when I was president of the American Psychological Association they tried to media train me and they an encounter I had with CNN summarizes what I'm gonna be talking about today which is the 11th reason to be optimistic the editor of discover told us 10 of them I'm going to give you the 11 so they came to me CNN and they said Professor Seligman would you tell us about the the state of psychology today we'd like to interview you about that that's it great you said but this is CNN so you only get a soundbite so
well how many words do I get I said well one cameras rolled and she said professor Seligman what is the state of psychology today good cut cut that won't do we'd really better give you a longer soundbite well how many words do I get this time when you get to dr. Seligman what is the state of psychology today not good look dr. Selig we can see you're really not comfortable in this medium we better give you a real soundbite this time you can have three words professor Seligman what is the state of psychology today not
good enough and that's what I'm gonna be talking about I want to say why psychology was good why it was not good and how it may become in the next 10 years good enough and by parallel summary I want to say the same thing about technology about entertainment and design because I think the issues are very similar so why was psychology good well for more than 60 years psychology worked within the disease model ten years ago when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate and told them what I did they'd
move away from me and because quite rightly they were saying psychology is about finding what's wrong with you the spot the loonie and now when I tell people what I do they move toward me and what was good about psychology about the thirty billion dollar investment ni MH made about working in the disease model about what you mean by psychology is that it 60 years ago none of the disorders were treatable as entirely smoke and mirrors and now 14 of the disorders are treatable two of them actually curable and the other thing that happened is
that a science developed a science of mental illness that we found out that we could take fuzzy concepts like depression alcoholism and measure them with rigor that we could create a classification of the mental illnesses that we could understand the causality of the mental illnesses we could look across time at the same people people for example who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia and asked what the contribution of mothering of genetics are and we could isolate third variables by doing experiments on mental illnesses and best of all we were able in the last 50 years to
invent drug treatments and psychological treatments and then we were able to test them rigorously in random assignment placebo-controlled designs throw out the things that didn't work keep the things that actively did and the conclusion of that is that psychology and psychiatry of the last 60 years can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable and I think that's terrific I'm proud of it but what was not good the consequences of that were three things the first was morals that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimology pathologize errs that our view of human nature was that
if you were in trouble bricks fell on you and we forgot that people made choices and decisions we forgot responsibility that was the first cost the second cost was that we forgot about you people we forgot about improving normal lives we forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier more fulfilled more productive and genius high talent became a dirty word no one works on that and the third problem about the disease model is you know a rush to do something about people in trouble in our rush to do something about repairing damage we
never occurred to us to develop interventions to make people happier positive interventions so that was not good and so that's what led people like Nancy at cough Dan Gilbert Mike Jake sent my behind myself to work in something I call positive psychology which has three aims the first is that psychology should be just as concerned with human strength as it is with weakness it should be just as concerned with building strength as well repairing damage it should be interested in the best things in life and it should be just as concerned with making the lives
of normal people fulfilling and with genius with nurturing high talent so in the last 10 years and the hope for the future we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology a science of what makes life worth living it turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness and any of you for free can go to that website and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness you can ask how do you stack up for positive emotion for meaning for flow against literally tens of thousands of other people we we created the opposite
of the diagnostic manual of the insanities a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio how they're defined how to diagnose them what what builds them and what gets in their way we found that we could discover the causation of the positive states the relationship between left hemispheric activity and right hemispheric activity as a cause of happiness I've spent my life working on extremely miserable people and I've asked the question how do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you and starting about six years ago we asked about extremely happy
people and how do they differ from the rest of us and it turns out there's one way very surprised that they're not more religious they're not in better shape they don't have more money they're not better looking they don't have more good events and fewer bad events the one way in which they differ they're extremely social they don't sit in seminars on Saturday morning they they don't spend time alone each of them is in a romantic relationship and each has a rich repertoire of friends but watch out here this is merely correlational data not causal
and it's about happiness in the first Hollywood sense I'm going to talk about happiness of a bouillon sand giggling and good cheer and I'm gonna suggest you that's not nearly enough in just a moment we found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries from the Buddha to Tony Robbins about 120 interventions have been proposed that allegedly make people happy and we find that we've been able to manual eyes many of them and we actually carry out random assignment efficacy and effectiveness studies that is which ones actually make people lastingly happier and a
couple of minutes I'll tell you about some of those results but the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable is kin psychology actually make people happier and to ask that question happy is not a word I use very much we've had to break it down into what I think is askable about happy and I believe there are three different and I call them different because different interventions build them it's possible
to have one rather than the other three different happy lives the first happy life is the pleasant life this is a life in which you have this much positive emotion as you possibly can and the skills to amplify it the second is a life of engagement a life in your work your parenting your love your leisure time stops for you that's what Aristotle was talking about and third the meaningful life so I want to say a little bit about each of those lives and what we know about them the first life is the pleasant life
and that simply as best we can find it it's having as many of the pleasures as you can as much positive emotion as you ken and learning the skills savoring mindfulness that amplifies them that stretched them over time in space but the pleasant life has three drawbacks and it's why positive psychology is not happy ology and why it doesn't end here the first drawback is that it turns out the pleasant life your experience of positive emotion is heritable about 50% heritable and in fact not very modifiable so the different tricks that mature and I and
others know about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life are 15 to 20 percent tricks getting more of it second is that positive emotion habituates it habituates rapidly indeed it's all like french vanilla ice cream the first taste is a hundred percent by the time you're down to the sixth taste it's gone and as I said it's not particularly malleable and this leads to the second life I have to say about my friend Len to talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion more than building pleasure in two of the three
great arenas of life by the time Len was 30 Len was enormous ly successful the first arena was work by the time used when he's an options trader by the time he was 25 years a multi-millionaire and they had an options trading company a second in play he's a national champion bridge player and but in the third grade arena of life love Len is an abysmal failure and the reason he was was that Len is a cold fish Len is an introvert American women said to limb when he dated them you're no fun you don't
have positive emotion get lost and Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him but it turned out there wasn't any sexual trauma it turned out that Len grew up in Long Island he played football and watched football and played bridge Len is in the bottom 5% of what we call positive activities the question is is Len unhappy and I want to say not contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50%
of the human race and positive affectivity I think Len is one of the happiest people I know he's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness and that's because Len like most of you are is enormous ly capable of flow when he walks onto the floor of the American exchange at 9:30 in the morning time stops for and it stops till the closing bell when the first card is played until 10 days later the tournament is over time stops for Len and this is indeed what Mike csikszentmihalyi has been talking about about flow and its distinct
from pleasure in a very important way pleasure has raw feels you know it's happening there's thought and feeling but what Mike told you yesterday during flow you can't feel anything you're one with the music time stops you have intense concentration and this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life and we think there's a recipe for it and it's knowing what your highest strengths are and again there's a valid test of what your 5 highest strengths are and then re-crafting your life to use them as much as you possibly can
re crafting your work love your play your friendship your parenting that just one example one person I worked with was a bagger at gene Ortiz hated the job she's working away through college her highest strength was social intelligence so shiri crafted bagging to make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer's day now obviously she failed but what she did was to take her highest strengths and recraft work to use them as much as possible what you get out of that is not smiling this you don't look like Debbie Reynolds you don't giggle
a lot what you get is more absorption so that's the second path first path positive emotion the second path is eudaimonia and flow and the third path is meaning this is the most venerable of all the happinesses traditionally and meaning in this view consists of very parallel to eudaimonia it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are well I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives the pleasant life the good life the meaningful life people are now hard at
work on the question are there things that lastingly change those lives and the answer seems to be yes and I'll just give you some samples of it it's being done in a rigorous manner it's being done in the same way that we test drugs to see what really works so we do random assignment placebo-controlled long term studies of different interventions and just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect when we teach people about the pleasant life how to have more pleasure in your life one of your assignments is to take
the mindfulness skills the savoring skills and you're assigned to design a beautiful day next Saturday set a day aside design yourself a beautiful day and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures and we control in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced gratitude visit I want you all to do this with me now if you would close your eyes I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormous ly important that changed your life in the good direction who you never properly thanked person has to be alive hey now okay you can open
your eyes I hope all of you have such a person your assignment when you're learning the gratitude visit is to write a 300 word testimonial to that person call them on the phone and Phoenix ask if you can visit don't tell them why show up at their door you read the testimonial everyone weeps when this happens and what happens is when we test people one week later a month later three months later they're both happier and less depressed another example is a strength state in which we get couples to identify their highest strengths on the
strengths test and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths and we find this is a strengthener of relationships and fun versus philanthropy but it's so heartening to be in a group like this in which so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy well my undergraduates and the people I work with haven't discovered this so we actually have people do something out true istic and do something fun and to contrast it and what you'll find is when you do something fun it has a square wave walk set when you
do something philanthropic to help another person it lasts and it lasts so those are examples of positive interventions so the next the last thing I want to say we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have this is really what you're about and that's our target variable and we ask the question as a function of the three different lives how much life satisfaction do you get so we ask and we've done this in 15 replications involving thousands of people to what extent does the pursuit of pleasure the pursuit of positive emotion the pleasant life the
pursuit of engagement times stopping for you and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction and our results surprised us they were backward of what we thought it turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction the pursuit of meaning is the strongest and the premises the pursuit of engagement is also very strong where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning then pleasures the whipped cream and the cherry which is to say the full life the sum is greater than then the parts if you've got all
three conversely if you have none of the three the empty life the sum is less than parts and what we're asking now is does the very same relationship physical health morbidity how long you live and productivity follow the same relationship that is in a corporation is productivity a function of positive emotion engagement and meaning is health a function of positive engagement of pleasure and of meaning in life and there is reason to think the answer to both of those may well be yes so Chris said that the last speaker had a chance thar try to
integrate what he heard and said this was amazing for me I've never been in a gathering like this I've never seen speakers stretch beyond themselves so much which was one of the remarkable things but I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel to the problems of Technology Entertainment and design in the following way we all know that technology entertainment and design have been and can be used for destructive purposes we also know that technology entertainment and design can be used to relieve misery and by the way the distinction between relieving misery and
building happiness is extremely important I thought when I first became a therapist 30 years ago that if I could make someone if I was good enough to make someone not depressed not at anxious not angry that I'd make them happy and I never found that I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero that they were empty and it turns out the skills of happiness the skills of the pleasant life the skills of engagement the skills of meaning are different from the skills of relieving misery and so the parallel thing holds
with Technology Entertainment and design I believe that is it is possible for these three drivers of our world to increase happiness to increase positive emotion and that's typically how they've been used but once your fraction eight happiness the way I do not just positive emotion that's not nearly enough there's flow in life and there's meaning in life as Laura Lee told us design and I believe entertainment and technology can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well so in conclusion our xi reason for optimism in addition to to the space elevator is that
only think with technology entertainment and design we can actually increase the amount of tonnage of human happiness on the planet and if technology can in the next decade or two increase the pleasant life the good life and the meaningful life it will be good enough if entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion meaning eudaimonia it will be good enough and if design can increase positive emotion eudaimonia and flow and meaning what we're all doing together we'll become good enough thank you you
