Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [217]
Later, Seligman broadened his theory into what he called “explanatory style.” It accounts for the basic aspect of personality that appears as overall optimism or general pessimism. In Seligman’s words:
Take a bad event such as a defeat in business or love, for instance. Pessimists attribute it to causes that are long-lasting or permanent, that affect everything they do, and that are their own fault. Optimists regard the causes of a defeat as temporary, limited to the present case, and the result of circumstances, bad luck, or the actions of other people.
Optimism leads to higher achievement than pessimism. Optimistic life insurance agents, we found, sell more insurance and stay at it longer than pessimistic agents. Optimistic Olympic-level swimmers, when they’re defeated, get faster; pessimistic swimmers, when they’re defeated, get slower. Optimistic professional baseball and basketball teams do better, particularly after they’re defeated, than pessimistic teams.61
On this basis, Seligman developed his own distinctive approach to personality: helplessness or pessimism could be learned (as the dogs had learned it)—but so could the opposite, optimism; one could learn mental skills that would change one’s view of life in a positive and self-directing fashion. “Learned optimism” became the basis of what he views as a new discipline, Positive Psychology, which studies positive emotion, positive character traits, and therapeutic methods of achieving them. Since 2000 this has been Seligman’s main interest, and at the University of Pennsylvania he now heads a training and research facility known as the Positive Psychology Center.62
One other issue on which social learning theory cast new light is that of the differences between male and female personalities. Ostensibly wise persons have had a lot to say about this subject throughout the ages, most of them men, who have spoken well of their own sex and ill of the other. Their views have ranged from Plato’s mild denigration of woman (“The gifts of nature are alike diffused in both [sexes], but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man”) to Clement of Alexandria’s tirade against woman’s sinful nature (“You are the gate of hell, the unsealer of that forbidden tree, the first deserter of the divine law”) to Lord Chesterfield’s genteel sneer at woman’s mind and personality:
Women are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never in my life knew one that had it…A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors them, and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly, forward child.
A number of traditionally female traits—emotionality, timidity, vanity, nurturance, perceptiveness, deviousness, and so on—have always been assumed to be innate. In the early decades of psychology, most psychologists, Freud among them, believed that these traits were the inescapable outcome of women’s hormonal and biological endowments and of the special experiences these brought about. As late as 1936, Lewis Terman and a colleague, C. C. Miles, published a well-received and influential study of male and female personalities, Sex and Personality, based on the results of a test they had constructed. Many of the answers were scored on the basis of traditional beliefs about gender differences. In the word-association section of the test, for instance, if the respondent’s association to “tender” was “meat,” the answer was scored as masculine, if “kind” or “loving,” feminine. Reading detective stories and liking chemistry were scored as masculine; reading poetry and liking dramatics, feminine.63
Extraordinary though it may seem today, the Terman and