I'm Angie Duckworth, damn it.
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner. And you're listening to No Stupid Questions.
Today on the show, how do hope and optimism affect long shots?
We'll call it optimism.
Or what would the other thing be?
Oop. Angela! Steven!
I have a question for you today that's not quite a riddle, but it is a question without an obvious answer.
And furthermore, a question of which the correct answering thereof is not the point.
Is that clear so far?
Clear as mud, Steven.
Here's the question though.
What do the following activities have in common, Angela?
A. Throwing a deep pass in football.
B. Casting your fishing line into a lake.
And C. Sending, let's say, a particularly ambitious email to someone you don't know.
Low probability of success.
Okay, that's right.
It's not exactly what I was thinking.
I was thinking that these are a few things that we do that we just put out there in the hope and anticipation, no matter how unlikely they may seem, that something good will happen on the other end.
And during that suspended moment in between when the ball is in the air, when the line is in the water, when the email is in the ether, there is that intoxicating sense that this might work.
Probably won't, but the attempt can maybe be very valuable in itself, even if you fail.
So I guess finally my question for you is this.
Should we all be putting more things out there, even if the odds of success are long?
I love a question about hope.
You know, my literary agent, Richard Pine.
Do you like to needle him?
No, I think he likes to needle me, actually.
Anyway, we were talking about books, and he said that all books that actually catch on to any extent are really about the same thing and wait for it.
Chewing gum? You were close.
That one thing is hope.
But it's interesting because you can remember the moment metaphorically, right, when the ball leaves your hand.
You're just this anticipation.
In that moment where you don't know yet what's going to happen, I think what you're doing is you're mentally visualizing that it's going to work out just the way you want.
It's buying a lottery ticket.
It's the period between which you've bought it and which the numbers have not yet been picked.
Yeah, that kind of heady anticipation.
Turns out that human beings are really good about imagining possible futures.
One theory is that that's our key evolutionary advantage, not standing on two legs, not the prehensile thumb, just the ability to imagine possible futures.
But wow, we are good at it.
Really? Yeah, that's a favorite theory of more than one social scientist, but the one who leaps to mind because he was my advisor and who's actually one of the pioneers in the science of hope is Marty Seligman.
Drink up people who drink when Angie says Marty Seligman and or Danny Kahneman.
I've learned that there are drinking games built around no stupid questions.
People would be really drunk too if you picked either of those people.
What was the name of that man again, Angela?
Marty Seligman, I know.
Sorry, a truck was going by.
I didn't hear it. Say it again.
Marty Seligman. You people have had enough to drink now.
Listen to what Angela has to say.
Marty Seligman was known for saying what about hope?
So the very first thing that he started working on when he was, oh, I don't know.
I think he had graduated from college early.
So probably he was like 21 and in graduate school or something like that.
And that work ended up being the science of helplessness and pessimism.
And then the opposite, the science of optimism and hope.
But one of the things that he most recently has been working on is what he calls prospection, the imagining of possible futures.
And I do think when the ball's in the air, when the lottery ticket numbers haven't been yet called, when the email doesn't look like it's going to be ignored, you don't know.
We imagine a possible future where it turns out just the way we want.
So, Angela, if we use the word hope, is it equivalent to optimism?
Is hope more of an emotional version of optimism and optimism is the intellectual academic version or are they really different?
You know, Stephen, I wish I could give you a simple answer.
Different researchers use different terms, but they use them in their own way.
So I can't give you a hope is this, however, optimism is that.
I think most people use hope and optimism pretty interchangeably.
We'll call it optimism.
Or what would the other thing be, ope?
I got a lot of hope today.
But I do want to say, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of hope.
One kind of hope, it's called dispositional optimism.
And it's really this kind of like general sense that the next day, the next week, the next year is going to be good.
Two psychologists, Carver and Shire, made a scale for it.
So let me give this test to both you and me and we'll see how we do.
Can you handle this for your working memory?
Very much like me, mostly like me, somewhat like me, a little like me, not at all like me.
That's a standard scale.
So, Stephen, in uncertain times, I usually expect the best.
I would say mostly like me.
Uncertainty makes me anxious as it does for, I think, most humans.
And so I believe that uncertainty overrides my natural optimism quite a bit.
So I'd put myself right in the middle.
Yeah, I would say mostly like me.
So, you know, high, but not at the very top.
How about this one?
I'm always optimistic about my future.
I would say mostly agree.
Except, of course, when things are uncertain as determined by question one, which makes no sense at all because things are always uncertain.
But anyway, true. Again, I'm with you.
And by the way, I'm actually thinking about this independently.
I'm not being a conformist.
Copy that. Overall, I expect more good things to happen to me than bad.
I would say mostly with a slight asterisk, which is that, as I'm sure I've mentioned in the show before, my dad died when I was quite young.
I was nine or ten. And that was a bit of a jolt because it was not happy, plainly, not expected.
And it left me in a strange place.
It made me an outlier, among other things at school.
So I did have a lurking feeling that there were bad things in the offing for a while.
And then I essentially outgrew it.
So if we'd been talking a few decades ago, I might have given you a quite different answer.
You are complex. You contain multitudes.
Okay, I rarely count on good things happening to me.
I rarely count on good things happening to me.
Yeah, I would say that's mostly like me.
What? Really? You rarely count on good things happening to you?
Well, I'm responding to the statement the way it's phrased.
I count on myself being an active participant in trying to make good things happen for me.
So yeah, I don't walk around expecting dollar bills to fall out of the sky and puppies to land in my basket.
Steven, this is the first item where we really diverged.
My visceral response was, yeah, completely.
You expect things to go your way?
I really do. I'm Angie Duckworth, damn it.
I count on good things happening to me.
And here you can see what this kind of hope is.
In some sense, these are agree to disagree statements about what you think about the world.
Sort of like, what is the nature of the universe?
And this dispositional optimism, believing that the world is going to be a good place to be tomorrow, next week, next year.
Good outcomes are going to happen to you separate from your agency, separate from your causal role.
It turns out that people who are higher in this kind of dispositional optimism, this species of hope, they do pretty great, Steven.
They have abundant physical health.
They have friends. They have more happiness.
They're positive consequences to this kind of hope.
So you've mentioned dispositional optimism.
What's the other form?
The other form is, well, it takes different names, but really it's agentic hope.
It's a kind of, what can I do sort of hope?
And actually, okay, everybody get your shot classes.
Marty Seligman. This is the kind of hope he's more interested in.
Because I think what you started to already introspect and it's like, well, I don't know if tomorrow is going to be necessarily good weather or not, but I know that I can wear rain boots.
This is about what you do.
Is there a scale for that one also?
So I want to bring up another hope researcher who sadly passed away before his time.
His name was Shane Lopez.
Shane Lopez and his collaborators came up with this scale that has a few items.
I'm just going to give them to you, Steven, so we can see how agentically hopeful you are.
Okay, so from strongly agree to strongly disagree, tell me, how would you react to I have the power to make my future better?
I would say strongly agree.
Okay, good. I see many paths to my goals.
Oh, that's interesting because I'm trying to learn to get better at backgammon because I'm decent, but I want to be great.
But the thing about backgammon I've realized is that one way to be better is by understanding that there are many paths to victory in a given game.
There are many ways to win.
So I would say that I am starting to strongly agree with that notion, but it's been a learning process.
So I put myself in the middle.
I'm becoming more agentic with each passing day.
And then the last item I want to read you is, the paths to my important goals are free of obstacles.
Oh, no, I strongly disagree.
So you're very hopeful, especially, you know, feeling an agentic sense of like, I have the power to change my future.
Anyway, I do think you can get a sense from the difference between, yeah, tomorrow is going to be great.
And oh, tomorrow I'm going to do something.
And it turns out they're both pretty good to have.
Marty would argue that there have been sweeping changes in human history that you can actually chalk up to the rise of agentic hope.
If you look at any Renaissance, if you look at technological leaps forward, if you look at these trends towards less violence and in some ways a more equitable planning, he would say, at the root of it all, the prime mover is agentic hope.
More and more over the course of history, there's been a seismic shift away from there's nothing you can do.
He talks about the Greek myths.
Most of the Greek myths are like, and then Apollo rises chariot across the sky.
That is why the sun rises.
And like, there's nothing you can do about Apollo, Apollo's chariot, the sunrise.
Then there's this move over the millennia toward what can I do here?
And he would argue that was just simply not true for maybe most of human history.
So let me ask you this.
When you talk about the relationship between dispositional optimism and good outcomes, persuade me that that's actually causal.
Because again, I could imagine you could say, yeah, sure, it's easy to be optimistic when you've already had a stretch of good outcomes like being born into a family with good resources and having good health and having good opportunities and things like that.
So persuade me that the arrow is traveling in the direction you're implying it's traveling.
So I'm going to try to persuade you in two ways, but I also just want to concede at the outset that it's not fully known that it is causal.
Of course, what you'd want to do is experimentally make people more optimistic and then see what happens.
And then take it away from them.
Yes, or you could bake them into pessimists.
And it's not that there haven't been some successful attempts to do some version of that.
But look, I think it's extremely hard to tease apart causality when
