Chuck Bryan

One's way more stable than the other.

And psychology tends to focus more on the trait side because they want to figure out what it is that makes people actually adopt or grow up or be bestowed genetically, who knows, with an outlook on life that's way more positive than somebody else who may even have been

like in the womb with them, but raised in a different house.

You know, like twin studies have shown there's actually huge variations in pessimism and optimism among twins who were separated at birth.

Yeah, those studies are always really telling to me because that's probably not the hugest cohort, but I think it just speaks a lot to a lot of different things.

Yeah, and there's a lot of really unethical studies that were carried out with twins too.

Like I imagine splitting them up, right?

Yeah, I think there was a researcher at some point in the 70s maybe who specifically was splitting up twins to study them.

All right, I'm going to put on my optimist cap and just think that everything worked out great for them because they were eventually reunited.

That's wonderful.

So when you talk about the psychology side of things, there's a couple of ways that they like to look at it, which are dispositional and attributional.

Dispositional is how we predict future events, and attributional obviously is like,

Basically saying like this happened because of this, assigning either credit or blame for the reason that something good or bad happened to you.

Right.

And those two are trait-based optimistic or pessimistic views.

We're no longer talking about state and trait.

These are all traits from what we're talking about.

This is how you view life, right?

Yeah.

One of the first tests of this that has proven to be really viable and valid, it's called the Life Orientation Test, the LOT.