, many of whom were training for the U.S. Olympic trials, took Marty’s optimism test. Next, coaches asked each swimmer to swim in his or her best event and then deliberately told each swimmer they’d swum just a little slower than was actually the case. Given the opportunity to repeat their event, optimists did at least as well as in their first attempt, but pessimists performed substantially worse.
How do grit paragons think about setbacks? Overwhelmingly, I’ve found that they explain events optimistically. Journalist Hester Lacey finds the same striking pattern in her interviews with remarkably creative people. “What has been your greatest disappointment?” she asks each of them. Whether they’re artists or entrepreneurs or community activists, their response is nearly identical. “Well, I don’t really think in terms of disappointment. I tend to think that everything that happens is something I can learn from. I tend to think, ‘Well okay, that didn’t go so well, but I guess I will just carry on.’?”
* * *