Book Review: Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
April 18, 2009 by Chris Duran
Filed under Blog, Choice Theory, Healthy Living, Mental Attitude, Positivity, Power of the mind, Reviews
Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
Optimism is the key ingredient to living a happy and successful life. Or at least, so Martin Seligman says. This message is the ever-present ideal underlying the content of his book entitled Learned Optimism
The book starts out with an example to ‘break the ice’ and get us to see how people can view the same event in vastly different ways. The example given is that of a young couple with their new-born baby. The baby isn’t responding to stimulus and the father duly freaks out, assuming the worst and acting in a manner that I imagine was very similar to how Paris Hilton reacted when told her inheritance had been put out to pasture. The mother on the other hand, acts in a calm and reasonable way with a level of diplomacy that I imagine would put Barrack Obama to shame.
Admittedly the example given is rather contrived, but the point is taken: two different people will view the SAME event in two different ways. This way of explaining how we view the world is labelled our explanatory style and sets the focus for the rest of the book.
I should mention here that the book is split into three different sections with some clever names. The first section in called “The Quest”, the second section “Realms of Life” and the third section “Changing: from pessimism to optimism”.
To give you a further idea on how the book is structured, we can draw up a little chart which shows some alternative titles we might give these sections.
| Actual Title | Alternative Title |
| The Quest | Hypothesis |
| Realms of Life | Observations |
| Changing: from pessimism to optimism | Actions |
You will notice that the second column of translations I’ve given looks like a high-school science report outline. This is for good reason. You see, Martin Seligman is a scientist – a psychologist to be precise – and this book is outlined similar to many an academic text. Thankfully, unlike much academic writing (which is historically as boring as your work colleague excitingly exhibiting every trivial feature of his iPhone over lunch for the 37th time this week), this book is written in clear and easy-to-read prose that is thankfully free of heavy terminology and scientific jargon. Concepts are explained clear and simply with much use of example and analogy.
Oh, and you get to do quizzes!
Lets check out what is on offer in the various sections of our scientific report turned novel, starting from the cream.
Section 1 – The Quest
This first section, better known since two paragraphs ago as the “Hypothesis” section, covers the early days of Seligman’s research career and the formation of his interest in ‘Positive Psychology’.
Seligman believes that whenever somebody suffers a setback in life, they experience a state of helplessness. The permanency of this state is dependant on the explanatory style of the sufferer. If they have an optimistic explanatory style, this state of helplessness is rather temporary. Negative people who exhibit a pessimistic explanatory style however, tend to stay in this helpless state for quite a while longer. This leads to a condition known as ‘learned helplessness’ which is where the subject learns that helplessness (learned helplessness) cannot be overcome, leading to chronic states of helplessness – otherwise known as depression.
The above point is taken further. As I just mentioned, Seligman believes that somebody who constantly views the world in a negative way will slow down and fall into a unproductive state of helplessness. He also believes that somebody with a positive mindset will achieve more, be more successful and be happier then their neutrally or negatively aligned peers. In other words, he believes that positivity is a driving force behind success and happiness.
He also believes it can be scientifically measured.
And that is exactly what the second part of this section is all about. It is a historical abridgement of Seligman’s (and subsequently Seligman’s researchers) research results for his studies in learned helplessness and the effects. It covers the initial studies he undertook on in the conditioning of dogs. He successfully showed that you can train a state of learned helplessness in dogs. By doing so, these dogs learn that their actions had no effect on changing their situation in the environment around them and would cease trying to improve their current predicament. For example, if a dog learnt that anything they did had no effect, they would not try to escape an unpleasant experience such as a mild electric shock. Dogs that hadn’t been conditioned in such as way would try to get away immediately!
If you think about it, this is very much the same way that a pessimistic person vs an optimistic person works. When faced with a negative event or situation in life (such as working a job they hate), a pessimistic person will accept the situation with bitter defeat. Whereas the optimistic person will work on ways that they can improve or change their current situation.
This is common sense.
What the dog study showed however was an indication of something much more important. It showed that the level of pessimism (helplessness) and optimism (pro-activeness) could be influenced and changed.
One question remained: Could this changing (or learning) of optimism that had been observed in animals be translated to humans?
It turns out it can be, and very effectively!
As I mentioned, you have to opportunity to do quizzes in this book, and that is what the final part of the first section contains. I won’t tell you exactly how the quizzes work as this may bias your results, but I will say that there is a number of quizzes in this section and they are all designed to allow you to effectively measure how optimistically you currently perceive the world. It provides measurements covering the major aspects of your explanatory style giving you a detailed indication of your current optimism levels. This part of the book is incredibly interesting and I strongly suggest that you put 10-15 minutes aside and do this quiz! The results are really interesting to see and I think they may surprise you.
Tell you what, I’ll share my results.
I was pretty confident when I took the quiz that I was going to ‘ace’ it. I thought of myself as a really optimistic person and thought that if I sent my soon to be amazing results to Seligman he would try to bottle my optimism and sell it at the markets… turns out I was in for a surprise! The quiz showed me that I do generally view bad events in my life in an optimistic manner, although not to the level that I imagined. And indeed, I do see negative events as temporary set backs that aren’t a reflection of my personal ability. However, the quiz drew to my attention that I tend to view good events in my life in a neutral to mildly pessimistic fashion – I tended to view my good fortune as just that, fortune. Truly optimistic people tend to attribute good events to their personal ability and work.
In the analysis of the quiz, there is a section that is pretty reminiscent of the old ‘choose your own adventure’ books that were pretty prevalent in the 80s and 90s. Depending on the results you get in your quiz, Seligman suggests which chapters and sections you should concentrate on. Should you get some extreme results, he might even recommend that you seek professional help!
Section 2 – Realms of Life
The second section of this book is the ‘Observations’ section. By this stage we’ve seen that Martin has nutted out a pretty comprehensive theory on how optimism has an effect on our mood and behaviour. He has also constructed a fairly solid methodology on how our levels of optimism can be measured. This section covers a bunch of case studies that show exactly how pervasive the effects of our positive or negative mindset is to the many facets of our lives.
I have to admit that I found the structure of this section a little repetitive (the first half at least, see the bit on physical health below). Seligman goes over case studies in a number of different facets. He looks at the effect of optimism in career building, relationships, professional sports and even politics. What he does is measure the levels of optimism of a number of individuals in a particular organisation, group, team, etc. He then observed the relative success that the individuals have in the particular area of interest for that chapter. The net effect is that he observes time and time again that the optimistic individuals tend to have greater productivity, are generally much more satisfied, less stressed and achieve greater success in the studied realm of the life.
Although a little dry in parts, this section is important for the sake of completeness as it is the proof in the pudding, the final cog in the wheel, the final piece of the puzzle or some other analogy that means it is the bit that really drives home the significance of all the discussions in the first section of the book.
The second part of this section looks at the effect of our mental state on our physical health. As much as I found the first part of this section a little dull, I found this second part extremely interesting. He covers some really strong correlations between optimism and a higher standard of health. In fact, he finds that optimism increases the standards of life in four different ways;
- Optimism boosts the immune system,
- optimistic people tend to stick to health regimes and therapy,
- optimists experience less bad events leading to less stress and illness
- and finally optimists have a more comprehensive level of social support.
He gives examples and reasoning behind all of this points and makes fascinating reading.
Section 3 – Changing: from pessimism to optimism
This is the final section, and arguably the most important. In fact, you would be forgiven for thinking that the first two sections merely exist to introduce this part. The final section strives to present a suite of methods or tools that people can use to start changing their explanatory style from a pessimistic outlook to an optimistic one.
It does this by encouraging the reader to keep a log of the adversities they face in life. The idea is to do this for all adversity across the scale – from minor events such as finding a cracked plate in the washing up to that of finding out that your fourteen year old daughter has stolen your car and gone on a road trip to Sydney. I don’t have a daughter, but if I did and she did that I imagine I would think it was a pretty big deal!
For each adversity you are encouraged to records your ABCDE’s:
- Adversity
- Beliefs
- Consequences
- Disputation
- Energisation
Without going in to too much detail, ABC is the first step and DE is the second step. For the ABC step, we record the event that has happened. Then we record our beliefs of what has happened. This is our thoughts, not our feelings. Finally we record the consequences of this event and beliefs, which is how it makes us feel – our feelings on the matter. Secondly, for the DE step, we dispute the event and thought patterns using the techniques explained in the book. Then, we record how this successful dispution makes us feel.
The final few chapters cover how these methods can be extended to improve the optimistic attitude for your family and your working organisations.
Final thoughts
I thought that overall the book was very well written and gave an excellent overview of how optimism can be introduced into our lives.
For an academic book, it is a pleasure to read and gives a comprehensive overview of the theories underpinning learned optimism and has a strong suite of case studies to support the research within.
The second section is quite dull compared to the first and third sections, both of which I found very captivating and hard to put down. I really struggled to get through the second section – but your milage may vary!
The best part about the book I feel is that it wasn’t just descriptive in nature – it gives a definite and sound set of tools to both help you identify your current levels of optimism and to assist you in changing your life outlook for a more fulfilling and successful life.