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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
by 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 agoI 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!
- lemming 10y agoYes, I remember that as well - it was very unfortunate. It's not what I mean though, I would swear that I had also seen criticism of the optimism training in the armed forces with respect to its tendency to disclaim responsibility for, or otherwise minimise, negative outcomes from one's actions. I can't find a reference now though, although I haven't had time to Google it properly yet.