Positivity Gets a Bum Rap

Dancing Elephants Book Project — Positivity, Group 1

Positive people tend to get belittled and demeaned by our culture. They are called “Pollyanna” or “Little Mary Sunshine”, as if the only proper place for a sunny outlook is in the pages of a book. Real people, in the real world, should have a pessimistic or negative attitude, and call it “being realistic”.

That’s defeatist, not realistic!

The truth is that a positive attitude, coupled with positive actions, creates a happier, healthier environment. And it’s not just my opinion. There’s an entire branch of psychology, called Positive Psychology, dedicated to helping ordinary people experience more joy, love, and inspiration.

Positivity leads to productivity and success

Back in the 1960s and 70s, psychologist Martin Seligman made an interesting discovery. Animals (and people) could develop something called “learned helplessness”, which was a view of the world that implied lack of agency. There was nothing they could do to change things, so they just had to make the best of it and find a way to endure.

In humans, this leads to apathy, resignation, and depression. If your actions can’t make a difference, why should you even try?

That sounds a lot like “being realistic”, doesn’t it? The point is, it’s not realistic. If you’ve learned helplessness, when the opportunity to do something comes along, you won’t take it. You won’t even recognize it.

On the other hand, if you keep a positive outlook, you believe that your actions can make a difference. When opportunities come along, you not only recognize them, you act upon them. As a result, you improve your life.

According to Lyubomirsky, King, and Diener in their 2005 research paper, happiness precedes success. In other words, it’s not your achievements that make you happy. It’s your positive outlook that helps you achieve your goals.

Positivity versus magical thinking

You might be thinking, “But I know plenty of positive people who are not successful. When things go wrong, they fall apart.”

That’s because there are different types of positivity. Radcliffe and Klein, in their 2002 paper, report that people can exhibit dispositional, comparative, or unrealistic optimism.

Dispositional optimism is the kind of positivity we’ve been discussing — the belief that what you do makes a difference. People with an optimistic disposition have a sense of agency in most areas of their lives. They are well-informed and take appropriate actions for the outcomes they desire.

Comparative optimism is simply when someone thinks they have a better than average chance of avoiding a negative event or benefitting from a positive event. They are well-informed and take appropriate actions for the outcomes they desire, so they’re right to believe they have a better than random chance.

The third type of optimism is the exact opposite of the other two. People with unrealistic optimism think that things will turn out well for them, regardless of their actions. They know less about the situation and get defensive when their prediction of success is questioned.

Unrealistic optimism leads to magical thinking. Magical thinkers insist you just have to put “good energy” out into the universe, and your life will be nothing but rainbows and unicorns. There’s no effort or action on their part other than having good thoughts. That means, they tend to either ignore potential problems, or double down on thinking only extra-good thoughts. But they don’t take any actions to actually change things. It’s a different flavor of helplessness, where any change is up to a higher power.

You can learn to be more positive

Here’s the great news, for anyone who isn’t already a fountain of positivity. Just like you can learn helplessness, you can learn optimism.

There are some simple tips to increase your optimism, such as keeping a gratitude journal, helping others, and challenging your negative self-talk or beliefs.

But to really have dispositional positivity, you need to address the following three areas of your mental outlook.

Attribution

People generally either have internal or external attribution. In other words, they think it was something intrinsic to themself or their behavior that caused an outcome, or they think it was a result of outside forces.

Positivity comes from having an external attribution for negative results, and an internal attribution for positive results. Although if you think every negative situation has completely external causes, that’s not optimism, it’s refusal to take responsibility.

Always/Never

If something goes wrong, is it proof that bad things “always” happen to you? That things “never” go right for you? Do you extrapolate from one isolated incident to create an all-encompassing negative judgment?

Positive people rarely make such absolute statements. They understand that every situation is different, and that you can change your behaviors to change your outcomes.

Permanence

Psychologist Carol Dweck, in her groundbreaking book Mindset, introduced the concept of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. People with growth mindsets believe that they can get better if they try harder, while people with fixed mindsets believe that they cannot change their level of ability.

Positivity comes from having a growth mindset. No matter what the situation, there is something you can do differently to change the outcome.

Final Thoughts

According to Dr. Seligman, in his book Learned Optimism, it is possible for everyone to have a life that is pleasant, engaged, and meaningful. Those are the three key traits he has identified that create a “good life”.

You can develop the skills required to be happier and more content. Whatever your current level of positive emotion, you can amplify it to be even more positive. Why settle for merely happy when you can be blissful or even ecstatic?

You can learn to make the most of your unique strengths. Instead of struggling to be average at everything, find the areas in which you can be a superstar. Use this to become a superstar at work, excel at interpersonal relationships, and get the most out of your leisure time.

You can discover a life purpose that is bigger than yourself. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl analyzed the experiences of many people in a concentration camp. He discovered that those who had a reason to live that was bigger than themselves fared better than those who didn’t. If meaning can help people survive a concentration camp, it can help you with whatever you’re facing.

One way to improve your positivity is to use cognitive behavioral techniques. Another is to imagine your best possible future self, if everything worked out as well as it possibly could. The mastermind group I’m a part of uses the future-self technique, and I can attest that it is extremely powerful. I never would have enrolled in a PhD program or moved to the Caribbean without it.

I was already a pretty positive person, but I found there were still ways to increase my positivity and have a better life. Wherever you are on the positive/negative scale, you, too, have the power to increase your positivity.

Thank you to the DEP Book Project editors, Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, Sharing Randomly, and Lady Dr. Gabriella Korosi.

If you’d like to learn more about how to use cognitive behavioral techniques to adjust your mental outlook, I wrote an article about that:

References:

“What is Positive Psychology?”, PositivePsychology.com, https://positivepsychology.com/what-is-positive-psychology-definition/

“Learned Helplessness”, Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/learned-helplessness

Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success? Psychological Bulletin, 131(6), 803–855. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.131.6.803

Radcliffe, N. M., and Klein, W. M. P. (2002). Dispositional, Unrealistic, and Comparative Optimism: Differential Relations with the Knowledge and Processing of Risk Information and Beliefs about Personal Risk. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 836–846. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202289012

“Using Learned Optimism in Your Life”, Very Well Mind, https://www.verywellmind.com/learned-optimism-4174101

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Vintage.

Frankl, Viktor E. (1959). Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Beacon Press.