What Changes? What Doesn't Change? : Part 2

What You Can Change . . . and What You Can't*: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement
by Martin E. Seligman, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 2)

I have spent the last thirty years working on the question of "plasticity," academic jargon for what changes and what doesn't. I have worked both sides of the street. I started my academic life in the field pretentiously called "learning." Like most of the social sciences of the 1960s, the psychology of learning was enthusiastically environmental, its ideology a reaction to the still-fresh nightmare of the genetically minded Nazis. Just arrange the rewards and punishments right, learning theory held, and the organism (pigeon, adult human, rat, rhesus monkey, or toddler - it mattered so little that we simply called all of them "S's," for "Subjects") would absorb whatever you wanted to teach it.

My years in the learning laboratory taught me that there were many things organisms wouldn't learn no matter how ingenious the experiment. Rats wouldn't learn that tones predicted poisoning, and pigeons wouldn't learn to peck keys to avoid getting shocked. (Humans are even more resistant to change - but more on that later.) My first book, The Biological Boundaries of Learning (1972), set out a theory, "Preparedness," of how natural selection shapes what we can and cannot learn. Evolution, acting through our genes and our nervous system, has made it simple for us to change in certain ways and almost impossible for us to change in others.

With the constraints that evolution places on learning very much in mind, I had to pick my problems carefully. I was and I am an unabashed do-gooder. I wanted to discover things that would relieve suffering - leaving knowledge for knowledge's sake to other, purer souls. Some psychological suffering seemed to me unyielding, unchangeable because of biology. Other problems seemed more tractable, solvable if only I was patient enough, worked hard enough, and was clever enough. I had to discover the "plastic" problems on which to work.

I chose to work on helplessness, depression, and pessimism. Each of these, I found, could be learned and could be unlearned. In 1975, I wrote Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. Its focus was on how helplessness was learned in the wake of uncontrollable bad events, and how this posture could devastate the rest of one's life. My most recent book, Learned Optimism (1991), was very much the opposite. It spelled out fifteen years of my research documenting the bad news: Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated. My present research program is trying to prevent America's most costly mental illness - depression - rather than waiting to attempt cures after it strikes. All this is very much in the spirit of the age of self-improvement and the age of therapy.

A recurring theme of this book will be the need for truth in packaging in psychology and psychiatry; so I had best start by laying out my biases and my background.

The nature of the beast. This book is about the psychological beasts: depression, anxiety, stupidity, meanness, traumatic stress, alcoholism, fatness, sexual "perversion." When I was a callow learning theorist, I knew I was stalking after those beasts. I did not then realize that to understand them I had to take into account another beast, the human beast.

My ideology told me that environment is completely responsible for the psychological beasts. Stupidity is caused by ignorance; provide enough books and education, and you will cure stupidity. Depression and anxiety are caused by trauma, particularly bad childhood experience; minimize bad experience, raise children without adversity, and you will banish depression and anxiety. Prejudice is caused by unfamiliarity; get people acquainted, and prejudice will disappear. Sexual "perversion" is caused by repression and suppression; let it all hang out, and everyone will become lusty heterosexuals.

My bias now is that while this is not wholly wrong, it is seriously incomplete. The long evolutionary history of our species has also shaped our stupidities, our fears, our sadness, our crimes, what we lust after, and much else besides. The species we are combines with what actually happens to us to burden us with psychological beasts or to protect us against them. To understand and undo such malevolent effects, we must face the human beast.

No sacred cows. This book walks a political tightrope. On one side is the racist segment of the right, fervently hoping that intelligence, femininity, and criminality are all entirely genetic. On the other side are many aging 1960s liberals and their "politically correct" campus heirs, condemning all who dare to speak ill of victims; failure, they say, results from poverty, racism, a bad upbringing, a malevolent system, under-privilege, deprivation - from anything but oneself.

My loyalty is not to the right or to the left. I have no patience for their sacred cows or their special pleading. My loyalty is to reasoned argument, to the unfashionable positions that deserve a hearing, to the thoughtful weighing of evidence. I realize that much of what I will say in this book is grist for the agendas of both political positions. I believe that facing the beast entails airing unpopular arguments. When the evidence points toward genetic causes, I will say so. When the evidence points toward a bad environment or bad parenting as responsible, I will say so. When the evidence points toward unchangeability, I will say so. When the evidence points to effective ways of changing, I will say that too.

Outcome studies as best evidence. Suppose for a moment that an epidemic of German measles is predicted. You are pregnant and you know that German measles causes birth defects. Two vaccines, Measex and Pneuplox, are on the market. A famous Hollywood star says on TV that she was given Measex and didn't get German measles. An Olympic sprinter also adds her testimonial. Your best friend has heard good things about Measex. Pneuplox, on the other hand, is not advertising. But it has been tested in what is called an outcome study, in which it was administered to five hundred people: Only two of these people contracted German measles. Another five hundred received a sham injection: Twenty-eight of them got German measles. Now assume that Measex has not been so tested. Which vaccine do you want? The one that has passed a rigorous outcome test, of course.

Making up your mind about self-improvement courses, psychotherapy, and medications for you and your family is difficult because the industries that champion them are enormous and profitable and try to sell themselves with highly persuasive means: testimonials, case histories, word of mouth, endorsements ("My doctor is the best specialist on X in the East"), all slick forms of advertising. Just as this is no way to pick a vaccine or to decide on whether to have chemotherapy versus radiation for cancer, this is no way to decide on whether to try a particular diet, or whether to send your father to a particular alcohol-treatment center, or whether to take a particular drug for depression or to have psychotherapy. Much better evidence - outcome studies - is now often available.

In the collision between self-improvement and biological psychiatry, the two sides have until recently used different sorts of evidence. The biological psychiatrists started with case histories but then built up to outcome studies - comparing a treated group with a group given a sugar pill, a placebo. The self-improvement and psychotherapy advocates still rely, for the most part, on single case histories and testimonials: before and after snapshots of some formerly obese person, a dramatic case report from a professional football player in Alcoholics Anonymous, a case of sudden recovery from profound depression following an angry confrontation with Mother. Case histories make absorbing reading, but they are clinically very weak, and, usually, self-serving evidence.

Copyright © 2007 by Martin E. Seligman.

About the Author

Martin Seligman, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a past president of the American Psychological Association, is a leading motivational expert and an authority on learned helplessness. His many books include Authentic Happiness and The Optimistic Child. Dr. Seligman's research has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Aging, the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.