Seligman and Gilbert TED Talks: Happiness and Psychology

Introduction: Psychology's Self-Assessment

Dr. Martin Seligman opens his TED Talk with a story about an interview he was asked to do with CNN. He had to prepare a sound bite about the state of psychology using, first, just one word. He simply said "good." When asked for two words, he said "not good." When asked for three, he said "not good enough." Before explaining why psychology is not good enough, however, he first addresses the disease model and the advancements that psychology has made within that framework.

The Disease Model and Its Limitations

Throughout most of its history, psychology has directed the majority of its work toward helping people with disease. Dr. Seligman states that there are roughly sixteen psychological diseases that affect mental health. Psychology can help with almost all of them and can completely cure two of them. However, the exclusive focus on disease has left psychology somewhat limited in scope when it comes to helping ordinary people. As Seligman describes it, psychology was all about finding out what was wrong with a person.

Seligman acknowledges that psychology has succeeded in helping miserable people become less miserable, and he is proud of that accomplishment. However, there were also costs to this model. Chief among them was the neglect of normal people and the question of what makes life genuinely fulfilling. From within this limitation, psychology has slowly begun to broaden its perspective, giving rise to what is now called positive psychology.

Positive Psychology and the Components of Happiness

Positive psychology has three core aims:

First, psychology should be just as concerned with human strength as it is with weakness. Second, it should focus on building the best things in life, not only on repairing the worst. Third, it should be just as concerned with making the lives of normal people more fulfilling as it is with treating those who have psychological illnesses.

Significant advances have been made under this framework. One is that researchers can now identify the precursors of positive emotional states. There have also been many proposed interventions—over one hundred twenty, ranging from ancient Buddhist practices to the work of contemporary motivational figures such as Anthony Robbins.

Seligman further defines three distinct aspects of a happy life. The first is the pleasant life, which is largely heritable. The capacity to experience the pleasures of life is tied to inherited traits; pleasure has a raw, immediate quality. The second is the life of engagement, in which a person applies their highest character strengths to work, love, and play through what is commonly referred to as flow. The third is the meaningful life, in which those same strengths are put in service of something larger than oneself.

Several positive interventions have been shown to cultivate these states. One is savoring—deliberately attending to and appreciating positive experiences. Another is gratitude. Seligman illustrates this with an exercise in which a person writes a three-hundred-word testimonial of thanks to someone who has been important in their life. This intervention has been shown to produce measurable increases in happiness. Notably, the pursuit of pleasure alone has very little influence on overall life satisfaction when it is not accompanied by engagement and meaning.

Conclusion: Keeping Preferences in Check

Dr. Gilbert concludes with a reference to Adam Smith and the observation that some things in our lives are genuinely worth having preferences for. However, there are instances in which our preferences drive us too hard and too fast. The range of any given preference is almost always perceived as more important to our happiness than it actually turns out to be. The things we believe will make us happy are often wrong, and as a consequence, some people become overstressed while chasing outcomes that are largely irrelevant to their actual overall well-being.

While it may be good to have preferences, those preferences should be kept in check. When they grow too large, they can consume an individual in ways that are ultimately counterproductive. Both Seligman and Gilbert, in their respective talks, converge on a similar insight: the most reliable path to a fulfilling life is not the unchecked pursuit of pleasure or achievement, but a more measured and aware engagement with the sources of genuine human happiness.