The Dogs That Gave Up

In 1967, two young scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, Martin Seligman and Steven Maier, were studying how animals learn. They wanted to understand fear. Their experiment had two stages.

In the first stage, dogs were held in a harness and given mild electric shocks. Some dogs could stop the shock by pushing a panel with their nose. Other dogs had no control at all. For them, nothing they did made any difference.

In the second stage, each dog was put in a box with a low wall in the middle. One side of the box gave shocks. The other side was safe. The wall was so low that any dog could jump over it easily.

The dogs that had controlled the shocks in stage one jumped over at once. But most of the dogs with no control did not even try. They lay down and accepted the shock. The way out was right in front of them, and they didn't see it.

Seligman called this "learned helplessness". The dogs had learned a terrible lesson: nothing I do matters. Then they carried that lesson into a new situation where it was no longer true. But one thing interested Seligman more than anything else. About one dog in three never gave up. Why not?

Years later, Seligman saw the same difference in people. Two people have the same bad experience. One gives up. The other tries again. What is the difference?

He decided that the answer is in what we tell ourselves. He called it our explanatory style: the way we explain bad events to ourselves. It has three parts, which he called "the three Ps".

The first P is permanent. A pessimist thinks a bad thing will last for ever: "I always fail." An optimist thinks it is temporary: "I didn't prepare enough this time." The second P is pervasive. A pessimist thinks a failure spreads into everything: "I'm useless at everything." An optimist keeps it small: "I'm bad at this one thing." The third P is personal. A pessimist blames the whole self: "I'm stupid." An optimist looks at the real cause: "The exam was very hard."

In the 1980s, the insurance company MetLife had a problem. Selling insurance is hard. Customers say no again and again, and many new salespeople left within a year or two. Seligman suggested a test. He measured how optimistic job applicants were. Then MetLife hired a special group of 129 people. They had failed the company's normal test — but they scored very high for optimism.

Seligman reports the results. In their first year, the special group sold 21 percent more insurance than the pessimists. In the second year, they sold 57 percent more. The optimists didn't hear "no" as "you are a failure". They heard "not this customer, not today". So they made the next call.

So should we all try to be optimists? It isn't that simple. The neuroscientist Tali Sharot found that about 80 percent of people expect their own future to be better than average. That cannot be true for everybody! This "optimism bias" helps us to start new projects. But it also makes us forget to save money, check our health, or plan for problems.

The psychologist Julie Norem studies another kind of person: the "defensive pessimist". These people feel anxious before a big event. They imagine everything that could go wrong, and then they prepare for each problem. Researchers asked some of these people to relax and think positive thoughts. Their performance got worse. The worry was not their enemy. It was their method.

The most dramatic example comes from a prison camp. Admiral James Stockdale was a prisoner in Vietnam for almost eight years, from 1965 to 1973. He said the first people to die were the optimists. They said, "We'll be home by Christmas." Christmas came, and they said "Easter". Each disappointment hurt more, and in the end their hearts broke. Stockdale believed he would get out one day, but he faced every hard fact of the present. The business writer Jim Collins later called this "the Stockdale paradox".

So perhaps the best outlook is not pure optimism or pessimism. It is hope about the end, and honesty about today.