[MUSIC] So let me start to take these one by one. P, positive emotion. Happiness, cheerful, merry, smiling. The first part of positive psychology is subjective well-being. Some things you should know about smiling is first, it's highly heritable, more than 50% heritable, and what that means is that if you take the whole world’s population right now, 50% of the world population is not smiling, merry and feeling good. In fact, what the data show us if what you’re trying to change is people's subjective feelings- how merry they are, how much they smile- that you have between a 5 and 15% leeway for changing the subjective well-being. Flow is when time stops for you, when you feel completely at home. Now interestingly, and looking around at you here, seems that almost all of you are one with the lecture, one with the music, in flow. Interestingly, when you're in flow, if you ask people what's going on, strangely, they say nothing. There's no emotion associated with it, and no cognition. You're one with the music. This is a very important state, and it's a state like serenity and contentment- complete involvement, and I think it's one of the highest forms of well-being. Mike tells a story about his brother. His brother was someone who looked at fossils and minerals, and he went to Budapest to visit his brother. His brother said “Mike, the strangest thing happened to me yesterday. I had gotten this new crystal, and when I woke up, I decided I really wanted to look at it closely under the microscope. So I put it under my microscope around dawn, after I woke up, and I started to look at it. After a little while, I noticed I couldn't see it very well, and I thought a cloud had just passed across the window. When I looked up, I noticed the sun had set.” The ability to be entirely immersed in what you're doing- with the people you love, in work, with the problem, with the conversation- is E, engagement. We discussed a bit about positive emotion and a bit about engagement. The third thing that people coolly choose is relationships, good relationships. There's a controversy in evolutionary theory about how basic relationships are. From the selfish gene point of view, we only engage in relationships in order to make our own genes go forward, the selfish gene. This is the Dawkins view. There is another view of relationships in evolution theory, and that is that we're not only selected for individual mastery, achievement, survival, but that we're also selected for groups, group selection. Here's the way to think about group selection primitively. Imagine you've got two groups of primates who are at war, or fighting over a resource like food for survival. The question is: Which group is going to win? There is reason to believe that a group in which every individual is entirely out for themselves will lose to a group in which individuals love each other, are compassionate, and will sacrifice their own lives for members of that group. That argument has said that we're selected by groups, and so when we think about emotions like compassion, love, understanding, these are evolved emotions that promote group relationships. So on group selection, human beings are very similar to the social insects. The vast majority, if you just weigh all of the insects on the planet, the vast majority of them are social. So, it turns out, the social turn has been enormously productive in insecta. Similarly, the dominance of human beings on the planet, is probably not because of individual forebrain stuff, but because we're like wasps and termites and ants, that is, we build fortresses together, we have means of communication together, we cooperate. So interestingly, I believe that our forming good relationships is a ground desire of human beings who are non-oppressed and not suffering. The third part of what positive psychology studies is what are good relationships and how to build good relationships. PERMA, the five roots to human well-being, we talked about P, positive emotion, E, engagement, and R, relationships. M is meaning and purpose. What is meaning and purpose? Well there's surprising agreement among philosophers about the bare bones of it. Meaning is to belong to and to serve something you think is bigger than you are, so serving the self is a very poor sight for meaning. But the larger the entity you can credibly believe in belong to, and serve, the more meaning people derive from their lives. Meaning seems to be particularly important in corporate group settings and in work. In general, the literature on worker productivity and meaning is: the more meaning, everything else being equal, that you can derive from your work, the more satisfied you are with your work, and the more productive you are. An interesting example took place at the University of Pennsylvania recently. I think Adam Grant conducted the study. The development office at this university raises money, so there are a lot of people who, all day long, write, and make cold calls to alumni, foundation, and the like. This is very difficult work, you get turned down most of the time. So, Adam reasoned that to the extent people in the development office could see what the money they brought in accomplished, people would do better work. So, Adam arranged for the development office people to meet the scholarship students that they had funded and to find out about them, and productivity went up. In general, there's reason to believe the more meaning and purpose one has at work, The better one’s work is. The fifth root to well-being, PERMA, is accomplishment, achievement, and mastery. Now there had been, before psychology became positive 20 years ago, a lot of study of achievement and mastery, and the importance in human life. This goes way back into the mammalian past. There's a species of mouse called the white-footed dear mouse. If you capture the white-footed dear mouse, and you put him in a little chamber, and you adjust the lights at which he lives, you might adjust so he lives at 40 lumens. He has a bar to step up the lights. He'll step them up to 80 lumens, okay? If you have him live at 80 lumens, and you have a bar he can press, he'll step it down to 40 lumens. Which is to say, he doesn't care about the illumination, what he wants is control and mastery, and control and mastery are very strongly built into our species. Now the leading person in the world now is at the University of Pennsylvania, Angela Duckworth, and you'll hear a lot more from her in the course of this program, but basically, Angela has worked on the question of self-discipline and grit. Angela's basic research has been to ask the question: for success in life, Academic success, real estate selling and the like, what's the relationship between talent and self-discipline? And here is the sort of thing that Angela had done. She took ninth graders at the Masterman School down the road here and measured self-discipline and grit, and measured IQ essentially as well as grades. She then asked the question: looking from 9th grade to 12th grade, and then into college admissions, what predicts good grades in school? Basically, she found that self-discipline and grit are twice as important as IQ and talent in the prediction of grades and how well you do academically. Angela has resolved a problem no one ever understood before, and that's girls versus boys in academic achievement: Girls do better than boys holding IQ constant in high school. The question is, why? It turns out the answer is almost entirely self-discipline and grit. Girls are grittier and more self-disciplined than boys, and that seems to account for why girls in high school come out with higher grades than boys. So the main development has been about grit. One more thing that Angela did was research on the National Spelling Bee. About a million kids a year enter the National Spelling Bee, and 168 of them make it into the finals in Washington. So two years running for the 168 kids, Angela measured IQ, and grit and self-discipline, and asked: Could you predict who's going to win before finals? Again, two years running, IQ had nothing to do with it, and the biggest predictor coming down with the final four were the kids with the most grit and self-discipline. The message here is if you are hiring people or you want associates to be productive, almost everyone you know is smart enough to do the job. What you want to find, is the people who can stay with it- the gritty, resilient people.
