In part one of our Q&A with Dr. Martin Seligman, author of Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress, he described agency as a psychological construct comprising efficacy, optimism, and imagination. A longtime friend and colleague of Dr. Aaron Beck, Seligman’s work asks us to examine how individuals’ beliefs about capability and possibility influence their behavior and psychological health. In part two, he discusses the relationship between agency and social and economic constraints and reflects on key takeaways from the book—and areas for future research.

Beck Institute: Do you think the emphasis on agency can inadvertently minimize the real effects of poverty, discrimination, or oppression? How does your message about agency acknowledge these constraints while still preserving hope and responsibility? 

Martin Seligman: It certainly can, and that is the reading I most want to head off, though the far greater danger in our moment runs in the opposite direction. First the acknowledgment, without hedging. Poverty limits choice. When survival is uncertain, agency is only potential, which is why the fall in extreme poverty from ninety percent of humanity in 1820 to under ten percent today is the central liberating fact of modern history. Oppression does something more specific. A slave might dream of many wonderful futures with nearly all of them foreclosed, and that is why slavery destroys freedom in the deepest sense: it shrinks the range of futures a person can plausibly entertain. Liberty is the condition under which agency becomes possible, and the remedy for oppression is freedom, not adjusted expectations.

Now the direction that concerns me more. The doctrine that human beings are products of forces beyond their control is the most agency-destroying idea in the history of the West, and it is once again the default assumption of the academy, of much of science, and of much that passes for compassion. It runs from Augustine replacing merit with grace, to the behaviorists and psychoanalysts of my own lifetime.

Dr. Martin Seligman

Every time it wins, people stop trying, and that is not a metaphor but the finding of my laboratory and of the effectiveness of CBT. The future is genuinely open, and individuals and civilizations that believe it act with boldness.

Which brings me to moral agency. Praise and blame presuppose the power of choice. If all things happen by fate, then nothing is in our own power, and neither reward nor punishment is just. When we relieve a person of responsibility in order to be kind, we remove them from the class of beings who can earn anything or be admired for anything. The academic version is the convention that everyone has full agency in all circumstances, and that the historian’s task is to give oppressed people their agency back. If everyone always had it, nobody ever won it, and two of my chapters are about winning it: how Black Americans expanded agency after centuries of oppression, and how women claimed an autonomy denied them.

External chains are real and they are alleviated by politics, law, and money. What psychology can offer is the removal of the internal chain, the belief that nothing I do will matter. Telling a young person that circumstances are destiny is the most demoralizing thing you can say, and it is exactly the explanatory style that predicts depression. Telling them that there remains a domain that responds to what they do, and teaching them to find it, is true and inspiring.

BI: What questions about agency remain unanswered and most excite you for future research?

MS: Four, in the order that they keep me up.

Building imagination. We can build efficacy and optimism. Imagination has nothing comparable, and since it is where freedom lives, that gap sits under my most important claim.

Raising agency at scale. Nobody has raised the agency of a school system, a city, or a nation, and that is the work that would turn this into a tool.

The modern paradox. By almost every material measure this is the best time to be alive, yet depression and powerlessness are on the rise among the young. This pessimism is both false and self-fulfilling.

AI: AI operates on coherence rather than correspondence, which is why hallucinations are so plausible, and it lacks the sensors and effectors that let a scientist correct a belief against the world. What humans have and the machines do not is abduction, the leap to an explanation incoherent with everything believed. Darwin and Einstein did that. Machines cannot yet, but humans can.

BI: If readers remember just one idea from Agency, what do you hope it is?

MS: That the future is open and the belief that what you do matters is itself one of the causes of what happens, in your life and in history. Cultures that have had agency progressed in thought, technology, science, quality of life and freedom, and cultures that lost it stagnated. Agency is not fixed. It can be measured and it can be raised. And because the future is genuinely open, what we do with it is ours to answer for. The future is not something that is going to happen to us. It is up to us.

For clinicians and researchers, Dr. Seligman’s ideas raise important questions about how beliefs and actions on an individual level can contribute to shaping a better future for all. Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress is available from Simon and Schuster.

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