Why pessimism is better than optimism - on a global scale - column

How's this for a horror movie? A psychologist (scary already, isn't it?) develops a questionnaire to tell who's an optimist and who's a pessimist. The test is designed to benefit humanity, just like the new genetically engineered bacteria. But it gets loose and falls into the hands of the insurance industry, which uses it to develop a task force of superoptimists, men and wo men who'll never admit defeat, who always have a cute story ready, who believe deeply in the product, whatever it is.

Cut to a shapely young woman taking a shower. The doorbell rings.She wraps herself in a towel and goes to the screen door. The background music is all funny chords, sevenths and ninths in minor keys. At the door are four young men in identical blue suits, each with a strangely cheery look on his face. Crescendo. In unison they begin a pitch for life insurance. The woman screams and slams the door. The young men, still smiling, continue selling insurance.

Sure, you say, it would make a scary movie, but it's like Alien,where the thing with the teeth pops out of the guy's chest. It isn't real; it's just some writer's nightmare. It could never happen in my town. Well, if that's what you think, you might want to pick up Volume 50 of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and read ''Explanatory Style as a Predictor of Productivity and Quitting Among Life Insurance Sales Agents,'' by Martin E. P. Seligman and Peter Schulman of the University of Pennsylvania. There is such a test and it has fallen into the hands of the insurance industry.

What Seligman and Schulman did was to use the test (AttributionalStyle Questionnaire) on insurance sales agents for Metropolitan Life in Pennsylvania to find out whether they had what Seligman calls optimistic or pessimistic explanatory styles. The optimists sold more insurance and kept their jobs longer. The pessimists sold less, and presumably seeing that there was no hope of improvement for them and that it was a horrible job anyway, quit earlier. (Not that one can assume they thought they were going on to anything better.) And there's indeed a task force, although it isn't exactly as I described it. The real one is composed of people who failed the standard industry test used to pick insurance sales agents, but whom the ASQ pegged as optimists. At last report they were doing better than anyone else.

This is only one piece of research. There are quite a few others.In fact, optimism is very big these days, because it seems that it's good for you. There's evidence that in addition to selling more insurance, optimists live longer and their immune systems work better. Not only that, but some people, Seligman among them, have suggested that one may be able to change from pessimism to optimism. I wonder. How could a die-hard pessimist muster the initial optimism needed even to try to become more optimistic? Wouldn't he say ''Oh, what's the point? I'd never be able to change. I'm just a pessimist at heart.''?

The optimism business seems to have begun with giving electric shocks to dogs. These experiments, which are quite famous, showed that if the shocks were inescapable the animals learned this and just gave up. This so-called learned helplessness seemed to Seligman to be somewhat similar to human depression. I guess the idea was that some humans, for whatever reasons, appeared to regard life as a series of inescapable electric shocks (I can't imagine why) and were lying down in their cages and giving up.

This perception led Seligman and others to consider, over a numberof years, the ways people explain bad things that happen to them, like electric shocks. In the current formulation, an optimist, when confronted with a personal failure like not selling an insurance policy, interprets this in external, specific, unstable (temporary) terms. He says, It's not my fault; this particular customer was a jerk. The next one will be a sucker for sure. The pessimist interprets failure in internal, global, stable (permanent) terms. He says, It's my fault, I'm an idiot, I've always been an idiot, I'll always be an idiot. Oh God, there's just no point in living. Of course, there are variations, cases that are hard to categorize. For instance, somebody could come up with an internal, global, temporary explanation: I'm an idiot; there's no point in living today. Pessimists, since they tend to blame themselves for everything, are more likely to get depressed and give up when bad things happen to them. Optimists just whistle a happy tune and blame someone else.

What strikes me about the interest in optimism is that it is, in essence, a re-emergence of the Pelagian heresy, which I thought had been taken care of once and for all in 418 at the Council of Carthage. But these things never die. Other people, smarter than me (some of them anyway), have pointed out that science continually plunders the past for its paradigms. There are only so many ideas around, and they keep resurfacing with new paint jobs. In a sense all intellectual endeavor is nothing but one big chop shop, disassembling, repainting, and filing the serial numbers off old ideas -- in this case the Pelagian heresy (a 1987 Nissan 300Z) and Augustinian orthodoxy (a 1936 Rolls-Royce Phantom).