Political systems can instill Hope or Despair in a population
This part of the book Learned optimism shows how optimism can be influenced by a political system.
Explanatory Style
Across Frontiers
IN 1983 I WENT to
Munich to attend the Congress of the International Society for the
Study of Behavioral Development, and on the second day I fell into
conversation with an intense young German graduate student who
introduced herself simply as Ele. “Let me tell you the idea I
had when you were talking this morning about the CAVE technique,”
she said. “But first let me ask a question. Do you think that
the benefits of optimism and the dangers of pessimism and
helplessness and passivity reflect universal laws of human nature, or
do they hold true only in our kind of societyWesternized, I mean,
like America and West Germany?” That was a good question. I told
her I sometimes wondered myself whether or not our concern with
control and with optimism was conditioned by advertising on the one
hand and the Puritan ethic on the other. Depression, I said, doesn’t
seem to occur in non-Western cultures at anything like the epidemic
rate it does in Westernized ones. Perhaps cultures that aren’t
obsessed with achievement don’t suffer the effects of helplessness
and pessimism the way we do. Perhaps, I suggested, lessons from the
animal kingdom were relevant. It isn’t just Westernized men and women
who show the signs of depression when they experience loss and
helplessness. Both in nature and in the laboratory, animals respond
to helplessness with symptoms amazingly parallel to those of
Westernized human beings. Chimpanzees reacting to the death of other
chimpanzees; rats reacting to inescapable shock; goldfish, dogs, even
cockroaches act very much like we do when we fail. I suspect, I said,
that when human cultures don’t respond to loss and helplessness with
depression, it’s because the punishment of endless poverty, of
thousands of years of having two out of three children die young, has
beaten the natural response of depression out of the culture. “I
don’t believe that Westernized human beings have been propagandized
into depression, brainwashed into the ethic of control,” I said.
“But to say that the desire for control and the devastating
response to helplessness are natural is not to say that optimism
works universally.” Consider success at work and in politics,
for example, I said. Optimism works well for American life-insurance
salesmen and for candidates who want to be president of the United
States. But it’s hard to imagine the understated Englishman reacting
well to the never-give-up salesman. Or the dour Swedish voter
electing an Eisenhower. Or the Japanese taking kindly to someone who
always blames others for his failures. I said I thought the
learned-optimism approach probably would, in fact, provide relief
from the torment of depression in these cultures but that optimism
would have to be adapted to other styles in the workplace or in
politics. The trouble was, though, that not much work had been done
yet on examining how optimism works from one culture to the next.
“But tell me,” I asked, “what was that idea you had
while I was lecturing on the CAVE technique?” “I think I
have found a way,” said Ele, “to discover how much hope and
despair there is across cultures and across history. For instance, is
there such a thing as a national explanatory style, one that predicts
how a nation or a people will behave in crisis? Does one particular
form of government engender more hope than another?” Ele’s
questions were great, I replied, but almost unanswerable. Let’s say
we learned, by “CA VEing” things they wrote or said or
sang, that Bulgarians have a better explanatory style than Navajos
do. That result would be uninterpretable.-It might be more macho to
say optimistic things in one culture than in the other. The peoples
experience different weather, have different histories and gene
pools, live on different continents. Any difference in explanatory
style between Bulgarians and Navajos could be explained in a thousand
ways other than a difference in the underlying amount of hope or
despair. “If you do the wrong sort of comparison,” Ele
said, “yes. But I wasn’t thinking of Navajos and Bulgarians. I
was thinking of a much more similar pair of cultures-East and West
Berlin. They are in the same place, they have the same weather, they
speak the same dialect, emotional words and gestures mean the same
thing, they have the same history up until 1945. They differ only in
political system since then. They are like identical twins reared
apart for forty years. They seem a perfect way of asking if despair
is different across political systems-with everything else held
constant.” The next day at the congress, I told a professor from
Zurich about this creative graduate student I’d met the day before.
After I described her and mentioned that she called herself Ele, he
told me she was the Princess Gabriele zu Oettingen-Oettingen und
Oettingen-Spielberg, one of Bavaria’s most promising young
scientists. My conversation with Gabriele continued the next day over
tea. I said I agreed that East versus West Berlin differences in
explanatory style-if found-could be meaningfully interpreted as
stemming only from communism versus capitalism. But how, I asked,
could she actually get the material to compare? She couldn’t just
cross the Wall and hand out optimism questionnaires to a random
sample of East Berliners. “Not in the present political
climate,” she agreed. (Andropov was then premier of the Soviet
Union.) “But all I need is writings from both cities, writings
that are exactly comparable. They have to be about the same events,
occurring at the same time. And they should be neutral eventsnot
politics or economics or mental health. And I’ve thought of just the
thing,” she said. “In about four months, the winter
Olympics will take place in Yugoslavia. They will be reported in
great detail in both East and West Berlin newspapers. Like most
sports reporting, they will be filled with causal statements from
athletes and reporters, about victories and about defeats. I want to
CA VE them in their entirety and see which culture is more
pessimistic. This will be a demonstration that the quantity of hope
can be compared across cultures.” I asked what her predictions
were. She expected that East German explanatory style, at least in
the sports pages, would be more optimistic. The East Germans, after
all, were an outstanding Olympic nation, and the newspapers were
emphatically organs of the state. Part of their job was to keep
morale up. This wasn’t my prediction, but I kept my silence. Over the
next three months I had several trans-Atlantic phone conversations
with Gabriele and received a number of letters from her. She was
worried about the mechanics of getting the newspapers from East
Berlin, since it was sometimes difficult to take written material
across the Wall. She had arranged to have a mechanic friend in East
Berlin send her worthless kitchen objects, broken cups and bent
forks, by mail-wrapped in newspaper, the sports pages of course. But
this proved to be unnecessary. During the Olympics, she was able to
walk through the Berlin checkpoints unchallenged, carrying as many
East Berlin newspapers as she wanted. Next came the labor, combing
through the three West Berlin and three East Berlin newspapers for
the entire duration of the Olympics, extracting and rating the
event-explanation quotes. Gabriele found 381 quotes. Here are some of
the athletes’ and reporters’ optimistic explanations. An ice racer
could not stand the pace because “on this day there was
no morning sun to cover the ice with a mirror-like ice film” Negative event (4); a skier fell because “an avalanche of snow from nearby trees covered the visor of her helmet” Negative event (4); athletes were not afraid because “we just know that we will be stronger than our competitors” Positive event (16). These were among the pessimistic explanations: A disaster came because “she is in such bad shape” Negative event (17); “He had to hold back tears. His hope for a medal had gone” Negative event (17); an athlete succeeded because “our competitors had been drinking all night before” Positive event (3). But who made the optimistic statements and who made the pessimistic ones? The answers were a complete surprise to Gabriele. The East German statements were much more pessimistic than the West German ones. What made this finding even more remarkable was how well the East Germans did in the games. The East Germans won twenty-four medals and the West Germans only four. So the East Berlin papers had many more good events to report: Indeed, 61 percent of the East’s explanations were about good events for the East and only 47 percent of the West’s were about good events for the West. Nevertheless, the tone of East Berlin’s reportage was much bleaker than that of West Berlin’s. “I’m astonished by my results,” Gabriele told me. “As strong as they are, I’m not going to believe them until I find some other way to see if East Berliners are more pessimistic and depressed than West Berliners. I’ve tried getting accurate suicide and hospital statistics from East Berlin to compare to West Berlin, but of course, I can’t get them.” Gabriele’s Ph.D. was not in psychology but in human ethology, a branch of biology that deals with observing people in the natural environment and noting in great detail what they do. It started with Konrad Lorenz’s observations of ducklings that had “imprinted” on him and then followed him around-they had formed the conviction that he was their mother. His careful observations of nature soon branched out to systematic peoplewatching. Gabriele had earned her degree under the two leading successors of Lorenz. I knew Gabriele had done a lot of minute observations in classrooms full of kids, but I was apprehensive when she told me what she was going to do in the bars of East and West Berlin. “The only way I can think of to get converging support for my CA VE findings,” she wrote, “is to go to East Berlin and rigorously count the signs of despair and then compare them to the same settings in West Berlin. I don’t want to arouse police suspicions, so I’m going to do it in bars.” This is exactly what she did. In the winter of IC)85, she went to thirtyone bars in industrial areas. She chose fourteen in West Berlin and seventeen in East Berlin. These bars, called Kneipen, are where workmen go to drink after work. They were located near each other, separated only by the Wall. She did all the observations in the five weekdays of one week. She would enter a bar and take a seat in a far comer, as inconspicuously as she could. She then focused on groups of patrons and counted what they were doing in five-minute blocks. She counted everything observable that the literature considers related to depression: smiles, laughs, posture, vigorous hand movements, small movements like biting one’s nails. Measured this way, the East Berliners were once again much more depressed than the West Berliners. Sixty-nine percent of West Berliners smiled, but only 23 percent of East Berliners. Fifty percent of West Berliners sat or stood upright, but only 4 percent (!) of East Berliners. Eighty percent of West Berlin workmen had their bodies in an open posture turned toward others-but only 7 percent (!) of the East Berliners did. West Berliners laughed two and a half times as often as East Berliners. These large effects show that East Berliners display much more despair as measured both by words and by body language-than West Berliners do. The findings do not show, however, exactly what causes this difference. Clearly, since the two cultures were one until 1945, the findings say something about the amount of hope engendered by two different political systems. But they do not isolate which aspect of the two systems is responsible for increased or decreased hope. It could be the difference in standard of living, or the difference in freedom of expression or of travel. It could even be the difference in books, music, or food. These findings also fail to tell us whether East Berliners became less hopeful with the advent of the Communist regime and the building of the Wall, or West Berliners have become more hopeful since 1945. All we know is that there is now a difference, with the East showing more despair than the West. But we are working on “CA VEing” the newspaper reporting of every winter Olympics since World War II. That will tell us how hope in East and West Berlin has changed over time.· These findings also show us something else: that there exists a new method for measuring the quantity of hope and despair across cultures. This method allowed Gabriele Oettingen to compare what other scientists thought were incomparable .
Originally published at Karlbooklover.
