How to Make a Difference: Part 2

Hidden Brain

This episode explores the psychological transition from learned helplessness to a sense of agency and optimism. Featuring psychologist Marti

Key takeaways

• Agency is a learnable skill rather than an innate personality trait.
• The 'nursing home study' demonstrated that having personal choice and responsibility significantly improves health outcomes.
• Countering catastrophic thinking requires evaluating the worst, best, and most realistic scenarios to find a middle ground.
• Graded task assignment—starting with tiny, achievable goals—is an effective tool against depression and phobias.
• Utilizing 'signature strengths' in everyday tasks can increase both productivity and positive emotion.

Main topics

• Learned Helplessness
• Positive Psychology
• Explanatory Styles

Notable quotes

If you have the talent of Mozart, But you don't believe you can compose music. The result is zero.

Conclusion

By intentionally challenging negative narratives and leveraging existi

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. If you look down the history of the world, you see a pattern repeat itself over and over again. For lengthy periods of time, groups, communities, and even nations can find themselves stuck. Years go by, sometimes decades, even centuries, and nothing shifts. And then a small group of people, sometimes even just one or two, decide they've had enough and start to foment change. Speaker 2 (0:32) At first, it looks impossible. The odds are too steep, the opposition too strong. But then, the impossible happens. And soon after, the change that seemed impossible appears like it was inevitable. In our story last week, we explored the psychology of learned helplessness. When people are shown over and over that they cannot change their lives or circumstances, they eventually stop trying to bring about change in their lives and circumstances. Speaker 2 (1:10) If you missed that story, you can find it in our podcast feed or at hiddenbrain.org. It's titled, How to Make a Difference, Part 1. Today, we look at the psychology of people who bring about change in their own lives or at the level of groups and nations. What prompts these brave souls to attempt to change their circumstances, even when it looks difficult or impossible? Speaker 2 (1:37) The evidence suggests that these individuals possess a powerful weapon. They have an internal sense of agency. By believing that change is possible, by believing that they can be agents of change, they create a force field that actually makes change possible. Today on the show, we explore research that shows that a capacity for agency is not a personality trait, but a skill that can be taught and learned. Speaker 2 (2:11) If we can learn to be helpless, apathetic, and passive, we can also learn to be optimistic and agentic. The surprising science of how people come to see opportunity where others see only roadblocks. This week on Hidden Brain. Speaker 1 (2:40) When we think about success, we usually focus Speaker 2 (2:42) on ingredients like talent, intelligence, and opportunity. But psychologists have found that another factor matters just as much, or even more. Before we ever take action, we carry around assumptions about whether our actions can make a difference. Those assumptions can determine whether we persist and adapt, or never make an attempt in the first place. At the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Martin Seligman studies how people can learn to be more agentic. Marty Seligman, welcome to Hidden Brain. Speaker 3 (3:14) I'm delighted to be here. Speaker 2 (3:17) Marty, in your early days as a professor, you had a brilliant student whom you called Suzanne. Describe her for me and tell me how she responded when you placed a significant challenge before her. Speaker 3 (3:29) In my earliest years as a professor, my policy with students generally has been, after they've shown they were A-plus students in my courses, is to treat them as a postdoc graduate student and give them really difficult problems. So this happened with one of my terrific students, I'll call her Suzanne, and she started to work on the problem. And eventually I saw her with her head in her hands, crying, sobbing. She had given up. It was too hard for her. Well, my thinking at the time was, what did psychology tell us about giving up and how we can get rid of it? And this is indeed, in many ways, the start of the arc of my 60 years of work, which started with helplessness and giving up, but halfway through. became the opposite question. How do we make people more agentic and happier? Speaker 2 (4:51) In many ways, Suzanne's example is not the example of someone who was lazy or incompetent, because in some way she had demonstrated that she was a good student in your class previously. And so it must have been a little puzzling when you saw her suddenly throw up her hands and give up, because in some ways this was not the giving up of someone who truly was unable to do the problem. It was somebody who had given up almost before they started. Speaker 3 (5:18) If you have the talent of Mozart, But you don't believe you can compose music. The result is zero. But psychology at that time had three huge blind spots about human beings, which made it impossible to ask questions about helplessness and mastery. Speaker 3 (5:44) The first blind spot was misery versus happiness. So psychology was entirely about the relief of misery. But when you lie in bed at night, you're not thinking about how to go from minus eight to minus three. You're thinking about happiness, doing better, how to go from plus two to plus five. Psychology didn't have a science of going from plus two to plus five. The second blind spot was determinism, and that we were puppets of the environment, and that notions like deliberation, choice, and preference made no sense. And the third blind spot was thinking itself. So it wasn't until the 21st century, with positive psychology and cognitive psychology, that psychology began to work constructively on happiness, on freedom and choice, and on cognition. I couldn't deal with Suzanne in 1969, but now psychology can deal. with a Mozart who has the talent but believes that he can't compose music. Speaker 2 (7:24) During that early part of Marty's career, he learned about a research project that had been carried out in a nursing home. The facility was planning to redecorate a floor that served patients with developmental disabilities. It moved the residents down to the first floor. The change made a striking difference for one particular resident. Speaker 3 (7:43) And they moved her down, and on the first floor, there were a lot of things you could do. And suddenly, for the first time, she started to blossom. She spoke for the first time. She helped in the cooking. Speaker 2 (7:58) About two weeks later, the third floor redecoration was complete. The woman and the other patients who had been moved to the first floor moved back to their original rooms. Speaker 3 (8:08) She immediately died within a few days. This inspired Ellen Langer and Judy Roden to see what was really going on. Now, in the background, we had discovered learned helplessness in people and animals, and we had the first indications that helplessness made you ill. Speaker 3 (8:34) took away from you physically. So here's what Judy and Ellen did. They went to one floor of a nursing home and they gave a speech to all the residents. And it was of the form, we want you to find out about all the things you can do for yourself at Shady Grove. You can choose whether or not to go to the movies on Tuesday night or Thursday night. You can choose whether or not to have lunch at one or two. Here's a group of plants. Pick out a plant, but you take care of it and water it. Speaker 3 (9:14) On the first floor of the nursing home, they gave a different speech. We want you to know all the things we're going to do for you here at Shady Grove. Tuesday night is movie night. Lunch is at one o'clock. And the nurse is going to pick out a plant, which will be nice in your room, but she's going to water it. Then they did two things. This was back in the days when psychology was done with paper clips and rubber bands. We didn't have motion detectors. They put on white adhesive tape on the wheelchair. And over two weeks, they measured how dirty it got, which was the motion detector. But most importantly, they measured death. And they found that a statistically larger sample of people died on the first floor than on the third floor. And they found that on the third floor, there was motion. People did things. The adhesive tape was black. And this opened the field of the positive psychology of health. Speaker 2 (10:28) I mean, in some ways it's striking because the options that people had at the nursing home on the third floor and the first floor were actually the same. I mean, people had plans. There were movies. There was food to eat. But the difference was that the people on the third floor had choice. And they were told, you not only have choice, but you have responsibility. You have to take care of this plant. And if you don't take care of the plant, the plant's going to die. And on the first floor, they had all the things. They had a beautiful plant in the room, but things were being done for them almost out of... You could argue love, but you could argue that this love was misplaced because the people on the third floor ended up doing much better because they had agency, they had options, they had choice. Speaker 3 (11:07) Notice there are two things going on between the first floor and the third floor. Is it the presence of agency that