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> Optimists explain good things as being personal, general, and permanent, and explain away bad things as being impersonal, specific, and temporary. Can't this

> Optimists explain good things as being personal, general, and permanent, and explain away bad things as being impersonal, specific, and temporary. Can't this be taken to unhealthy extremes? Sounds exactly like how narcissists think. Just look at Trump. He claims personal responsibility for his successes, but his failures are always one-time events that were other people's fault. Where should one draw the line?

braythwayt 10y ago
My understanding is that narcissism is a slightly different thing: > Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a long-term pattern of abnormal > behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an > excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others' feelings. Seligman claims that people who have the "optimistic" asymmetry are happier and more productive than those who have the "pessimistic" asymmetry. Unfortunately, he makes no claims about other aspects of people's personalities, such as whether they are ethical. I think you can be optimistic without having an exaggerated feeling of self-importance, and certainly it has nothing to do with a need for admiration or lacking understanding for the feelings of others. So... I think the answer as to where to draw the line is, "If you are aware enough to worry about the line, you don't need the line."
drewrv 10y ago
> Where should one draw the line? Engage in self reflection and be honest with yourself, something I doubt Trump does.
- PSeitz 10y ago
  According to the research he must be pretty happy.
  - 77pt77 10y ago
    Knowledge isn't conducive to happiness.
tspike 10y ago
> Can't this be taken to unhealthy extremes? Sure it can. Happiness is orthogonal to ethicality or mental health. The line is not a line but rather a homeostatic balance subject to your own priorities and your culture's definition of those concepts.
lemming 10y ago
This is actually one of the strongest criticisms of Seligman's work. There's a clear example of this - after his work was published, the US Army adopted this as part of their training. After all, the results are fantastic - people become more psychologically robust in all sorts of ways if they're more optimistic, and soldiers are frequently in very stressful situations. However the flip side of this is that it essentially trains people to disclaim any personal responsibility for bad events, and this has been mentioned in investigations into atrocities committed by the US military. Unfortunately the only citations I can find with a quick Google search are from pretty shady or biased sources, but I do remember seeing some more reliable-looking ones in the past. It's also a common claim that CEOs tend to exhibit sociopathic tendencies, and it's not hard to see how this might apply there. I read Seligman's book several years ago (and like Reginald, I recommend that almost everyone reads it - it's fascinating) but when I took the test I only came out as mostly optimistic. On 4 of the 6 axes I was considered optimistic, but the other two could be colloquially translated as "when I do bad things I think it's my fault". Now according to Seligman, if I didn't think like that I'd be way better off, but I think I'm ok with maintaining the psychological equivalent of a moral compass there.
- braythwayt 10y ago
  I don't know if this is what you're thinking of, but Dr. Seligman's other big research work was into "Learned Helplessness." Seligman did some work with optimism and the forces, but the Learned Helplessness stuff was taken by two people unconnected with Seligman (James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen) who turned it into a manual for torturing people. Seligman's name was dragged through the mud for this, but he didn't do the work on torture, and his research was into identifying the causes of Learned Helplessness precisely so people could avoid it. He openly discusses helping the forces apply his research to aiding captured soldiers resist torture: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/learned-helplessness-torture-an-exchange/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/learned-helplessn... There is a lot of he-said/he-said at work, but there is no evidence that he worked with the CIA or anybody else on implementing torture. Of course, you may be discussing something else entirely!
  - 10y ago
gertef 10y ago
postmortem culture -- when something goes wrong, it isn't your fault, and it isn't anyone else's fault, but it's an opportunity to build a better system.

braythwayt 10y ago

My understanding is that narcissism is a slightly different thing: > Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a long-term pattern of abnormal > behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an > excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others' feelings. Seligman claims that people who have the "optimistic" asymmetry are happier and more productive than those who have the "pessimistic" asymmetry. Unfortunately, he makes no claims about other aspects of people's personalities, such as whether they are ethical. I think you can be optimistic without having an exaggerated feeling of self-importance, and certainly it has nothing to do with a need for admiration or lacking understanding for the feelings of others. So... I think the answer as to where to draw the line is, "If you are aware enough to worry about the line, you don't need the line."

drewrv 10y ago

> Where should one draw the line? Engage in self reflection and be honest with yourself, something I doubt Trump does.

PSeitz 10y ago
According to the research he must be pretty happy.
- 77pt77 10y ago
  Knowledge isn't conducive to happiness.

tspike 10y ago

> Can't this be taken to unhealthy extremes? Sure it can. Happiness is orthogonal to ethicality or mental health. The line is not a line but rather a homeostatic balance subject to your own priorities and your culture's definition of those concepts.

lemming 10y ago

This is actually one of the strongest criticisms of Seligman's work. There's a clear example of this - after his work was published, the US Army adopted this as part of their training. After all, the results are fantastic - people become more psychologically robust in all sorts of ways if they're more optimistic, and soldiers are frequently in very stressful situations. However the flip side of this is that it essentially trains people to disclaim any personal responsibility for bad events, and this has been mentioned in investigations into atrocities committed by the US military. Unfortunately the only citations I can find with a quick Google search are from pretty shady or biased sources, but I do remember seeing some more reliable-looking ones in the past. It's also a common claim that CEOs tend to exhibit sociopathic tendencies, and it's not hard to see how this might apply there. I read Seligman's book several years ago (and like Reginald, I recommend that almost everyone reads it - it's fascinating) but when I took the test I only came out as mostly optimistic. On 4 of the 6 axes I was considered optimistic, but the other two could be colloquially translated as "when I do bad things I think it's my fault". Now according to Seligman, if I didn't think like that I'd be way better off, but I think I'm ok with maintaining the psychological equivalent of a moral compass there.

braythwayt 10y ago
I don't know if this is what you're thinking of, but Dr. Seligman's other big research work was into "Learned Helplessness." Seligman did some work with optimism and the forces, but the Learned Helplessness stuff was taken by two people unconnected with Seligman (James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen) who turned it into a manual for torturing people. Seligman's name was dragged through the mud for this, but he didn't do the work on torture, and his research was into identifying the causes of Learned Helplessness precisely so people could avoid it. He openly discusses helping the forces apply his research to aiding captured soldiers resist torture: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/learned-helplessness-torture-an-exchange/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/learned-helplessn... There is a lot of he-said/he-said at work, but there is no evidence that he worked with the CIA or anybody else on implementing torture. Of course, you may be discussing something else entirely!
- 10y ago

gertef 10y ago

postmortem culture -- when something goes wrong, it isn't your fault, and it isn't anyone else's fault, but it's an opportunity to build a better system.