WEBVTT

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When I was President of the American
Psychological Association,

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they tried to media-train me.

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And an encounter I had with CNN summarizes

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what I'm going to be talking about today,

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which is the eleventh reason
to be optimistic.

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The editor of Discover told us 10 of them;

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I'm going to give you the eleventh.

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So they came to me, CNN,
and they said, "Professor Seligman --

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would you tell us about the state
of psychology today?

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We'd like to interview you about that."

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And I said, "Great."

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And she said, "But this is CNN,
so you only get a sound bite."

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I said, "Well, how many words do I get?"

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And she said, "Well, one."

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(Laughter)

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And the cameras rolled, and she said,

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"Professor Seligman,
what is the state of psychology today?"

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"Good."

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(Laughter)

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"Cut! Cut. That won't do.

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We'd really better give
you a longer sound bite."

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"How many words do I get this time?"

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"Well, you get two."

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(Laughter)

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"Doctor Seligman, what is the state
of psychology today?"

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"Not good."

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(Laughter)

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"Look, Doctor Seligman,

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we can see you're really
not comfortable in this medium.

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We'd better give you a real sound bite.

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This time you can have three words.

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Professor Seligman, what is the state
of psychology today?"

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"Not good enough."

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That's what I'm going to be talking about.

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I want to say why psychology
was good, why it was not good,

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and how it may become,
in the next 10 years, good enough.

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And by parallel summary, I want to say
the same thing about technology,

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about entertainment and design,

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because I think the issues
are very similar.

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So, why was psychology good?

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Well, for more than 60 years, psychology
worked within the disease model.

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Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane

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and I introduced myself to my seatmate,
and told them what I did,

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they'd move away from me,

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because, quite rightly, they were saying

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psychology is about finding
what's wrong with you.

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Spot the loony.

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And now, when I tell people
what I do, they move toward me.

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What was good about psychology --

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about the $30 billion
investment NIMH made,

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about working in the disease model,

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about what you mean by psychology --

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is that, 60 years ago,
none of the disorders were treatable;

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it was entirely smoke and mirrors.

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And now, 14 of the disorders
are treatable,

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two of them actually curable.

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And the other thing that happened
is that a science developed,

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a science of mental illness.

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We found out we could take fuzzy concepts

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like depression, alcoholism,

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and measure them with rigor;

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that we could create a classification
of the mental illnesses;

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that we could understand
the causality of the mental illnesses.

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We could look across time
at the same people --

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people, for example, who were genetically
vulnerable to schizophrenia --

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and ask what the contribution
of mothering, of genetics are,

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and we could isolate third variables

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by doing experiments
on the mental illnesses.

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And best of all, we were able,
in the last 50 years,

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to invent drug treatments
and psychological treatments.

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And then we were able
to test them rigorously,

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in random-assignment,
placebo-controlled designs,

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throw out the things that didn't work,

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keep the things that actively did.

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The conclusion of that is,

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psychology and psychiatry
of the last 60 years

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can actually claim that we can make
miserable people less miserable.

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And I think that's terrific.

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I'm proud of it.

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But what was not good,
the consequences of that,

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were three things.

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The first was moral;

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that psychologists and psychiatrists
became victimologists, pathologizers;

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that our view of human nature
was that if you were in trouble,

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bricks fell on you.

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And we forgot that people
made choices and decisions.

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We forgot responsibility.

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That was the first cost.

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The second cost was
that we forgot about you people.

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We forgot about improving normal lives.

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We forgot about a mission to make
relatively untroubled people happier,

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more fulfilled, more productive.

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And "genius," "high-talent,"
became a dirty word.

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No one works on that.

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And the third problem
about the disease model is,

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in our rush to do something
about people in trouble,

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in our rush to do something
about repairing damage,

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it never occurred to us
to develop interventions

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to make people happier --
positive interventions.

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So that was not good.

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And so that's what led people
like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert,

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Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself

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to work in something I call,
"positive psychology,"

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which has three aims.

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The first is that psychology
should be just as concerned

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with human strength
as it is with weakness.

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It should be just as concerned
with building strength

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as with repairing damage.

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It should be interested
in the best things in life.

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And it should be just as concerned

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with making the lives
of normal people fulfilling,

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and with genius,
with nurturing high talent.

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So in the last 10 years
and the hope for the future,

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we've seen the beginnings
of a science of positive psychology,

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a science of what makes life worth living.

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It turns out that we can measure
different forms of happiness.

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And any of you, for free,
can go to that website --

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[www.authentichappiness.org]

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and take the entire panoply
of tests of happiness.

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You can ask, how do you stack
up for positive emotion, for meaning,

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for flow, against literally tens
of thousands of other people?

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We created the opposite of the diagnostic
manual of the insanities:

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a classification of the strengths
and virtues that looks at the sex ratio,

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how they're defined, how to diagnose them,

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what builds them
and what gets in their way.

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We found that we could discover
the causation of the positive states,

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the relationship between left
hemispheric activity

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and right hemispheric activity,
as a cause of happiness.

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I've spent my life working
on extremely miserable people,

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and I've asked the question:

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How do extremely miserable people
differ from the rest of you?

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And starting about six years ago,
we asked about extremely happy people.

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How do they differ from the rest of us?

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It turns out there's one way,
very surprising --

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they're not more religious,
they're not in better shape,

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they don't have more money,
they're not better looking,

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they don't have more good events
and fewer bad events.

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The one way in which they differ:
they're extremely social.

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They don't sit in seminars
on Saturday morning.

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(Laughter)

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They don't spend time alone.

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Each of them is in a romantic relationship

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and each has a rich repertoire of friends.

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But watch out here -- this is merely
correlational data, not causal,

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and it's about happiness
in the first, "Hollywood" sense,

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I'm going to talk about,

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happiness of ebullience
and giggling and good cheer.

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And I'm going to suggest to you
that's not nearly enough,

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in just a moment.

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We found we could begin to look
at interventions over the centuries,

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from the Buddha to Tony Robbins.

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About 120 interventions have been proposed
that allegedly make people happy.

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And we find that we've been able
to manualize many of them,

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and we actually carry out

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random-assignment efficacy
and effectiveness studies.

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That is, which ones actually
make people lastingly happier?

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In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you
about some of those results.

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But the upshot of this is that the mission
I want psychology to have,

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in addition to its mission
of curing the mentally ill,

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and in addition to its mission of making
miserable people less miserable,

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is, can psychology actually
make people happier?

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And to ask that question -- "happy"
is not a word I use very much --

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we've had to break it down

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into what I think
is askable about "happy."

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And I believe there are three different --

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I call them "different" because different
interventions build them,

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it's possible to have one
rather than the other --

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three different happy lives.

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The first happy life is the pleasant life.

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This is a life in which you have
as much positive emotion

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as you possibly can,

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and the skills to amplify it.

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The second is a life of engagement:

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a life in your work, your parenting,
your love, your leisure;

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time stops for you.

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That's what Aristotle was talking about.

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And third, the meaningful life.

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I want to say a little bit
about each of those lives

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and what we know about them.

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The first life is the pleasant life,
and it's simply, as best we can find it,

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it's having as many
of the pleasures as you can,

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as much positive emotion as you can,

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and learning the skills -- savoring,
mindfulness -- that amplify them,

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that stretch them over time and space.

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But the pleasant life has three drawbacks,

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and it's why positive psychology
is not happy-ology,

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and why it doesn't end here.

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The first drawback is,
it turns out the pleasant life,

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your experience of positive emotion,

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is about 50 percent heritable,

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and, in fact, not very modifiable.

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So the different tricks
that Matthieu and I and others know

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about increasing the amount
of positive emotion in your life

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are 15 to 20 percent tricks,
getting more of it.

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Second is that positive
emotion habituates.

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It habituates rapidly, indeed.

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It's all like French vanilla ice cream:

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the first taste is 100 percent;

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by the time you're down
to the sixth taste,

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it's gone.

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And, as I said,
it's not particularly malleable.

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And this leads to the second life.

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I have to tell you about my friend Len,

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to talk about why positive psychology
is more than positive emotion,

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more than building pleasure.

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In two of the three great arenas
of life, by the time Len was 30,

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Len was enormously successful.

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The first arena was work.

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By the time he was 20,
he was an options trader.

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By the time he was 25,
he was a multimillionaire

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and the head of an options
trading company.

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Second, in play, he's a national
champion bridge player.

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But in the third great arena of life,
love, Len is an abysmal failure.

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And the reason he was,
was that Len is a cold fish.

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(Laughter)

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Len is an introvert.

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American women said to Len,
when he dated them,

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"You're no fun. You don't have
positive emotion. Get lost."

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And Len was wealthy enough to be able
to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst,

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who for five years tried
to find the sexual trauma

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that had somehow locked
positive emotion inside of him.

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But it turned out there wasn't
any sexual trauma.

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It turned out that --

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Len grew up in Long Island

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and he played football
and watched football, and played bridge.

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Len is in the bottom five percent
of what we call positive affectivities.

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The question is: Is Len unhappy?

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And I want to say, not.

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Contrary to what psychology told us

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about the bottom 50 percent
of the human race in positive affectivity,

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I think Len is one
of the happiest people I know.

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He's not consigned
to the hell of unhappiness,

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and that's because Len, like most of you,

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is enormously capable of flow.

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When he walks onto the floor
of the American Exchange

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at 9:30 in the morning,

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time stops for him.

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And it stops till the closing bell.

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When the first card is played
till 10 days later,

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when the tournament is over,

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time stops for Len.

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And this is indeed
what Mike Csikszentmihalyi

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has been talking about, about flow.

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And it's distinct from pleasure
in a very important way:

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pleasure has raw feel -- you know
it's happening; it's thought and feeling.

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But what Mike told you
yesterday -- during flow ...

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you can't feel anything.

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You're one with the music.

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Time stops.

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You have intense concentration.

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And this is indeed the characteristic
of what we think of as the good life.

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And we think there's a recipe for it,

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and it's knowing what
your highest strengths are --

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again, there's a valid test

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of what your five highest strengths are --

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and then re-crafting your life

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to use them as much as you possibly can.

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Re-crafting your work, your love,

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your play, your friendship,
your parenting.

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Just one example.

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One person I worked with
was a bagger at Genuardi's.

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Hated the job.

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She's working her way through college.

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Her highest strength
was social intelligence.

00:14:27.928 --> 00:14:32.643
So she re-crafted bagging
to make the encounter with her

00:14:32.667 --> 00:14:35.438
the social highlight
of every customer's day.

00:14:35.922 --> 00:14:37.638
Now, obviously she failed.

00:14:37.662 --> 00:14:40.976
But what she did was to take
her highest strengths,

00:14:41.000 --> 00:14:44.408
and re-craft work to use them
as much as possible.

00:14:45.000 --> 00:14:47.348
What you get out of that
is not smiley-ness.

00:14:47.372 --> 00:14:49.275
You don't look like Debbie Reynolds.

00:14:49.299 --> 00:14:50.703
You don't giggle a lot.

00:14:50.727 --> 00:14:53.313
What you get is more absorption.

NOTE Paragraph

00:14:54.000 --> 00:14:56.074
So, that's the second path.

00:14:56.098 --> 00:14:58.450
The first path, positive emotion;

00:14:58.474 --> 00:15:01.570
the second path is eudaemonian flow;

00:15:01.594 --> 00:15:03.976
and the third path is meaning.

00:15:04.000 --> 00:15:07.976
This is the most venerable
of the happinesses, traditionally.

00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:11.499
And meaning, in this view, consists of --

00:15:11.523 --> 00:15:14.443
very parallel to eudaemonia --

00:15:14.467 --> 00:15:18.030
it consists of knowing
what your highest strengths are,

00:15:18.054 --> 00:15:22.697
and using them to belong to
and in the service of

00:15:22.721 --> 00:15:24.864
something larger than you are.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:26.922 --> 00:15:30.174
I mentioned that for all three
kinds of lives --

00:15:31.247 --> 00:15:34.590
the pleasant life, the good life,
the meaningful life --

00:15:34.614 --> 00:15:36.778
people are now
hard at work on the question:

00:15:36.802 --> 00:15:40.729
Are there things that lastingly
change those lives?

00:15:41.768 --> 00:15:44.767
And the answer seems to be yes.

00:15:44.791 --> 00:15:47.346
And I'll just give you some samples of it.

00:15:47.370 --> 00:15:49.534
It's being done in a rigorous manner.

00:15:49.558 --> 00:15:52.395
It's being done in the same way
that we test drugs

00:15:52.419 --> 00:15:54.028
to see what really works.

00:15:54.513 --> 00:15:59.326
So we do random-assignment,
placebo-controlled,

00:15:59.350 --> 00:16:02.197
long-term studies
of different interventions.

00:16:02.221 --> 00:16:06.726
Just to sample the kind of interventions
that we find have an effect:

00:16:06.750 --> 00:16:09.976
when we teach people
about the pleasant life,

00:16:10.000 --> 00:16:11.976
how to have more pleasure in your life,

00:16:12.000 --> 00:16:16.019
one of your assignments
is to take the mindfulness skills,

00:16:16.043 --> 00:16:18.458
the savoring skills,

00:16:18.482 --> 00:16:21.240
and you're assigned
to design a beautiful day.

00:16:22.173 --> 00:16:27.187
Next Saturday, set a day aside,
design yourself a beautiful day,

00:16:27.211 --> 00:16:31.405
and use savoring and mindfulness
to enhance those pleasures.

00:16:31.429 --> 00:16:35.930
And we can show in that way
that the pleasant life is enhanced.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:37.738 --> 00:16:38.962
Gratitude visit.

00:16:41.083 --> 00:16:43.739
I want you all to do this
with me now, if you would.

00:16:43.763 --> 00:16:45.011
Close your eyes.

00:16:46.812 --> 00:16:51.156
I'd like you to remember someone

00:16:51.180 --> 00:16:54.228
who did something enormously important

00:16:54.252 --> 00:16:57.976
that changed your life
in a good direction,

00:16:58.000 --> 00:16:59.933
and who you never properly thanked.

00:17:01.147 --> 00:17:02.636
The person has to be alive.

00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:06.163
Now, OK, you can open your eyes.

00:17:06.187 --> 00:17:08.521
I hope all of you have such a person.

00:17:08.545 --> 00:17:12.143
Your assignment, when you're learning
the gratitude visit,

00:17:12.167 --> 00:17:15.816
is to write a 300-word
testimonial to that person,

00:17:16.534 --> 00:17:18.463
call them on the phone in Phoenix,

00:17:19.161 --> 00:17:21.808
ask if you can visit, don't tell them why.

00:17:21.832 --> 00:17:23.335
Show up at their door,

00:17:24.299 --> 00:17:28.296
you read the testimonial --
everyone weeps when this happens.

00:17:29.579 --> 00:17:32.481
And what happens is, when we test people

00:17:32.505 --> 00:17:35.624
one week later, a month later,
three months later,

00:17:35.648 --> 00:17:38.306
they're both happier and less depressed.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:39.722 --> 00:17:42.057
Another example is a strengths date,

00:17:42.081 --> 00:17:46.263
in which we get couples to identify
their highest strengths

00:17:46.287 --> 00:17:47.662
on the strengths test,

00:17:47.686 --> 00:17:52.767
and then to design an evening
in which they both use their strengths.

00:17:52.791 --> 00:17:56.284
We find this is a strengthener
of relationships.

00:17:56.788 --> 00:17:58.762
And fun versus philanthropy.

00:17:58.786 --> 00:18:01.506
It's so heartening
to be in a group like this,

00:18:01.530 --> 00:18:05.130
in which so many of you have turned
your lives to philanthropy.

00:18:05.154 --> 00:18:08.812
Well, my undergraduates and the people
I work with haven't discovered this,

00:18:08.836 --> 00:18:11.644
so we actually have people
do something altruistic

00:18:12.422 --> 00:18:14.086
and do something fun,

00:18:14.197 --> 00:18:15.351
and contrast it.

00:18:15.375 --> 00:18:17.976
And what you find
is when you do something fun,

00:18:18.000 --> 00:18:19.889
it has a square wave walk set.

00:18:19.913 --> 00:18:23.549
When you do something philanthropic
to help another person,

00:18:23.573 --> 00:18:25.662
it lasts and it lasts.

00:18:26.526 --> 00:18:30.046
So those are examples
of positive interventions.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:30.680 --> 00:18:34.096
So the next to last thing
I want to say is:

00:18:35.000 --> 00:18:38.119
we're interested in how much
life satisfaction people have.

00:18:38.143 --> 00:18:40.083
This is really what you're about.

00:18:40.107 --> 00:18:41.976
And that's our target variable.

00:18:42.000 --> 00:18:45.976
And we ask the question as a function
of the three different lives,

00:18:46.000 --> 00:18:48.216
how much life satisfaction do you get?

00:18:48.747 --> 00:18:51.852
So we ask -- and we've done this
in 15 replications,

00:18:51.876 --> 00:18:54.254
involving thousands of people:

00:18:54.278 --> 00:18:56.773
To what extent does
the pursuit of pleasure,

00:18:56.797 --> 00:18:58.569
the pursuit of positive emotion,

00:18:59.143 --> 00:19:00.317
the pleasant life,

00:19:00.341 --> 00:19:03.749
the pursuit of engagement,
time stopping for you,

00:19:03.773 --> 00:19:07.147
and the pursuit of meaning
contribute to life satisfaction?

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:07.171 --> 00:19:10.765
And our results surprised us;
they were backward of what we thought.

00:19:10.789 --> 00:19:14.293
It turns out the pursuit of pleasure
has almost no contribution

00:19:14.317 --> 00:19:15.976
to life satisfaction.

00:19:16.000 --> 00:19:18.529
The pursuit of meaning is the strongest.

00:19:18.553 --> 00:19:22.700
The pursuit of engagement
is also very strong.

00:19:23.000 --> 00:19:27.634
Where pleasure matters
is if you have both engagement

00:19:27.658 --> 00:19:29.267
and you have meaning,

00:19:29.291 --> 00:19:31.580
then pleasure's the whipped
cream and the cherry.

00:19:31.604 --> 00:19:38.122
Which is to say, the full life --
the sum is greater than the parts,

00:19:38.146 --> 00:19:39.552
if you've got all three.

00:19:39.576 --> 00:19:42.818
Conversely, if you have none
of the three, the empty life,

00:19:42.842 --> 00:19:44.499
the sum is less than the parts.

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:44.523 --> 00:19:48.774
And what we're asking now is:
Does the very same relationship --

00:19:48.798 --> 00:19:53.741
physical health, morbidity,
how long you live and productivity --

00:19:53.765 --> 00:19:55.174
follow the same relationship?

00:19:55.198 --> 00:19:57.676
That is, in a corporation,

00:19:57.700 --> 00:20:03.539
is productivity a function of positive
emotion, engagement and meaning?

00:20:03.563 --> 00:20:06.730
Is health a function
of positive engagement,

00:20:06.754 --> 00:20:09.491
of pleasure, and of meaning in life?

00:20:09.515 --> 00:20:13.730
And there is reason to think the answer
to both of those may well be yes.

NOTE Paragraph

00:20:16.204 --> 00:20:20.633
So, Chris said that the last
speaker had a chance

00:20:20.657 --> 00:20:23.078
to try to integrate what he heard,

00:20:23.102 --> 00:20:24.808
and so this was amazing for me.

00:20:24.832 --> 00:20:28.126
I've never been in a gathering like this.

00:20:28.801 --> 00:20:32.525
I've never seen speakers stretch
beyond themselves so much,

00:20:32.549 --> 00:20:34.621
which was one of the remarkable things.

00:20:35.000 --> 00:20:38.976
But I found that the problems
of psychology seemed to be parallel

00:20:39.000 --> 00:20:43.215
to the problems of technology,
entertainment and design

00:20:43.239 --> 00:20:44.714
in the following way:

00:20:44.738 --> 00:20:48.220
we all know that technology,
entertainment and design

00:20:48.244 --> 00:20:53.244
have been and can be used
for destructive purposes.

00:20:54.371 --> 00:20:58.526
We also know that technology,
entertainment and design

00:20:58.550 --> 00:21:01.069
can be used to relieve misery.

00:21:01.551 --> 00:21:04.976
And by the way, the distinction
between relieving misery

00:21:05.000 --> 00:21:07.976
and building happiness
is extremely important.

00:21:08.000 --> 00:21:11.611
I thought, when I first became
a therapist 30 years ago,

00:21:11.635 --> 00:21:16.976
that if I was good enough
to make someone not depressed,

00:21:17.000 --> 00:21:20.048
not anxious, not angry,

00:21:20.867 --> 00:21:22.333
that I'd make them happy.

00:21:22.902 --> 00:21:24.277
And I never found that;

00:21:24.301 --> 00:21:26.323
I found the best you could ever do

00:21:26.347 --> 00:21:27.749
was to get to zero;

00:21:28.350 --> 00:21:29.564
that they were empty.

NOTE Paragraph

00:21:29.588 --> 00:21:35.194
And it turns out the skills of happiness,
the skills of the pleasant life,

00:21:35.218 --> 00:21:37.589
the skills of engagement,
the skills of meaning,

00:21:37.613 --> 00:21:41.764
are different from the skills
of relieving misery.

00:21:42.335 --> 00:21:47.706
And so, the parallel thing holds
with technology, entertainment

00:21:47.730 --> 00:21:49.303
and design, I believe.

00:21:49.327 --> 00:21:56.206
That is, it is possible
for these three drivers of our world

00:21:56.230 --> 00:21:58.445
to increase happiness,

00:21:58.758 --> 00:22:01.646
to increase positive emotion.

00:22:01.670 --> 00:22:03.857
And that's typically
how they've been used.

00:22:03.881 --> 00:22:06.491
But once you fractionate
happiness the way I do --

00:22:06.903 --> 00:22:09.976
not just positive emotion,
that's not nearly enough --

00:22:10.000 --> 00:22:13.133
there's flow in life,
and there's meaning in life.

00:22:13.506 --> 00:22:14.976
As Laura Lee told us,

00:22:15.000 --> 00:22:18.668
design and, I believe,
entertainment and technology,

00:22:18.692 --> 00:22:23.423
can be used to increase meaning
engagement in life as well.

NOTE Paragraph

00:22:23.447 --> 00:22:25.067
So in conclusion,

00:22:25.091 --> 00:22:27.518
the eleventh reason for optimism,

00:22:27.542 --> 00:22:30.717
in addition to the space elevator,

00:22:30.741 --> 00:22:35.872
is that I think with technology,
entertainment and design,

00:22:35.896 --> 00:22:39.644
we can actually increase
the amount of tonnage

00:22:39.668 --> 00:22:41.918
of human happiness on the planet.

00:22:42.521 --> 00:22:46.784
And if technology can,
in the next decade or two,

00:22:46.808 --> 00:22:50.672
increase the pleasant life,
the good life and the meaningful life,

00:22:50.696 --> 00:22:52.186
it will be good enough.

00:22:52.210 --> 00:22:57.815
If entertainment can be diverted
to also increase positive emotion,

00:22:57.967 --> 00:23:01.061
meaning eudaemonia,

00:23:01.085 --> 00:23:02.524
it will be good enough.

00:23:02.548 --> 00:23:07.114
And if design can increase
positive emotion,

00:23:08.582 --> 00:23:11.577
eudaemonia, and flow and meaning,

00:23:11.601 --> 00:23:15.140
what we're all doing together
will become good enough.

NOTE Paragraph

00:23:15.164 --> 00:23:16.343
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:23:16.367 --> 00:23:22.169
(Applause)