Can the hope circuit help us to circumvent dysfunctional politics?

This question came to mind when I was reading the final chapter of Martin Seligman’s latest book, The Hope Circuit.

The book is an autobiography, but in discussing his own life the author provides readers who have little knowledge of psychology, people like me, with a painless way of informing themselves about some major developments in this field over the last century.

Marty Seligman played an important role - as a researcher, author of popular books, and transformational leader - in helping to bring about important changes in his profession. He made major contributions in encouraging the profession to study cognition, recognise evolution, embrace positive psychology, and give greater attention to prospection.

I will focus here on learned helplessness, learned optimism and the hope circuit. Marty, as he is accustomed to being called by just about everyone, made his name as a researcher in the 1960s for his work, with Steve Maier, on learned helplessness. Marty and Steve observed that when dogs were unable to avoid electric shocks by changing their behaviour, they subsequently tended to remain passive when they did have the opportunity to avoid shocks. The dogs appeared to have learned that nothing they did mattered.

Marty saw the potential implications of this research for understanding of mental illness among humans and developed the helplessness theory of depression on that basis. That theory was subsequently reformulated, with assistance from John Teasdale, to take account of the way people think about the causes of their feelings of helplessness. For example, those who see their current problems as likely to last forever and to undermine everything they do are likely to feel helpless long into the future. Pessimism leads to helplessness.

Marty’s popular book, Learned Optimism, published in 1990, integrated research findings on learned helplessness and explanatory style.  It advocated disputing pessimistic thoughts as the central skill of learned optimism.

Marty coined the term “hope circuit” in 2015 to describe the MPFC-DRN circuit of brain activity discovered by Steve Maier, who had retrained as a neuroscientist. Marty explains that Steve’s discoveries turned learned helplessness on its head:

“He showed that the arrow of causality that we had postulated was wrong and that it was not helplessness but control and mastery that were learned".

One of the implications of this research is that therapy that “creates end runs” around trauma and helps people to plan a better future is likely to be more helpful than therapy that tries to undo trauma by confronting the past.

What does all this have to do with dysfunctional politics? This passage got me wondering:

"Human history has, until recently, been a tale of woe: warfare, plague, famine, injustice, poverty, ignorance, and violent death. The last half century has witnessed, if not the eradication, a great reduction of these ills. When the world is a vale of tears, it is natural that politics, religion, science, medicine, and the arts should concern themselves with defense and damage. But what happens when the world is no longer a vale of tears?"

My initial reaction to that passage was the same as my reaction to Steven Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now. I agree that massive progress has been made in human flourishing, but I see huge problems ahead for liberal democracy. We are confronted by widespread failure to adhere to the norms of self-reliance and reciprocity that underpin liberal democracy.

I became even more pessimistic when my thoughts turned to Jason Brennan’s book, Against Democracy. In my response to that book I mourned the declining power of the major political parties to shape political agendas in ways that moderate the ill-informed desires of electors. I raised the question of whether many voters would be likely to accept impartial advice on how to vote to achieve their objectives.

It is not obvious that there is anything that anyone can do now to save liberal democracy from political hooliganism.

So, why aren’t I feeling depressed and helpless?  The main reason is that a few months ago Max Borders’ book, The Social Singularity, gave me grounds to hope that technological advances will eventually enable citizens to circumvent dysfunctional politics. Rather than moaning endlessly about the decline of liberal democracy, we can look forward in the hope of a better future. There may even be practical things that we can do in cooperation with others to facilitate growth in opportunities for human flourishing.   

Is human flourishing primarily about psychological health, capability or opportunity?

This question is not just an intellectual puzzle. The way we answer it has important practical implications. The main point I want to make is that the appropriate answer if we are thinking about the flourishing of a close relative, friend or acquaintance is not appropriate if we are thinking about public policy.

Before attempting to answer the question, I need to outline the three different approaches.

The psychological health approach:  Martin Seligman is a leading exponent of this approach. In his book, ‘Flourish’, Seligman suggests that well-being theory ‘is essentially a theory of uncoerced choice, and its five elements comprise what free people will choose for their own sake’. The five elements he identifies are summarised as PERMA: positive emotion (pleasant experiences, happiness and life satisfaction); engagement (the flow state); relationships (positive relations with other people); meaning (belonging to and serving something bigger than yourself); and accomplishment (success, achievement, mastery).

In an earlier post I suggested that Seligman has missed another important element that people seek for its own sake, namely control over their own lives.

A more fundamental weakness of this approach is that it ignores all elements of well-being other than psychological well-being. For example, it seems reasonable to suppose that free people would usually choose to be wealthy rather than poor, even if their wealth made no contribution to their psychological well-being.

The capability approach: This approach was developed by Amartya Sen, an economist. Sen argues that a person’s capability reflects the alternative combination of functionings the person can attain and from which he or she can choose one collection. Functionings include objective criteria as being adequately nourished and being in good health as well as a range of other factors such as achieving self-respect and being socially integrated. In his contribution to ‘Capabilities and Happiness’ (2008, edited by Luigino Bruni et al) Sen noted that individuals may differ a good deal from each other in the weights they attach to different functionings. He seemed unwilling, however, to leave the weighting exercise to the individuals concerned. He suggested that ‘the weighting exercise has to be done in terms of explicit valuations, drawing on the prevailing values in a given society’.

The opportunity approach: The concept of opportunity proposed by Robert Sugden, also an economist, rests on “an understanding of persons as responsible rather than rational agents”. According to this view, individuals may sometimes act foolishly but nevertheless accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The term “opportunity as mutual advantage” expresses the idea that “one person’s opportunities cannot be specified independently of other people’s desires”. Sugden implies that an economic system that generates a great deal of individual opportunity is a system that rewards individuals for finding ways to benefit others. (‘Opportunity as mutual advantage’, Economics and Philosophy (26)). Sugden's opportunity criterion is also explained in The Community of Advantage, which I have reviewed on this blog.

If we were discussing the measurement of flourishing, I would add life satisfaction to this list of approaches. As discussed in another post, it has become common for life satisfaction ratings to be used to measure the extent that people are thriving or flourishing. Life satisfaction is measured by surveys asking individuals to give a simple numerical rating to their satisfaction with their lives. The countries with highest life satisfaction ratings tend to be those with highest ratings in terms of psychological flourishing and opportunity. Nevertheless, it would be difficult to argue that life satisfaction provides an ideal measure of any of the three aspects of human flourishing identified above.

So, what aspects of flourishing are most relevant if we are considering the extent to which relatives, friends and acquaintances are flourishing. In that context it seems reasonable to argue that psychological health, capability and opportunity are all relevant. For example, you might be able to think of individuals who would score highly in terms of PERMA even though they have limited capability and limited opportunities. You might be able to think of others who may have a fairly low PERMA score, even though they have had superior opportunities in life and seem to be functioning at a high level in many aspects of their work and family life. You might be able to think of people who have weak capabilities because they have wasted the opportunities available to them, and of others who have strong capabilities despite limited opportunities.

When we are assessing the extent that an individual is flourishing, it makes sense to consider the opportunities they have had, their current capabilities and their emotional well-being. It seems to me that an assessment would obviously be incomplete if it focused on only one of those aspects.

However, if we are looking at human flourishing from a public policy perspective, we need to have in mind what aspects of human flourishing public policy could, or should, be attempting to influence.

It doesn’t make sense for governments to accept responsibility for raising PERMA scores, because PERMA scores depend on factors that are largely outside the influence of governments. That is why the role of governments in relation to mental health has traditionally been focused on protecting community members and protecting the mentally ill from those who might seek to harm them. As options for treatment of mental illness have improved, the role of government in funding treatment has become more like its role in relation to other forms of illness. The main difference arises in relation to compulsory hospitalisation/treatment of people who are a danger to the community or themselves.

It seems to make more sense for governments to accept greater responsibility for raising the capability of citizens, but that is not without problems. Governments of wealthy countries have arguably played a role in enhancing the capability of many citizens through their involvement in funding of education and healthcare. However, it seems to me to be more accurate to describe those government interventions as attempting to promote more equal opportunities, rather than raising capabilities. Opportunities provided in education, for example, do not always end up raising the capability of students to earn an income after graduation.

The role played by governments in promoting more equal opportunities seems to me to be rather like a parent intervening in a card game to take good cards from some children to give to others, or to take out of the game. Despite the redistribution of opportunities, the scores throughout the game still depend largely on how well individuals play the cards in their hands. Further paternalistic intervention to nudge the weaker players might improve their scores, but is also likely to weaken their incentive to enhance their capabilities.

In my view, from a public policy perspective, human flourishing should be primarily about enabling opportunities to grow, rather than about redistributing the available opportunities. It makes sense for governments to accept responsibility for facilitating growth in opportunity because government policies impinge greatly – often negatively – on growth of opportunity. Although the growth of opportunity is often uneven, we have seen with the history of economic growth since the industrial enlightenment, that as some people take advantage of new opportunities – for example as a result of technological innovations - additional opportunities are created for others. The growth of opportunity has also provided the wherewithal for individual and collective efforts to improve economic security for those who are not capable of providing for themselves.

Growth of opportunity is not identical to economic growth as conventionally measured. Growing opportunities for people to live the kinds of lives that they aspire to have obviously encompasses considerations of environmental quality and all the other important things that are excluded form GDP measures. As noted in a recent post, the objective of growing opportunity amounts to the same thing as the Wealth Plus objective advocated by Tyler Cowan in his recent book, Stubborn Attachments.

Summing up, considerations of psychological health and capability are highly relevant to assessment of the extent that individuals are flourishing, but the primary focus of public policy should be facilitating growth in the opportunities for people to live the kinds of lives they aspire to have.