How to Make a Difference: Part 1
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Why do some people act on opportunities while others feel powerless?
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantham. You can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. It's an old saying, but it captures a fundamental truth about human nature. How often have you come by people who fail to seize the opportunities in front of them, who decline to make the most of the privileges they've been given? If you're a parent or a teacher, you may have sometimes felt like saying to a kid, I can't make you want it. If you're a manager, perhaps you've told an employee, there's a ladder over here, but you have to be the one to climb it. Sometimes the thing that needs to be seized is not an opportunity, but a lifeline. Do you know people stuck in bad situations, unhappy marriages, dead end jobs, soul crushing living conditions, who seem unwilling to escape even when the chance presents itself?
Does that describe You? Today on the show and in a follow up episode next week. Why do some people act on the possibilities before them while others believe that nothing they do can make a difference? How to discover or rediscover your ability to change things for the better This week on Hidden Brain.
Every day, life
presents us with small moments of possibility, a conversation that could change the course of a career, a relationship that could be repaired, a job posting that could become the start of something new. Some people step toward those moments almost instinctively. Others turn away without even trying. Today we explore the hidden psychological forces that determine which path we take and why the stories we tell about ourselves can become self-fulfilling. At the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Martin Seligman has spent many years studying these questions. Marty Seligman, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you, Shankar. I'm happy to be here.
Marty, I want to take you back to what might be your earliest memory. Uh tell me the story about a time when you saw your mother crying.
I'm two and a half years old, and I think this really is my first memory. And uh I hear these heartbroken sobs and guests coming from the next room and I run in to see my mother and there she is sitting on the second step of the stairs to the upstairs with her head in her hands and she's sobbing. Many years later he had I try to figure out what was really going on. It would have been Мід ерлі найтін форті фай. I think the concentration camps had opened up. And All of my mother's Hungarian relatives were uh her family that she abandoned uh in hungry were murdered But something happened to me then, Chakra, that actually fits with the hidden brain. And that is when I look at the photos of me.
I'm a Smiley Uh Here down to my shoulders and E bullying kid up until about age three. And then when I look at my photos up to my teenage and beyond, I'm tight lipped, I'm unsmiling, I'm looking thoughtful. And when I look at my really early photographs of this smiley bullion kid, I don't recognize myself.
Marty, I want to skip forward to another experience a few years later when you were thirteen. Your dad was driving you in the car and he shared something with you that was very disturbing. Describe for me what happened.
It's now nineteen fifty-five. I'm thirteen years old and I go to my second day of playing golf uh with my friend Bob Kaiser. And when my father drops us off of the golf course, uh he says, I can't feel My left arm. And that scared me and and it scared Bob also. I slept overnight at uh My best friend Jeff Albert's house, and I had this dreadful feeling. That something was wrong. And I walked home probably nine in the morning the next day, and there was my father being uh Dragged out on a stretcher. Into an ambulance. And he had had a A small stroke. And then within a couple of days, Shankar, my mother said my father had had massive strokes. And um in the next couple of months I visited my father reluctantly.
I was really afraid of this helplessness that I saw. And My father was paralyzed, he could speak. And he basically said I'm helpless. I don't want to die. I love you and your sister and your mother and I don't want to die.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
Why do some people act on opportunities while others feel powerless?
0:00–6:12
2
How did Martin Seligman’s early memories of his mother’s grief shape his interest in helplessness?
6:12–14:19
3
What was the impact of his father’s stroke on Seligman’s view of helplessness?
14:19–23:39
4
How did the animal and human experiments reveal the mechanics of learned helplessness?
23:39–33:31
5
What distinguishes optimistic from pessimistic explanatory styles and why do they matter?
33:31–41:56
6
How does Seligman define agency and what are its three core components?
41:56–47:58