1.09 (V) How Do People Explain Bad Events? Risk Factors and Protective Factors
[MUSIC] When I described human helplessness and animal helplessness to you, what I omitted was, it is a statistical phenomenon: about two-thirds of people, two-thirds of dogs, and two-thirds of rats who get inescapable shock become helpless in the way I described. One-third of people and animals we could not make helpless, so we began to wonder: what is it about some people that makes them immune from helplessness? What is it about some animals that makes them immune from helplessness? Now, what we had found experimentally in both animals and people, was that if your first experience was the bad event like shock or noise, but the event was escapable, and then, later on you got inescapable noise or shock, you were immunized against helplessness. You didn't become helpless later on. So we began to wonder about early experience and about personality. What protects people from helplessness? Conversely, we found in people who got no prior noise, no prior shock, about one out of ten of the people and animals who got nothing were helpless in the laboratory. So we asked about the converse as well: What is it about some of you that makes you so sensitive to bad events that you become helpless no matter what? And conversely, what is it about other people that protects them from becoming helpless? So we begin to look at personality. We began to look at the way you think about the bad events that had occurred to you and there were three dimensions of the way you think about bad events that constitute vulnerability or protection from helplessness. The first dimension is when a bad event occurs to you, do you think it's temporary or permanent? You're rejected by someone you love, do you think I'm unlovable, which is relatively permanent, or do you think she is fickle, which is another person? It's her, it's not about you- it's temporary if we go to another person. So we began to wonder: people who can think habitually that bad events go away in time, are they immunized against helplessness in new situations? Conversely, people who think when a bad event occurs, it's going to last and last, it's forever, are they going to be helpless for a long time? That was the first dimension we wondered about. The second dimension was local or everywhere? So you do badly on a math test, and you might say to yourself, I'm stupid. Well, stupidity hurts you in many situations. Then, you might say, I'm bad at math, and that's just about the one situation. So we wondered if people who thought bad events, when they occurred, were pervasive, would be more susceptible to helplessness than people who thought the bad events were just this one situation. And the third dimension we asked about was: do you in general think bad events are controllable or uncontrollable? So we developed a personality test that well over a million people have taken by now, of optimism and pessimism. Pessimists were the people who, when confronted with situations such as your boss gives you more work than you can possibly handle, and you're asked to generate a cause, they might say, he's a mean overbearing boss. Or they might say, I don't have the ability to do this job. What we tested was the extent to which you believe bad events were stable in time- permanent or temporary, and whether or not bad events were local or pervasive. So pessimists, I'm going to call them catastrophizers for now, are people who, when bad events occur to them chronically, reflexively believe “it's going to last forever, it's going to undermine everything I do, it's me and it's uncontrollable.” Optimists are people who when bad events occur, believe it's temporary, it's just this one situation, I can do something about it, and it's not my fault. So we ask the question: how do optimists and pessimists do in the laboratory? What we found: it was the optimists who didn't become helpless, and the pessimists who just sat there no matter what we did. So, in general, we found that being a catastrophizer, being a pessimist, was a major risk factor for becoming helpless in the laboratory, and being an optimist was a major protective factor.
