Nice review, Book-tator. I had many of the same reactions you did, although my notes are much less organized. Seligman obviously has a huge ego and seems very narcissistic and also defensive both on defending the importance of academia (geez, how many names can he drop) and the value of psychology as a science (lots of physics envy here). And who cares about his bridge game in this context?
I was wondering if Seligman was trying to write his version of Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”, which was part summary of research and part memoir. Seligman mentions Kahneman and notes that Kahneman refuses to be categorized with Seligman. I had this notion that Seligman views Kahneman’s work as analogous to microeconomics (individual decision making) and Seligman want to be the equivalent of Keynes – a macropsychological measuring overall societal contentment.
Problem is, Kahneman’s memoir is interesting and makes you want to like him, but Seligman’s really is not inspiring at all. From this book and another couple articles I read, it appears that Seligman married a woman when he graduated, divorced her in the seventies (she became a minister) and then married a student that idolizes him and had a mess of kids. Then he tells us he spends three hours a day playing bridge on line. His real life seems to bear little resemblance to what he advocates. (Baby boomer.)
Don’t get me wrong – I like what he says and suggests is important and the practices he mentions. Yet as others have pointed out, none of this is new. Most of it comes from ancient spiritual practices that can be found in most major religions and many philosophies, including Stoicism. More recently, a lot of this was well-developed in the self-help area with everyone from James Allen to Napoleon Hill to Earle Nightingale to N.V. Peale and to Jim Rohn (and many others). What he should be saying is that there is a lot of commonly held wisdom and practices that he has been able to verify or confirm with a variety of tests. Yet he would pretend that he invented this stuff.
This reminded me of the observation (maybe it was Taleb where I read it) that there is a misconception that, historically, science comes first by developing theories and then practical applications flow from that knowledge. In reality, the usual development is that there are tinkerers who figure out how to do/make things and then the scientists come in later to provide new and better explanations for what has been discovered or is already known with Popperian methods of falsifying bad theories until only the good ones are left. The exceptions to this historical pattern – such as the development of the atomic bomb from theory or the moon landings – are so unusual that they tend to prove the rule. Seligman refuses to give credit to the tinkerers who preceded him.
As for the three demands of the Book-tator:
1. I’m not sure anyone was measuring this 50 years ago. Maybe we are just over-diagnosing and over-medicating people (with SOMA). There is an unfortunate nostalgia for the past, which often only exists in the imaginations of the proponents. You can almost always find a time in the past that was better or worse in some measure than currently.
2. PTG – some people are naturally more resilient than others. Maybe its genetic. But I think occasional stress is good for this like lifting heavy weights is good for building muscles. This phenomenon repeats often in the human experience in different ways. Humans are meant to experience occasional stress, but chronic stress is almost always bad and unhealthful.
3. My biggest weakness was humility/modesty, followed by spirituality, hope, appreciation of beauty, prudence and love. Biggest strengths are open-mindedness, citizenship, fairness, forgiveness and mercy and creativity. Pretty much what I would have expected. No, this stuff hasn’t changed. I’ve been perfect and god-like for a long time now.
Here’s some more specific notes on some passages from the book – a lot of this touches on many of the topics we discuss around here:
‘Here is the exercise: find one wholly unexpected kind thing to do tomorrow and just do it. Notice what happens to your mood.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 21).
This is random acts of kindness. Very well-known practice.
“Negative emotions and the negative personality traits have very strong biological limits, and the best a clinician can ever do with the cosmetic approach is to get patients to live in the best part of their set range of depression or anxiety or anger. Think about Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill, two severe depressives. They were both enormously well-functioning human beings who dealt with their “black dog” and their suicidal thoughts. (Lincoln came close to killing himself in January 1841.) Both learned to function extremely well even when they were massively depressed. So one thing that clinical psychology needs to develop in light of the heritable stubbornness of human pathologies is a psychology of “dealing with it.” We need to tell our patients, “Look, the truth is that many days— no matter how successful we are in therapy— you will wake up feeling blue and thinking life is hopeless. Your job is not only to fight these feelings but also to live heroically: functioning well even when you are very sad.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (pp. 52-53).
This is the advice I would give for raising children and personal growth. People need to have practice in being in stressful situations so they know how to deal with them. For some its more of an issue than others.
“Originally, I went into psychology to relieve human suffering and to increase human well-being. I thought I was well prepared to do this, but I was actually miseducated to this task. It took me decades to recover and to work my way out of solving puzzles and into solving problems, as I explain below. Indeed, this is the story of my entire intellectual and professional development. My miseducation is instructive. I went to Princeton in the early 1960s afire with the hope of making a difference in the world. I got ambushed in a manner so subtle that I did not know I had been ambushed for about twenty years. I was attracted to psychology, but the research in that department seemed pedestrian: laboratory studies of college sophomores and white rats. The world-class heavy hitters at Princeton were in the philosophy department. So I majored in philosophy, and, like so many bright young people, I was seduced there by the ghost of Ludwig Wittgenstein.”
Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (pp. 55-56).
What is interesting about this is that is shows Seligman comes from a place of being disenchanted with academia. Yet his solution was not to get out, but to attempt to reinvent it. He falls into the same traps and the people he criticized. Also note his apparent fascination with being involved with the most visible (“world-class”) activities.
“Positive psychology emerged from Nikki’s [his daughter’s] rebuke. I saw that I had indeed been a grouch for fifty years, that child rearing for me had been all about correcting weaknesses rather than building strengths, and that the profession of psychology— which I had just been elected to lead— had been almost exclusively about removing the disabling conditions rather than creating the enabling conditions for people to flourish.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 68).
Talk about a “duh” moment. Took him 50 years to figure this out? Demonstrates a profound lack of awareness.
“As coaching stands now, I told our graduate students, its scope of practice is without limits: how to arrange your closet, how to paste your memories into a scrapbook, how to ask for a raise, how to be a more assertive leader, how to inspire the volleyball team, how to find more flow at work, how to fight dark thoughts, how to have more purpose in life. It also uses an almost limitless array of techniques: affirmations, visualization, massage, yoga, assertive training, correcting cognitive distortions, aromatherapy, feng shui, meditation, counting your blessings, and on and on. The right to call oneself a coach is unregulated, and this is why scientific and theoretical backbones are urgent. For this transformation of coaching, you first need the theory; next, the science; and then the applications.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 70).
Here is the mistaken view of history. The applications actually come first. Some are good at some are bad. His job should be to use science to confirm or refute the known applications, not to invent allegedly new theories and take credit for them.
“Finally, what we are doing in MAPP will help establish guidelines for training and accreditation. You assuredly do not need to be a licensed psychologist to practice positive psychology or to be a coach. Freud’s followers made the momentous error of restricting psychoanalysis to physicians, and positive psychology is not intended as an umbrella for yet another self-protective guild.”Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 71).
Exactly correct – you don’t need a lot of training or to pay a lot of money to acquire the necessary skills to counsel and help another person. Yet ironically, Seligman would make the same error in pretentiousness as Freud by assuming that people need to be taught in Seligman’s methods in an academic setting to be effective.
“Caroline lived up to her aim. In the years since her MAPP degree she added a major missing piece to the world of coaching. MAPP introduced her to goal-setting theory, which had never been part of any coach-training program that she had heard of. In her capstone project, she linked goal-setting theory to happiness research and to techniques of coaching. She then published Creating Your Best Life: The Ultimate Life List Guide, the first book in the self-help section of any bookstore that discusses research-based goal-setting for coaches as well as for the general public. She now speaks to standing-room-only audiences, and her book is used in study groups around the world.”Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (pp. 71-72).
Never heard of goal setting theory? My god, what planet have you people been on? Missing piece? I see – its got to be “research-based goal-setting” (from a very expensive and selective institution) or we can pretend it never existed.
“How did I change my life to make it “exactly the right moment”? First of all, thanks to what I had learned from the MAPP program, I was becoming a happier person, more attuned to my own spirituality and to reasons to celebrate gratitude. I kept a gratitude journal, and I started using goal-setting for the future and visualizing what I wanted. I wrote my list, starting with phrases ranging from “I will find a man who is …” to “My guy will be…” thinking that maybe different linguistic expressions would be more friendly to my personal outlook and search. Also, I stopped watching Sex and the City. I used visualization techniques, including meditation and collaging. My collage had words and images outlining how I wanted my life to be. Finally, I chose my favorite love song, the James Taylor version of “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You),” and every night before bed for the three months before I met my husband, I listened to it religiously, as if to serenade love into my life. The words “How Sweet It Is” were also on my collage, right above the words “Bridal Suite.” So those were the changes I made to get romantic love into my life. Today is our one-year wedding anniversary, and what is the biggest change in my life now? Well, a few things. I compromise more. I get and give a lot more hugs. I smile more. I speak and hear the words “I love you” much more often. I have a new nickname. Most important, I have someone I can trust, whom I love, and who loves me.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 74).
This is very basic self-help and spiritual/religious material than millions of people have used in the past to improve their lives. You don’t need to pray at the U. Penn. Psychology Department to get this.
“I did not choose positive psychology. It called me. It was what I wanted from the very first, but experimental psychology and then clinical psychology were the only games in town that were even close to what was calling me. I have no less mystical way to put it. Vocation— being called to act rather than choosing to act— is an old word, but it is a real thing. Positive psychology called to me just as the burning bush called to Moses. Sociologists distinguish among a job, a career, and a calling. You do a job for the money, and when the money stops, you stop working. You pursue a career for the promotions, and when the promotions stop, topped out, you quit or become a time-serving husk. A calling, in contrast, is done for its own sake. You would do it anyway, with no pay and no promotions. “Try to stop me!” is what your heart cries when you are thwarted.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 75).
Yes, a calling. This is a spiritual experience, not a scientfic one. Seligman completely fails to recognize what it is.
“Not about bizeboll, indeed. This movie is about vocation, about being called, about building something where there was nothing. “If you build it, they will come.” Called, that’s what I had been. Over the objections of deans, my own department, and trustees, a MAPP program arose on the barren cornfields of Philadelphia. (“ Is this heaven?” Shoeless Joe asks. “No, it’s Iowa,” Ray Kinsella responds.) And who came? “How many of you were called here?” I ventured timidly. Hands shot up. Everyone’s hand. “I sold my Mercedes to get here.” “I was like a character from Close Encounters, sculpting the tower I repeatedly dreamt. Then I saw the ad for MAPP, and here I am at the tower.” “I left my clinical practice and my patients.” “I hate flying, and I get on a goddamn airplane and fly sixty hours from New Zealand and back once a month to be here.”
Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 77).
Build it and they will come. See my introductory post:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1396&p=18642#p18642
Nor is it ecological; the Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, who live thirty miles down the road from me, have only one-tenth of Philadelphia’s rate of depression, even though they breathe the same air (yes, with exhaust fumes), drink the same water (yes, with fluoride), and make much of the food we eat (yes, with preservatives). It has everything to do with modernity and perhaps with what we mistakenly call “prosperity.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 80).
And why is that? Seligman makes no attempt at an explanation of the community and purpose that the Old Order Amish have created. He completely ignores this important real-world data in favor of often artificial experiments.
“We believe that well-being programs, like any medical intervention, must be evidence based, so we have tested two different programs for schools: the Penn Resiliency Program (PRP) and the Strath Haven Positive Psychology Curriculum.”
Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 81).
Limiting condtiion. Yes, evidence is important, but what if the evidence is simply that it worked in a number of circumstances? Does that mean you should pretend it doesn’t exist?
“Indeed,” I chimed in, now asking for the moon, “bring in the stars of positive psychology— Barb Fredrickson, Stephen Post, Roy Baumeister, Diane Tice, George Vaillant, Kate Hays, Frank Mosca, Ray Fowler— one each month, creating a speaker series for the faculty, students, and the community. Then have each of them live on campus for a couple of weeks, teach students and teachers, and advise on the curriculum.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 87).
So Why do we require "the stars"? Is this not broadly applicable or is this a fallacious appeal to authority?
“The big idea claimed that it was not bad character but a malignant environment that produced crime. Theologians and philosophers took up this cry, and the end result was “social science”: a science that would demonstrate that environment, rather than character or heredity, is a better explanation of what people do. Almost the entire history of twentieth-century psychology and her sister disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and political science have acted out this premise.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 104).
This is a huge point. What its saying is that there is a faulty basis for the entire field akin to economics faulty assumptions about rational actors.
“Meditation and cultivating deliberation— slow talking, slow reading, slow eating, not interrupting— all work. For young children, Tools of the Mind may work. We need to know much more about how to build patience, an unfashionable but critical virtue.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 125).
I would compare this with books like “The Mindful Child” and other books recommending meditative practices. “Tools of the Mind” is neither original nor unique.
“How would you select hens to maximize egg production? The selfish gene tells farmers to select the individual hens that produce the most eggs in generation one, breed them, and do the same thing for several generations. By generation six, the farmer should have much better egg production, correct? Wrong! By generation six, using this scheme, there is almost no egg production, and most of the hens have been clawed to death by their hyperaggressive and hyper-egg-laying competitors. Hens are social, and they live in clutches; so group selection suggests a different way to maximize egg production. Breed the entire clutch that produces the most eggs in each successive generation. Using this method, egg production does indeed become massive. The same logic of natural selection seems to hold for the social insects as well. These enormously successful species (half the biomass of all insects is social) have factories, fortresses, and systems of communication, and their evolution is more compatible with group selection than with individual selection. Human beings, on this account, are ineluctably social, and it is our sociality that is our secret weapon.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 145).
This is an incredible example that is extremely useful in explaining the value of the so-called less talented.
“In addition to physical data, a few items were psychological (sadness, happiness, loneliness, and the like) and were administered several times; and, of course, the actual location of every house was known. This allowed researchers to draw an emotional “sociogram”: a plot of how physical proximity influences emotion into the future. The closer someone lived to someone who was lonely, the lonelier the second individual felt. The same was true for depression, but the blockbuster was about happiness. Happiness was even more contagious than loneliness or depression, and it worked across time. If person A’s happiness went up at time 1, person B’s— living next door— went up at time 2. And so did person C’s, two doors away, by somewhat less. Even person D, three doors away, enjoyed more happiness. This has significant implications for morale among groups of soldiers and for leadership. On the negative side, it suggests that a few sad or lonely or angry apples can spoil the morale of the entire unit. Commanders have known this forever. But the news is that positive morale is even more powerful and can boost the well-being and the performance of the entire unit. This makes the cultivation of happiness— a badly neglected side of leadership— important, perhaps crucial.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (pp. 146-147).
This re-emphasizes the importance of spirituality and happiness.
“Few of us are lucky enough to acquire mentors after age fifty. Ray became mine when I became president of the American Psychological Association in 1996. He had been president ten years before and had served as CEO (the real seat of power) ever since. In my first couple of months, as an innocent academic, I bumbled my way around the politics of psychotherapy, getting a bloody nose trying to convince the leading private practitioners to get behind evidence-based therapy. Pretty soon I was in “deep shit” with the practitioners.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 214).
Personal amusing anecdote: I was involved in a lawsuit against the APA where I deposed Ray Fowler – meaning I questioned him for several hours under oath (it was just a contract case). I asked Fowler about a one line email he had sent to someone else and why he wrote it that way. He said it would take four hours to explain the thinking behind it. (I asked him to give me the 30-second version). But Fowler was indeed very diplomatic, nice and did not come across like Seligman.
“We have become friends, bonded by this common interest. I believe such Internet groups are one new technique that will save lives.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 219).
I agree. The new communities that are just proto-forming now are likely to be internet based. Millennial generation is all over this stuff. And we have one right here. We are forming good friendships and I am grateful for them.
“20 Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being: M. E. P. Seligman, T. A. Steen, N. Park, and C. Peterson, “Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions,” American Psychologist 60 (2005): 410– 21. In recent research, we found that, among five different positive psychology exercises, the gratitude visit (as described in Authentic Happiness) produced the largest positive changes in happiness (and decreases in depressive symptoms), and this effect lasted for a month. In the gratitude visit exercise, participants are asked to write and deliver a letter of gratitude in person to someone who had been especially kind to them but had never been properly thanked. S. Lyubomirsky, K. M. Sheldon, and D. Schkade, “Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change,” Review of General Psychology 9 (2005): 111– 31. Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues have also found that asking students to perform five acts of kindness per week over six weeks resulted in an increase in well-being, especially if they performed their five acts of kindness all in one day. Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (pp. 275-276).
Thank you for confirming the validity of this ancient practice, Dr. Seligman. I should direct him to “Of Heaven and Mirth” by Rev. James Martin, S.J., better known as Stephen Colbert’s chaplain.
“51 There is another, more realistic approach to these dysphorias: learning to function well even if you are sad or anxious or angry— in other words, dealing with it: S. C. Hayes, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Relational Frame Theory, and the Third Wave of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies,” Behavior Therapy 35 (2004): 639– 65. The so-called third wave of behavioral and cognitive therapies shares the idea that patients may be better off dealing with their problems rather than trying to get rid of them. Steven Hayes, the architect of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT, pronounced as one word), explains how clients can lose sight of what their ultimate goals are, and how acceptance, or “dealing with it,” can help them do just that: “Typically, an anxiety-disordered person wants to get rid of anxiety. It could be experienced as invalidating to refuse to work directly on that desired outcome. At another level, however, the anxious client wants to get rid of anxiety in order to do something such as living a vital human life. Lack of anxiety is not the ultimate goal— it is a means to an end. Since often it has failed as a means, ACT suggests abandoning that means […] The larger message thus is validating (trust your experience) and empowering (you can live a powerful life from here, without first winning a war with your own history)” (p. 652). Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 287).
This goes to the idea that we need practice and limited exposures to dealing with stress.
“103 Character had long since gone out of fashion in social science: The decline in psychologists’ interest for the notion of character can be traced back to the work of Gordon Allport, one of the founding fathers of the study of personality in the United States. Allport borrowed from John Watson, another psychologist, the distinction between “character” (the self viewed from a moral perspective) and “personality” (the objective self). According to Allport (1921), “psychologists who accept Watson’s view have no right, strictly speaking, to include character study in the province of psychology. It belongs rather to social ethics.” Personality is a morally neutral version of character and thus more appropriate to objective science. Allport urged psychologists to study personality traits and leave character to the province of philosophy. For a review of Allport’s work on character and personality, see I. A. M. Nicholson, “Gordon Allport, Character, and the ‘Culture of Personality,’ 1897– 1937,” History of Psychology 1 (1998): 52– 68. For Allport’s original work on the distinction between character and personality, see G. Allport, “Personality and Character,” Psychological Bulletin 18 (1921): 441– 55; G. Allport, “Concepts of Traits and Personality,” Psychological Bulletin 24 (1927): 284– 93; G. Allport and P. Vernon, “The Field of Personality,” Psychological Bulletin 27 (1930): 677– 730.” Seligman, Martin E. P. (2011-04-05). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being (p. 297).
This is a critical problem with many of the social sciences and limits their usefulness. Assuming its all nurture and no nature. In this field, there is a blindness to natural narcissists and psychopaths. We cannot assume that all humans have the same hard wiring and the evidence strongly suggests that they don’t. (Why do all these left-handed people keep showing up anyway?)
Yes, I understand that people can be manipulated into happiness by expressing gushing interest, but surely this does not hold for everybody. On that note, I lean much closer to Ehrenreich's Bright-sided.
). To my mind, it's the same as assuming more = better, or bigger = better.
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