Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Appearances
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I think optimism is about being able to appreciate that there are more possibilities ahead of you than you may necessarily be able to see.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
Yeah, I mean, people do say that, and I don't have a lot of time for realism. I think it's a fig leaf for ignorance a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of the time, someone who says they're being a realist is simply saying, I don't want to engage with the possibilities. I'm going to stick to what I know and assume that carries on.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
And what we know from history is that history doesn't really move in straight lines. If you look back at just the course of this past century so far, there have been a number of epochal events since the year 2000. Most of them were not kind of straight line continuations of where we were going or what we thought was going to happen.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
If you were being a realist under those circumstances, I think you would have missed most of the surprises that we've had in the past 25 years.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I think it's more in the, it seems like it might be the case. I mean, the evidence, I mean, this is a contentious subject, right, is the degree to which the ad media diet, if you like, is making it hard for us to see any beyond that. I think there's a, I mean, personally, I think there is a degree of truth to that. It's hard to see how being exposed to negative information, bad news,
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
terrible news a lot of the time, often about things that are happening in places and at times where we really can't, at an individual level, do very much about them. It's hard to see how that doesn't take a psychological toll. It's very easy to think that that might have a negative effect. In terms of the causation, that is less well-researched, less well-attested.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
It's not really clear how that feeds directly into our levels of optimism or otherwise.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of work done in the past kind of couple of decades by people like Steven Pinker or the Max Rosa who runs the Our World in Data website that kind of show us that, you know, on a numbers basis, you know, it's a good time to be alive. And I think that's a good message. And I, you know, and I, you know, I support it. I mean, if you look at
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
It is probably better to be an ordinary person today and certainly in the industrialized world than it would have been to be a monarch 200 years ago, certainly better than a thousand years ago. We live longer. We live healthier lives. We have material standards of living that are incomparable to anybody who's come before us.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
And in most other respects and things like crime as well, there's probably... I think it's probably reasonable to say that we live in safer times. But I think that the psychological difficulty here is that those gross aggregate statistics are all very well, but they don't necessarily help me very much when it comes to what I'm going to do about my own life.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I mean, you're right, there is this kind of focusing effect of, you know, a terrible story breaks in the news and then it sticks in your head and you kind of think, I mean, even if you are, you rationally kind of think, well, the chances of that happening are very small. You still don't want to be the person who that very small probability happens to. So that's kind of one thing.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
It's hard to kind of get away from the irrationality of being, well, I mean, from the concern that you would feel about having been exposed to that. The other is that, of course, aggregate statistics, I mean, as I just said, that it's probably better to be an ordinary person today than it was a monarch 300 years ago. Kind of irrelevant because I wasn't a monarch 300 years ago.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I'm an ordinary person now. And whatever concerns I have about the world I live in now are the concerns I have about the world I live in now. It's not especially helpful to me living my life to know that if I'd been alive 250 years ago, it probably would have been worse.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I don't know if I would go so far to say it's only optimists who change the world, but certainly it's substantially optimists who change the world, I would say. Because they are the ones who find solutions, who find technologies, who find ideas that the rest of us don't necessarily... I say the rest of us. Actually, I count myself as an optimist, but some people really put that into practice.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I think if you look at someone like Elon Musk, I mean, set aside his... his politics, or you might think of him personally, you think about what he's achieved in terms of, you know, revolutionizing the car industry, revolutionizing the space industry, becoming the richest man in the world, and now something close to the most powerful man in the world. That's an extraordinary thing.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
And he is a self-described optimist, because he's, you know, set out to do things that most people looking at them would have said, that is, you know, out of and out of scope. That is not something that you can do from a standing start. So I think Elon Musk is a very good example of an optimist who's changed the world.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
There are many other people who fit those sorts of templates, who've gone out for something that the rest of us would say, that's really not possible. And it turns out it is.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I think you can change your default level of optimism when it comes to your own life. I think you can do that, and this is, you know, I think if you kind of get into the habit of challenging yourself, and there are various ways that psychologists have proposed to do that, of challenging yourself to think more optimistically, you can do that.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I think the piece that we can change, that I think all of us can change, is the intellectual part of this. Because we're not just creatures of instinct. We formulate views about the world and we assess what we know critically and what we learn critically. We think about what we're told. We think about how to frame it. That part, I think, is amenable to an effort of will. I think if you...
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
you know, try there to think about the world in a positive light. If you try to think about what's happening in more constructive ways there, I think it is possible to be more of an optimist. And I think that's actually where the need is. We're pretty good at being optimistic about our own lives.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I think what we're not so good at is being optimistic about our social lives, about our collective lives. And I think that's kind of where we could do with putting in the practice.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I've really enjoyed this. All right. Thank you very much for having me. That was great. I enjoyed that a lot. And thank you for the interesting questions. And let's keep the dialogue going.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
What is it? Well, one of the reasons I kind of started looking into this subject is because, actually, I think we all kind of think we know what optimism is. We kind of think it's this sort of general attitude that life will go all right and things will work themselves out. But when you start digging into it, you find there are actually kind of several distinct flavors of optimism.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
There's a psychological version of optimism. There's a philosophical version of optimism. And then there's kind of a practical version of optimism. And they kind of flow on from each other. The psychological definition of it is essentially having expectations about the future that are not supportable by the available evidence.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
So you think things are going to go well, even when you don't have evidence that testifies to that or demonstrates that's going to be true.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
Is that a safe assumption? It's one of those things. It's a safe assumption except when it isn't. One of the things I dug into was the evolutionary origins of optimism and why it seems to be that we have this innate, very widespread tendency to look on the bright side and why that seems to be part of the human condition.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
And actually goes beyond the human condition, because actually you also find that animals are optimistic or they express kind of biases in the way they look at the world that reflects what we would think of as optimism. So you can, for example, you can do an experiment with chickens in which you train basically chicks to associate, say, a black card with food and a white card with no food.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
So, you know, if they move a black card, there'll be food behind it. If they move the white card, there won't be. And once they're trained to do this, you show them a grey card and you see what they do. And what happens is that most chickens tend to go for the grey card, which basically means they think, well, it's probably going to have food.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
It's more likely to have food behind it than it's not, which is essentially an animal version, a chicken version of optimism. And when you start looking around, you discover that lots of animals do this. All sorts of animals, kind of the clever animals you might expect, like monkeys and dolphins and dogs.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
But also, as I say, chickens, sheep, even animals that we think of as being really simple, like bumblebees, express this kind of bias. And the most compelling explanation I found for this is that essentially you need something to motivate you to take action when you don't know what the future holds. When you're presented with an ambiguous situation.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
When you don't know what the answer is, when you have a grey card, or in the human case, when you have a glass half full of water. Obviously nobody ever does that experiment, but you understand the point. If you have the half glass of water and you have to decide if it's half full or half empty, there isn't actually a good answer to that. There's no meaningful answer to that.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
You have to make a call of some decision. In kind of the long run, if you don't do anything every time you're presented with that kind of situation, you're gonna go extinct. You're not gonna thrive if every time you don't know what's gonna happen next, you do nothing. That isn't a recipe for success.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
So optimism, and most of the time in life, we're faced with situations where we don't know what's gonna come next, not in detail. We may have an idea, and humans are better than most species, obviously, at figuring out what's coming next. But most of the time, we don't have enough information to know what's coming next. So you have to have something that makes you act.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
And essentially, if you kind of work through the logic of this, if we make the right kind of mistake or you make the right kind of assumption, as long as the negative effects are that small, every now and again the positives are large. So you can think about this in all sorts of circumstances in your life, really.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I mean, if you apply for many jobs, for example, that you're not very likely to get, fair enough, most of the time you won't get them, but you haven't expended much beyond the cost of applying for those jobs. When you get one that is transformative for your life, on the other hand, it transforms your life.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
And so then when you look back at this, of course, you say, well, things did mostly work out. You know, things have worked out pretty well. And that's kind of optimism working on an incremental step-by-step basis. One of the psychological ways of looking at optimism is explanatory style, which is say, do you look back at your life and think things worked out well?
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
Or do you look back at your life and think they didn't work out so well? Most people tend to go for the optimistics end of things.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
A bit of both. So like most psychological traits, or most traits in general, it's a mixture of your inheritance, your genetic inheritance, and your environment. In the case of optimism, it seems to be a bit more about experience than it is about genetics. Your genetics sort of account for a decent chunk of your level of optimism as an adult, but not the majority of it.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
Your experiences in your environment seem to play quite a significant role in molding your optimism. And the pattern tends to be that young children are hyper-optimistic. They're extremely optimistic. And you can kind of understand why that would be because You think about the challenges a little kid, I mean, a really small child faces. You know, they can't speak. They have no motor control.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
They can't feed themselves. They're essentially helpless. But from there, they have to get to a position where they can do all those things, where they can stand, they can walk, they can eat, they can talk, they can eventually write and tie their shoelaces and all those kinds of things.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
And if you did not expect that you were going to succeed, you know, I mean, if you didn't think you would succeed at managing those tasks, even though when you start out, you have absolutely no ability to do them and no way to communicate with anyone about them. you know, you would get nowhere, right?
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
People who are strongly optimistic tend to live longer, they tend to be healthier, they tend to be more successful. People who score high on pessimism, that associates quite strongly with depression, and depression is characterized, among other things, by an inability to see that there is any other way forward.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I mean, as an infant, you have to be a hyperoptimist because you have to kind of believe that you can achieve these things. So children are hyperoptimistic, and that kind of tends to gradually wane over the course of our, as we get older, for various reasons. I mean, there are sort of a number of reasons why that might happen. One of them is just the accumulation of negative experience.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
Over time, it seems like we've become better understanding what negative experiences are telling us about the world. When we're very young, we tend to ignore them. We kind of pay a lot of attention to the positives, but we brush off the negatives.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
And again, if you know any kids, you know that kids forget a bad thing pretty quickly, but they remember when they're successful and they remember how to build on that. Over time, we start to become better at absorbing negative information because as we become more independent, we're going to encounter more situations where we need to be good at handling them. That's one.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
We build better models of the world. We understand how the world works better. And we kind of get different feedback from the adults around us. We don't get told, like, you know, you can do anything. Just put your mind to it. You start getting, you know, hopefully constructive criticism about what you're doing.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
So eventually kind of, you know, those experiences gradually mount up and they essentially set your adult level of optimism. From there on, it fluctuates a bit with life experience. And, you know, depending on how well or badly things go for you, it does go up and down a bit. Trying to move the needle on optimism is not that easy. It's not a short-term thing.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I think that, and this is kind of moving away from the research really into what I concluded, I think that if you do various practices, you can probably improve the way that you look at the world, particularly if you're talking about more intellectual kind of problems rather than emotional, intuitive things.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I think you can, but I think it probably takes a lot of repetition over a lot of time, and the chances are if you haven't been doing it for a lot of your life already, you may not make that much difference.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
I think it's even more polarized than that, actually. So what I eventually concluded was that the essence of optimism is openness to possibility. Because essentially, I kind of said that optimism comes into its own when you don't know what the future holds. I think the critical thing that an optimist does, and there are kind of various studies that back this up in different ways.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
The critical thing that an optimist does, a strongly optimistic person does, is they remain open to the possibilities, to the idea that there are many possibilities that lie ahead of them. And optimists kind of tend to think about the positive ones. But I think just the very awareness that there are lots of possibilities makes you more inclined to go out and look for them and to seek them.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
A pessimist, by contrast, I think it's not so much that you look at many things and look at them negatively as so much as you just don't see alternatives. I think, really speaking, in a practical sense, the opposite of optimism is fatalism. It's this idea that actually there is nothing you can do. You can only carry on down the track that you've been that you're on at the moment.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
And that kind of is reflected in, so in psychology, for example, people who score highly on optimism tend to do well. It's an association rather than a causative thing. But people who are strongly optimistic tend to live longer, they tend to be healthier, they tend to be more successful. People are complicated, so there's no hard and fast rules here, but that tends to be the case.
Something You Should Know
How and Why Optimism Works & Why a Little Defiance is a Good Thing
People who score very low on optimism, people who score high on pessimism, that associates quite strongly with mental illness, in particular with depression. And depression is characterized, among other things, by an inability to see that there is any other way forward or to believe that you can do anything that would change your status or your situation. So I think that's the one thing, really.