Hidden Brain - How to Make a Difference: Part 1

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

Why do some people act on the possibilities before them, while others come to believe that nothing they do will make a difference? Psychologist Martin Seligman describes his groundbreaking research on learned helplessness, and explains how the stories we tell ourselves about setbacks can shape what we do next. We also explore how optimism can help us rediscover our ability to change things for the better.If you have a question or comment about the science of optimism and pessimism that you'd be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience after listening to this episode, please find a quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone. Email the file to us at [e-mail]. Use the subject line: “How to Make a Difference.” If you love Hidden Brain in audio, check out our video series on YouTube. You'll find episodes there about memory, focus, getting unstuck, and much more at youtube.com/@hiddenbrain.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. 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. 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 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, I tried to figure out what was really going on. It would have been mid-early early 1945. I think the concentration camps had opened. And all of my mother's Hungarian relatives, her family that she abandoned in Hungary or murder. But something happened to me then, Shakra, that actually fits with the hidden brain. And that is when I look at the photos of me, I'm a smiley hair down to my shoulders,

a bullion 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 a smiley, a bullion kid, I don't recognize myself. Marty, I want to skip forward to another experience a few years later when you were 13. 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 1955. I'm 13 years old, and I go to my second day of playing golf with my friend Bob Kaiser, And when my father drops us off of the golf course, he says, I can't feel my left arm. And that scared me. And it scared Bob also. I slept overnight at 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 dragged out on a stretcher into an ambulance. And he had had a small stroke. And then within a couple of days, Shanker, my mother said my father had had massive strokes. And 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 think this is the major experience of my childhood. I'm wondering, Marie, if you can spend a minute talking about the helplessness that you had seen in your mother when she was crying, the helplessness that you saw in your father when he told you that he was afraid of dying, how did that make you feel?

It's hard for me to remember, Shanker. I know my response was avoidance, not to visit my father, not to see more of it. But very interestingly, when I got to college, I found myself wearing black all the time and thinking all the time about death. I think those were the, if you will, the hidden brain consequences of whatever happened when I visited my father. Our experiences teach us lessons about the world. They also teach us lessons about ourselves, whether it's worth taking a risk,

whether setbacks are temporary, and whether our actions can shape what happens next. Those lessons can be remarkably powerful. When we come back, Mardi steps into a psych lab and starts to understand the true horror of helplessness. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

All of us carry around a private explanation. for why things happen. When something goes wrong, we ask ourselves, was this just bad luck? Is it going to last? Does it say something about who I am? We usually don't notice ourselves asking these questions, but the answers can quietly shape the course of our lives.

Martin Seligman is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the science of human flourishing. Marty, you told me about some personal encounters with hopelessness and helplessness that you had as a teenager. A few years later, as a 21-year-old entering graduate school in psychology, you had the opportunity to explore these same themes in a research context. Paint a picture for me of what you saw when you first entered the psychologist Richard Solomon's lab.

What was he working on, and what did you see? Well, they were doing experiments that I actually felt were horrified. I'm a dog lover, and psychologists were working with dogs at the time and giving them mild to moderate electric shock. So these were very difficult experiments for me to participate in, but there was something very puzzling going on, and that is the primary puzzle that animal learning psychologists were working on was Pavlovian conditioning. A dog or a rat or a part, person gets a tone followed by a shock, and then the tone comes to elicit fear.

And they were working on that. And indeed, in phase one of their experiments, dogs were put into a havoc and given Pavlovian conditioning with shock. But they were running into this enormous problem is they wanted to see the next day when dogs were put in a different situation, a shuttle box in which the dogs just needed to run from one side to the other to turn off shock that the dogs didn't run. So in some ways, what you observed was that on day one, the dogs were essentially learning to associate the painful electric shock with this tone, but they could do not. nothing about it. They couldn't escape. On day two, the dogs were placed in a position where they

were hearing these tones and they could escape, but in fact they were not doing so. And this was a puzzle for the people in your lab. You interpreted this in some ways as the dogs experiencing helplessness? I said, you know, there's something much more important in Pavlovian conditioning than learning the association of a tone with shock. The dogs are helpless. In Pavlovian conditioning by definition, there's nothing you can do about it. The shock comes regardless of what you do, and their interest was, did you learn to be afraid of the tone? But could it be that more important to an animal or person is the fact that you're helpless in this situation, and that you might be learning that nothing you do matters?

And if that were so, it would make sense that the next day, when you got shock again, you just lay there and didn't do anything. So this began a major uphill battle between me and the behaviorists. And what was behind it was the notion that people and animals were cognitive, that they could think, that they could integrate experience. across time. And we theorized that the animals has learned that nothing they did mattered. I understand that a psychologist named Donald Hiroto extended some of this work with a very interesting experiment involving human beings. Describe for me what Heroto did, Marty. Yeah, so Don Herodo said, let's try exactly the same thing with humans. So what Don did, and it became an entire field, he put for day one headphones on people and turned on a loud,

annoying noise. This is the equivalent of shock, nothing traumatic, but very annoying. And for one group, nothing you did matter. For a second group, you got the tone, but you could press a button to turn off the noise. And then the next day, Don built a human shuttle box. About four feet long, you put your hand on one side, and noise went on. And all you had to do was move your hand to the other side of the shuttle box. And lo and behold, he found that the people who had had the helplessness experience, inescapable noise, just something. And so, sat there with their hand in the shuttle box and didn't move. And that was the beginning of a vibrant field of learned helplessness, which went way beyond the animal laboratory to the

question of human trauma and human depression. So you used this term learned helplessness a moment ago, and it's an important term to stop and ponder for a second. How would you describe the phenomenon of learned helplessness, Marty. What is it? Here are the basics of learned helplessness. First, the event is inescapable, the first event. Nothing you can do matters. And what we believed was that people learned that nothing they did mattered.

And this had two consequences. The first consequence is you became passive later on, particularly when you faced a similar kind of annoying or traumatic event. And the second problem was that you had a lot of trouble learning that you could do something about it. So once you had learned that nothing you did mattered, it was very hard to unlearn it. But the most surprising thing we found, Chunker, was there was an emotional consequence as well, that people felt sad and anxious. So there was passivity, cognitive difficulty, and emotional sadness and anxiety.

Importantly, this was not the result of trauma itself. We controlled for that. It was a result of not having any control over trauma. And so that was the operative variable that in many ways has been the arc of my entire life's work. And of course, you can think about so many groups of people who experience something like this in the real world. If you're a small child, for instance, your life is governed by people who are bigger than you, more powerful than you. And if they treat you badly, you might not have options to escape your circumstances. If you're trapped in poverty, for example, you might not have the ability to escape your circumstances.

And you can quickly see how these experiments in the lab might have much, much bigger consequences in the real world. Exactly. And so I thought a great deal about poverty, about war, and in particular, adult circumstances in which you're helpless. And there was a literature that I got very interested in about sudden death itself. I remember interviewing someone named Harold Kushner, who had just come back from being a prisoner of war in Hanoi. And Harold told me the story of his best friend, Robert. They were down to about 95 pounds by then. But they kept Robert going by telling them that he was first on. on the list to be released, and that in December he was going to be released, particularly if he

cooperated and told them about what he did during the war. Well, December first came around, and he wasn't released. And Harold told me, Robert just shriveled up, and within a few days, was dead. So I was not only interested in early experiences of abuse, helplessness, systematic experiences like poverty, but adult experiences in which, even though you've had a lifetime of doing well and you're deprived of control, what the consequences were. I understand that at one point, Marty, you spotted a connection between what you were seeing with learned helplessness and the pervasive phenomenon of depression. Talk about that connection that you made.

When I was a graduate student, one of my young professor was someone named Jim Gier. And Jim came up to look at the helpless dogs. And he looked at them and said, Marty, that's depression. I said, what's depression, Jim? And now, if we go back to 1970, depression was not a category. So if you looked at the diagnostic categories, there was something called manic depression. But by 1975, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association for the first time isolated a new disorder called unipolar depression.

Unipolar depression had nine different symptoms, and if five of them were present for two weeks or more, you got the diagnosis. So the symptoms were passivity, cognitive difficulty, sadness, anxiety, trouble sleeping, food, not tasting, good, numbness, lack of mirth, and thoughts of death. So, I looked at those nine symptoms, and then I looked at the very large literature I learned helplessness, which had accumulated by 1975. Eight of the nine symptoms were present. The only one that wasn't present in the laboratory,

was thought to death. And that's probably because we're using things like loud noise. And so I proposed that learned helplessness was a model of depression. And indeed, that went on to become the leading model of depression. And it led to a vibrant neuroscience in which people tried out drugs that broke up helplessness in the laboratory in rats, for example, and then tried them in people. And it turned out the drugs that worked to break up helplessness of the laboratory became the leading antidepressants. Now, the research that you were conducting at this time was focused on the people who experienced adverse conditions. They became helpless and then perhaps even depressed. But there was also another.

group of subjects that at first you didn't pay so much attention to. Tell me about this group of subjects, Marty. Who were they? And what did you notice? In the entire helplessness literature, both in animals and people, the helplessness effect was statistical. So when I described a person becoming passive and just sitting in the shuttle box and not doing anything, that was five out of eight people on average or a helpless rat that five out of eight of them were helpless. But about a third were not. And so starting in the 1970s, I began to ask, well, what is it about some people, some animals that made them resilient or resistant to helplessness? What is it about some people that make you in spite of the fact that your girlfriend has rejected you, your stocks have

gone down, what is it that gives some people the courage to transcend helplessness? And this was the turning point in my career. So you started thinking about what might distinguish the people who become helpless and passive in the face of adversity from those who remain motivated. and energetic, were there differences between the groups and in the stories they told about their experiences, Marty? Yes, and it led to nailing down what it was about the one-third of people who didn't become helpless. Optimism versus pessimism. These were vague terms to me at the time,

but what we wondered was when you have a bad example, a traumatic experience, you could believe there's nothing I can do and I'm helpless. But we postulated from the stories we heard that what protected people from helplessness, what made them resilient was different dimensions of interpreting what happens to you when bad events occur. So first, you might believe that the bad event was going to last forever. Or you might believe it was temporary. And so, for example, if you fail in examination, you might say, I had a hangover.

That's temporary. That means the next time you confront an examination, you'll be fine. On the other hand, you might say to yourself, I'm stupid. That's permanent. So the first thing we thought about was when bad events occurred to you Shankar, do you reflexively believe they're going to last forever? Or do you believe no? Just this one time. The second dimension we worried about was pervasive versus local. And that is, you're rejected by your girlfriend. You could believe I'm unlovable. Well, unlovable is pervasive, and it means no matter who you come across, you're not going to find love. On the other hand, you might say, that's her. And we postulated that people who believed that helplessness was pervasive would go on to generalize across situations. People who believed it was temporary, would recover quickly. So we began to look at the way people interpreted the bad events in their

lives. And this opened up an enormous literature on learned optimism. And it basically showed that the people who became helpless in the laboratory believed the helplessness was permanent, pervasive, and typically their fault. The third of people who didn't become helpless believed it was temporary, it was just this one situation, and it wasn't their fault. So having established the importance of explanatory styles, Marty, you began to generate evidence that an optimistic or pessimistic explanatory style can significantly affect how people go about pursuing goals.

One place you explored this was at the West Point Military Academy. Paint a picture for me of that study. So we not only asked the question about depression. So what we did was to take large groups of people at time one, measure their explanatory style, and then go on to predict who's going to become depressed. And it turned out the pessimists, the people who believed, it's me, it's going to last forever, are between two and eight times as likely to become depressed.

And so we then asked the question, let's test this in the real world. And so one thing we did is we went to West Point. And West Point at the time, and still does to some extent, had something called Beast Barracks. Well, West Point is one of the most selective schools in the United States. These are very highly qualified young men and women. But in the first six weeks, in mid-summer, July, they arrive at West Point, and they're put through six weeks of helplessness

experience in which the attempt is explicitly to break them. They're woken up at foreign the morning, sent on a 10-mile run, they're systematically abused. And my memory is that about a third of the candidates drop out. So we asked the question, could you predict from day one in Beast Barracks who was going to drop out? And it turned out it was the pessimists who dropped out. We then looked at something very similar about the grades you get in college. We looked at the optimists and the pessimists, and we asked who does much better than their talent augurs, and it was the optimists, and who does much worse, and it was the pessimist. And then in selling insurance, exactly the same thing.

I had been working on learned helplessness and optimism in Olympic swimming. And I'd just come back from a day of looking at our Olympic swimming data. And the phone was ringing. I picked up the phone and it was an insurance salesman. And I hung up on him. And I said to myself, gee, this must be an awfully difficult job. I mean, people hanging up on you all the time. And it so happened that the month before, I had become friendly from a professional meeting with the CEO of Metropolitan Life.

And I had told him about optimism and pessimism. And I said, well, Marty, if you ever have an application to life insurance, give me a call. So I called him up. And I said, well, how do you hire life insurance sales? said, well, there's an SAT of life insurance, recommendations, do you want to make a lot of money? And we hire 5,000 new salesmen a year because of this. But after one year, 50% of them drop out. And after four years, 90% of them have quit.

They just can't take the rejection. said, well, I think I've got a test that might predict who can stick with a difficult job like life insurance. We've just found out it predicts grade point average and it predicts Olympic swimming success. Maybe it'll predict professional success. So indeed, Metropolitan Life started to give the test. First, they found that the pessimistic life insurance salesman is more optimistic than you or me. You have to be frank, instidiously optimistic to even start. And then they hired a special force of 140 salespeople who knocked the top off of optimism scale.

This special force outsold everyone at MetLife, and by the end of four years, 75%, as opposed to 10%, were still working. So we basically found across success in beast barracks, grade point average, and difficult jobs that the optimists did better than the pessimists. And they were the people who didn't become helpless in the laboratory. Most of us think our lives are shaped by events. But just as important is the meaning we assign to those events. The way we interpret a setback today can quietly influence the decisions we make tomorrow and the future we ultimately create. When we come back, we'll explore one of the most powerful forces in human psychology.

The belief that our choices can shape. what happens next. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Has this conversation evoked your own experiences of feeling helpless? Or has it reminded you of a time when you stepped up and took charge of your own destiny? If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with a hidden brain audience

or a question or comment about the science of optimism and pessimism, please find a very quiet room and record a voice. memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Use the subject line, how to make a difference. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Martin Seligman is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. He's the author of many books, including most recently, Agency, the psychological history of human progress. Marty, so much of this conversation has really been about whether people feel like they can make a difference in their own lives. It's about the idea of agency. How do you define that term?

Agency is the opposite of learned helplessness. If you break it down, it's got three beliefs. The first is efficacy, and that's the belief that in the here and now, you can accomplish a specific goal. The second was optimism. And that's the belief that you can accomplish this goal, not just now, but into the future and into the far future. And the third is imagination, which is the range of possible goals that you might achieve. And the broader the range of goals, the more agency. So full-blown agency is efficacy. I can do it in the here and now.

Optimism. I can do it in the future. And imagination. I can innovate across many different situations. So this idea of agency is something that fascinates you, and you think that it tells us the story of humankind. How so, Marty? My hypothesis was that because,

because agency is such a potent force that maybe this was the psychological state that was key to progress and innovation. Let me take you through some of the main highlights, which convinced me of this. One of the great mysteries of human history, it's called the mystery of the Axial Age. So come back with me to 1,000 BCE. What you've got is primitive societies, small villages. This is true of Greece. It's true of the Hebrews. It's true of China.

It's true of India. It's true of Persia. A thousand years BCE. 500 years BCE, all of these societies, have changed radically. The Buddha has lived, Confucius has lived, Socrates has lived, and progress breaks out. Technology, medicine, arts, literature, the first smattering of political freedom. What happened between 1,500 BCE? I think I've discovered the answer. And that is, and that is humans discover the concept of agency.

So the hypothesis I had was that maybe in a thousand BCE, they didn't have the words for agency, words like, I can do it, human agency and the like. And there's an entire lexicon of agency, which I had created. So in Homer, for example, in the, Aalid, Achilles doesn't decide to act. Athena tells Achilles to act. But a hundred years later, in the Odyssey, you've got Odysseus, who's this clever, cunning, wily person.

The gods have started to leave the stage. And so convincingly, across these cultures, by 500 BC, E, and so, convincingly, You've got a massive vocabulary of human agency, and you can track it almost century by century. So I took the entire Old Testament and looked for agentic verbs and words. And grossly you can see that the Torah is God commanding and humans obeying, with a few exceptions, like choose life. But as you go into the prophets and the writings, human agentic words occur more, divine agentic words occur less. And now it turns out you can have AI read the entire Old Testament, book by book, and rate how agentic each book is. And you plot it across time and it's linear.

So as time goes on from the Torah to essentially 300 BC, the Babylonian exile, more and more agency occurs. And if you plot it against human innovation, population, standard of living, political freedom, technology, it's linearly related to the development of the words. I mean, in some ways, the point that you're making, Mardi, is that there was a time when, when people essentially turn their fates over to the gods, where they assume that the gods were telling them what to do, that their fates were written on their foreheads, if you will. And over time, people started to feel, no, in fact, it's not the gods, but I, the individual who actually can do things.

And your argument really is that the more people have come to feel like they themselves can be the architects of their future, the more, in fact, that future has shown signs of flourishing, signs of innovation and progress. Exactly so. Two comments on it. Progress in agency have not been linearly going up in human history. And when does progress stagnate? When does the human condition deteriorate? And the Christian Middle Ages are a very interesting example of that. And this is not what you were taught in school. But basically, early, Christianity is highly agentic and highly optimistic, and then something radical happens. In actually 383 AD, and it's St. Augustine. St. Augustine says grace is arbitrarily bestowed by God. predestination occurs and there is no human will that is independent of arbitrary grace.

This becomes the theology of the Middle Ages. And if you plot progress across time, basically the Middle Ages believe that God does it and humans don't do it. And it's not until the Renaissance that Augustine's views are overthrown and progress breaks out. So that's one point. When does stagnation occur? But the other has to do with China versus the West and the importance of agency in China. Western agency, Shankar, is about I can do it. the individual, and indeed progress in the West, is intimately related to I can do it.

But we've asked exactly the same question about the history of China. But in the history of China, we quantify we agency as well as I agency. And to make a long story short, the balance in China between we agency and I agency is what predicts population, innovation, GDP, and the like. And when we agency in the form of the state is very high and crushes individual agency, that's when you get stagnation and regression. But when there's a balance between collective agency and individual agency in China, that's when progress breaks out. A reminder, has this conversation evoked your own experiences of feeling helpless? Or has it reminded you of a time when you stepped up and took charge of your own destiny? If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the hidden brain audience

or a question or comment about the science of optimism and pessimism, please find a very quiet room and record a voice. memo on your phone. Two or three minutes is plenty. Then email the file to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org using the subject line, how to make a difference. Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org. In our episode next week, we take a deep dive into the ingredients and drivers of agency. We examine how people can become more agentic and how you can help the people around you discover their autonomy, drive, and self-confidence. Mardi told me how he himself has taken his research to heart and learned to be more optimistic and agentic, and, as he puts it, less of a grouch.

I think it's important to tell you about it, Chonker. I'm sitting in the garden. I'm a gardener with my five-year-old daughter, Nikki. We're weeding together. I am grimly. I am grimly. pulling weeds out, Nikki's having a wonderful time. She's dancing and singing, throwing weeds in the air, running around, and I shouted at her. Nikki, get to work. And Nikki walks away from me, come back and says, Daddy, can I talk to you? He said, yeah, what is it, Nikki? And Daddy, do you remember that before my fifth birthday, I was a whiner that I whined all the time? I said, yeah, Nikki, you were pretty horrible. And Nikki said, well, that was two weeks ago, my birthday.

And have you noticed that I haven't whined once in the last two weeks? Oh, yeah, yeah, you've been a real pleasure. Well, Daddy, on my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn't going to whine anymore. And that was the hardest thing I've ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch. Well, this was for me an epiphany, and it changed my career. In that moment, Shankar, I realized that I was a grouch, and indeed I was proud of being a grouch. What a grouch does, he sees everything wrong with what's going on, criticizes it, and corrects it.

And it occurred to me for the first time in my life that maybe any success I had had in life was not because I was a grouch. but in spite of it. And so I resolved to personally change. And by the way, I do measure these things, shocker, and I'm a completely different person than I was 30 years ago. I'm not a grouch anymore. Martin Seligman is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

He's the author of Agency, the Psychological History of Human Progress. Marty, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. I've been enjoying our time together, This is great fun for me, Shankar. I hope it's fun for you. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul,

Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Before we go, I'd like to give a special shout-out to a friend of mine who has a new podcast. I first met Vivek Murthy years ago when he joined me as a friend. a guest on Hidden Brain. At the time, Vivek was the Surgeon General of the United States, and he was particularly interested in calling attention to the issue of loneliness and social isolation.

His episode with us was hugely popular, in large part because Vivek has a powerful way of showing vulnerability and talking about topics that can be painful to discuss. Vivek has continued to expand on his work on social connection in the year since our interview, and I'm delighted to recommend his new show. It's called Staying Human, and if you love Hidden Brain, I'm confident that you love staying human as well. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.