Episode 54: The Guy Who Shocked Dogs and Less Controversial Figures

[MUSIC] Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Psychosocial Distancing Podcast. I'm one of your host, Daniel Chadborn. And with me for season three is both Thomas Brooks, and- >> Hello. >> [LAUGH] >> Give you a second to introduce yourself, or to say hello, and Alyssa Jones. >> Hi everybody. >> So we brought Alyssa on for the season because we are not conscious like colleges, despite some of the classes that we've taught, it is best we bring someone on who knows a little more about some of these topics, who studies it a little more in depth than we do, at best we're social cognitive psychologists, social cognitions about us far as we go. So before we begin, I want to let our listeners, new listeners, students joining us this semester, know kind of what we do here. And because we're officially starting season three, season one was social psychology, season two introductory psychology. We're moving into cognitive psychology. And so our goal is to provide sort of this supplementary information, through interviews, applied content, or just whatever, might be more interesting to some students than just covering the definitions in a textbook, we'll do that in class. We won't do it here on the podcast. Last year officially we began starting an open source social book. Beginning of this year, we went into an open source intro book. The big problem that we've got this season is that we do not have an open source cognitive book because there just isn't one. We're kind of stuck utilizing whatever cognitive psychology. So if you want to find a book to follow along with us, we're going to hit all of the major points this season that you would expect to find in any good cognitive psychology class, or any good cognitive psychology book. We might add a chapter, we might combine a chapter. We're probably going to be adding chapters somewhere. But any basic cognitive psychology book will do, or you could just follow along with us and hopefully gain something listening to us ramble about a number of topics this this semester. So yeah, I guess that's that's it. Is there anything you guys want to say before we get? We get started with the season three. I think I'm good. I mean, we're just going to keep track of it on like we're usually doing. We're in a vastly different topic area. Hello to all of my students who may be listening, whether you're in the grad grad class or the undergrad class. But yeah, no, I'm set. Yeah, and I'm just excited to be here. I'm glad to be joining the team and hello to my students too, because I'm going to be sharing this with you all as well. And I hope that it does some good because you'll be saying, you know, other perspectives in just my own throughout this podcast. So it'll be a good additional source to learn some of this stuff. And I'm not teaching cognitive psychology this semester. So hello, all of Alyssa and Thomas is students. Yeah, I snatched them from you. Yes, I'm not complaining too much. I enjoy cognitive psychology. But I don't delve into it enough to be maybe as comfortable as I do walking in or maybe just haven't taught it enough. I can walk into a social psych class without notes now. Like, I think I've hit that point. I still need to bring my notes to cognitive psychology just to be. So I mean, if anything, this season is going to force me to prepare a lot more than I usually do, but I'll put the work in. So for this first episode, we are going to get into kind of an introduction to cognitive psychology. And while the textbook will usually cover all the basics of, you know, kind of what cognitive psychology is, a let Alyssa give us a little rundown of cognitive psychology. We're going to talk about some researchers that seems to be our good starting point to talk about some researchers that maybe the book isn't going to talk about all that much. And we've taken three researchers that are kind of considered this transitionary phase between behavioral psychology and cognitive psychology. I think Alyssa is going to talk about Edward Tolman, who's a behavioral psychologist first. Thomas is going to talk about, I wanted to say Lawrence Colberg. It's Kohler Wolfgang Kohler. And he was a Gustalt theorist. And I'm going to talk about another behavioral psychologist who went on to gain a lot of fame, who might be based on our last couple of discussions, be in that like C tier B tier, behind the scenes. Because he's got some really similar stuff. Some of those people we talked about. And I'm going to talk about Seligman. So I guess we should start Alyssa by giving us the rundown on what cognitive psychology is. What do you do in cognitive psychology? So cognitive psychology is really all about the study of mental processes that go on in our mind whenever we're interacting with the world around us. And even when we're not actively engaging consciously with world around us, we constantly are still at work in our head, whether it's forming memories, or just interpreting the world around us, perceiving the world around us. Cognitive psychologists all kind of narrow in on those mental processes that we can't see, that we can't touch. So it's the unobservable parts of being a human or even an animal that lead us to act in certain ways, or lead us to behave in certain ways. So for instance, cognitive psychologists study things like memory. That's one of the big, big ones. Learning, perception, intelligence, all kinds of things that we talk about our everyday life with people. But psychologists, cognitive psychologists have specifically taken the road of trying to really put their finger on those mental processes and try to determine how they work. And that is something that is, I would say, relatively new in the grand scheme of psychology as a whole. Because before that psychologist, specifically like behaviorists, they were focused on just the observable behavior. And that stems from philosophy, like old, old philosophy. And that's not a wrong approach by any means. Because observable behavior is something that we can actually see happening. And it's definitely tangible. We can make assumptions about why the behavior occurs. But cognitive psychologists have decided to try to show that there's something in between the actual stimulus and the behavior that's going on for animals and humans. So that's what we study primarily. And so that's what we're going to be delving into all for the next 16 weeks. It's going to be over before we know it. It seriously will. Yeah. So I guess who wants to go first? I think mine's oldest. Yeah. Collar's probably the oldest. So I guess we'll go in chronological order. Collar told men, and then I'll go last with Seligman. Sounds good. Yeah, no. So Wolfgang Collar is probably one of the cleanest psychologists that I've done and deep dive in for the podcast. I found zero dirt for the dude. He was born in 1887 to a German family in what was-- well, what is now a stonia, but it was a part of the Russian Empire at the time before the glorious revolution. Because he was German, his family decided to emigrate to Germany, where he worked at several different universities. His major advisor was Karl Stump. So for people interested in history of psychology, Karl Stump, Wolfgang Collar, connected there. And he was interested in psychoacoustics for his dissertation. So it was actually called Acoustic Investigations in 1909, where he looked at the link between physics and psychology through sound, through ears, through sensing noises, et cetera. So we start off with a very traditional German kind of psychology going on here. The major contribution, Collar, is his development with the Psychological Institute in Frankfurt of Gestalt Psychology. And he's the one who has the famous quote, "The hole is greater than the sum of its parts." He actually says that-- so the actual quote is that the hole is different than the sum of the parts. And there's kind of a philosophical debate going on, is are the parts put together something more, or is it something different? It's kind of like our mix up between subconscious and unconscious, like is the subconscious below the conscious, or is the unconscious something different than the conscious? And so confusing German to English translation issues here. But Gestalt Psychology was very interested in the idea that kind of laying the groundwork for perceptual research, how we visually understand objects, how objects and shapes and forms move together to create something different than the little pieces. And this very much kind of runs counter to the kind of traditional behaviorist mode of the time, like Alexa talked about, where it's just a neilous response. Because he's a little bit older, it's less behaviorist and more of a critique of previously discussed by collegeists, Oh shoot, Thorndijk, where the law of action or the law of effect-- what did he-- and put notes down, Thorndijk. - Thorndijk's the law of effect or a law of effect. There we go. So Colour was mostly engaged in debate with Thorndijk's crew, so kind of our pre-behaviorists, the idea that no, we can actually like study things that are going on in the mind. We can look at things like perception. He was very interested in what he called indirect experience or direct experience. So this idea that we can tangibly measure things like heart rate, blood pressure, physiological responses that may be able to predict behavior as well. So he hasn't quite gone as far as the cognitive cycle followed the fact. But that's very much in line of where his critique lie was that no, we can actually do a little bit more than, say, just, you know, do a stimulus measure response stick with our law of effect from Thorndijk. On the other hand, he was also very critical of the structuralists who were using introspection. So that was a little bit too far for him as well. And the opposite direction. So he kind of has this little trifecta he found himself in, where he was also criticizing structuralists about how inaccurate introspection is, how it's going to differ across different people. And then he actually kind of had a systems critique of it that if one lab consists of only found results with introspection, that perhaps it was unique to that lab that they found consistent results due to introspection. And so that they may be leading participants on to give particular answers, that there was something methodologically or structurally going on within that collective of structuralists, like advisor, advisee relationships. That was replicating research. That wasn't also replicating beyond that lab. So he was maybe our progenitor of the replication crisis psychology, maybe. So behaviorism doesn't go too far. Introspection goes too far in the other direction. And his major contribution, I think, towards a development of cognitive psychology that kind of extends beyond just his criticism, is his work with apes, where he would put them in problem solving situations. He was spending time in the Canary Islands. And he wrote his book, The mentality of apes in 1917. And his work there put chimpanzees in situations where they would not be able to problem solve their way to a banana as a lure. And so they couldn't trial and error a methodology, like Edward Dornock would say, would need to happen. And this is where we get the idea of the aha moment or the aha effect, where all of a sudden you're like, oh, wait, I can figure it out, the solution has come to me. I can stack the crates and climb up to the banana, or I can use a rod or a tree branch and extend my arm length to knock the banana down. And so this was primarily going on as a means to kind of dispute Dornock in that way, that not all problem solving behavior is trial and error or algorithmic. Sometimes you just have to be with a problem for a little while, and then the solution occurs to you through a mental process. In terms of him as a person, those were the major contributions he had. This is very foundational, very early 20th century psychology. He, like most psychologists, ended up fleeing Europe to America due to the Nazis. He, while he wasn't an outspoken critic of the Nazis, he did start taking a stand in 1933, where he started to express ambivalence about the regime. He wrote a couple articles about it. He then started to protest the Nazi government demanding professors began lectures by doing the Highell Hitler salute. And so he refused to do that. And then the Nazis started harassing him after class and his students after class. And so in 1935, he needed it to the United States of America. And he was a professor at Swarmorth College, where he served on faculty for 20 years. He was also a research professor at Dartmouth. He was also the president of the American Psychological Association. And then, let's see, he lectured in the United States and then throughout the mid 20th century, he did return back to Berlin to give lectures. But he stayed in the United States and died in 1967 and New Hampshire. And he is the 50th most cited psychologist. So color, one of the founders of Gestalt Psychology, our aha moment with apes, lots of spicy takes against thorn dyke and the trial and error approach to problem solving and the law of effect, but also forward thinking in terms of leaving the structuralist and introspection behind. Fairly clean, fairly straightforward. I didn't really find a lot of drama with them beyond Nazis. And it's the good kind of drama, because you're against the Nazis, as opposed to-- and unlike our Carl Jung, this guy is also a gentile, I believe. So he didn't really like-- he could have just hailed Hitler and had a nice time in Berlin until the war was over. But yeah, decided to be like, no, I'm not going to do that. Bye. No? So that is color and in that shell. I didn't know his biography. I pretty much only knew him from the ape studies. But then I connected it to Gestaltism while I was doing the readings. I was like, oh, OK, so this guy's got his fingers and everything. Yeah, it's like one of the people that's pushed us into the cognitive revolution. Yeah, it really, really gets me every time like I go over the kind of American European divide when it came to the kind of Gestalt early cognitive psychology going on in Europe versus the hardline behavioral takeover of the United States. And I remember it so readily, because I still have nightmares about that comprehensive exam question. So yeah, so we have we have color who kind of represents one of these early forces who's kind of going against or at least critiquing people like foreign dyke. But where our other two psychologists differ is that both Tolman and Seligman are within the system. And Seligman, as I'll talk about, he just leaves. He just leaves the system. Tolman, I'm right. A list you'll correct me. Seems to kind of be looking to sort of change the system from within. I agree. Shall we go into Tolman then? Yeah. Cool. I think it's a good follow up, too, to Kohler, because I mean, Kohler with his insight learning is a good thing to think about first before we talk about Tolman. I mean, it's kind of like the first kind of evidence of there's more going on than just presenting a stimulus and then observing a response in an animal or a person. But so to begin, like Tolman, he actually originally was studying electrochemistry at MIT. And he actually ended up reading a really, really influential piece of literature by William James, who, if you have never heard of him before, was a huge person in the history of psychology. He wrote the book Principles of Psychology. And after Tolman read it, he started to realize he was maybe a little bit more interested in philosophy and psychology, rather than the hard sciences that he was involved in with his work at MIT. And so he ended up actually going on to study just all psychology in Germany. And then he ended up transferring from there to Harvard, which is where he did earn his PhD under Hugo Monsterberg, which is also another big name in the history of psychology. But we won't get into Hugo Monsterberg right now. Tolman ended up going on to working at Berkeley, a university of-- it's a university of Berkeley. Is that the full title of the university? I think it is. University of California at Berkeley? That's what it is. That's where he ended up. But he originally was really interested in honestly trying to breed rats to be better at learning things such as how to navigate a maze, for instance. So you could say that he was kind of dabbling in what we would call nowadays behavioral genetics, which stems from-- Galton, Frank's Galton-- but he was open to this idea of the notion that there was more going on in the mind that we could actually try to study. And so he's really, really well known for some of his work on what is called latent learning. And so the researchers that came before him, specifically some really big ones like John Watson and B.S. Skinner, they were what we call behaviorists. And so, like I said at the beginning of the podcast, before cognitive psychology really became a thing, researchers viewed the research as being the most usable information if it was focused on just the stimulus and the response. Researchers believe that since we couldn't see what was going on inside the head or the mind, then it was kind of a black box that we can't really do anything about that. So we might as well just study what we can observe. But Tolman kind of thought that he did fight that viewpoint. And so he wanted to try to show that there is a way that we can study and show evidence of certain processes that are going on in between the stimulus and the response. So people like John Watson, who was the father of behaviorism, he really believed that there was no such thing as the mind or consciousness. So he thought that we were almost trainable in a sense so that we can, we literally are any of the behaviors that we exhibit are based on a form of conditioning to external stimuli that we come into contact with. So you can think about something as simple as touching a hot stove, the stove, touching the stove, and then the pain of the heat is going to negatively reinforce you so that you don't do it again. So Watson and other behaviors believe that everything that we do is just based on these stimuli and responses that we interact that basically occur each and every day of our lives. People like VS Skinner also studied, did his research in the same way, but he didn't necessarily say that there wasn't more going on in the mind, but he still was in the camp where they believe that the best way to research behavior was to just focus on the observable. Tolman decided that he was going to try to show that his rats could learn things without it being observable at the time of the learning. So he basically, his biggest theory is that learning happens all the time, even if we aren't aware of it happening or we aren't aware that somebody around us or an animal is learning at the time of their learning. So you can think about if you're walking around town or walking around campus, for instance, you are learning things as you walk around without even realizing that you are. So one day when your route is blocked, for instance, maybe they're doing construction on a building that you have to walk a different way to your class. Because of your ability to take in information constantly and latently, you probably are able to find a new alternative route. So that's an example of what Tolman was trying to, in terms of, we are able to show proof of our ability to learn things when the circumstances ask for it or when we have motivation to demonstrate some form of learning. So he, one of his biggest lines of studies were these rats and these mazes where, for instance, the biggest one that I can really describe is he had three different groups of rats where the first group was the immediate reward group. So they would put the rats in the mazes and whenever they reached the end of the maze, they would be reinforced. So they would get a piece of cheese or some kind of food. So they quickly learned because they were being, they were reinforced with something that they wanted, obviously, or that increased their ability to find the end of the maze quicker. My group was a delayed, a delayed reinforcement group. So for the first half of the study, the rats were able to just roam around the maze and whenever they reached the end, they were immediately taken out, but they weren't given any kind of reinforcement, they weren't given food. But then during the second half of the study, they actually did start giving those specific rats in that group, they gave them food at the end of the maze. And what they ended up finding was that the rats that had the delayed reinforcement actually ended up starting to find the end of the maze faster than the group that was reinforced in the first place. And he tried to, he claimed that that was evidence of latent learning basically saying that the rats, while they were roaming around without reinforcement, they were still mapping the area of the maze. And so he coined the term cognitive maps, which refers to a mental representation of our external surroundings or environments. And he, because these rats in the delayed group were able to even find end of the maze even faster, shows that because once they were motivated, they exhibited their behavior more readily. So it was a form of what he would call purposeful behavior. So he really was adamant about you have some form of motivation or some kind of circumstance that changes what the response would have normally, or what the response would condition to be, you're still able to demonstrate that you've learned some kind of alternative route or some kind of alternative way of solving a problem, for instance. So he, I would say, in my personal opinion, as a cognitive psychologist, I would say he's one of the people that led the path between behaviorism and what is now cognitive psychology. He was really against the stimulus response paradigm that behaviorists were using. And he came up with this idea that there's intervening variables in between what the researcher is manipulating and what the observed behavior is. So for instance, if the rat had a bigger appetite that day, then they would have a bigger motivation to find the food at the end of the maze, which would lead them to produce that response faster. And so that was a big term that he is still credited for. Is this intervening variable in between the stimulus and the response? I actually did find some interesting stuff about him that I wanted to ask you all about because I wasn't aware of this before, but he was awarded a few different things. For instance, he at Berkeley, they named a hall after him, Tolman Hall, for his contributions to psychology. But I was reading about something called the McCarthy era. Have you all heard of the McCarthy era? Yes. Oh, yeah. Academic-- OK, so maybe y'all can help me learn about this. But apparently, he was a big, big person in terms of either fighting against the McCarthy era, or maybe he was in support of it. But basically-- Those are two very different things. Being in support or being against it. Oh, yeah. I'm sure what I gathered was that researchers or academics should have the ability to pursue whatever they want, basically academic freedom. It's when I gathered from it. So he was probably against-- Joseph McCarthy basically ran the red scare in the United States against the communists that were hidden in plain sight. I actually have this really hilarious American Legion magazine that I went and downloaded from their archives. And it's like, should we allow red professors on campus? And it's all about academic freedom. It's all about how the way they spun it was there's this guise of academic freedom. But what they're really going to teach our kids is communism. And McCarthy blacklisted a lot of people. He would bring people before him. No. Every woman was against the McCarthy era because he refused to sign the loyalty oath to the United States because of the infringed academic freedom, which resulted in a court case, Tolman versus Underhill in 1955 at the California Supreme Court, overturning the oath and enforcing the reinstatement of all those who had refused to sign it. Oh. So he's a big anti-McCarty figure. Yeah, big props to Tolman. Yeah, nowadays McCarthy is not nearly as nearly seen as the hero that he was at the time. It's kind of very obvious he was engaging in a lot of overreach. I mean, the red scare basically created a bunch of-- you could turn people over, but Hollywood blacklisted a bunch of people. There's a whole lot in there to talk about the psychology of that at some point in the future. But yeah, that's wild. I didn't know that either. I didn't hear that either. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. And he's very decorated with his awards because of these stances that he took. And also just what he created when he showed evidence of these intervening variables and these mental processes that are clearly going on. I mean, and they also researchers, psychologists that have shown obviously more evidence of these forms of learning that don't require some kind of physiological or biological form of interacting with the world, like observational learning, for instance. And y'all probably know more about observational learning than I do, I would guess. But Albert Vander, for instance, has shown that children can learn behaviors just by watching the behaviors occur in somebody else. So there's definitely evidence of things that we learn where until we're ready to use that piece of information, we don't necessarily have to exhibit it. But that doesn't mean that we didn't learn it. Fun fact about how young psychology is, Albert Vander died last week? Did he really? He was still alive, but that's crazy. That was just so recent. He was getting up there. He was pretty old then. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I remember it was like '94. Wow. I really enjoyed a lot of his work. July 26, 2021. Wow. Yeah, I mean, the people that we've been talking about recently are these big names in psychology. And they're either very recently passed, like within the last couple of decades, or selling them, for example, in his 70s. And he's the huge name still in behavioral psychology, and in clinical, and a number of other fields, including positive psychology. Well, I don't know if I'm going to end on a positive note. Because Thomas, he said, you couldn't find any dirt on Kohler. Maybe this was because Kohler and Tolman are kind of like pre-internet. Seligben, on the other hand, kind of fits a lot of the criteria for these sort of celebrity academics. Because he does have his hands in some interesting pots that made me question, is this all? And there are people who have made this argument. There's a book that's very anti-optimism, positive psychology that really tries to criticize a lot of Seligben's work. But I guess we could start at the beginning. So Martin Seligben was born in 1942. And I'll quote his Wikipedia, an American psychologist educator and author of self-help books. My favorite. Yeah. I will say, though, the only self-help book I actually liked was from Seligben. It's his learned optimism. I loved his chapter on strategic pessimism. I was like, this is some good shit. That's interesting. Yeah, he's probably most well-known as kind of the father, the creator, at least the progenitor of positive psychology and the concepts of well-being, or at least like heavy study into the concept of well-being. He's currently the Zellerbach family professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Psychology. He was previously the director of the clinical training program, and he taught at Cornell before that. So he's not a Harvard grad, like a lot of those celebrity academics, but he's not as well-known as some of the other people we've talked about. But he has a lot of similarities. He's currently the director of the University's Positive Psychology Center. So he's got his own center and it focuses on his research. And in 1998, he served his tenure as the president of the American Psychological Association. And that's kind of the point where he began his pivot, which I thought happened a lot earlier than this. But as I started delving in it, it seems that part of this pivot was around-- or at least, I guess, the fame of this pivot was around this time because he had a platform. He could go in front of the entire American Psychological Association and say, hey, so we're focusing on a lot of negative stuff. Maybe we should stop that for a while. He's the founding editor of Prevention and Treatment, one of the APA journals. And just sort of as an autoside because people at this level have their hands on a lot of odd things that we would consider, like for us, low-tier psychologist. He's also in the Board of Advisors for Parents Magazine. Weird. A little bit. But it's like a developmental magazine for parents who want to teach their kids stuff. And he has sort of a-- well, he's got a kind of like a clinical behavioral background. So he's probably most well-known outside of positive psychology for his research, developing what is called learned helplessness. Oh, is he the guy that zapped the dogs? He's the guy-- well, he's the guy who with his colleague zapped the dogs. Oh, no, no. Where they put the dogs-- The positive side guy. Yes. Yes, which-- I mean, if you think about it, that's the kind of study. So the study basically had basic operant conditioning. Dog is on one side of the fence. They hear a tone. If they stay on that side of the fence, they get electrocuted. So the dog learns really quickly I need to jump the fence. Because if I get on the other side of the fence, I don't get the shock. And so dog is sitting there. They play the tone. Dog jumps over. Perfect operant conditioning study. Well, then they chain the dog up. And that's where things get dark. Because what they find is, is that after a couple of shocks, the dog stops trying to escape. And it lays there and takes the shock. And I mean, again, if you were going to create the field of positive psychology, this is probably the study that would prompt you to do so. That watching a dog sort of sit there and be electrocuted and not try to escape, which kind of goes against operant conditioning, operant conditioning at its core would say, like, you have to escape at whatever cost. So you're just going to keep fighting, because you have to avoid that negative response. But it turns out the failure itself is a negative outcome. And so it's actually less psychologically stressful to sit there and take the shock than it is to try to escape the fail and also take the shock. And so this has actually been picked up pretty heavily by clinical psychologists in trying to understand why people stop seeking help for psychological disorders. We talk about things like depression. And I mean, even your average aunt at a press and takes four to eight weeks to work, you might have to change the dosage, takes another four to eight weeks. You might have to change the pill, takes another four to eight weeks. At some point for someone, it might become easier. And that easier is learned helplessness. And the same with a lot of other fields as well. We could probably apply it to teaching and learning for people who feel that, hey, I failed that class. I'm going to try again. I just can't do it. You kind of take on that fixed mindset. It's just easier for me to give up than it is to put all this effort and bomb it again. And so that again is probably what he's most well known for outside of what has kind of become his life's work for the last 20, 30 years. And that that's positive psychology. So yes, he's the guy who shocked the dogs. So I learned that positive psychology gets it start from Maslow. Maslow's the one who actually coined the term, which is also kind of not surprising. But Martin Seligman is kind of this I'll read from one of his websites. He's a pioneer of positive psychology, not simply because he has a systematic theory about why happy people are happy, but because he uses the scientific method to explore it. And that's actually probably the biggest criticism about positive psychology right now is that there really isn't a systematic theory that underlies it. So when we talk about cognitive psychology, your behavioral psychology, they're these broader, long standing, kind of underlying theoretical frameworks for it. We're talking about something that's only about 20 years old. And so there's still a lot being done. There's a lot being explored. He worked with a fellow psychologist, Christopher Peterson, and they created this as part of one of the big positive sites, and just kind of give you an idea on what they look at, what they call the character strengths and virtues. Seligman's really interested in happiness. They kind of proposed this idea of positive psychology as a way to get away from the DSM and all the negative stuff. They offered, what is the book called? It's lost it. Is it the character strengths in Birch's book? It is the character strengths and virtues book. And it's sort of meant to be a mirrored companion to the DSM, where the DSM talks about how all these things can go wrong. Character strengths and virtues are about what can go right. And one of the big things that he kind of harps on is the concept of happiness. And so happiness comes from there kind of this three-stage hierarchy. There's pleasure and gratification, which would be kind of your behavioral psychology, operant conditioning, kind of happiness. And then there's the embodiment of strengths and virtues. And at the highest level, it's sort of meaning and purpose. So you find some meaning or purpose in your life. And he has 24. So this is very-- it has been compared to the MBTI, because it's kind of a little personality test, though it's a little more empirically-- at least, it's definitely more empirically sound than the MBTI. But I mean, I could scribble some questions on a piece of paper, and that would be more sound than the MBTI. But it looks like I at least have a background in psychology. It has 24 kind of factors. And they're clustered into six virtues. They're all equal, which I found really interesting. He's actually been asked, is one higher than the other? And he's like, nope, there's no hierarchy. They're all equal. No one is greater than the other. They all kind of exist on the same level. So if you develop one, one does not lead to another, it's kind of its own thing. And they include wisdom and knowledge. And it includes subcategories like creativity, curiosity, open mind and this love of learning, and perspective, or maybe perspective taking courage. Some of these get a little nebulous. But courage includes bravery, perseverance, integrity, and enthusiasm, humanity. Humanity focuses on love, kindness, and social intelligence, justice focuses on teamwork, fairness, leadership, temperance, so forgiveness, humility, prudence, and self-control, and transcendence. So appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, optimism, humor, and purpose, which, I mean, if anything, if we're taking the Maslow approach to this, you can't have Maslow without transcendence or actualization. And those are very kind of, I don't know, I see a lot of Maslow in that section. He has done some clinical work, and it seems that a lot of his clinical work was inspired by Beck. Some of his different websites that are tied to both him and some of the things that he's written, focus on kind of a clinical process of optimism's a big part of it, but a number of things to kind of keep optimistic and keep positive. So much like Beck, the past is the past. Like, you can't change it. And so kind of fretting and ruminating on it is a bad thing. There's a big focus on happiness in the present, so finding the good things in the present, and then also optimism about the future. And so that's pretty much the good stuff about Selegman, because it's mostly-- I mean, I love the concept of positive psychology. I love the concept of being like, you know, we've been doing all of this research, or we've been chaining and shocking animals. Maybe, maybe as a field. We can branch out and focus on grit. And these motivating factors that make people do good, altruism is a big aspect of some of the parts of his research. But there's kind of two big criticisms that I found. And one of them is just that it's like not as founded as other fields of psychology. And even if we talked about someone like-- we talked about Hyatt. Hyatt's been doing research less time than Selegman. And Hyatt's created an underlying theory for moral foundations. There's this underlying aspect. There's a bit of an argument to where some of his findings and some of the things that have been published around positive psychology aren't as empirically sound or don't really have the kind of-- basically, there's a big magnifying glass from the replication crisis people on them and have been for a long time. Yeah, unlike Coler, there's a lot of criticism regarding things like-- so one of his biggest-- I guess, opponents, critics is Barbara Aaron Reich. And she's a former positive psychologist, if I'm kind of understand. Well, she was kind of around at the beginning of positive psychology. She's very critical of it. But also, she's trying to promote her book called Bright Sighted, How Positive Thinking is Underlining America. Yeah. And so it's kind of hard like, who should I trust in this? But, yeah, she's a pretty heavy opponent of the idea of positive psychology. There's been a number of things because like Seligman itself, one of one of the big criticisms that she has against Seligman outside of just the positive psychology stuff is tied to-- he's really good at marketing a lot of these ideas because they're very positive. And so he, like, a lot of these big names, like when you make it big, he goes on to conference calls for $2,000 a pop to tell people about how-- to coach people in the workforce to be more positive, to have more optimism about their jobs. He has given keynote addresses to plenty of corporations. He's had personal audiences with politicians. He's very much one of these high-tier, famous people, but he's very behind the scenes. He does not publicize his popularity. But he's meeting the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the Dalai Lama and people like that because he's promoting a far more empirically invested self-help through a lot of those aspects of optimism. And I mean, like you said, it's the only self-help book you've enjoyed. He's definitely putting his research in it. He's definitely doing the legwork. But he's definitely taking advantage of the corporate side of what positive psychology can offer as opposed to maybe the layperson's benefit. So I'll read this as a quote from an article. "In an episode recounted in her book, Barbara, Aaron Reich challenged a few of Seligman's most basic mathematical assumptions regarding happiness, the things that underlie, the claims that prove the effectiveness of his work. The professor responded with a patronizing comment about her lack of sophistication. However, when Aaron Reich got home and looked up the issue, it turned out that her criticism was more valid than he would admit. That they quote, "Martin Seligman's math was flimsy that said his marketing was sound." But it's really hard for me to be like, how much of this is like stirring the pot to sell the other book? I don't know. However, one of Martin Seligman's most visible contributions to the new field he created was a psychological assessment called the Authentic Happiness Inventory. After taking this test, which consists only of 24 questions, the subject will allegedly learn precisely how happy he or she really is. It's very-- we've got our own personality test. And you can actually go take it, but you have to create an account. And they will use all of your data for research. You're very upfront about that. I don't think it's for them. Yep. So what's her name? [INAUDIBLE] Aaron didn't give us that honor. No. No. She's like a social work, but she does psychology research. She's another self-help person. She does a lot of like what's your leadership, strengths, empowering characteristics. And she has an online quiz that she uses in her research about your leadership qualities. And she doesn't tell you that she's going to use your data, but she's definitely using her data. Because we definitely took the test. Yeah. So I feel just to throw it out here in terms of positive psych, it feels very reactionary, which is probably why we don't have a solid foundation for it to stand on. Yeah. And it's kind of odd that like, I mean, I'm sure they're taking people like Maslow's work. I mean, I'm sure you have people who are well-known within the more positive aspects of psychology, or either going through his program, working with him in some way, or like tangentially related. So like it makes me think of people like Daniel Batson, and his empathy altruism hypothesis. So when you start getting into like the altruism research, that's probably overlapping somewhere in positive psychology. But yeah, it's definitely one of those fields that like, it's definitely reactive. Because it is definitely a reaction to what was trending. And I mean, what has been trending in psychology since let's say the 50s and 60s. I mean, we're talking about post-World War II psychology, especially in kind of like the social fields, is very much a reaction to like, there are bad things in the world why we want to explain why all this stuff is happening. That being said, that's probably not the biggest controversy. And what I think is the biggest controversy, and is the only thing that makes me kind of-- I like to add a little spice to the podcast. So Seligman's lab has been awarded-- or was awarded at one point in February 2010-- a no-bid contract with the US military for $31 million. When asked about it, Dr. Seligman claims that he has no idea how or why the military awarded a $31 million contract for resilience training to his University of Pennsylvania Center. Does it know apparently? The Hoffman Report in 2015 notes that, quote, "critics alleged that the contract was awarded because of the assistance that Seligman provided to the government with his counterterrorism efforts with his research that's not positive psychology that he's well known for that could definitely be used in, let's say, a CIA black site. The learned helplessness stuff would be pretty effective torture, is at least what some people have claimed." Oh, my goodness. Oh, yeah. And this is actually a quote from him. I'll say, in the 30 years that followed World War II, the federal government has spent over $1.2 billion to fund psychological research, and much of this research was funded through the military services. And this was him and Raymond Fowler's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness and the Future of Psychology in the American Psychologist 2011. This starts to kind of get into a lot of the stuff that we found out a couple of years after this, 2015, 2016, regarding the APA's really buddy buddy work with the Department of Defense and some of the stuff that was going on, like those two psychologists who helped oversee all of the CIA torture stuff, makes it seem like it all kind of lines up. But that's not nice. I mean, that's more like speculation. Because I mean, we do know, at the very least, it does seem that they were using aspects of his research, like whether they were using him could have been using aspects of his research to crack people, to get people to open up or just to admit the stuff. Because we know that's, at the very least, what torture does. It gets people to admit the stuff, whether they did it or not, they will admit to it to get out of that situation. But in February 2010, he was awarded a $31 million no-bid resilience training contract for his Pennsylvania resilience program, PRP, involving students. It served as the scientific basis for the military's comprehensive soldier fitness experimental initiative, the CSF. It sounds a lot, I guess, scarier than it actually is. In reality-- I mean, it is kind of scary if you think about it-- in reality, the US military was basically using positive psychology to make soldiers more resilient to warfare so that they could basically train people to sort of steal themselves using this. And they could also sort of weed out the people who might break under the pressure or to put them into more and more training until they no longer kind of tested under that threshold. The PRP-- this is the Penn Resiliency Program that he collected data from students. And this is from Seligman, from the APA conference in 2009 talking about this-- sought to increase students' ability to handle day-to-day stressors and problems that are common for adolescents. The program was designed to prevent depression. The PRP promotes optimism by teaching students to think more realistically and flexibly about the problems they encounter. PRP also teaches assertiveness, creative brainstorming, decision-making, relaxation, and other coping and problem-solving skills. So it was originally this plan. And again, I don't-- from what I've read, I can't criticize the program because what it's there for is to say, look, you know, if students in this situation, they may feel overwhelmed. They're going to be stressed out. We've talked about trauma. There's going to be these events. Can we give them some training to help buffer them? Well, they then used it to kind of scale it up. They used that as the baseline and started applying this. In 2009, the US military launched the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Initiative, a vast psychological experiment being conducted on 1.1 million US soldiers who are under intense physical and emotional stress. It, quote, utilizes theoretical positive psychology techniques with the goal of creating psychologically resilient soldiers who are trained to overcome their innate human empathy and moral aversion to killing other human beings. Beautiful. The focus-- the focus, yeah. It just kind of gets worse from here. The focus of psychologists under military contract shifted from detainees suspected of terrorism to the entire US military. And that's another big criticism, because Seligman just got a 1.1 million participant subject pool who could not say no. So there might be some consent, but there's no ability to back out. Yeah, the terminology shifted from interrogation enhancement to performance enhancement technology. It's kind of gross. And Seligman seems to be-- and again, like-- so this guy, Roy Edelsen, who wrote 2011 about the dark side of Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, said that psychology and psychologists have contributed to training programs aimed at increasing soldiers' willingness to kill. Now this newest positive psychology program for resilience promises to shield soldiers from some of the debilitating consequences of their actions. So this reminds me-- so I recently learned about a new concept. It's called a Cruel Optimism Cultural Theory. It is the moment that we are presently and right now is the Age of Cruel Optimism. And Berlin, who coined the term in 2011, says, "A Cruel Optimism is a relation of Cruel Optimism is a double bind in which your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time that object is actually a threat to your flourishing." And so it's a good thing, but it's going to stab you. And that's what makes me-- that makes me feel very positive psych. Like, let's teach students resilience and then train soldiers. Yeah. You've got to have that second-like stab, otherwise, it's not complete. Yeah, it gets even kind of sketchier. So in addition to the troubling moral violations entailed in this coerced experiment-- because it is a coerced experiment. It's like doing research on prisoners who can't say no. Like, we're supposed to have these additional ethical barriers. But it turns out the APA doesn't have that guideline for soldiers. Oh, they don't do that. I mean, we're actually ethically we aren't supposed to give people the option to leave. But if I want to go and interview prisoners, I have to leap through extra hurdles. But if I'm working for the Department of Defense, I don't have to run through those extra hurdles. Because there's not an additional IRB checkbox that asks, are the people you're doing research on soldiers? Interesting. Who also can't say no. Like, it's just for we, but not for the. Yeah. Nicholas Brown, a graduate student in the UK, raised several fundamental questions about the applicability of PRP, a school-aged children's resilience program, as the basis for the comprehensive soldier program. This is a quote from him is critical examination of their program. A, whether a program based on resiliency training for school-aged children can hope to address the serious mental trauma, including PTSD faced by soldiers deployed to war zones. Can it? Shouldn't necessarily be as applicable there. B, whether the instruments used to measure the performance of the program are reliable, valid, and appropriate for the circumstances in which they are being used. And see whether the design and delivery of the program takes sufficient account to the conflicting real world demands placed on the individuals involved. So can you take a program used for undergraduate students and expect it to apply perfectly to soldiers? They might be similar age. You have a lot of 18 to 21 year olds, 22 year olds in the army. But there's a big difference between, I'm really stressed out because I can't handle my 15 credit workload, and I'm being overworked. And I just killed someone. Not even the same at all. Right. I'm also very glad that I could throw this huge curveball in our discussion of Kohler, Tolman, and Seligman. You guys thought I was just going to talk about learned helplessness? What happens when you get social psychology just to sit still and talk about Kog? They talk about positives, that. I mean, pretty much. Like, again, it's this, but he's also-- he's still working within the kind of system that ran. He's doing research like in this pre and post 9/11 era. And so especially because this is one of those really big things that the APA's been grappling for has recently grappled with, is that they're working with the DOD and how much they were actually involved and some of this stuff going on. But yeah, that Brown also showed in his research that the GAT, which is the global assessment tool, it's a psychometric instrument involving a 105 item computer questionnaire that helps to kind of measure where people are resilient wise. It turns out that it'll always reveal that large numbers of soldiers are facing, quote, "significant challenges." And hence, our quote, "deemed to be in need of further resilience training by a process that appears to consist of circular reasoning." So it continues to justify money flow. Yep. So it will kind of-- Right. Yeah, soldiers in particular will continue to score low on this because of the stresses that they face. And thus, it will mean that they keep needing to go through training and take the test again. Beautiful. Yeah. And then also, there's that force participation may have effect on their responses. Because I mean, that's a huge thing that we deal with. We talk about what's going on in your head. And we kind of take the social cognitive aspect that you have soldiers who are in a system where it might not actually be a good idea for you to say, I'm not happy. Or I'm feeling stressed out. Or I'm having vivid flashbacks. It may not be a good idea for you to admit that in the culture in which you exist. And so-- So yeah. Little, little controversial. Yeah, I'll say. So yeah, I just couldn't leave an episode sitting without some interesting takes. And I wasn't expecting to find half of what I expected to find. Actually, what I was looking for were articles. I knew that part of this resilience training program would put a heavy emphasis on soldiers with religious background. And so any soldier who was a kind of non-believer, agnostic atheist, would almost always-- or at least would be at a significant disadvantage to some of these happiness scales that they could use. And that was a big controversy a couple of years. I mean, it may be more than a couple of years at this point that I remember reading about is that Seligman was kind of under fire for that, for putting this really high weight on that you could only find meaning and purpose through religion. And there are plenty of people who don't. And so it kind of created that conference. So when I went and looked for additional stuff, one Seligman and the military, well, it turns out it was a lot worse than I thought it was. Oh, man. I don't know if it gets much better from here. But you know what? Well, we'll probably move on to better-- I don't know. There's probably some controversy with most of the people that we're going to talk about. I don't think you get to these high levels of your field without some, but I don't know. I probably don't have tolements problems, though, like-- Yeah? Oh, yeah. Like that's a good controversy to have. Be anti-Macartheia. I agree. Or, you know, protest, Nazi salutes in your classrooms. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's a much higher tier of like ethical controversy than like-- so I may have been involved with the CIA counterterrorism program and enhanced interrogation. And then might be helping soldiers steal themselves when they're doing stuff in battle, because we want to make a less empathetic soldier. That's-- Oh, man. That's the big yikes. So I don't know if I'm going to end on a high note, because the bias of the week that I've picked for this week is not necessarily best to bias that we all fall prey to. So I'll get to our bias of the week. [MUSIC PLAYING] So Kanaman and Sversky or Tversky-- I want to say Sversky, because it's like ZAR. That's how I read it. But it's TVERSKY1979 planning fallacy. One I used to help me write a release for this semester. I kind of added a couple of hours to all my estimates, because planning fallacy exists. It's the tendency to underestimate task completion times. So when I say, and this is only an hour and a half podcasts, it's only going to take me about an hour and a half to edit the three and a half hours later. Still editing it. That's usually what happens. And so the same thing. We tend to say, oh, this is only going to take me a couple of minutes. It's only going to take an hour to finish. Four hours later, we're still working on it. That's planning fallacy. We're just not really all that good at estimating how much time it's going to take to do something. We could have been able to fall to that every semester when we plan our skill a little by. I'm currently reaping the consequences of planning fallacy. I'm about to face it in a couple of hours, be honest. I have some work to do. And I think it's about to be an hour of work. I guarantee that it's going to be two and a half hours of work. I have, for some reason, cannot foresee happening, but it always happens. Always happens. Yes. They're deteriorating. But also, I think this is a really good thing to maybe end on for everyone students this semester, is that when you've got that paper due, when you've got something to study for, when you are working on a project, just know that no matter how long you think it's going to take, it will probably take longer. Yeah. Yeah. Even without obstacles or things like coming into play that could like cause you to slow down, like even without those things happening, it's still going to take longer. So probably even longer than the longer we're talking about. Right, right. Yeah, cause yeah, that's with everything removed. And once once you include that person calling you, are you getting absorbed into that YouTube video, or are you deciding to put on a podcast and try to listen to it and study it the same time? Don't do that. Yeah, we'll talk about. We'll talk about divided attention in a later episode. So yeah, a good rundown of three researchers who are not really cognitive psychologists that help to pave the groundwork. They helped this transition into 1950s, 1960s, beginning of the cognitive revolution and into cognitive psychology. And so we're going to continue that journey this semester, this season, and move into a little more neuroscience in the next episode. Yay. Thomas is favorite. So with that, we will bid everyone to do. Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye. Bye. (upbeat music)