THE WORLD LOVES AN OPTIMIST. A POSITIVE OUTLOOK IS WIDELY recommended as a cure for whatever ails you, and nowhere more so than in the United States, where a can-do attitude is viewed as essential to success. No surprise, then, that many self-help books touting the power of positivity are runaway bestsellers here, and that the so-called Law of Attraction—the belief that good things will “manifest” themselves in our lives if we purge our minds of “negativity”—has garnered so much attention.
It all sounds really good, doesn’t it? After all, positive thinking is fun! What could be more pleasant than visualizing how great it will be when all your dreams come true? (And frankly, thinking about negative things—like the obstacles we might face or what might go wrong along the way—is just no fun at all. There’s no denying it.) So being able to reach goals like being healthy, wealthy, and deeply in love by thinking only shiny, happy thoughts has a natural appeal. The Law of Attraction lets you have your cake and eat it, too! Or at least it would . . . if it worked. (It might be more accurate to say that it lets you visualize what it would be like to have cake to eat. The odds of obtaining actual cake this way are not in your favor.)
In fairness, there are plenty of positive thinkers out there who don’t subscribe to ideas like these—they are just garden-variety optimists. Optimism is the belief that, generally speaking, good things will happen and bad things won’t. It’s often measured by assessing your responses to statements like these:1
In uncertain times, I usually expect the best.
I always look on the bright side of things.
Things never work out the way I want them to. (Optimists don’t believe this.)
While the Law of Attraction has few fans in the scientific community, optimism itself has a far better reputation, and with good reason. Study after study shows that, compared to pessimists, optimists enjoy better physical health and recover more quickly from illness. They adjust more easily to change and are more likely to cope actively with a problem. They have more satisfying relationships and are more willing to accept a mutually beneficial compromise. Optimists are, on average, more likely to succeed in reaching their goals than pessimists, in large part because they don’t give up too soon when the road gets rocky.
So optimism can indeed be a very good thing compared to pessimism. For some people, some of the time. That latter part is the part that most of the proponents of relentless positivity and optimism in the Self-Help section of your bookstore (and among the gurus of business, education, and parenting) neglect to mention—possibly because they are not aware that they are only telling half the story. As our research shows, there are those for whom the best way to ensure success is actually to believe they just might fail.
Yes. We realize that this may be counterintuitive. After all, it doesn’t exactly sound like can-do spirit. And aren’t we supposed to banish negative thoughts if we want to succeed?
Not if you are prevention-focused or are pursuing a prevention-focused goal. Because if you are, optimism not only feels wrong—it will actually disrupt and dampen your motivation. If you’re sure that everything is going to work out for you, then why would you go out of your way to avoid mistakes or to plan your way around obstacles or to come up with a plan B? Seems like a waste of time and energy. If everything is going to work out, then relax and take it easy.
On the other hand, if you are prevention-focused, you can’t afford to just relax and take it easy. Being optimistic takes away the vigilance you need to get the job done. Instead, avoiding mistakes and preparing for potential problems are precisely the vigilant things you feel you should do. This is, not surprisingly, something that many successful prevention-minded people have intuitively realized all along. They have silently resisted the call to positivity, understanding (perhaps unconsciously) that this sort of thinking simply won’t work for them. Let’s give you an example.
In a study we conducted with MSC colleagues Jens Förster and Lorraine Chen Idson, we gave participants a set of anagrams to work on (e.g., NELMO, which, provided you don’t have to use all five letters, can be elm, one, mole, omen, lemon, melon, etc.). All were told that if they did well, they could earn more money. Then we manipulated their motivational focus: those in the promotion condition were told that they would be paid four dollars and could earn an extra dollar if they performed above the 70 percent level, while those in the prevention condition were told that they would be paid five dollars but could lose a dollar if they performed below 70 percent.
Just to be clear—everyone would get four dollars for a poor performance and five dollars for a good one, so the incentives were identical across the board. And the 70 percent level was the performance target for everyone. All that changed was how we talked about it (called framing in the psychological literature)—whether succeeding in ending up with five dollars meant you gained a dollar (promotion focus) or avoided losing a dollar (prevention focus).
Back to the experiment. About halfway through the anagram task, we gave everyone feedback. We told each person that so far, he or she was performing either above or below the target level of 70 percent. (This had nothing to do with their actual performance—we just randomly assigned them to get good news or bad news.) So they were led to believe that they were either well on their way to succeeding or possibly in danger of failing. Following that feedback, we measured both the strength of their motivation and expectations for success.
As you might expect, after hearing the positive feedback, expectations for success in the promotion-focused group soared, and so did their motivation. I’m doing great! I’m advancing! Hooray! they thought. Who wouldn’t, right? The prevention-focused group, that’s who. When they were given the good news that they were right on track, their expectations for success didn’t change at all, and their motivation actually decreased. Looks like I’m safe, they thought. Nothing to worry about. Might as well relax.
What happens when news isn’t so good? After negative feedback, expectations for success in the promotion-focused group went down a bit as you might expect, and so did motivation. Hmm . . . it’s not looking good. That’s discouraging. Why try hard if I’m just going to end up with four bucks anyway? I might as well save my energy for something later that I can succeed on. . . .
The prevention-focused group, on the other hand, sat up and took notice. Their expectations dropped . . . dramatically. These participants were quite sure they were going to fail . . . unless they changed things by increasing their effort. Despite that drop, or more accurately because of it, motivation surged! Oh, no, I’m going to lose a dollar! Unless . . . I must do whatever is necessary to make that not happen!
The promotion-focused really get going when they feel they are doing well. Optimism and confidence enhance their eagerness, and their motivation and performance soar. Perhaps the most defining characteristic of our promotion-minded colleague Ray is his everything’s-gonna-be-all-right attitude. He takes it with him wherever he goes (including on long walks in the middle of the night through bad neighborhoods in search of great jazz), and so far it has served him very well.
The prevention-focused, on the other hand, really hop to it when things aren’t going so well. The possibility of failure enhances their motivation, and their performance, too. Our prevention-focused colleague Jon may seem like he’s torturing himself needlessly when he frets over every tiny detail of his work, but he knows that being a worrywart really works for him. (And for the record, you couldn’t get Jon within a mile of a bad neighborhood even if you gave him his own SWAT team.)
To understand what works for Jon and other prevention-focused people, it is important to recognize that they are not pessimists in the traditional sense. They don’t believe that they will fail or are even likely to fail. What they tell themselves is that they might fail if they are not careful enough or don’t work hard enough. What motivates them is imagining the possibility of failure in the future from not doing what’s necessary now—what the literature calls defensive pessimism. Pessimism—that is, expecting that you will fail—undermines everyone’s motivation . . . whether you are prevention-focused or promotion-focused. Indeed, at least part of the reason why the literature has found so many good outcomes from people being optimistic is that the research compares people who are optimistic to people who are pessimistic. What is clear is that pessimism undermines motivation. Optimism, on the other hand, doesn’t always enhance motivation. It does so when people have a promotion focus . . . but not when they have a prevention focus.
Answer the following questions using this scale:
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
|
Never or Seldom |
Sometimes |
Very Often |
1. How often have you accomplished things that got you “psyched” to work even harder?
2. How often did you obey the rules and regulations that were established by your parents?
3. Do you often do well at different things you try?
4. I feel like I have made progress toward being successful in my life.
5. Growing up, did you avoid “crossing the line,” avoid doing things your parents would not tolerate?
6. Not being careful enough has gotten me into trouble at times.
Your promotion success score = Q1 + Q3 + Q4
Your prevention success score = Q2 + Q5 + (6 - Q6 [reverse scored])
The questions above are from a measure developed by members of the Motivation Science Center in order to identify people with a history of success in promotion or prevention—what we call promotion and prevention pride. If you score high in one or the other (or both), it means that you are someone who “gets” how to work with your motivational focus. (It’s quite possible to score high in both, since you can understand how to be effective in promotion and how to be effective in prevention, and this is true even if either promotion or prevention is still your dominant focus. Of course, it’s also possible to score low in both. In which case reading this book may be especially useful.) To be effective in either promotion or prevention, you need to learn how to use your outlook strategically.
Being effective when you are promotion-focused requires pursuing goals in an eager manner . . . making things happen in eager ways. Having an optimistic outlook enhances your eagerness, and thus it fits a promotion focus. In other words, optimism works for promotion motivation. It sustains it and strengthens it, leaving us better able to reach promotion goals. If you are reaching for the stars or taking big risks, a dose of positive thinking is just what the doctor ordered.
Being effective when you are prevention-focused, on the other hand, requires pursuing goals in a vigilant, careful manner . . . making things happen in vigilant ways. For successful prevention, we need to dampen or suppress our optimism, and cultivate a mild skepticism in the service of sustaining our vigilance. The maybe-it-won’t-work-out attitude works for prevention motivation. Having a more realistic than optimistic outlook enhances your vigilance, and thus it fits a prevention focus. When you need to be vigilant—to fulfill your responsibilities and avoid danger—you can’t allow yourself to be too confident, no matter how successful you’ve been in the past.
People high in promotion pride or prevention pride may both have good reason to be optimistic. They’ve both got strong track records of getting the job done. But those in the latter group know they can’t afford to be optimistic, and they spend as little time as possible dwelling on past successes.2 Instead, when preparing for an upcoming task—a presentation, a test, or any other challenge—they set low expectations, ignoring the evidence of their past successes. “I know I’ve got all A’s in chemistry so far, but this test could be much harder—I may not do well,” they think to themselves. Sometimes they even say it out loud, and get pelted with small objects by irritated classmates.
Because of their low expectations, those high in prevention pride mentally play through and rehearse all the ways in which things could go wrong—and prepare for every eventuality. As a result, they perform as well as promotion-focused optimists (and, for the record, perform far worse when you try to keep them from doing things their own “defensively” pessimistic way).3
Under the right circumstances—say, when a situation calls for careful planning and due diligence—people high in prevention pride can even outperform the promotion-pride optimists. One need look no further for evidence than our recent recession and the mortgage crisis that helped precipitate it. When home prices keep going up and up, people buy mortgages they can afford only if everything goes right (with lots of assurances from mortgage brokers that everything will). It’s the prevention-focused people in an environment like this who ask, “But what if it doesn’t go right?” and save themselves the agony of losing their home and destroying their credit.
History books and news programs are packed with examples of the perils of excessive optimism. Failures to take seriously the possibility that everything would not go according to plan have had profound consequences: protracted wars with staggering civilian casualties that were predicted to end quickly (Vietnam, Iraq), humanitarian crises that could have been prevented with proper planning (Hurricane Katrina, the Fukushima nuclear disaster), and of course, economic meltdowns resulting from reckless and irresponsible investing (the subprime mortgage crisis, the Great Depression).
There is power in defensive pessimism—thinking about obstacles and the things that might go wrong (which some might disparage as “negative thinking”) will give you a tangible advantage in pursuit of your prevention-focused goal. Parents who want to keep their toddler safe will benefit from scanning the home for potential dangers before anything bad happens. Adults who get regular annual health screenings are more likely to detect a problem early, dramatically increasing the odds of a full recovery. Business leaders who take their competition seriously are better able to anticipate their actions and stay ahead of the game.
One of the most important things to learn (and most difficult to accept) about the prevention-minded, whether the mind in question is your own or someone else’s, is to respect their mild pessimism or skepticism and keep the pep talks to a minimum. Their pessimism is strategic. They know what they are doing. (And, as we noted earlier, they are not saying to themselves that they will fail. That could, indeed, undermine their motivation. Instead, they are imagining how they might fail if they did not dedicate themselves to doing whatever is necessary to avoid failing. Such “unless” thinking motivates them to do what needs to be done.) Only when we learn to understand and respect these two different ways of motivating ourselves can we help ourselves to be as effective as we can possibly be (and help the people we care about to be as effective as they can be).
So the next time you are tempted to give your prevention-focused friend or colleague a few words of encouragement, trying to make him more optimistic, you actually might want to reconsider. You may be doing more harm than good. (And if you’re prevention-focused, then next time someone tells you to “lighten up” or says “I’m sure you’ll do great,” feel free to ignore her. You know what you’re doing.)
Sure. If by “happier” you mean that they are more cheerful and upbeat, that is. But if you mean that they have more rewarding life experiences and greater psychological well-being . . . then no, they aren’t “happier.” The focus in the popular media and the self-help industry (and to some extent, in psychological science itself) on “happiness” as the end-all and be-all of human existence is, frankly, far too narrow. Not everyone is upbeat and full of cheer (what psychologists call high-positive affectives), but that doesn’t mean they aren’t living fulfilling lives. This is something Martin Seligman, father of positive psychology and author of Authentic Happiness, has also argued in his latest book, Flourish.
A mood view of happiness consigns the 50 percent of the world’s population who are “low-positive affectives” to the hell of unhappiness. Even though they lack cheerfulness, this low-mood half may have more engagement and meaning in life than merry people. (p. 14)
Many of these “low-positive affectives” to whom Seligman refers are no doubt individuals with dominant prevention motivation. When prevention-focused people succeed, they may not jump up and down about it—but feeling peaceful and calm can be just as rewarding as feeling excited and happy. After all, millions of people around the world meditate to seek serenity, not cheerfulness. And importantly, even when prevention-focused people are not allowing themselves to feel calm and relaxed for too long, in order to restore their vigilance, they still experience well-being from managing to make prevention work for them.4
So if well-being isn’t the same thing as being happy, what does it refer to? What is it that people want? The traditional answer among research psychologists—and dating at least as far back as Freud—has been “to approach pleasure and avoid pain.” And obviously there is some truth to that. But at the same time, simply “approaching pleasure and avoiding pain” doesn’t really capture what it is to have an engaged, meaningful existence. As one of us (Higgins) has argued in his recent book on motivation, Beyond Pleasure and Pain, what people really want is to be effective—to know what’s real, manage what happens, and achieve the results they desire. We want to be able to interact with the world around us, and to be able to understand and manage the world in ways that allow us to reach our goals.
Why would anyone choose to endure the years of arduous training required to compete at the Olympic level, making countless personal sacrifices, if all they wanted was to maximize their pleasure and avoid pain? Why would anyone deliberately offer up their lives for the sake of their loved ones, their community, or their country, if life was all about pleasure? They wouldn’t—because these aren’t pleasurable choices. But they can be highly effective ones. And in the end, it’s a sense of effectiveness, in whatever you do, that makes us experience life as worth living.
So promotion-focused people aren’t necessarily better off than the prevention-focused, since you can experience effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) with either motivation. We’ve found that people who are high in promotion pride or prevention pride—people who are effective when it comes to pursuing goals because they are optimists or defensive pessimists, respectively—handle problems better than their low-pride peers by engaging in active, problem-focused coping. In other words, when something goes wrong, both groups take action to fix the problem. And both report having fewer emotional problems (e.g., clinical depression, severe anxiety, somatization). It’s clear that while optimism may be the key to well-being for some people, it’s not for everyone. And given that all of us are prevention-focused some of the time, for all of us there are times when being optimistic is not the key to our feeling effective, such as when we help a two-year-old cross the street safely. For all of us, there are times to be prevention-realistic rather than promotion-optimistic.
(Note: In many studies, including some of our own, prevention-minded people do not score high on traditional measures of well-being. As we’ve discovered, this has a lot to do with how well-being is measured—typically, with questions that focus a lot on self-confidence and self-acceptance. Prevention motivation makes people loath to explicitly acknowledge that they are doing well for fear of lowering their vigilance. As a result, they appear to be less well-off than the promotion-minded. They are, however, delighted to tell you how successful they’ve been in the past or how effective they are in meeting their duties and obligations. Thus, it’s all in how you ask the question.)
So if you usually are all about going forward eagerly, you should embrace optimism, and if you are more of the cautious type, you should eschew optimism for a more realistic skepticism, right? Yes. And no. Remember that everyone has both motivations—even the most promotion-focused person may shift to prevention when, for instance, a loved one becomes seriously ill. And even the prevention-focused know that vacations are times for a little more adventure and fun. To be maximally effective, you are going to want to match your outlook to the activity or task at hand. Most of the time, it will be to your dominant motivational focus—but not always. So remember to think of being optimistic or defensively pessimistic not as traits, but as tools.
To some extent, successful people do this intuitively. Psychologists call it having a forecasting preference—a way of looking at the future chosen strategically to maximize your performance or prepare you for what lies ahead.5 Optimism is a good choice when you are trying to be innovative or creative or embrace risk. It’s the attitude that will give you big gains. But defensive pessimism—thinking how might things go wrong?—is the better choice when your top priority is remaining safe and secure. And you could always try doing both together, as in the idiom “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.”