A Short Course In Scientific Optimism

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Author: Vladimir Georgievich Romek, PhD in Psychology, Head of the Department of Applied Psychology, South Russian University for the Humanities

The system of education and upbringing is often guided by the techniques of "negative reinforcement". Parents and teachers keep a close eye on mistakes that children make, and note these mistakes whenever possible. In addition to all the other disadvantages of this method of upbringing, children develop a habit of noticing the negative in themselves, blaming themselves for the mistakes they have made and blaming themselves for the wrong decisions

Pessimism and helplessness in the sense that Martin Seligman ascribed to these two qualities can be a consequence of the "negative-centered" way of education.

Seligman's optimism theory

Martin Seligman's theory of optimism arose from experiments to study the causes of the formation of "learned helplessness." In the course of these experiments, it was found that even in a very unfavorable environment, some people are very resistant to the transition to a helpless state. They keep the initiative and never stop trying to achieve success.

The quality that provides this ability, Seligman associated with the concept of optimism. He suggested that the optimism acquired in the "struggle with reality" is the reason that temporary insurmountable difficulties do not reduce the motivation to take action. More precisely, they reduce it to a lesser extent than it happens in “pessimistic” persons who are prone to the formation of learned helplessness.

According to Seligman, the essence of optimism is a particular style of explaining the reasons for failure or success.

Optimistic people tend to attribute failure to a coincidence that happens at a certain point in space at a certain point in time. They habitually consider successes as personal merit and tend to view them as something that happens almost always and almost everywhere.

For example, a wife who discovers a long-standing relationship between her husband and her best friend is optimistic if she says to herself: “It happened only a few times, a long time ago, and only because I myself was abroad at that time” (locally time, locally in space and due to circumstances).

Thoughts of the following character can be called pessimistic: “He never loved me and constantly cheated on me on the sly, because it is no coincidence that there are so many pretty young students around him. Yes, and I myself am already old, and it is unlikely that he will love me as much as he was in his youth”(troubles are distributed in time, occur in many points in space, occur because someone himself is not like that).

It is through the style of attribution that the experience of failure is sifted. In the case of optimistic attribution, the significance of this experience is understated; in the case of pessimism, it is exaggerated.

Having thus determined the key characteristics of optimism, Seligman was able to find a very reliable way to assess the degree of inherent optimism in a person by his statements, letters, articles, and also proposed a special test to assess the degree of optimism / pessimism.

This discovery made it possible to conduct a number of interesting experiments that showed the degree of influence of optimism on the political and professional activities of people and on the life of entire countries.

Studies show that optimistic people have a number of advantages: they are more proactive, energetic, less likely to fall into depression, and the results of their activities usually look more impressive. Further, they make a better impression on others and, which is especially important for us, they often enjoy life and are in a good mood, which attracts other people to them.

Table 1. Characteristics of styles of thinking according to M. Seligman

A number of rigorous psychological studies have been aimed at exploring the relationship between optimism and health. As a result, optimistic people live longer, get sick less often, and achieve more in life. Of course, the question of what is the cause and what is the effect remains unresolved. It may be easier for healthy people to remain optimistic.

Experiments by Ellen Langer and Judy Roden made it possible to more accurately define the "line of influence." They worked with older people in a private hospital and had the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of older people. On two different floors, they gave the old people two almost identical instructions, differing only in the degree to which the old people could change anything in the reality around them.

Here is an instruction that gave people the right to choose, the right to determine what is good for them and what is bad: “I want you to learn about everything that you can do yourself here in our clinic. For breakfast, you can choose either omelet or scrambled eggs, but you need to choose in the evening. There will be a movie on Wednesdays or Thursdays, but it will need to be recorded in advance. In the garden, you can choose flowers for your room; you can choose what you want and take it to your room - but you will have to water the flowers yourself."

And here is the instruction, which deprived the elderly of the opportunity to influence, although it implemented the idea of absolute care for them: “I want you to learn about the good deeds that we do for you here in our clinic. For breakfast there are scrambled eggs or scrambled eggs. We cook omelet on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and scrambled eggs on other days. Cinema happens on Wednesday and Thursday nights: on Wednesday - for those who live in the left corridor, on Thursday - for those on the right. Flowers grow in the garden for your rooms. The sister will choose a flower for each and take care of it."

Thus, it turned out that the inhabitants of one of the floors of the nursing home could manage their own lives; choose what is good for them. On the other floor, people received the same benefits, but without the ability to influence them.

Eighteen months later, Langer and Rodin returned to the hospital. They found that the group with the right to choose was more active and happier, judging by the special rating scales. They also found that fewer people died in this group than in the other.

In other words, people become optimists if they have the opportunity to make their own choices in favor of what gives them pleasure and pay attention to their own successes.

Stress and failure are the foundation of success

In the late 80s of the XX century in Germany, under the leadership of Professor J. Brengelmann, a large-scale study of the factors that contributed to the success of German managers was carried out. Initially, it was assumed that stress arising from a variety of factors, including unsuccessful actions and mistakes in business, hinders success, spoils the health of the manager and slows down the development of the enterprise.

This turned out to be only part of the truth. The stress of failure did interfere with success, but only if failure was taken personally and served as an excuse to quit.

Failures became factors of success if the manager knew how to view failures as a reason for innovation, knew how to reformulate failures into new plans.

Moreover, German researchers have found that business success is often directly related to stress levels, that stability often means the beginning of an inevitable loss of the enterprise in the competition. The impression was that successful managers were looking for stress, which, when reformulated into a task, gave them a reason to enjoy new successes.

Probably not the best option would be to completely ignore failures and difficulties. Moreover, the very failures and difficulties can become a source of pleasure if we learn to reformulate them into new achievable goals and tasks to be solved.

Errors and failures become factors of success if one can derive from them a simple and feasible rule for the future or a feasible task.

Self-reinforcement (as well as self-control) is a method that is widely used in the framework of cognitive behavioral psychotherapy. Some researchers consider self-reinforcement to be an even more effective procedure than reinforcement from the psychotherapist or the world around the client. As the name implies, the essence of the method is that a person himself gives himself positive or negative reinforcement every time he manages to achieve some goal or solve a life task.

Positive development assessment

There are two fundamentally different ways to measure progress towards personal goals. The difference lies primarily in the emotions that these methods usually generate.

Usually, people set themselves long and difficult goals, choose the ideal state or image for them, and begin to make efforts to achieve this image or state. Of course, at every step they reveal a significant difference between themselves and the ideal. Since the difference will not be for the better, people will become upset and their enthusiasm will gradually fade away. But even if this does not happen, then the very process of achieving an ideal goal will become an unpleasant and energy-consuming process.

This method of assessing the process and the result of development is extremely ineffective, but very widespread in modern society. We see its origins in the "punitive" style of education and management.

The second method is less common in everyday life, but is very widely used in behavioral psychotherapy. It is based on capturing and reinforcing all changes in the direction of the ideal goal that have occurred since the last assessment. A person is compared not with an ideal, but with himself, as he was yesterday.

With this approach, even minimal efforts and changes become a reason to conclude that movement towards the final goal is already taking place and to rejoice at this. In other words, during such a procedure attention is drawn to any positive changes in themselves and in those around them, regardless of the degree and size of these changes.