[Music] welcome to the psychology podcast where we give you insights into the mind brain behavior and creativity i'm dr scott barry kaufman and in each episode i have a conversation with a guest who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself others and the world we live in hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast today it's great to have dr martin selgman on the podcast dr seligman is director of the pen positive psychology center the zellerbach foundly professor of psychology in the penn
department of psychology and director of the penn master of applied positive psychology program commonly known as the founder of positive psychology dr seligman is a leading authority in the fields of positive psychology resilience learned helplessness depression optimism and pessimism he is also a recognized authority on interventions that prevent depression and that builds strengths and well-being he has written more than 250 scholarly publications and 20 books including flourish authentic happiness learned optimism character strengths and virtues which was co-authored with chris peterson and his autobiography the hope circuit a psychologist's journey from helplessness to optimism dr selgman
what an honor it is to chat with you today hey scott it's good to see you again i think it's been about two years since i saw you left and it's a pleasure to be your guest here yeah it's been a moment as they say well let me ask you what are some of the things you are most excited about that you've worked on in the past few years well i've been struggling to write a book on agency across all of human history so when i looked over my work it was basically about the effect
that human beings by exerting voluntary action could have on the world and it occurred to me that this might vary across time and culture and particularly there are lots of times in human history which are stagnant in which really nothing happens medieval apologists notwithstanding 400 a.d to about 1400 a.d is a time in the west of great stagnation and then starting around 1500 a.d uh we have enormous human progress which accelerates uh through the industrial revolution and is still accelerating so i started to wonder if what could be driving this was different beliefs about human
agency and so i've tried to look at words concepts philosophical beliefs and i'm trying to write on the notion going back to hunter-gatherers through the uh bronze age through the hellenic concepts through christianity and judaism about agency and it's waxing and waning but the basic hypothesis is when human beings don't believe in free will and agency there's no human progress when human beings do believe in free will and an agency that's when human progress occurs so i've been struggling with this book my eldest daughter is a historian and uh i sent her a 60 page
outline of it and she said it was hopeless that i no knew i know knew i knew no history and it was time i learned some and so she assigned me to read the nine volume 10 000 page cambridge history of the world which basically talks about uh agency at least subtly across time and space so i'm on volume three now that's so interesting well agency so whether or not we actually have free will it's the belief in free will is that right do you think we actually have free will so this is not about
whether or not we actually have free will although i happen to believe we do this is about the belief in free will so the belief itself is a driver and so when augustine comes along in the fourth century and says uh that pelagius is a heretic and that human beings cannot choose uh good or evil it's all of god's grace a gift from god that becomes a christian doctrine for almost a thousand years and it coincides with almost no material progress and then starting around 1500 uh catholicism begins to change its view erasmus pico argue
that human beings can participate in their own grace that we're like toddlers but when we fall down god lifts us up but we have to have motive power of our own and that's when we see human progress beginning again in the west but it's stymied by the reformation the reformation contrary to what protestants are talked about today is calvin and luther's revolt from erasmus claiming that we have no free will at all and a lot of the burning of the stake in the battle from uh 1525 to about 1700 is over this issue of free
will and it's uh the dutch and the liberal catholics who believe in it uh the calvinists uh the lutherans deny it people are burnt at the stake over it but basically the the dutch protestants win and we get methodism and modern protestantism which is a very strongly believes in human efficacy and will so that's that's more than that's more than you want to know about what i'm working on now no it's it's very interesting and it's a lot i didn't know about and you know i try to look it through threads of your own research
and i think about your original work in grad school and learned helplessness and how far you've come from that research so far that you argue recently that you got it backwards is that right yeah yeah but importantly learned helplessness was about human efficacy and not having human efficacy and indeed its agency is the red thread that's run through my work importantly steve mayer has convinced me that we were wrong in our characterization of animals and humans in the original helplessness experiments so what we believed was that rats dogs and people when they had inescapable events
learned that nothing they did mattered and that's why they did so badly uh mayer has convincing data that the dorsal refae nucleus little 50 000 cell structure in rats 150 000 cell structure in human beings is the default activity when we face aversive events and that the default is helplessness helplessness is unlearned but what we learn is that we can do something and what makes uh human beings very special is we have a frontal cortex which is all all about learning hope learning that what we do matters learning that the future can be better than
the past so we had it backwards the the action is in learning that you can do something and if steve is right the default condition of mammals when bad things happen is to curl up and be helpless were they dogs that you originally did your research on were they dogs or rats the very first experiments were dogs but very soon uh became rats mice cats and most importantly the human helplessness work started about three years after the first work in animals i was worried in the animal research that it was some artifact about rats or
dogs but it turns out to be uh highly replicable uh across every mammalian species has been tried in if they had a more developed proof on the cortex some of your original conclusions might have been different all mammals as far as i understand have some prefrontal cortex um but what humans have is massive prefrontal cortex and a prefrontal cortex that's affected by words by and so that makes a big difference we can learn hope not just by uh doing things that succeed we can be taught about hope we can culturally accrue hope so you know
since you went from learned helplessness to learned hope hopefulness that's the way i would characterize uh first my own life yeah and that's what the hope circuit is about secondly uh psychology as a whole so when i started in psychology it was all about fear conflict struggle competition and uh i was part of a movement that changed it to be also about meaning control love engagement uh accomplishment success and hope and the third thing that happened in my lifetime was the world got better so my life changed for the better psychology changed to include uh
positive topics uh and this was legitimized by massive changes in human progress hey everyone if you find the themes we cover on the psychology podcast interesting and enlightening you might be interested in my new book transcend the new science of self-actualization the book is the culmination of my journey to scientifically discover the factors that can lead us to optimal health growth creativity peak experiences and deep fulfillment i believe we can still manage to have peak experiences the most wondrous moments that make life worth living regardless of our current life circumstances we can choose growth for
more you can visit transcend hyphen book dot com that's transcend hyphen book dot com with a hyphen between the word transcend and the word book if you get a chance to read the book it'd be great if you could leave a review on amazon tweet about it or share the book with friends i truly hope this book can help people get through these tough times and realize that we all have greater resiliency creativity and potential within us than we ever realized okay now back to the show well so i want to go back a second
here so when you're at your age 30 and you have this dream that changes the trajectory of your career and what you decide you want to do can you talk a little about that dream and how that impacted you i'll give you one quote from that dream why is everyone playing with cards yeah so i've always paid attention to dreams in fact i think the best paper i ever wrote is a theory of dreaming that almost no one has ever read in the early 1970s i had become a professor young professor at the university of
pennsylvania and the work on learned helplessness in uh animals and humans was becoming well known and my mentor was a a middle-aged psychiatrist named aaron beck and he and i would have lunch um about once a month we still do uh beck is now 98 years old i'm 77 and we still have great lunches we're doing them now on uh google meet and zoom and so we met for lunch at kellyanne cones and uh tim who's ordinarily a very gentle person said to me marty if you continue doing what you're doing you're going to waste
your life and i choked on my grilled reuben and thought that tim must be wrong but a few months later i had a one a dream that one would call a numinous dream a very salient dream in which i was walking up the ramp at the guggenheim museum and on my right there were rooms and in the rooms people were playing with cards and i asked the question why is everyone playing with cards whereupon the roof of the guggenheim opened and the godhead appeared and you'll be interested to know scott that that god is a
elderly male with a white beard and a booming voice and what god said very loudly to me in this dream was well seligman at least you're starting to ask the right questions and that coincided with what beck had said and it told me the time had come to change my research from animal models of psychopathology to what i now do human research longitudinal research research not only on the bad stuff that cripples life but research on what uh builds life as well what makes life worth living when i look back the dream and the uh
choking on my grilled reuben with tim beck were turning points in my research i was about 30 years old at the time wow that's that's that's historic well you started working on optimism before you founded positive psychology now what was this what was the research why did you get interested in optimism how'd that happen well i thought i was working on pessimism so i'll tell you the story of how it happened in our helplessness experiments both in animals and people we found that only about two-thirds uh who got inescapable events uh unsolvable problems inescapable shock
uh inescapable noise only about two-thirds became helpless and the other one-third of people and animals didn't become helpless so i began to wonder what was it about some people that made them so resilient and so resistant to depression and to becoming helpless so we did about 10 years of research on this question and we basically found that it was optimism that people who believed that when bad events occurred to them the bad events were transient they're temporary the bad events were local just as one situation the bad events were controllable these were the optimists and
these were the people who we could not make helpless easily in the laboratory conversely of people who came to the laboratory with the belief that when bad events occur they're permanent they're pervasive and there's nothing they can do about them where the people became helpless at the drop of a hat so the story was that pessimists become helpless easily they get depressed at about twice the rate of optimistic people and optimists uh are resilient when bad events occur uh they recover and they don't become helpless in laboratory easily at all wow that must have been
quite a quite a stark contrast from the learned helplessness research just it's just as a human being to hear these these uh dogs yelling and in pain that must have been hard for you right as an experimenter and hearing all that the suffering of those animals no yeah i'm i'm a dog lover and it's very difficult experiments to do i found myself in a laboratory at age 21 that was doing shock experiments with dogs and as soon as i could get out of it i stopped doing experiments with dogs did experiments with rats for a
while also difficult to do much easier to do experiments with people so the 90s we're in the 90s now and you decide i'm going to run for president of apa the american psychological association and people told you forget about it candidates are already lined up in vance the order of succession is already designated why did you decide to run for apa president why persevere when people told you that well i in about 1993 consumer reports contacted me and said they were going to do they usually do studies of washing machines and automobiles and get consumer
ratings of them they said they wanted to do psychotherapy and they asked me if i would become their main consultant for consumer reports study of whether or not people thought uh psychotherapy was effective now i had been a psychotherapy researcher both drugs and psychotherapy but i uh was involved in doing uh small essentially uh laboratory and clinical studies of cognitive therapy and the like uh but this was an opportunity to send a questionnaire out to a hundred thousand people uh many of whom had psychotherapy and asked them to rate it and so we got back
uh tens of thousands of responses and analyzed them and i was shocked by the results they're completely different from the results we found in uh uh essentially uh outcome studies of psychotherapy uh the first big difference was that 80 to 90 percent of people in the consumer report study thought that psychotherapy was very effective for them whereas in the uh laboratory research on psychotherapy uh only about 60 of people are affected uh markedly against the 40 placebo rate generally the first thing we found that people like psychotherapy much more than laboratory told us they did
the second big difference was that with clinical outcome studies there's high specificity so flooding works well on obsessive complex obsessive compulsive disorders exposure works well on therapy cognitive behavior therapy works well on depression but in the consumer report study everything worked about equally well so once we had those results and published them it occurred to me that these were results that would be very important to the main constituency of the american psychological association and indeed i decided to run for president based on the consumer reports results and in spite of the fact that everyone told
me i couldn't possibly win that uh the next three presidents had been designated by the people who ran apa i won by the largest margin in uh modern history and it's not like you went into that saying i'm going to create a new field that revolutionizes psychology and creates all these things at what point did you think well i'm going to make this my platform positive psychology didn't have something to do with your daughter nikki well it wasn't my platform going in but it was going out basically i found myself asking the question what what
did what was missing in psychology and what was present and something psychology could could be proud of was that psychotherapy actually worked that it helped a good number of people and it was well liked but what psychology was missing was what makes life worth living psychology was all about what what cripples life and trying to get rid of the things that crippled life but i think the belief that the best we can ever do in life which is what freud told us in chopin hour is not to be miserable uh that that belief is empirically
false morally insidious and a personal and political dead end and so i began to think about the question of could there be an effective psychology of the good life of what makes life worth living not just getting rid of what cripples life and so that became the driving force for my next uh 20 years of work i see and then when was this this gardening incident that you talk about with nikki oh that was a emblematic turning point that occurred in uh i think about 1996 i had just become president-elect-elect and was wondering uh what
my theme might be and uh nikki had turned five years old nikki by the way is just getting her phd from fordham now in clinical psychology so she's gone into the family business in some ways nikki had just turned five and we were gardening together and nikki was throwing weeds in the air and dancing and singing and having a great time and i'm a worker bee and i shouted at her and i said get to work nikki and she looked at me and she walked away and she came back and she said daddy can can
i talk to you and i said sure he said daddy uh do you remember um i was my fifth birthday was about two weeks ago so this must have been in early september of 1996. i would have to guess then from that counting backwards um uh do you remember before my fifth birthday that i was a whiner that i whined all the time and i said yeah i said well have you noticed in the last two weeks i haven't whined once and i said yeah yeah you've really been a pleasure he said well daddy i
i decided on my fifth birthday that i wasn't gonna whine anymore and uh that was the hardest thing i've ever done and it succeeded and if i can stop whining you can stop being such a grouch and indeed that was the emblematic inspiration for me of founding a movement which was not about what was wrong but a movement about what was right in life well i want to take the spirit of positive psychology and ask you what are your top character strengths what are your top three character strengths i last time i looked they were
um leadership uh critical intelligence and uh love of a love of beauty bravery might have been up there but i'm not sure but importantly it was uh leadership creativity uh critical intelligence and love of beauty yeah i would i would after spending four years with you i i'd say that makes a lot of sense you often got touched by by uh beautiful things even just listening to classical music i know really grabs you bad day today i haven't listened to any music i think when this is done i'll go for a walk and listen to
music you should you should i highly recommend it well so positive psychology right now a lot of people in the age of this chronovirus uncertainty what can positive psychology offer people this is partly why i reached out to you to have i have you on my podcast because i heard you do this thing for the mapsters with aaron beck and what you said inspired me so i want you to be able to inspire the thousand thousands of people listening to you right now as well well i i have some a pretty firm hypothesis about uh
what positive psychology says both about what you should do during the pandemic and then the way out what you you should do after so the background for this is uh to split different aspects of positive psychology so i'm going to split here between positive emotion which is being cheerful merry having fun and smiling a lot having a good time and optimism which is not a feeling state optimism is a belief about the future a belief that the future will be better now let's take a look at what we know about the effects of those two
different aspects of positive psychology well on the first positive emotion and the jargon here is positive affectivity that is there are some people who are highly positively affective uh scott and i are not among them uh these are people who smile a lot who are merry uh who laugh a lot uh and have a good time sheldon cohn decided about 15 years ago to ask the question about the relationship of positive affectivity and of optimism uh to viral infection and he did he used three different kinds of uh rhinoviruses i think two of them are
coronaviruses if i'm not mistaken and he took i think a couple hundred volunteers paid them 300 a piece and squirted rhinoviruses into their nose and asked who got a bad cold and who didn't and how long did the cold last and interestingly the main variable that worked was positive affectivity people who were high positive affect who smiled a lot laughed or married people uh got shorter colds and a less severe colds and he measured this by the way by the weight of the weight of the mucus so this is not self-report uh interestingly optimism had
no effect so optimistic people uh got colds at the same rate as pessimistic people so the first lesson from sheldon cohn is that if you want to avoid the effect the infection during the pandemic the hypothesis is you sh as hard as it sounds you should have a lot of fun we bought a puppy for example listening to music having sex having good food do finding all the things that give you joy and make you smile so that's part one if i had to make a guess the formulation from positive psychology have as much fun
as you possibly can during this difficult time then the question is this pandemic will wane it's probably the first wave that is probably waning now in the united states and then the question is um who will recover who will lead us what kind of personality is needed uh uh for resilience and the answer there is not merry smiling laughing people it's people with hope and optimism so the massive literature on optimism says these are the people who rebuild so scott the the underlying lesson here is during the pandemic have as much fun as you possibly
can as difficult as it sounds but as the pandemic wanes it's optimism and hope that's going to matter i'd like to take a moment to talk about our sponsor betterhelp is there something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals for quite a lot of us right now during this coronavirus pandemic we are struggling with our most fundamental basic needs such as our needs for security connection and opportunities to master our work i think all of us could use some therapy right now i know i sure could which is why i've really
been enjoying working with a professional therapist at betterhelp so i can realize the best version of myself even under the current circumstances betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist and you can start communicating with your therapist in just under 24 hours note that it's not a crisis line and it's not self-help it is professional counseling done securely online there is a broad range of expertise available which may not be locally available in many areas in fact the service is available for clients worldwide what i really like about betterhelp
is that you can log into your account anytime and send a message to your counselor you'll get timely and thoughtful responses plus you can schedule weekly video or phone sessions so you won't ever have to sit in an uncomfortable waiting room as you typically have to deal with traditional therapy betterhelp is really committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed it's more affordable than traditional offline counseling and financial aid is available betterhelp wants you to start living a happier life today visit their website and read
the testimonials that are posted daily here's a recent one for example camilla helped me turn my life around everything has been so positive for me since our first session deep gratitude i'm pleased to announce a special offer for listeners of the psychology podcast you can get 10 percent off your first month of professional counseling by going to betterhelp.com forward slash psycpodcast that's better h e l p forward slash psych podcast join the over 800 000 people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional okay now back to the show you've
criticized this happy ology of positive psychology but you're saying let's allow ourselves let's give ourselves permission to have some happy ology right now this is the very first time i've ever endorsed the smiley face so as you know whenever i speak to journalists about positive psychology the first thing i say is don't put the smiley face on the cover well i think the smiley face matters right now i agreed so you made that you made a comment and maybe i misunderstood you said me and you are not the uh the smiley uh have fun kind
of got people is that right i'm low positive effective uh and i have to go out of my way listen listening to meatloaf having a puppy cooking good food gardening during the pandemic so i'm a massively uh trying as hard as it is uh to have fun during the pandemic some people have fun more easily than i do uh but that's what i'm working on i've i've uh even been dancing a little that's awesome yeah and so is your perception your perception of me as well positive affective as well yeah so i i i've always
seen you as a sort of like me basically glum and that we had to work at positive aff activity am i wrong about you i think so i think you are wrong about me maybe we've never partied together no no i've partied with almost none of my students and post docs and coworkers ever so you're you're you must have taken some of the positive affectivity tests how do you come out i'm pretty high i'm pretty high in positive affect but but i want to just comment on something i noted about you because i i think
that you know your your personality has changed you i mean you know throughout your whole course your whole life but i can only speak the past four years or so i mean i think i would almost characterize you these days as naturally positive affect you you don't you know i don't know if you you if you think that you've had quite a transformation over the years but my own perception of you is your default state now is quite seems quite friendly and positive affect i've measured it over the years both optimism and positive affect and
you're right so i've gone from being pessimistic and negatively affected to being quite optimistic and not particularly negatively affective anymore so i am better at having fun than i used to be so i think that it'd be helpful in this kind of rest of this conversation talk a little about what are some critiques of positive psychology that you've addressed you know you've talked about strong criticisms and weak criticisms what's a strong criticism of the field that uh people have leveled against a positive psychology well i think the best criticism is that it uh it positive
psychology says that it's in the head and uh the best criticism is that a good world is not in people's head a good world is in the world and that if we want to allocate money uh to make people happier it's not doing positive psychology things it's rather more income and like and so that's a good criticism and the answer to it is interestingly that more and more income both for individuals and for nations uh asymptotes uh quickly and that in the united states at between 80 and 100 000 a year increases in income don't
produce increases in life satisfaction so that's a good criticism and i think the answer to it is that below the safety net what we really want to care about is increasing people's income and the world above the safety net more and more we want to ask the question of perma engagement good relationships meaning and accomplishment rather than more money so that's uh the best critique i know uh the second good critique which i think really is insidious and false but it's uh catchy is that happy people don't care about the world that happy people are
blithe and they're they care about themselves and uh barbara this is basically barbara ehrenreich's main critique of positive psychology that happy we don't want to make people happy we want to make them realistic rather than happy and the answer to that is there are quite a few studies now of uh altruism uh who volunteers who contributes money uh who works hard for other people and uh the strong weight of that evidence is that it's happy people depressed people turn inward uh they tend to be less altruistic they tend not to volunteer and uh you know
almost all of your listeners who have been depressed at one time or another another when you're depressed you turn you turn to yourself and you're you become number one um and so this second criticism that uh making people happy will make them bad citizens is 180 degrees wrong so those are those are my two favorite criticisms what's your favorite criticism my favorite is that the field ignores suffering so maybe it went in the opposite direction and trying to correct the record that the food focused too much in suffering but it it ignores those at the
very the most vulnerable in our society those in the lower um rungs that that really just want their most basic needs met how do you respond to that yeah i agree with that and by definition the field came out of clinical psychology and 30 years of my life had to do with the relief of suffering so i take relief of suffering very seriously but the field by definition is not about the relief of suffering it's not about removing what cripples life and i definitely think we should be doing that uh positive psychology is not a
replacement for clinical psychology or or for negative psychology but rather positive psychology says in addition to caring about relief of suffering let's ask the question what builds the good life and part of that is certainly removing suffering and that's what psychology has traditionally done positive psychology says in addition we need to ask about more than just the relief of suffering right what do you think of humanistic psychology you knew i was going to ask you that question it hasn't played much of a role in my life so um when i was an undergraduate i read
from and i remember meeting al ellis and uh uh then i went through laboratory psychology and clinical psychology and uh in the invention of positive psychology i was reminded of humanistic psychology uh but hadn't read much of it so most of the humanistic psychology i read was kind of uh in response to the critique of humanists uh humanistic psychologies of positive psychology which basically just said it was uh old wine and new bottles i went back and read more and more maslow and rodgers and the like and i liked them a lot i think the
difference between positive psychology and humanistic psychology is that it's more rigorous and so positive psychology for me arose out of uh laboratory and longitudinal experimental and social psychology and it would have been dishonest of me to cite humanistic psychology since that played almost no role and i was pretty much ignorant of it in the founding of positive psychology but in retrospect um maslow and rogers were deeply on to very much the same thing long before i was but they weren't scientists essentially uh and i guess we added seven point scales and laboratory experiments and rigor
to many of the premises that uh maslow uh began with that's a very fair answer and as i assume you didn't you didn't read a lot of maslow then in the 50s and 60s yeah by the way you did a great job in in your book of uh characterizing maslow's life and i found i i just learned a lot more about maslow from your book thank you i appreciate that i'm trying to i'm trying to put some of those ideas on a firm scientific foundation so i really appreciate that and there's no reason for uh
for for human modern day humanistic psychologists and positive psychologists not work together on a scientific foundation there's no reason why we can't work together i love it i agree completely i think it's a historic accident partly due to my own ignorance but also partly due to the insularity and the strained scientific methods that some of the humanistic psychologies uh advocated that the two disciplines were so far apart yeah i agree i agree there's a lot of a lot of just words you know put forth their beautiful words beautiful words you know like in the art
of loving eric from the art of living is a beautiful book but there's no not a lot of scientific rigor in it so i'm trying to resurrect it and put some of that on a scientific foundation so would you say that you are a natural in psychology in the sense because you play bridge as well is that right can you compare and contrast your bridge talent to your psychology talent i can answer that pretty definitively since i spend about half my time playing bridge in about half my time doing psychology doing psychology is easy for
me the cards just fly off my hands you know when i hear you talking about creativity i really understand what you're saying and i can often see to the bottom of it uh psychological questions uh become not are naturals for me uh playing bridge however is labor i have to sit there and sweat and reason it out and calculate probabilities whereas some of the great partners i play with in bridge the cards just fly off their hands they just know what the right move is without being able to explain it so in bridge there are
clearly naturals and i've been privileged to partner quite a few of them and then there are students like me for whom it's sweat in psychology i'm a natural i love it it's easy but many of my students are students it's hard for them so that's the distinction that i think is a real one by the way it's not about not about success so in bridge uh some of the students who sweated out are just as successful as the naturals and in psychology some of the students are just as successful as the naturals and naturals are
often failures grit matters a bit as well in addition time on task matters yeah for me the the operative part of grit is how much time you spend at it and indeed uh there's a lot to be said for time on task particularly if you're a student as in bridge so i play about four hours of bridge a day and over 60 years i it's become easier for me but it's still hard uh psychology which i spend about the same amount of time on has always been easy for me today i'd like to talk about
one of our sponsors noom in psychology we know that getting in shape isn't all about losing a specific amount of weight or reaching a magic number on the scale there are many reasons why someone might want to practice self-care for instance for me i really want to feel more energized and alert to tackle the day i want to have a greater ability to resist the temptations of late night snacking and i want to be able to focus more generally on my highest priority goals deeply grounded in psychology noom helps you understand why you make the
choices that you make and gives you the tools to break bad habits and replace them with positive habits newm doesn't lecture you or tell you what to do but they help empower you with the skills of mind so you can make the healthy choice for yourself repeatedly and over the long haul what i personally like about newm is that they come up with a plan that fits my lifestyle and they really only require 10 minutes of my time a day i'm amazed what even 10 minutes of working on my relationship to my habits can do
for the rest of my day noom teaches you the psychology behind the decisions you make and help you keep track of everything from your steps to your diet i really like the flexibility of new and how well the program they set out for me works with my lifestyle i can eat whatever i want in moderation because what i'm really targeting and working on is my ability to curb my cravings when i really don't want to have them i also really like their support system from personally assigned goal specialists to a community of numerous you have
all the support you need to finally make that change look rome wasn't built in a day as we've mentioned many times on this podcast small steps can add up to big changes in your life so sign up for your trial today at noom.com forward slash psychology what do you have to lose except your weight visit dot noom.com forward slash psychology to start your trial today that's n o o m dot com forward slash psychology now back to the show so talent and natural being natural that's different than creativity what is creativity i'm asking this to
you because i know you have a new theory a new paper i i'd much rather know what you think about it since you you know and have written uh more deeply than i have about creativity i like your new paper i want to say i don't know if you've published yet but no it's still you know it's it's dormant uh and it's dormant because i want to create uh essentially courses to see if it works so it's just an idea it basically says that in science and maybe in art but only in science i'm uh
hypothesizing about there are five different kinds of creative ideas uh not just one uh the first is uh uh integration that's seeing that two things uh look like they're different are really the same basically uh uh newton in the apple story is newton the real part of the story is that when he was back at the farm during the plague he this moon was rising behind the family apple tree and uh one of the apples occluded the moon perfectly and newton thought that could it be that what draws the apple to the earth is the
same thing that keeps the moon in orbit what newton was really great at was integration seeing that two things that looked different were the same uh he did the same thing with fundamental colors the second kind of creativity is differentiation that is seeing that two things that look like they're the same or really different and so uh dividing smallpox into uh variola major which was deadly and variola minor which had the same symptoms but was not deadly was an example of that the periodic table of the elements is an example of differentiation the third kind
is figure ground reversal and that is taking the basic premise of the science and reversing it and asking what's the case and the copernican revolution putting the sun at the center of the solar system not the earth uh was a an example of that positive psychology is an example of that which says hey the answer is not in the clinic but it's in normality the fourth kind is distality and that's being able to imagine things that are very different from the here and now so einstein and tesla were wonderful imaginers of space and time and
machines and the fifth kind for me is creative accidents itself like the discovery of uh antibacterials in which you just come upon something uh discovery of radiation was similar so scott that's kind of where i am about it but for me this is just idle thought and so i'm beginning to ask the question with a company called better up uh giving courses on each of these five different kinds of creativity within the business setting depending on what the company needs integration differentiation figure ground reversal and seeing if that helps creativity so i'm probably not going
to really do much with this theory until i can find that you can actually uh change these things for the better fair enough but what i like about it and what i think that we both criticize about some of the field is that there's a lot more to creativity than what's measured by the existing creativity tests that exist like tests of divergent thinking divergent thinking tests don't get at the quality of the thought right so it might measure the quantity but not the extent to which you have i've looked at it so it's cool stuff
and you've also talked about the importance this is something you stressed all four years i worked with you the importance of the sense of the audience that's not picked up by existing tests of creativity either right yeah although the third criteria of creativity uh that is usefulness seems to me really quite important that there there really is a market and an audience and it's a part of creativity is not just originality but that there's an audience for the originality i think surprisingness uh i don't what do you think i think surprisingness uh counter-intuitive counter-intuitivity is
really another important thing that simonton points to what's your view on surprisingness how do you separate that from the ability to connect dots that other people don't connect is that similar to it well that's one kind of surprisingness another kind is figure ground reversal which says people hey your basic premise is wrong so it's not the connecting of dots it's rather the shock value uh we were working together on prospection saying to people uh that uh it's not enough just to know about the past and the present uh that we should start with thinking about
the future has shock value and i don't think that's really the connection of dots i don't think so either it doesn't seem like quite the same thing yeah you know there's the term of disrupters a lot of creativity creative people are disruptors and they disrupt this sort of status quo of ideas it's not a formula for being popular but it is a formula for getting work done that asks about the basic premises you know you've said in your career that your one of your ambitions is to not be boring right to quote not be boring
do you think creative that's also a prerequisite for being a creative human being well that's a good question so creativity is almost by definition not boring so surprisingness is part of uh not being boring uh yeah it's a good question so i uh not being boring may be very similar to being surprising yeah i think so i think so so to be a disrupter for a second and the future of psychotherapy you see perspective as being perhaps a future of psychotherapy and not focusing so much on the past but helping people focus more in the
future one of the privileges of having lunch with beck once a month at age 9 98 is that he's come around i think to the view of the importance of perspective uh and positivity in psychotherapy so uh i think anxiety and depression are right on their surface not about the past or the present they're about the future you're anxious about what might happen and you're depressed about what you uh that the future is bleak so it's so bizarre that the psychotherapies for anxiety and depression have neglected the future orientation of them and concentrated on the
past and the present beautiful okay so last this to end here is there anything you want to bring up any anything you want to tell people to set records straight i know there was some controversy with apa and the and applications of your work and um is there anything at all you want to address or to talk about here at the end well to the extent this conversation has intrigued people i have the satisfaction of having written an autobiography the hope circuit which uh warts in all tells the story of the trajectory in my life
and scott was a reviewer of it and uh i recommend it to you thank you i also by the way recommend scott's excellent book to you particularly the sailboat in his book thanks marty um i i just want to personally thank you for giving me the chance that you gave me to work at a positive psychology center to teach positive psychology at penn and it was those were four of the most uh meaningful years of my entire existence so far in life so i just want to really thank you and thank you to all the
work you've done for everyone else you're well you're welcome scott thanks for listening to this episode of the psychology podcast if you'd like to react in some way to something you heard i encourage you to join in the discussion below also please add a reading and review of the podcast on itunes and subscribe to the psychology podcast youtube channel as we're really trying to increase our viewership on youtube thanks for being such a great supporter of this podcast and be sure to tune in next time for more on the mind brain behavior and creativity
