Bright-Sided (21 page)

Why so much negativity in such a comfortable age? Seligman blames our perilous evolution: “Because our brain evolved during a time of ice, flood and famine, we have a catastrophic brain. The way the brain works is looking for what’s wrong. The problem is, that worked in the Pleistocene era. It favored you, but it doesn’t work in the modern world.”
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As he wrote in 2004 with his frequent collaborator Ed Diener, “Because goods and services are plentiful and because simple needs are largely satisfied in modern societies, people today have the luxury of refocusing their attention on the ‘good life.’ ”
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In this view, which was restated uncritically by a reviewer of two books on happiness in a February 2006 issue of the
New Yorker
, our Paleolithic ancestors may have been well served by the suspicion that a saber-toothed cat crouched behind every bush, but today we would do better to visualize pots of gold.
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Going to the Source

I approached my chance to interview Martin Seligman in May 2007 with some trepidation. Only three months earlier I had published an essay in
Harper’s
critical of both positive psychology and pop positive thinking. Sure enough, when I first encountered Seligman he was practically scowling. “There he is!” the security guard at the reception desk in a boxlike building at the University of Pennsylvania said, pointing upward to a short, solid, bullet-headed man looking down from the second-floor balcony. I smiled and waved, to which Seligman responded only, “You’ll have to take the elevator.”

He was not, however, waiting for me on the second floor and had disappeared into his office. His secretary informed me that he would be busy for a minute and that he wanted me to meet these two ladies from the Australian military while I waited. after shaking their hands and learning that they had come for help in “preventing problems before they get to the complaint stage,” I was ushered into his office, only to face another delay—a phone call from the BBC, he told me, which I was welcome to sit through, although no chair was offered.

The phone call—to schedule an interview about a plan to offer “optimism training” in the British public schools—seemed to lift his spirits, and after a few minutes of innocuous conversation, he announced that it was such a beautiful day that it would be a shame to spend it indoors. “I have a plan,” he said. “We’re going to go the art museum. Flowers will be blooming outdoors and we can see the Monets.” I protested weakly that this excursion might interfere with note taking, not bothering to point out the contradiction between being in a museum and being outdoors. But apparently he was following his own instruction from
Authentic Happiness
: “Choose your venue and design your mood to fit the task at hand.”
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As soon as we were in a taxi heading to the museum, he revealed that the Monets were his wife’s idea. “That’ll put her in a good mood,” she had suggested. I began to wonder whether the Australian visitors and the BBC call had been timed, in part, for my benefit.

Once we were at the museum—the one made famous by Rocky Balboa—the barriers to a normal interview seemed only to multiply. First he insisted on a quick tramp around the outside of the building; then, inside at the reception desk, he made my heart sink by inquiring about a lecture that seemed to be going on. When that turned out to be unavailable, he started asking about an exhibition of photographs of early Santa Monica, and I pictured
an afternoon spent trailing him throughout the more obscure sections of the museum. It was impossible not to dwell on the fact that Seligman’s early work, before he announced the launching of positive psychology, had been about “learned helplessness,” showing that when dogs are tormented in random ways they become passive, depressed, and unable to defend themselves.

Although note taking was almost impossible, I attempted to carry on a conversation about
Authentic Happiness
, which I had found just as elusive as he was turning out to be. Like most lay books on positive thinking, it’s a jumble of anecdotes (primarily autobiographical in Seligman’s case), references to philosophers and religious texts, and tests you can take to assess your progress toward a happier and healthier mind-set. Only on a second reading did I begin to discern a progression of thoughts—not a logical progression but at least a kind of arc. He begins with what positive psychologists call their field’s “origin story,” about how he was weeding his garden one day when his five-year-old daughter challenged him to stop being such a “grouch.” Grouchiness, he realizes, is endemic to the academic world: “I have noticed over thirty years of psychology department faculty meetings—conducted in a cheerless, gray, and windowless room full of unrepentant grouches—that the ambient mood is on the chilly side of zero.” Prodded by his daughter, he decides that “it was worth trying hard to put more positive emotion into my life,” and a veritable candy land of pleasures begins to open up, epitomized by “a cloudless spring day, the ending of the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude,’ pictures of babies and young lambs, and sitting down in front of a blazing fire on a snowy evening.”
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But just as he seems to be on the verge of embracing hedonism, or at least a kitschy version thereof, he pulls back sharply in a burst of Calvinist disgust, enjoining the reader to “strive for
more gratifications, while toning down the pursuit of pleasure.” “Gratifications,” it turns out, are “higher” forms of pleasure because they take some effort, and they include “playing three sets of tennis, or participating in a clever conversation, or reading Richard Russo.” In contrast, things like “watching a sitcom, masturbating, and inhaling perfume” involve no challenge and hence are only “pleasures.” This seems unnecessarily judgmental, and not only because Richard Russo is not exactly Marcel Proust, but the reader soon finds, to her complete confusion, that the whole category of “positive emotions,” including both gratification and pleasure, is suspect: “When an entire lifetime is taken up in the pursuit of positive emotions, however, authenticity and meaning are nowhere to be found,” and without them, evidently, there can be no “authentic happiness.”
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Abandoning the positive emotions, Seligman’s book goes off in search of “character,” which he admits is a Calvinist-sounding concept—“nineteenth-century Protestant, constipated, and Victorian.” To get to the roots of character, he and his colleagues sift through two hundred “virtue catalogs”—including Aristotle and Plato, Augustine and Aquinas, the Old Testament, Confucius, Buddha, and Benjamin Franklin—out of which they distill “six virtues”: wisdom and knowledge, courage, love and humanity, justice, temperance, spirituality and transcendence.
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Now, as we walked up the museum stairs to the Monet exhibition, I told him that he had lost me at this point in his book. Courage, for example, could take one very far from the “positive emotions,” with their predicted positive effects on health and success, and into dangerous and painful situations, just as spirituality could lead to social withdrawal, fasting, and self-mortification. In fact, I blathered on, the conventional notion of “character” seems to include the capacity for self-denial, even suffering, in pursuit of a higher goal. To my surprise, he deflected the implicit criticism onto his
erstwhile collaborator, Ed Diener, saying that Diener is “all about the smiley face” and just “trying to make people feel better,” whereas he, Seligman, is concerned with “meaning and purpose.” Loyalty, I recall, did not make it onto the list of virtues.

Finally we arrived at the Monets, where after some preliminary gushing on his part we sat down on a bench and I settled my stenographer’s pad on my knee for some serious interviewing. But just then a security guard bore down on us and announced that I could not use a pen in the presence of the Monets. It is true, I don’t like the Monets, if only because they have been so thoroughly absorbed—along with lavender, scones, and “pictures of babies and young lambs”—into middle-class notions of coziness. I wanted to protest that I don’t hate them enough to stab them with my felt-tip pen, but I obediently traded it in for one of the stubby No. 2 pencils available at a nearby desk. At this point, the interview seemed to have gotten completely out of control: Seligman was the psychologist; I was the mental patient, deprived of sharp objects.

I plowed ahead, focusing now on the “Authentic Happiness Inventory,” a test available on one of his Web sites ( [http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu] http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu). I had scored a less-than-jubilant 3.67 out of 5, and one of the questions that had pulled down my score asked the test taker to choose between “A. I am ashamed of myself” and “E. I am extraordinarily proud of myself.” I am neither of these, and since we’d been talking about virtues, it seemed fair to ask: “Isn’t pride a sin?” He answered that “it may be bad, but it has a high predictive value.” Predictive of what—health? “The research is not fine-grained enough to say that pride predicts health.” Frustrated and by now utterly baffled, I moved on to another question that had hurt my score, where I had confessed to being “pessimistic about the future,” assuming that it was the future of our species at issue, not just my own. Now, in the museum,
I mentioned the possibilities of specieswide disasters like extinction or barbarism, but he just looked at me intently and said that, if I could “learn” optimism, as in his earlier book
Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life,
which shows the reader how to reprogram his or her thoughts in a more optimistic direction, my productivity as a writer would soar.

Only when we returned to his office, away from the mood-elevating Monets, did things take a nasty turn. Going back to his Authentic Happiness Inventory, I remarked that many of the questions seemed a bit arbitrary, leading him to snap, “That’s a cheap shot and shows your failure to understand test development. It doesn’t matter what the questions are so long as they have predictive value. It could be a question about butterscotch ice cream and whether you like it. The issue is how well it predicts.” Well, no. First you come up with a test that seems to measure happiness as generally defined, and then you can look for things that happiness seems to correlate with, such as liking butterscotch ice cream. But you cannot fold the ice cream into the definition of happiness itself.

Instead of saying this, I moved on to one of the most irritatingly pseudoscientific assertions in his book, the “happiness equation,” which he introduces with the coy promise that it “is the only equation I ask you to consider,” as if positive psychology rests on whole thickets of equations from which the reader will mercifully be spared.
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The equation is:

H = S + C + V

H is “your enduring level of happiness, S is your set range, C is the circumstances of your life, and V represents factors under your voluntary control,” such as, for example, whether you engage in “optimism training” to suppress negative or pessimistic thoughts. I understand what he is trying to say: that a person’s
happiness is determined in some way by his or her innate disposition (S), immediate circumstances (C), like a recent job loss or bereavement, and by the efforts (V) that the person makes to improve his or her outlook. This could be stated unobjectionably as:

H = f(S, C, V)

Or, in words: H is a function of S, C, V, where the exact nature of that function is yet to be determined. But to express it as an equation is to invite ridicule. I asked the question that would occur to any first-year physics student: “What are the units of measurement?” Because if you’re going to add these things up you will have to have the same units for H (happy thoughts per day?) as for V, S, and C. “Well, you’d need some constant in front of each,” he said, and when I pressed on, he responded that “C is going to decompose into twenty different things, like religion and marriage,” referring to the fact that positive psychologists have found that married and religious people are likely to be happier than single and skeptical people. So how, I ask, do you boil C into a single number? Again, his face twisted into a scowl, and he told me that I didn’t understand “beta weighting” and should go home and Google it.

So, just to be sure, I did, finding that “beta weights” are the coefficients of the “predictors” in a regression equation used to find statistical correlations between variables. But Seligman had presented his formula as an ordinary equation, like E = mc2, not as an oversimplified regression analysis, leaving himself open to literal-minded questions like: How do we know H is a simple sum of the variables, rather than some more complicated relationship, possibly involving “second order” effects such as CV, or C times V? But clearly Seligman wanted an equation, because equations add
a veneer of science, and he wanted it quickly, so he fell back on simple addition. No doubt equations make a book look weightier and full of mathematical rigor, but this one also makes Seligman look like the Wizard of Oz.

The field of psychology has produced its own critics of positive psychology, none more outspoken than Barbara Held, a professor at Bowdoin College. A striking woman with long black hair and a quick sense of humor, Held wrote her own self-help book, defiantly titled
Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching.
When she was invited to speak on a panel at the International Positive Psychology Summit in 2003, she arrived with T-shirts picturing a smiley face with a cancel sign through it and offered them to both Seligman and Diener. One of her major complaints centers on positive psychology’s approval of “positive illusions” as a means to happiness and well-being. She quotes Seligman: “It is not the job of Positive Psychology to tell you that you should be optimistic, or spiritual, or kind or good-humored; it is rather to describe the consequences of these traits (for physical health, and higher achievement,
at a cost perhaps of less realism
)” (italics added).
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If, as she writes, “positive psychologists of all stripes tout their dedication to rigorous science,” how can they be prepared to toss out “realism and objectivity?” She argues that some positive psychologists are employing a “double epistemic standard,” upholding objective and unbiased science while endorsing an “optimistic bias” in everyday life.
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