How to Make a Difference: Part 2
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What is learned helplessness and how does it affect our sense of agency?
This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantham. If you look down the history of the world, you see a pattern repeat itself over and over again. For lengthy periods of time, groups, communities, and even nations can find themselves stuck. Years go by, sometimes decades, even centuries, and nothing shifts. And then a small group of people, sometimes even just one or two, Decide they've had enough and start to foment change. At first, it looks impossible. The odds are too steep, the opposition too strong. But then? The impossible happens. And soon after, the change that seemed impossible was Appears like it was inevitable. In our story last week, we explored the psychology of learned helplessness. When people are shown over and over that they cannot change their lives or circumstances, they eventually stop trying to bring about change in their lives and circumstances.
If you missed that story, you can find it in our podcast feed or at hiddenbrain dot org. It's titled How to Make a Difference Part one. Today we look at the psychology of people who bring about change in their own lives or at the level of groups and nations. What prompts these brave souls to attempt to change their circumstances, even when it looks difficult or impossible? The evidence suggests that these individuals possess a powerful weapon. They have an internal sense of agency. By believing that change is possible, by believing that they can be agents of change, and They create a force field that actually makes change possible. Today on the show, we explore research that shows that a capacity for agency is not a personality trait, but a skill that can be taught and learned.
If we can learn to be helpless, apathetic, and passive, we can also learn to be optimistic and agentic. The surprising science of how people come to see opportunity where others see only roadblocks. This week, on Hidden Brain.
When we think
about success, we usually focus on ingredients like talent, intelligence, and opportunity. But psychologists have found that another factor matters just as much, or even more. Before we ever take action, we carry around assumptions about whether our actions can make a difference. Those assumptions can determine whether we persist and adapt or never make an attempt in the first place. At the University of Pennsylvania, psychologist Martin Seligman studies how people can learn to be more agentic. Marty Saligman, welcome to Hidden Pray.
I'm delighted to be here.
Marty, in your early days as a professor, you had a brilliant student whom you call Suzanne. Describe her for me and tell me how she responded when you placed a significant challenge before her.
In my earliest years as a professor, my policy with students generally has been after they've shown they were A plus students in my courses is to treat them as a postdoc graduate student and give them really difficult problems. So this happened with uh one of my terrific students, I'll call her Suzanne. And uh she started to work on the problem. And Eventually I saw her with her head in her hands and Crying, sobbing, charming. She had given up. was too hard for her. Well, my thinking at the time was w what did psychology Tell us about giving up. and how we can get rid of it. And this is indeed in many ways the start of the arc of my sixty years of work. Which started with helplessness and giving up. But Halfway through.
became the opposite question. How do we make people more agentic and happier?
In many ways, uh Suzanne's example is not the example of someone who was lazy or incompetent, because in some ways she had demonstrated that she was a good student in in in your class previously. And so it must have been a little puzzling when you saw her suddenly throw up her hands and give up, because in some ways this was not the giving up of someone who truly was unable to do the problem. It was somebody who had given up almost before they Started.
If you have the talent of Mozart But you don't believe you can compose music. The result is zero. But psychology at that time had three huge blind spots about uh human beings which made it impossible to ask.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is learned helplessness and how does it affect our sense of agency?
0:00–6:28
2
How does Martin Seligman define agency and why is it a skill that can be taught?
6:28–13:42
3
What techniques can we use to shift from catastrophic thinking to a more optimistic explanatory style?
13:42–20:31
4
How can graded tasks and small wins build confidence and increase agency?
20:31–30:12
5
What role do signature strengths and strengths‑based work play in fostering agency?
30:12–40:55
6
How can imagination be cultivated—through writing about a best possible self or modeling successful role models?
40:55–48:38