World’s Most Influential Psychologist: The Hidden Force That Drives Human Progress | Dr. Martin Seligman – EP 817

Passion Struck with John R. Miles

In this episode of Passion Struck, host John R. Miles interviews Dr. Martin Seligman, pioneering psychologist and founder of positive psychology, about his new book 'Agency:

Key takeaways

• Agency is not just about taking action but believing that actions can produce a response in the world.
• Learned helplessness undermines flourishing, while agency fosters resilience and growth.

Main topics

• Psychological history of human progress
• Agency as a foundation for flourishing

Notable quotes

"What I do can make a difference." – The foundational belief of agency.

"Agency is built from three capacities: efficacy, optimism, and reciprocity."

Conclusion

True agency begins with the simple yet powerful belief that individual actions can influence outcomes. Over time,

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) Hey friends, I've learned that some of the simplest habits can make the biggest difference in how you feel throughout the day, and hydration is one of them. I've been using instant hydration regularly, especially first thing in the morning, and on those long days when I'm recording, traveling, or getting a workout in. What I especially like is that it makes hydration something I actually look forward to. I'm a huge fan of the orange flavor. It's smooth, refreshing, and doesn't have that overly salty taste you sometimes get with electrolyte drinks. It has zero sugar with 500 milligrams of sodium, 470 milligrams of potassium, and 100 milligrams of magnesium. And they use authentic French gray sea salt imported from France. For me, it's become one of those easy habits that helps me stay on top of hydration. For a better way to stay hydrated, go to instanthydration.com slash passionstruck and use my promo code passionstruck for over 40 % off. your first subscription order. It's Instant Hydration's best offer available. That's instanthydration.com slash passionstruck. Promo code passionstruck. Have you ever reached a point where you stopped believing that anything you did would really make a difference? Maybe you kept trying. Maybe you worked harder. Maybe you kept showing up, but eventually... something inside you started to wonder, why bother? When I asked Dr. Marty Seligman, what happens when people lose their sense of agency? His answer went to the heart of more than 60 years of his research. Take a listen. Speaker 1 (1:45) Individual action is where things start, but whether or not it modifies the world, that is, you have mastery and agency. or it falls flat and you're helpless and you're non-agentic is crucial to the shaping of the self and to flourishing. And in general, the more reciprocity, the more our actions produce upward spirals in the world, the more agency, the more flourishing we have. John, and welcome to Speaker 2 (2:27) Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've felt the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it. Speaker 2 (3:05) Welcome back to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. This is episode 817, and today we're continuing our new series, The Adaptive Human, How We Thrive in a Changing World. Over the past two episodes, we've been exploring an important question. How much control do we really have over the direction of our lives? Angela Duckworth challenged us to think about the power of the situations we're in. the people, the places, and the environments that quietly shape our behavior. And Jared Diamond took that question even further, asking when individual leaders can actually change the course of history. But today we come to the question underneath both of those conversations. Do we believe our actions can make a difference? Because there are moments in life when that belief gets tested. You try, you fail, you try again, and eventually, especially, When nothing seems to change, it's so easy to begin asking yourself, why bother? That's exactly why I wanted to have this conversation with Dr. Marty Seligman. Marty is one of the most influential psychologists of our time and one of the pioneers of positive psychology. For more than 60 years, his work has explored helplessness, optimism, flourishing, and one of the most important ideas we'll discuss today. agency. In his new book, Agency, Marty explores what happens when people, organizations, and even entire societies lose the belief that their actions can shape what comes next and what it takes to reclaim it. In this conversation, we talk about why learned helplessness is about more than simply giving up, why agency begins with action, how hope differs from optimism, and why the way the world responds to our actions helps shape our sense of who we are. But here's what stayed with me long after we finished recording. This wasn't just a conversation about psychology. It was a conversation about what happens when we stop believing that we matter to the world around us. Because agency requires more than action. Somewhere along the way, we have to believe that what we do can create a response, that our choices can influence something beyond ourselves. And when we lose that belief, it's not just our motivation that disappears, our sense of possibility can disappear with it. I think that's a conversation that all of us need right now. So let's dive into it. Here's my conversation with Dr. Marty Seligman. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. Speaker 2 (5:52) Hey friends, I've learned that some of the simplest habits can make the biggest difference in how you feel throughout the day, and hydration is one of them. I've been using instant hydration regularly, especially first thing in the morning, and on those long days when I'm recording, traveling, or getting a workout in. What I especially like is that it makes hydration something I actually look forward to. I'm a huge fan of the orange flavor. It's smooth, refreshing, and doesn't have that overly salty taste you sometimes get with electrolyte drinks. It has zero sugar with 500 milligrams of sodium, 470 milligrams of potassium, and 100 milligrams of magnesium. And they use authentic French gray sea salt imported from France. For me, it's become one of those easy habits that helps me stay on top of hydration. For a better way to stay hydrated, go to instanthydration.com slash passionstruck and use my promo code passionstruck for over 40 % off. your first subscription order. It's Instant Hydration's best offer available. That's instanthydration.com slash passionstruck. Promo code passionstruck. Speaker 2 (7:06) I am absolutely honored and thrilled to welcome Professor Martin Seligman on Passion Struck. Marty, it is such an honor to have you on the show. Oh, thank you, John. I'm happy to be here. Marty, you probably don't even realize this, but Passion Struck has been, in many ways, completely built on your work. And I heard you recently. on the Happiness Lab talking to Lori Santos. And she also mentioned that the Happiness Lab wouldn't exist without your work. The same thing goes with Passion Struck because this whole podcast really goes into human flourishing. And I've tried to take the lessons I've learned from you and explore this every single way I possibly can because I think today so many people are struggling with living their life in a flourishing way. Have you found that to be the case as well? Speaker 1 (8:07) Indeed, that's the theme of my last 40 years of work. I think if I did anything, I ushered in a new psychological age of looking at what was going right, flourishing, as opposed to looking at what was going wrong and trying to correct it. So I think that's the examination of flourishing as opposed to looking at what was going wrong. to the examination of pathology has been the theme of the last 40 years of my work. Speaker 2 (8:40) Today, we're going to be discussing your brand new book, which I have to say is incredible. It's titled Agency, The Psychological History of Human Progress. And I want to start out here. Your career began with a simple, but a really profound question. If helplessness can be learned, Can hope be learned too? Looking back now, was there a moment you first encountered what you now call agency? Speaker 1 (9:10) What surprises me about the trajectory of my work is how long it took me to realize that I was not working on pessimism, helplessness, and hopelessness, but I was really working on the opposite, which is human agency. And the new book, Agency, is the culmination of 60 years of work and how I realized that the human future and the individual future for us is not correcting our weaknesses, but finding out what we're good at and building flourishing on what we're good at. Speaker 2 (9:54) You write that psychology in the 1960s suffered from three blind spots that you saw at the time, happiness, freedom, and thinking itself. Which of those blind spots do you still think shapes our culture most powerfully today? I Speaker 1 (10:12) think psychology has changed to work on happiness, freedom, and cognition. But I think in many ways, our society is still stuck on misery, on a lack of freedom, constraints. And I do think we take cognition seriously for a change. So the behaviorism that existed in the 50s and 60s, I think it's gone from psychology. And I think it's also gone from the society as a whole. So I think we take mental life and what we're feeling and thinking seriously, both in society generally and in psychology, finally. Speaker 2 (10:59) Marty, the book opens up with the story of a woman named Susan, and it's a deeply personal story for you and obviously has affected you for decades. And when I was reading her story, it reminded me of my own mentor, a woman named Wendy Lawrence, who was my physics instructor when I was at the Naval Academy. And Wendy became the first female astronaut from the Naval Academy. And she and I, as we've had conversations over the years, her central message to children today, and it's been this way for decades. is that oftentimes the first time they run into any hardship, instead of trying harder, they give up. And it's something that you have studied as well. When did you realize that learned helplessness wasn't simply an individual phenomenon, but something entire institutions, cultures, even civilizations can experience? Speaker 1 (12:04) It took me a long time, John. So as a psychologist, what I worked on was individual helplessness. First, helplessness in animals, and then helplessness in individual human beings. The book opens with someone named Susan, who's actually a collage of two Susans, brilliant students of mine, that I had in my very first job teaching at Cornell. And both of them, when I gave them a really difficult research problem, their reaction was to give up and I can't do it. And they both turned out to be success stories. One went on to become the editor of the Journal of Animal Psychology. The other one went on to become the president of the American Psychological Association. Wow. So a lot of my... mentoring them had to do with breaking up individual helplessness. My thinking about individuals really went on for almost 40 years. And it began to dawn on me first that I wasn't really working on helplessness. I was working on mastery and agency. I was working on the opposite. But what psychology was all about was about pathology, and what getting grants was all about was curing pathology. So it took me almost 40 years to realize that I was not working on pathology, but its opposite, on flourishing and growth. The question of society as a whole, of human history, was a new one for me starting maybe 25 years ago. Mandy and I have seven children, and we've homeschooled them. Mandy felt that I was incompetent for teaching psychology, so I got consigned to teaching history. I'd never taught history before. And so I started to teach and taught five of our children American history. And it was reading American history starting 25 years ago that I began to think about helplessness, hopelessness, and agency as a historical, societal. individual situation and not just an individual situation. So I think it started with teaching my children about the history of the world in which I had to begin to learn myself. Speaker 2 (14:51) This whole topic is so interesting to me because as I have leaned more into the research and what's happening in the world, I keep looking at the challenges that we're facing in society as more systemic in nature. So in order to fix some of the upcoming things that are going to need to be fixed, we're going to need overall systems change to happen. And so I think what you were discovering with learned helplessness