Instant Genius - The power of optimism

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

Be it the recent outbreak of wars around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic or the unfortunate personal events that will undoubtedly befall us at some points in our lives, it can sometimes be difficult to look on the bright side. But is doing so even helpful? Science writer Sumit Paul-Choudhury certainly thinks so. In this episode, we catch up with him to talk about his latest book The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World. He tells us how the term was coined based on the theory that we live in the best of all possible worlds, or the optimal world if you like, why far from being unique to humans, many animals such as chickens and bumblebees also show signs of optimism, and how optimistic thinking will play a crucial role in helping us overcome the problems of the 21st Century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Be it the recent outbreak of wars around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the unfortunate personal events that will undoubtedly befall us at some point in our lives. It can sometimes be difficult to look on the bright side, but is doing so even helpful? Science writer Summit Paul Chowdry certainly thinks so. In this episode, we catch up with him to talk about his latest book, The Bright Side, why optimists have the power to change the world. He tells us how the term was coined based on the theory that we live in the best of all possible

worlds, or the optimal world if you like, why far from being unique to humans, many animals such as chickens and bumblebees also show signs of optimism and how optimistic thinking will play a crucial role in helping us overcome the problems of the 21st century. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. you. Good to be here. So today we're talking about your book, The Bright Side, How Optimists Have the Power to Change the World. So that in itself is quite an optimistic title. Well, I should say, I mean, you say it's an optimistic title. And so it is in the sense that it just that we can harness optimism to our own ends. And that's what I'm trying to make the case for really.

There's kind of an instinctive version of optimism that we all practice in our own lives just to get out of bed in the morning, really. And then there's kind of a more difficult to conceive version about how we make the world better. But the reason the subtitle says that is because, yeah, we can change the world, but it depends on whose optimism is the guiding force. I think optimism, optimism is real, optimism is powerful, optimism is everywhere, but you do have to make sure it's channeled in the right direction. So let's ask the obvious question then. What exactly is optimism? Well, optimism, so there's kind of, one of the things I found out when I was doing this, is there are three versions of optimism. One of them is the psychological one, which is more or less

innate to actually not just to human beings, to animals as well. all the way down to things like bumblebees, which we think of as being quite simple. But recently there's been all this kind of work on whether even quite quote, unquote, simple animals experience things like emotions. And what you find across the animal kingdom, animals have a tendency to take a positive interpretation. So if you, I mean, the example that I quote in the book is of chickens. You can't ask a chicken if a glass of water is half empty or half full. You have to kind of do that some other way. So what you do is you train chickens to associate a white card, say, with no food.

and a black card with food. And then you show them a grey card, which is like your half-full condition, like is the card black or white? And chickens kind of tend to go for the positive interpretation. So there's that kind of very basic, psychological version of optimism. And that's kind of the one that human beings

tend to practice all the time. So that's the psychological version, is this kind of innate tendency to look at the world in a positive way, to hope for the best, essentially. Hope is a slightly different concept, but still you get the idea. But then the other piece of optimism,

the other definition of optimism, which is actually the original one, goes back to the 18th century and as a philosophical concept. It was actually originally this idea about why evil exists in the world. It was a theological question. I mean, why is it there's evil in the world? If God is kind of, you know, all loving and all power, you know, all powerful and all loving or seeing, why is there evil? Why is it all better?

And so the original answer to that, well, the original answer, actually, that goes back, a long, long back way back to Pandora and all sorts of other, like, you know, myths from the past try to explain it. But when science and reason were just starting to become forces in the world, Godfried Leibniz, the great German polymath, took this question on. And the answer he came up with, which has sort of echoes in talk about the multiverse today, was that ours is only one out of many possible worlds. And this answer was that we live in the best of all possible worlds. You know, we live in, you know, it's not a perfect world. You can't make a perfect world in a world governed by reason and logic because not everything is possible and everything is

compatible. We live in the best one, the optimal one. And so people who kind of thought he was right became known as optimists. His version of this basically just appeals to God to make sure this is the case. You know, there's no, unless you're a believer in God, as many people obviously still are. You don't have to believe that this is the optimal world, the best of all possible worlds. But that was his suggestion. And actually, slightly unfortunately, I think, what happened next was that Voltaire, the great French writer, got hold of this idea and was very skeptical about it basically, like, as your reaction might be, he looked to the world and kind of said, how can this, like this mess of war and natural disaster, how can that be in the best of all

possible worlds? And so he kind of wrote this book, Condeed, whose subtitle was optimism, in which he rubbishes this concept thoroughly, right? I mean, he kind of, and he writes Leibniz into it as Dr. Pangloss, who is this ridiculous figure who goes through incredible suffering, like, you know, he gets syphilis, and he goes to an earthquake and war, and it's mutilated, and his companions will die and they'll drown. and whatever else. And throughout all of it, he just keeps on saying all is for the best and the best of all possible worlds. And Voltaire is very clear that he thinks this is just delusional. And that, I think, is why to this day, we still think of optimism as being this kind of slightly

foolish, unworldly, not very particularly clear thinking version of, you know, way to look at the world. So the final version of optimism, which is the one that I'm trying to get at in my book or try to provide some pointers to is what you do in practice. So if you're not going to rely on God to make the world perfect or the world as best as it can be. It's up to us to do it. And so in my kind of framing of this, there's a practical version of optimism, which is, you know, there's no kind of overarching philosophy here. It's just how do you think about the world in a way that makes you want to make the best of it, to make the best of all possible futures, actually, because these days we're talking about the future really rather than creation or the world as it is.

So that third version is kind of optimism in practice, if you like, which is what can we do, How can we think or how can we look at the world in order to make it better than it is? And that is a very long way of saying. That's why I say, why optimists have the power to change the world, how you do it is then another question. There's an awful lot to unpick there. So let's start with evolution. I mean, it makes sense in a way that we'd be evolved to be optimistic. What do we know about that?

Well, I mean, we don't, it's, to some extent, it's not a particularly well-studied field. But we know that animals exhibit these judgment biases. if you want to kind of take away the sort of slightly motive framing of it as optimism or pessimism. We know that animals exhibit it. We know that people exhibit this really widespread amongst people. And in fact, the people who don't kind of test as being optimistic on the standardized tests of these things tend to be people who suffer from depression or other kind of mental

health difficulty. And that sort of suggests, it doesn't prove it, it suggests that there's a very deep connection to something that's good for us. And one of the most, there's several, there's a bunch of explanations for why that might be the case. When you're talking about evolutionary psychology, it's always a bit speculative because you're always trying to guess at why something happened millions of years ago in our ancestry, and you can't really tell whether it did or it didn't. But one of the explanations I find most persuasive is that essentially something to help you make decisions when the best course of action is unclear,

which in the real world, it is most of the time. I mean, in the laboratory, if you're doing a laboratory experiment, obviously depending on the experiment, but in laboratory conditions, the right course of action is kind of usually very tightly prescribed. So there's usually a right course of action. In the real world, it's not, right? We don't have all the information about what's going on. We can't figure out what's going to happen next. We don't have all the salient bits of detail. We want to make a decision. So we have to make decisions, and we have to make decisions kind of in the knowledge that they're not going to be perfect. And so, you know, just to paraphrase Leibniz a bit, you have to make the best of all possible decisions. As I mentioned before,

we know that animals have this tendency to skew towards the positive, that tend to make positive interpretations of things. That's also true for human beings. By default, most human beings tend to make unrealistic positive estimates of how well you're going to do in life. We kind of think that things will go well for us and that we won't suffer any of the kind of bad things, that we won't be diagnosed with a terrible disease, or that we won't get divorced or that, you know, any of the kind of bad things in life, we don't think it can happen. And most of the good thing we overstate. So we kind of think we've got much better chance. Then both the the statistical odds suggest of leading happy, successful lives, but we also kind of think that

we'll do better than our peers. So if you ask me how I'm likely to do compared to other people like me, I tend to say, I'll do better. And then we have lots of complicated rationale, but obviously, on average, not everybody can do better than everybody else, which doesn't make sense. So this is kind of fundamentally quite unrealistic. And that's sort of puzzling, if you are as I am, the kind of person who's been brought up to think of rationality and reason and kind of, you know, decision-making as being the way forward. You think, well, how is it helpful to be unrealistic? The reason it's helpful is because that's kind of what helps you to find opportunities that you don't know exist. If you don't know what the future holds, and most of the time, you know, we don't, not in enough detail to be,

you know, ultra-confident about our decisions or our choices. You have to kind of sometimes try to do things, even when you don't know whether they'll be successful. You have to kind of assume will succeed, even when you don't know how. And what I'm kind of put suggesting and what there's some, you know, there's some empirical evidence for is that actually that helps you to go out there and find solutions that you don't know exist. You have to kind of be optimistic that there are solutions to your problem, even if you don't know what those solutions are right now. Sometimes you just have to put yourself out there and see, you know, if a way to your destination presents itself, you can also see how that might apply in the social sphere. So if you take something

like climate change, for example, at the point when it became apparent that this was going to be a major problem, we didn't have most of the solutions we would need, or even idea of what those might be, because we lived in a heavily carbon-intensive economy, and there were no serious consideration of alternatives. Once you start looking for those alternatives, they start coming to view, and they start becoming something that you can use. So I think that's, you know, that's taking you all the way from the evolutionary benefit, which is pretty much, you know, should I get up and go and do something today through to how do we solve mine problem. And it's by looking for solutions that you don't know exist yet, but you have to believe that they do. So having said that,

is it possible to be too optimistic to the point where it becomes harmful? I think that's true in two ways. So one is, yes, it's undoubtedly possible to be too optimistic to the point where it becomes harmful. That means an issue when it comes to specific problems or specific of things you're investigating. So one of the kind of, in some ways, innocuous versions of that is that there's, you know, big projects, big engineering projects, are notorious for running over budget and over time. And this is the planning fallacy, as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Sversky called it.

And they always, like, you know, if you think about something like HS2, which is currently going on in the UK, they're always plagued by massive cost overruns, and they never arrive on time. And actually, generally, when you look at them, they don't actually arrive on time or on schedule. And that is because of optimism bias,

because everybody concerned wants things to work out. Even when people try to factor in things that they think will go wrong, they still are on the positive. side. And that ends up, you know, meaning that it's very hard for things to end up happening as they should. So that's kind of one of the more, that's an economically problematic, but not necessarily problematic in any other kind of way. On a personal level, it's said the optimists are always late, which is ironic because I was late for this podcast, but, you know,

because you never think that things will go wrong, and that's kind of one of the issues. It does have more serious consequences as well. There's some evidence that people who smoke heavily tend to be overly optimistic about their chances of not being diagnosed with cancer, say, or to think that it would be very easy for them to give up, and that means they don't necessarily take on board health prevention advice. So those kind of specific estimates, those can be problematic. What the research tends to show, though, is if you're generally optimistic, if you kind of go into life thinking that you can make things better,

that you can do the best to yourself, that actually works out pretty well for most people most of the time. That's a healthier kind of way to approach your life than to be pessimistic. I don't think realism really exists, actually. I think realism is kind of an on the fence. position. So it's better not to be overly optimistic about a specific thing in your life, but it is good to be generally optimistic in how you approach the world, let's say. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost

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Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So in the book you have these questionnaires where you can rate yourself on optimism. I score quite highly on these, except the fact that I have an anxiety disorder. So how do we square that off? Well, that one, I mean, I can't mean.

I'm not psychologist. so I can't speak to that specifically. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I think it's possible to hold, I mean, people are complicated, right? I think if you are, as both of us are, in the business of thinking about science and technology in the future, that automatically predisposes you a bit towards this. And, you know, amongst the ways people have investigated, of boosting optimism,

thinking about the future, even just thinking about the future and what the future holds, kind of tends to make you score higher on optimism. And if you think about it in more detail, if you think about your life in more detail, that makes you score higher on optimism as well on the standardized tests. How that translates into your own actual life is, you know, obviously a more complex question gives people complex things. It is possible for us to be contradictory in the way we see the world. It's possible to be contradictory in the way that we think about our own lives versus the way we think about the world. And the time horizons and lots of it, there's not a kind

of single, although those take those tests give you, you know, a one point score. those things are never really the end of the story, right, in the psychology. So let's switch around then and talk about pessimism. In the book, you talk about something called the pessimism trap. What's that? Well, the pessimism trap is sort of the opposite of what I was saying with why optimism works for us. The pessimism trap is the point in which, because you're no longer looking for solutions, it's the opposite self-fulfilling prophecy.

Optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy in the sense that you go looking for solutions, and if they exist, and there is always an if, if they exist, you'll find them and you will improve your situation. The pessimism trap is kind of the opposite of that, which is that if you succumb to the idea that you can't improve your situation, then you don't go looking for those solutions, when you don't find them, you don't implement them. And my concern with that is that, I don't know whether you could say this is a dominant influence or not, but it feels like there's a lot of that going on at the moment. There's a lot of writing off potential solutions, you know, before we've really had a chance to test. So one of the examples I give in the book is of

geoengineering. the large-scale re-engineering of the climate of the environment in order to, you know, to ameliorate climate change and other environmental problems. And this is kind of a contentious issue. I mean, it's a very kind of interventionist way of trying to tackle the issue. It would involve a lot of money. There's a lot of politicking involved. It's not a, by any means, a simple solution to the problem. The thing that I find concerning about it is that there's a lot of, there has been, until relatively recently, so much doubt about this that we haven't even started to investigate whether it's possible what the consequences might be. We haven't really thought until quite

recently about whether it's possible to test this stuff on a small scale and if so how you should do it. And that's starting to happen now. But my concern is that we've left it very late, essentially. If any of this is to be useful, it'll take a lot of time, money and effort to make happen. And by being pessimistic about it, by kind of writing it off before we even started looking at it, we may have compromised our ability to deal with climate change of potentially catastrophic proportions. So coming off the back of that then, everything doesn't always go right. So what can we do to engender optimism in ourselves and in others? So there are a lot of different answers to that. And there isn't a magic bullet. In the psychological sense, there are various therapies that people have tried. Then they are therapies, really, because they're intended to help people who have significant difficulty with pessimism and depression.

People have tried all sorts of things. People have tried kind of, as I say, you can just think about the future and that has a bit of an uplift. and the more you think about the future, and try and think about the future in relatively concrete terms, like that helps. So that's one thing. The exercise, which probably has the most effect for us as individuals, is called the best possible self-exercise. And as it sort of sounds like, the idea is basically to spend some time thinking about the version of you that is the best that you can possibly be. There's a degree of, you know, practicality in that. You're not supposed to think about some sort of utopian. This isn't, I win the lottery and everything goes brilliantly. It's kind of what do you actually want to achieve with your life and how you get there. You spend a bit of time

doing that. You write it down or depict it in whatever way makes sense to you. And that's been shown to kind of help to uplift your level of optimism by a modest amount. And, you know, my speculation is that if you do this continuously for a long time, if it becomes sort of second nature, then that will eventually lead to a permanent uplift. But that's not something that's been demonstrated rigorously. There's a backwards-looking a version of this, which is due to Martin Seligman, who's kind of the father of positive psychology, which is the idea that the way that you explain things to yourself, particularly negative events, is very important. So that if something unpleasant happens to you, if you explain that in ways that you kind of think, you feel this always

happens to me and you catastrophize the outcome, that kind of leads you to then think whenever things come up in the future, that those are going to be negative as well. His kind of argument is you can reframe that and you can try and look for balanced explanations for how the external factors might play the part, how it wasn't necessarily something that always happens, that it's not actually all that bad. And if you do that continuously, that will retrain. So you start thinking more positively about the past, and then you look more positively at the future. The other thing, which I think is more, which is kind of a major theme of my book, but isn't necessarily so well supported. There's lots of hints at this, is that counterfactual thinking, thinking about

what if, seems to be quite important in your ability to cope, to visualize different ways of going about things. And I said optimism is about because of, you know, believing that there are possibilities out there that you haven't investigated and that might hold the solution to your problems. I think the more thinking you do of the what ifs, what might happen, what might have happened, what could happen. I think the more that you think about that, the more likely you are to kind of be more positive about the world. The greater your belief that there are possibilities out there that you haven't thought about, the more likely you are to go look for them, the more likely they are to happen. So how does the notion of bigger picture thinking

fit into this. You know, so not talking about your own personal issues, but thinking more widely about society and culture. So saying you're not the most important person in the world, but you're recognising that you're part of wider systems. Yeah, I think there are two things that help there, or that I've found helpful there. So one is to look, as you say, it's look both, you know, to elsewhere in the world, for examples of how things work differently in other places, but also to history. I think that it's important to remember that the way things have panned out, isn't the way they had to pan out. There's a real tendency, I think, innate to us, because we tell stories about the way things have evolved. There's a real urge to kind of believe that the way

things are the ways that it had to be. And when you look back, it's usually not the case. Usually there are all sorts of accidents of, you know, circumstance, of geography that mean that the world didn't have to be this way. And I think that can give you perspective. So that's one form of historical perspective. There's another one, which is I think you can look at the challenges that people faced in the past. And actually, you know, one of the, you know, one of the the things that I'm very skeptical about is that we live in the time of truly unprecedented, like change and doubt. There are, you know, as we do have, obviously have significant problems and significant challenges that we face. What I'm less convinced by is that our capabilities

have not grown proportionately. I think that, you know, the challenges that people face, if you think about someone, a peasant, or not even a peasant, anybody facing the black death in the 14th century, say, you know, a disease that wiped out somewhere between maybe a third of the European population may be more. At a time when there was no modern medicine, and there was no germ theory, imagine the scale of that event. And sure, obviously, it was not great to lift with black death, you know, it wasn't that people, you know, came through it smiling, but people did survive it and people did eventually find ways through to it. So then you look at our situation, if you look at COVID, and COVID obviously was not a pleasant experience of anyone, particularly

not those who were directly affected. But, you know, within a year, more or less, and well, within days of COVID being identified, we knew what it was. We had sequenced. it. We had a pretty good idea of what the organism wasn't what was causing it. We knew how to respond, even if we didn't like it. And within something like a year, we had an effect preventative measure that we could take against it. I think we should take more heart in the fact that our capabilities are much larger than they were. So that's one form of historical. The other one, the big picture one, is that actually there is a, all these problems are collective action problems. Not all these problems. Many of these problems are collective action problems.

And our individual optimism doesn't necessarily get us very far. And I think one of the reasons that we feel so disparate about, again, to go back to climate change, is because a lot of the emphasis has been on what can we do, you know, how can we cut our carbon footprints? And at some level, I think we all know that actually there's not enough that any of us individually can do. And we are a bit skeptical, I think, many of us are a bit skeptical that even collectively, if we all do our bit, that it will add up to being enough. We need systemic level changes. But in order to that to happen, we have to be optimistic about optimism. You know, we have to believe that other people will also act optimistically. And I think

that's the bigger picture thing, as you say, you have to kind of empathise with other people and realise that other people also want a better future. And we might have different ways of getting there. We might have different perspectives on how you get there. But you have to believe that they will also try to be optimistic about their futures that will want a better future. By way of summing up, then, in terms of this idea of mass optimism, is that really a job for policy makers? Well, that's kind of spoils by my next book, actually. But yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I did originally write about this in this one, but it was too much to get into a single book.

So I think that the answer, to my one of the answers here, I think, is a greater emphasis on, what, two things. One is openness to possibility, which is something that I think, when you look at how, if you, let's talk politics for a second, I mean, I don't want to be specific about it, but we've been having the same conversation about left versus right and capitalism versus socialism. for, well, you know, for whatever how long now. And it feels to me like that discussion has been out of date for a good couple of decades now. And I don't, you know, we're still talking about which side of that did you on. And I think the axes are wrong. There are other ways of looking at the world now. And we're not really, we need to kind of move away from that. And I think you can see that in the, in the emergence of insurgent political movements, you know, various stripes. You know, people have become more willing to vote for groups that don't necessarily, you know, whether it's

the Greens or the kind of populist movements. People, people, people are more willing to vote for parties that are not part of political mainstream or we're not. So that's one thing. I think it would help if the dominant parties were to reflect a bit more of that in their thinking. From policymaking point of view, I think part of the answer is experimentation. And there's been a fair amount of work done now with trying to have communities. So the RSA, the Royal Society of Arts, for example, has done some work on trying to help build community versions of these best possible self-execisages. And so they do things like, you know, you write a postcards from the future about your local community. How do you think your

community would look after the green energy transition, say, or if, you know, or if automation takes over some of the jobs that are important, you're part of the world. So there's partly, there's partly that, and there needs to be greater appetite and uptake of that, I think. And partly, I think, experimentation. I mean, again, this is happening now, which I think is gratifying. So you do things like you trial the four-day working week, or you trial, you know, we had a forced trial of working from home. I mean, I don't know if that would ever have happened that we would said, let's all try working from home a couple of days a week, had it not been for COVID. But we did it. And then we discovered that actually worked okay, you know, and people got better

work-life balance and people like doing it. And many of us have carried on doing it when we can. But those kinds of experiments, I think, should not be sort of slap dash things that happen because circumstances force us to, or because, you know, some think tank somewhere manages to scrape together the funds to run a trial. I think that's the thing that government should be doing in a coordinated, large-scale way to establish, you know, what are the alternatives? What are the better ways of living than ones we have? Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Science Writer Summit, Paul Chowdry. To discover more about the

topics we've just discussed, check out his latest book, The Bright Side, Why Optimists have the power to Change the World. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favorite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at ScienceFocus.com. In a place like Los Angeles, people don't stop being who they are. Writers, thinkers, creators, people with stories still unfolding.

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