Re-Thinking Optimism
About a year ago, I had a brief exchange with a friend about the future. She thought the world was going to hell. I said there was a lot of progress to be proud of, and I was hopeful, to which she replied, “Well, lucky to be you.”
At the time, I chalked her comment up as an offhand joke, but I didn’t think much more beyond that. I was more optimistic, and she was not. That was the end of the story. But coming back to this quote a year later, a lot has changed.
If you were to search up the word “optimism” on YouTube, you might find videos like “learning to be an optimist” or “the power of optimism” or “how to be more optimistic.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with these videos, I suppose, but they do point to an interesting fact about how we think about optimism these days.
The idea that many of these videos want to advance is that we shouldn’t think of optimism as something that defines us, but as an asset that we can acquire through effort and better our lives with. And I can totally see the appeal of this; after all, if we can learn optimism, we can learn to turn our lives around and be happier. Isn’t that a good thing?
Well, there’s something a little more insidious going on.
Now, technically, the videos aren’t wrong. You can become more optimistic. Many of the videos cite a real and influential study done by Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. In part one of his experiment, Seligman separated dogs into two groups. Group 1 were given random electric shocks that they could stop by pressing lever. Group 2 were shocked at the same times, but their levers did not stop the shocks; they stopped randomly.
In part two of the experiment, the same dogs were put into a box separated by a barrier, which the dogs could jump over. Each one was then administered random shocks again, except this time, the shocks for all the dogs stopped when they jumped over the barrier to the other side of the box. The dogs from Group 1 learned to do this fairly quickly, but the dogs from Group 2 did not. They had learned that there was nothing they could do about the shocks, and so they did nothing. Seligman called this phenomenon learned helplessness.
In a later paper however, Seligman argued that it was not that dogs in Group 1 became more passive, it was the dogs in Group 2 that became more proactive. The idea that one can learn to be more optimistic then, took hold, and was elaborated on extensively for the general reader in his book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. The main point is this: sometimes we overestimate our causal inefficacy in the world, so by proving that we do have control over outcomes, we can become more optimistic. In other words, we learn that we matter.
But there is a crucial difference, I think, between the videos I saw and Seligman’s general idea, which is this: the videos start at the assumption that the viewer isn’t optimistic enough. For example, in the video Optimism — How to Become Optimistic Right Now from Actualized.org, Leo, the speaker, asks the viewer “how many projects have you fallen off track with? How many diets?” After a short pause for an “answer,” he states, “Right. Exactly.”
But construing the problem this way shifts the burden of lacking optimism onto the individual. In other words, if there is a way to be more optimistic and you are not, it is because you have not done what is required. Conversely, because a person’s history starts right now, at the assumption that they are not already optimistic, it stops us from asking why some individuals lack optimism in the first place.
Many of these videos mention that optimism leads to success in life. But a study from 2015 showed that optimism is correlated with other social factors too, like race and gender. This puts a wrench in their assumptions. Maybe optimism doesn’t just lead to better lives; maybe it is also caused by better lives.
The weird thing is, this alternative interpretation does not contradict Seligman’s study; if anything, it directly follows from it. The different dogs’ optimism levels in Seligman’s study were not random; they were directly caused by subjecting some dogs to harsher conditions. The disparity then, is explained by the different “life histories” of each dog. Analogously, optimism in humans may also be explained by the social (and often prejudicial) forces that influence our own life histories.
In that same 2015 study, self-identified Black individuals had lower scores of dispositional optimism when compared to Whites. This is not a surprise. The systemic racism against Blacks in the United States is, in many ways, achieved through the process of removing autonomy and control in Black lives. This persists even at higher socio-economic levels.
In Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility, she explains clearly how the agency of Blacks are taken away by Whites. When White people are confronted with their racist personas that clash with their self-image, it almost always results in “confusion, defensiveness, and righteous indignation.” For example, when the 2016 Oscars were criticized for lacking diversity, actor Helen Mirren replied, “It just so happened it went that way,” and actor Charlotte Rampling described the criticism as “racist against whites.” “In so responding,” DiAngelo argues, “whites invoke the power to choose when, how, and to what extent racism is addressed or challenged.”
Like the electric shocks from Seligman’s experiment, Black people’s control over their own suffering is taken out of their hands. The result is this disparity in optimism. And to address this problem solely at the individual level is to ignore, or worse, conceal, the underlying power relations that facilitate this disparity.
So, in this way, optimism is far less an asset as it is a privilege. And under this interpretation, my friend’s reply makes a lot more sense. I am lucky to be me. I have autonomy over what I eat, where I live, what I do; my achievements in the world mostly reflect, and sometimes augment, the effort I put in. Under the system in which I live, I matter. And insofar as I do, I am permitted to be optimistic.
Works Cited
Boehm, Julia K, Ying Chen, David R Williams, Carol Ryff, and Laura D Kubzansky. 2015. “Unequally Distributed Psychological Assets: Are There Social Disparities in Optimism, Life Satisfaction, and Positive Affect?” PLoS ONE 1–16.
Maier, Steven F, and Martin EP Seligman. 1967. “Failure to Escape Traumatic Shock.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 1–9.
Maier, Steven F, and Martin EP Seligman. 2016. “Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights From Neuroscience.” Psychological Review 349–367.
