In his new book, Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress, Dr. Martin Seligman presents his latest work on agency as a psychological construct driving both individual action and human progress. Dr. Seligman, a longtime friend and colleague of Beck Institute co-founder Dr. Aaron Beck, draws together decades of research into a rich account of how people understand their own capacity to influence the future. In part one of this Q&A, Dr. Seligman explains how agency works, and how it relates to both his own earlier research, and that of Albert Bandura.
Beck Institute: In Agency, you say that agency is connected to resilience, optimism, and psychological health. Is agency something we discover or something we develop through practice? How might someone go about building a sense of agency?
Martin Seligman: It is developed, and the evidence for that is one of the most encouraging things I know in psychology.
Agency is the belief that I can achieve my goals, and it has three components. Efficacy is my estimate that I can reach a specific goal in the here and now. Optimism is my estimate that I can reach it in the future. Imagination is my representation of the range of goals available to me. Efficacy causes us to try hard, optimism causes us to persist, and imagination causes us to innovate. Each can be raised, and only the person can do that work.
I start with optimism, the one most teachable. What matters is explanatory style. Pessimists explain bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal. Optimists explain the same events as temporary, specific, and controllable. The workhorse technique is disputation, first discovered by Aaron Beck. I call it mental toughness: Catch the catastrophic thought, then argue against it with realistic evidence, the way you would argue against a rival who was slandering you. For efficacy the strongest source is mastery, and the mind registers completion rather than magnitude, so someone paralyzed by a chaotic apartment should wash one dish and let the successes cascade.
Notice what explaining a setback by a controllable cause asks of you, because it is the moral heart of this and it is usually missed. It asks you to take responsibility. The pessimistic style and the excusing style are the same move: both put the cause beyond the reach of your action, one by calling it your permanent defect, the other by calling it someone else’s fault. Taking responsibility is not self-blame. It is the claim that you were the author of the act, and it is the only version of the story with a next step in it.
BI: Do you see Agency as the culmination of your earlier work on learned helplessness and learned optimism, or does it represent a significant departure from your previous work?
MS: Both. It is the culmination in content and a departure in scale. Three of my lifelong projects map onto the three components. Learned helplessness is efficacy studied from its failure side. Learned optimism is optimism. Prospection is imagination. I worked on them in sequence over sixty years and only lately saw they were three faces of one thing. The question that has organized my life came out of the 1965 experiments: if helplessness can be learned, can hope be learned?
There is a deeper continuity. When I entered psychology, the field was split between behaviorism and psychoanalysis, two camps that held each other in contempt and agreed on exactly one thing: free will is an illusion. People were products, of conditioning, of unconscious drives, of forces beyond their control. Everything I have done since is a revolt against that. The mind is not a bystander, it is the driver.
The departure is the unit of analysis. Everything before was about individuals. Agency claims that the psychological state of ordinary people is a proximal cause of human progress, and that when it is absent civilizations stagnate or even regress.
BI: How is your work similar to or different from Albert Bandura’s work on self-efficacy?
MS: I am in his debt. Bandura was the father of the cognitive revolution in social psychology, and when he published on self-efficacy in 1977 the field still sneered at his thinking as too mushy for the laboratory. Like Aaron Beck, Bandura and I hold that what a person believes about their own capacity is a cause of what they do, not a commentary on it.
Three differences from Bandura matter. The first is scope. Efficacy in Bandura’s sense is anchored in the here and now: Can I do this task? In my scheme that is one of three components. Optimism extends the estimate into the future, which produces persistence when the present offers no encouragement. Imagination sets the size of the goal space you can envision, and it is therefore the seat of freedom. Pharaoh and the slave laying his bricks may both have efficacy and optimism. What separates them is the range of futures they can plausibly picture, and that is what we mean by liberty.
The second is approach. Bandura came at the problem from mastery, I came at it from failure, which put explanatory style at the center of my account. The third is level of analysis. His evidence is individual and experimental. Mine is historical, which obliged us to build AI measures of agency in language across three thousand years of writing.
In part two of this Q&A, Dr. Seligman addresses an important question about the relationship between agency and socioeconomic constraints and how they relate to personal responsibility. Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress is available from Simon and Schuster.
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