Martin E. P. Seligman - Specialized Research AI at MIT

Martin E. P. Seligman

Can happiness be taught?

Since World War II, the ½eld of psy-

chology has largely focused on suffering.
Psychologists now measure such former-
ly fuzzy concepts as depression, schizo-
phrenia, and anger with respectable
precision. We have discovered a fair
amount about how these disorders de-
velop across life, about their genetics,
their neurochemistry, and their psycho-
logical underpinnings. Best of all, we can
relieve some of the disorders. By my last
count fourteen of the several dozen ma-
jor mental illnesses could be effectively
treated–and two of them cured–with
medications or speci½c psychothera-
pies.1

Unfortunately, for many years interest
in relieving the states that make life mis-
erable has overshadowed efforts to en-
hance the states that make life worth liv-
ing. This disciplinary bias has not pre-
empted the public’s concern with what
is best in life, however. Most people
want more positive emotion in their

Martin E. P. Seligman is Fox Leadership Profes-
sor of Psychology and director of the Center for
Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsyl-
vania. Former president of the American Psycho-
logical Association, he is the author of “Helpless-
ness” (1975), “Learned Optimism” (1990), and
“Authentic Happiness” (2002).

Dædalus Spring 2004

lives. Most people want to build their
strengths, not just to minimize their
weaknesses. Most people want lives im-
bued with meaning.

What I have called Positive Psychology
concerns the scienti½c study of the three
different happy lives that correspond to
these three desires: the Pleasant Life, the
Good Life, and the Meaningful Life. The
Pleasant Life is about positive emotions.
The Good Life is about positive traits–
foremost among them the strengths and
the virtues, but also the talents, such as
intelligence and athleticism. The Mean-
ingful Life is about positive institutions,
such as democracy, strong families, and
free inquiry. Positive institutions sup-
port the virtues, which in turn support
the positive emotions.2 In its scope,
then, Positive Psychology diverges
markedly from the traditional subject
matter of psychology: mental disorders,
developmental stunting, troubled lives,
violence, criminality, prejudice, trauma,
anger, depression, and therapy.

But can a science of Positive Psycholo-

gy lead us to happiness? Five years ago,
in an effort to answer that question, I

1 Martin E. P. Seligman, What You Can Change
& What You Can’t (New York: Knopf, 1993).

2 Martin E. P. Seligman, Authentic Happiness
(New York: Free Press, 2002).

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started to teach an annual seminar to
undergraduates at the University of
Pennsylvania.

This seminar is similar to the other
courses I have taught for the last forty
years: we read and discuss the primary
scienti½c literature in the ½eld. It differs,
however, in an important way: there is a
real-world homework exercise to do and
write up every week. When one teaches
a traditional seminar on helplessness or
on depression, there is no experiential
homework to assign; students can’t very
well be told to be depressed or to be al-
coholic for the week. But in Positive
Psychology, students can be assigned
to make a Gratitude Visit, or to trans-
form a boring task by using a signature
strength, or to give the gift of time to
someone they care for. The workload is
heavy: two essays per week, one on the
extensive readings and the other on the
homework exercises.

The course begins with personal in-
troductions that are not perfunctory. I
introduce myself by narrating an inci-
dent in which my then ½ve-year-old
daughter, Nikki, told me that she had
given up whining and if she could do
that (“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever
done, Daddy”), I could “stop being such
a grouch.” I then ask all of the students
to tell stories about themselves at their
best, stories that display their highest
virtues. The listening skills taught in
traditional clinical psychology center
around detecting hidden, underlying
troubles, but here I encourage the oppo-
site: listening for underlying positive
motivations, strengths, and virtues. The
introductions are moving and rapport
building, and they easily ½ll the entire
three hours.

The course then spends four meetings

on what is scienti½cally documented
about positive emotion: about the past
(contentment, satisfaction, serenity),

about the future (optimism, hope, trust,
faith), and about the present (joy, ebul-
lience, comfort, ecstasy, mirth, plea-
sure). We read and discuss the literature
on depressive realism (happy people
may be less accurate than miserable peo-
ple 3), on set ranges for weight and for
positive emotion (lottery winners and
paraplegics revert to their average preex-
isting level of happiness or misery with-
in a year, because the capacity for plea-
sure, ‘positive affectivity,’ is about 50
percent heritable and therefore quite
resistant to change4), on wealth and life
satisfaction (the one hundred ½fty rich-
est Americans are no happier than the
average American5), on education, cli-
mate, and life satisfaction (there is no
impact6), on optimism and presidential
elections (80 percent of the elections
have been won by the more optimistic
candidate–partialing out standing in
the polls, vigor of the campaign, and
funding7), on longevity and positive
emotion (novitiates who at age twenty
included positive-emotion words in
their brief biographies live about a
decade longer than more deadpan

3 Lauren B. Alloy and Lyn Y. Abramson, “Judg-
ment of Contingency in Depressed and Nonde-
pressed Students: Sadder but Wiser,” Journal
of Experimental Psychology: General 108 (1979):
441–485.

4 Phil Brickman, D. Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-
Bulman, “Lottery Winners and Accident Vic-
tims: Is Happiness Relative?” Journal of Person-
ality and Social Psychology 36 (1978): 917–927.

5 Ed Diener, Jeff Horwitz, and Robert Em-
mons, “Happiness of the Very Wealthy,” Social
Indicators 16 (1985): 263–274.

6 Chapter 4 of my book Authentic Happiness
reviews these data.

7 Harold Zullow and Martin E. P. Seligman,
“Pessimistic Rumination Predicts Defeat of
Presidential Candidates: 1900–1984,” Psycho-
logical Inquiry 1 (1990): 52–61.

Can
happiness
be taught?

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Dædalus Spring 2004

Martin E. P.
Seligman
on
happiness

nuns8), and on the brain and positive
emotion (positive emotion correlates
well with activity in left-frontal regions
of the cortex 9).
The scienti½c literature bears on inter-

ventions. In parallel to the techniques
that therapists have developed for reduc-
ing misery, there exist empirically vali-
dated techniques that we have developed
for enhancing the positive emotions. In
our discussion of the positive emotions
about the future, we focus on optimism
and how it lowers vulnerability to de-
pression and how it enhances productiv-
ity, physical health, and immune activity.
We practice the skill of disputing unreal-
istic catastrophic thoughts, the main
tool for increasing optimism.10 One stu-
dent wrote a long letter to her future self
from her graduating-senior self, outlin-
ing her advice about optimism and stick-
ing to her values.

Gratitude, meanwhile, is a skill, too lit-

tle practiced, that ampli½es satisfaction
about the past. Gratitude Night is a high-
light of the course.

An evening is set aside, and class

members invite guests–mothers, close
friends, roommates, fathers, teachers,
and even younger sisters–who have
contributed importantly to their well-
being, but whom they have never prop-
erly thanked. The exact purpose of the

8 Deborah D. Danner, David A. Snowdon, and
Wallace V. Friesen, “Positive Emotions in Early
Life and Longevity: Findings from the Nun
Study,” Journal of Personality and Social Psycholo-
gy 80 (5) (2001): 804–813.

9 Richard Davidson, “Biological Basis of Per-
sonality,” in Valerian J. Derlega, Warren H.
Jones, and Barbara A. Winstead, eds., Personali-
ty: Contemporary Theory and Research (Chicago:
Nelson-Hall, 1999).

10 Martin E. P. Seligman, Learned Optimism
(New York: Knopf, 1990).

gathering is a surprise to the guests, who
are honored with testimonials of grati-
tude from their hosts. For instance, Patty
to her mom:

How do we value a person? Can we mea-
sure her worth like a piece of gold, with
the purest 24-karat nugget shining more
brightly than the rest? If a person’s inner-
worth were this apparent to everyone, I
would not need to make this speech. As it
is not, I would like to describe the purest
soul I know: my mom . . . You are, however,
the most genuine and pure-of-heart per-
son I have ever met . . . .

When complete strangers will call you to

talk about the loss of their dearest pet, I
am truly taken aback. Each time you speak
with a bereaved person, you begin crying
yourself, just as if your own pet had died.
You provide comfort in a time of great loss
for these people. As a child, this confused
me, but I realize now that it is simply your
genuine heart, reaching out in a time of
need . . . .

There is nothing but joy in my heart as I

talk about the most wonderful person I
know. I can only dream of becoming the
pure piece of gold I believe stands before
me. It is with the utmost humility that you
travel through life, never once asking for
thanks, simply hoping along the way peo-
ple have enjoyed their time with you.

There was not a dry eye in the room as
Patty read her testimonial and then her
mom choked out, “You will always be
my Peppermint Patty.” In their evalua-
tions of the course at the end of the se-
mester, “Friday, October 27 was one of
the greatest nights of my life” was not
untypical. Crying in any class is extraor-
dinary, and when everyone is crying,
something has happened that touches
the great rhizome underneath us all.

We then turn to the knotty subject of
happiness in the present. The pleasures
have clear sensory and feeling compo-

Dædalus Spring 2004

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Can
happiness
be taught?

nents; they are evanescent and they in-
volve little if any thinking. To enhance
the pleasures, we practice in homework
the skills of savoring (sharing experi-
ences with others, taking mental photo-
graphs, collecting physical mementos)
and of mindfulness (looking at experi-
ences afresh from new angles, slowing
down, and taking another’s perspec-
tive).11 One of the homework assign-
ments is to design and carry out a Plea-
surable Day. Experiencing many of these
pleasures and having the skills of savor-
ing that amplify them constitute what
I call the Pleasant Life.

In ordinary English we fail to distin-
guish the grati½cations from the plea-
sures. This is a costly confusion because
it muddles together two different classes
of the best things in life, and it deceives
us into thinking they can each be had in
the same way. We casually say that we
like caviar, that we like a back rub, and
that we like the sound of rain on a tin
roof–all pleasures–as well as say that
we like playing volleyball, that we like
reading Andrea Barrett, and that we like
helping the homeless–all grati½cations.
Like is the operative confusion. Like’s

primary meaning in all these cases is
that we choose to do these things; we
prefer them to many other possibilities.
Because we use the same verb to charac-
terize what pleases and what grati½es us,
we are inclined to expect, erroneously,
that the liking comes from the same
source. And so we slip into saying, “Cav-
iar gives me pleasure” and “Andrea Bar-
rett gives me pleasure”–as if the same
positive feeling exists underneath both
sentiments and that commensurability
is the basis of our choosing one or the
other.

When I press people about the positive

emotion underlying their experience of

11 Fred Bryant and Joseph Veroff, Savoring
(Hillside, N.J.: in press).

pleasure, they tend to describe a felt,
conscious, positive feeling. Great food,
a back rub, perfume, a hot shower–all
produce what Gilbert Ryle in The Concept
of Mind calls “raw feels”: salient, felt,
articulable emotion. In contrast, when
I press people about the positive emo-
tion they feel when serving coffee to
the homeless, reading Nozick, playing
bridge, or rock climbing, they tend to
describe a feeling that is elusive–one
they cannot succinctly characterize as a
discrete emotion. Total immersion usu-
ally blocks consciousness, so thinking
and feeling are completely absent ex-
cept in retrospect (“Wow. That was
fun!”). Indeed, it is the total absorption,
the suspension of self-consciousness,
the blocking of thought and feeling, and
the flow that the grati½cations pro-
duce–not the presence of any felt sensa-
tion–that de½ne liking these activities.
In short, pleasure is de½ned by the pres-
ence of raw feels, grati½cation by their
absence.

I suggest that the difference between
the Good Life and the Pleasant Life re-
sides in this distinction. The great bene-
½t of distinguishing pleasure from grati-
½cation is that even the bottom half of
the Gaussian distribution of the capacity
for positive affect (three billion non-
ebullient people) is not consigned by
psychology to the purgatory of unhap-
piness. Not remotely. Rather, these peo-
ple’s happiness lies in pursuing the Good
Life–in the abundant grati½cations that
can totally absorb them.

While we moderns have lost the dis-
tinction between the pleasures and the
grati½cations, the ancient Greeks and
the Romans of Hellenistic bent were
keen on it. For Aristotle, happiness (eu-
daimonia), distinct from the bodily plea-
sures, is akin to grace in dancing. Grace
is not a separable entity that accompa-
nies the dance or that comes at the end

Dædalus Spring 2004

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Martin E. P.
Seligman
on
happiness

of the dance; it is part and parcel of a
dance well done. To talk about the hap-
piness of contemplation, then, is only to
say that contemplation absorbs us and is
done for its own sake; it is not intended
to refer to any emotion that accompa-
nies contemplation. Eudaimonia, what I
call grati½cation, is part and parcel of
right action.12 For Seneca, pleasure and
virtue are wholly separate; the happy life
is lived in harmony with its nature, and
while it may or may not contain plea-
sure, it must contain virtue.13 Unlike
pleasure, which can be had by drugs,
shopping, masturbation, and television,
grati½cation cannot be had by shortcuts.
Grati½cation can only be had by the
exercise of strength and virtue.

“Flow”14 is the way that Positive Psy-
chology measures grati½cation empiri-
cally. It is the state we enter when our
highest strengths meet our highest chal-
lenges. The loss of consciousness char-
acterizes such complete immersion:
time stops for us, we concentrate, we
feel completely at home. The Good Life,
in contrast to the Pleasant Life, is about
identifying one’s strengths and virtues
and using them as frequently as possible
to obtain grati½cation.

One of my teachers, Julian Jaynes, was

given an exotic Amazonian lizard as a

12 Aristotle, book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Especially useful is J. O. Urmson, Aristotle’s
Ethics (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988): “But
for Aristotle the enjoyment of an activity is
not the result of it but something barely dis-
tinguishable from the activity itself; for him,
doing a thing for the sheer pleasure of doing it
is doing it for its own sake.” Ibid., 105. For the
distinction between the grati½cations and the
pleasures, see Richard Ryan and Ed Deci, “On
Happiness and Human Potential,” Annual Re-
view of Psychology 51 (2001): 141–166.

13 Seneca, Moral Essays De Vita Beata, x–xi.

14 Mihalyi Csikszentmihaly, Flow (New York:
Harper and Row, 1990).

pet for his laboratory. In the ½rst few
weeks after getting the lizard, Julian
could not get it to eat. Julian tried every-
thing. It was starving right before his
eyes. He offered it lettuce and then man-
go and then ground pork from the super-
market. He swatted flies and offered
them to the lizard. He tried live insects
and Chinese takeout. He blended fruit
juices. The lizard refused everything and
was slipping into torpor.

One day Julian brought in a ham sand-
wich and proffered it. The lizard showed
no interest. Going about his daily rou-
tine, Julian picked up The New York Times
and began to read. When he ½nished the
½rst section, he tossed it down and it
landed inadvertently on top of the ham
sandwich. The lizard took one look at
this con½guration, crept across the floor,
leapt onto the newspaper, shredded it,
and then gobbled up the sandwich. The
lizard needed to stalk and shred before it
would eat. So essential was the exercise
of this strength to the life of this kind
of lizard that its appetite could not be
awakened until it had engaged it.

Human beings are much more com-
plex than Amazonian lizards, but all our
complexity sits on top of a lizardly brain
that has been shaped for hundreds of
millions of years by natural selection.
Our pleasures, and the appetites they
serve, are tied by evolution to a reper-
toire of action. This repertoire is vastly
more elaborate and flexible than stalk-
ing, pouncing, and shredding, but it can
be ignored only at considerable cost.
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts
to grati½cation and bypass the exercise
of the strengths and the virtues is folly.
It leads to legions of humanity who are
depressed in the middle of great wealth,
who are starving to death spiritually.

This leads to my formulation of the

Good Life: identifying one’s signature

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Can
happiness
be taught?

strengths and virtues and using them in
work, love, play, and parenting to pro-
duce abundant and authentic grati½ca-
tion.

To identify their signature strengths,

the students take the via (Values-In-
Action Institute of the Mayerson Foun-
dation) questionnaire of strengths and
virtues.15 This instrument picks out the
½ve highest self-rated strengths for each
student from a classi½cation (Psycholo-
gy’s undsm-1)16 of twenty-four that in-
cludes love of learning, valor, perspec-
tive, kindness, optimism, capacity to
love and be loved, humor, perseverance,
spirituality, fairness, and the like.

The ½rst time I taught my undergradu-
ate seminar on the Good Life, I asked the
students after they had identi½ed their
½ve highest strengths if they got to de-
ploy at least one of these strengths every
day at college. They all said no.

My class’s homework assignments
followed from this dismal statistic. We
each chose an unavoidable task that we
found tedious and invented a way to per-
form the task using one of our signature
strengths. One student transformed data
entry into flow. Using his strengths of
curiosity and love of learning, he began
to look for patterns in the mound of
demographic data he had been entering
for months as a research assistant. He
15 The via questionnaire is available at . This website contains
all of the leading tests of positive emotion. As
of this writing, two hundred thousand people
have taken the via on this website. We have
found the web collection of psychometric data
vastly cheaper and faster than paper question-
naires, and the samples are more representative
of our target populations than are college soph-
omores.

16 Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Selig-
man, Classi½cation of Strengths and Virtues (New
York: Oxford University Press; Washington,
D.C.: American Psychological Association
Press, 2004).

discovered a pattern: the higher the fam-
ily income, the more likely the parents
remain married. Another student trans-
formed his lonely midnight walk from
the library to his apartment using his
strength of playfulness by rollerblading
home and trying to set a new Olympic
record on each run. Another student
used her strength of social intelligence
to turn waitressing into grati½cation
by setting the goal of making each cus-
tomer’s interaction with her the social
highlight of his or her evening.

An assignment that contrasts fun with
altruism makes the distinction between
pleasure and grati½cation clearer to my
students. We each select an activity that
gives us pleasure, and we contrast this
with doing something philanthropic that
calls upon one of our strengths. There is
quite a uniform emotional experience
that ensues. The pleasurable activities–
hanging out with friends, getting a scalp
massage, going to the movies–have a
square wave offset. When they are over,
they leave almost no trace. The grati-
½cation of the altruistic activities, by
contrast, lingers. One junior who spon-
taneously tutored her third-grade neph-
ew in arithmetic on the phone for two
hours wrote, “After that, the whole day
went better, I could really listen and peo-
ple liked me more. I was mellow all day.”
One Wharton student said, “I came to
Wharton to make money because I
thought money would bring me happi-
ness. I was stunned to ½nd out that I am
happier helping another person than I
am shopping.”

This assignment is the transition to the

½nal part of the course–the study of the
third happy life, the Meaningful Life.
From the perspective of Positive Psy-
chology, meaning consists in attachment
to something larger. So on this account,
the Meaningful Life is similar to the

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Martin E. P.
Seligman
on
happiness

Good Life, but with one further ingredi-
ent: identifying and using your highest
strengths in order to belong to and serve
something larger than you are. We call
these larger things Positive Institutions.
In this part of the course we read some
of the primary literature on Positive In-
stitutions (e.g., Robert Putnam’s Bowling
Alone and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search
for Meaning ) and we do a set of exercises
designed to connect the students to
things larger than their own successes
and failures. In one exercise, they create
a family tree of strengths and virtues by
having their parents, grandparents, and
siblings take the via test, and by inter-
viewing their parents about dead rela-
tives. In another, they mentor a younger
student who is facing the speci½c issues
they faced and solved in high school or
college. In another, they write their
vision of a positive human future and
what their role in bringing it about
might be. In another, they write their
own obituary from the point of view of
their grandchildren, emphasizing their
own legacy.

We read George Vaillant’s Aging Well,
which seems to demonstrate that Ameri-
can higher education is not teaching its
students the Good Life. In a sixty-year
longitudinal study of the lives of 268 top
members of the Harvard classes of 1939
–1942 and 456 Core City men of Boston
from the same era, Vaillant came up
with a robust and disturbing ½nding:
higher education made little or no dif-
ference for “success in life.” (I hasten
to add that Vaillant, like I, means not
champagne and Porsches, but a life well
led, a eudaimonic life.) Looking at a pan-
oply of indicators such as life satisfac-
tion, marital happiness, physical vitality,
freedom from depression, longevity, lack
of alcoholism, job promotions, maturity,
and enjoyment, Vaillant found that the
Core City men did as well as the Harvard

graduates, save for two variables: higher
Harvard incomes and more Harvard en-
tries in Who’s Who. My students were
not at all puzzled by this, although they
were discom½ted that their parents were
paying six ½gures for such an education.
“We are taught the wrong stuff at col-
lege,” they said. “If college taught the
material we’ve learned in this course,
higher education would lead to success
in life.”

To end the course–having read the lit-

erature on memory and hedonics that
shows that what people most remember
about any endeavor is how it ends17–we
parallel our serious introductions with
serious farewells. Each of us picks our
favorite ending–of a movie, poem, or
piece of music–explains it and then
presents it in a ½nal all-day session.

All in all, teaching this subject has

been the most gratifying teaching I have
done in my forty years as an instructor. I
have seen young lives change before my
eyes, and more importantly, I have never
before seen such engagement and such
mature intellectual performances by un-
dergraduates. So encouraged, I am now
teaching this material both at the intro-
ductory level in college and at the pro-
fessional level once a week on the tele-
phone to a massive audience of clinical
psychologists, social workers, executive
coaches, and life coaches.18

Teaching about the Good Life is by no
means the unique province of a psychol-
ogy course. Indeed, if the pursuit of eu-
daimonia can be taught to psychology
students steeped in a century of victim-

17 Daniel Kahneman, Barbara L. Fredrickson,
Charles A. Schreiber, and Donald A. Redel-
meier, “When More Pain is Preferred to Less:
Adding a Better End,” Psychological Science 4 (6)
(November 1993): 401–405.

18 .

Dædalus Spring 2004

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ology and shallow hedonics, think how
easily this lesson might be taught to stu-
dents who have previously encountered
the better examples of well-led lives
found in the humanities. A stance, more-
over, that gives the best in life equal foot-
ing with the worst, that is as concerned
with flourishing as with surviving, that
is as interested in building as in repair-
ing, should ½nd a comfortable home in
most any discipline. In the end, I believe
that we learn more when lighting can-
dles than when cursing the darkness.

Can
happiness
be taught?

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Dædalus Spring 2004

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