“THIS PLACE SUCKS,” I said to Alan Kors and Dick Solomon at the Chicken Dinner Club. “Penn has all the raw ingredients, but they are not baked into a university. The best conversations of my life were at those dinners at the Wilson Society. They are what a university is.”
When Alan arrived as a faculty member in the early 1970s, he and I waxed nostalgic about the life of the mind we led as undergraduates at Princeton. He did history and poetry. I did philosophy and psychology. And we both learned more than a smattering of physics and math and art and politics sitting across the dinner table at the Wilson Society from the faculty and the serious undergraduates in those subjects.
Penn had nothing like this. It had as sparkling a faculty as Princeton, but we never saw each other, except at the occasional faculty senate meeting in which we debated such weighty issues as more parking space. So Alan and I formed the “Chicken Dinner Club,” inviting a dozen of the liveliest faculty from across the whole campus to dine on overcooked faculty club chicken once a month. Each of us led one dinner’s discussion: Jerre Levy on the split brain, Mark Adams on time travel, Dan Ben Amos on Yiddish humor, Marv Wolfgang on money and happiness, Alan Kors on Delmore Schwartz, Arnold Thackery on Newton, Dick Solomon on addiction.
Having made our little dent into raising Penn faculty morale, we tackled a more entrenched problem: undergraduate philistinism. The whole point, we believed, of a university education was simply to become an intellectual, to become serious about the life of the mind. To our dismay, too many Penn undergraduates, prime candidates once, since they were selected for their academic accomplishments in high school, soon become anti-intellectual party animals. They settled into fraternities, sororities, and dormitories, grouped by age, with no faculty presence outside class. They soon came to think of class, of reading, writing, and learning, as an obligation, but they lived for the real life of Penn—networking and mating—and the two worlds almost never met.
With Dick Solomon for gravitas, we approached Vice Provost Humphrey Tonkin, a scholar with the peculiar specialty of spreading Esperanto across the planet. We pushed for a college house in which faculty lived with the students and created an intellectual and artistic environment therein. Very aware of the undergraduate morass, the administration was eager to experiment. It awarded us a building, a slightly rundown 1950s-era, four-story, ragged-stone affair, which we named Van Pelt College House. Dick had just gone through a messy divorce (his second) and was without a home base, so he became the first master of Van Pelt College. Three years later Alan Kors then paid the price for this bright idea and became the second master of Van Pelt College. I, now a bachelor with no home, succeeded Alan in September 1980.
I spent the next three years counseling undergraduates about dating, mating, bullying, homosexuality, tolerance, racism, and, once in a while, ideas. I brought distinguished guest speakers to Van Pelt (Norman Mailer found the students “fucking stupid”) and hosted seminars (Alan Kors’s reading his own poetry was an overflow smash hit). We housed distinguished academics visiting Penn on sabbatical. Two British philosophers, the cigar-smoking Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter (“Logic is the sword of God”) Geach, graced us with their presence for a year. They were argumentative, even truculent. This seemed a great opportunity for me to get back in touch with modern philosophy, so puppylike I attended Anscombe’s undergraduate lectures.
“The word,” she announced, “is merely a printer’s artifact.” Her theory of language built on this premise. After she spun out her theory, I injected some empirical psychology into the argument.
“If it’s an artifact, why then do children first speak in single words?” I queried. Anscombe ignored the question, and Geach looked very annoyed.
At cocktails that evening, Geach stormed up to me. “I don’t give a damn what is in your books, Sir.” So ended that attempt at reengaging in philosophy. I didn’t try again until three decades later, as I tried to move psychology toward a science of the future.
I FOUND THAT I could make deep contact only with the most serious students. Robin Forman was a mathematical whiz and a member of a band that did The Doors almost as well as The Doors themselves. His band played at my “Master Blasters,” the master’s open house I held periodically with loud music in my attempt to appear less geeky to my students. Robin bore an uncanny resemblance to my college roommate Wilfrid Schmid, Princeton valedictorian of 1964, now gone off to parts unknown.
“Harvard mathematics is my first choice, and I just got accepted, but with $5,000 minus tuition,” Robin said, exuding disappointment, when he came to me in April for advice.
“That is an amazing coincidence,” I replied. “My roommate, Wilfrid, also first in our class, applied to Harvard almost twenty years ago and was only given $5,000 minus tuition. He asked my advice, and I told him to phone the chairman of math at Harvard and tell him confidently, ‘Perhaps, you don’t know who I am.’ Wilfrid did this and was promptly given a full fellowship at Harvard. Phone the chairman of math at Harvard and tell him, ‘Perhaps you don’t know who I am,’” I suggested.
“I phoned the chairman of math at Harvard and said exactly those words,” Robin reported back to me the next day. “Wilfrid Schmid is the chairman, and he gave me a full fellowship.”
BEING A HOUSEMASTER was the hardest job I’d had since selling magazines as a teenager. I rose to the occasion as a salesman, earned a lot (for a teenager), and, most importantly, learned how to sell, a skill that I used all the time. But I did not rise to the occasion as a housemaster. As a lecturer my words were finding a large audience among the students. I was teaching introductory psychology and abnormal psychology to, frankly, rave reviews, and I began to think of myself as a teacher. Three years of daily—and nightly and midnightly—contact with the undergraduates convinced me otherwise. One-on-one, my job—trolling and proselytizing for the life of the mind—did not succeed with the average Penn student. Nor did their issues make contact with me.
I gave popular Master Blasters for the students, and I began to notice that I failed at these conversations more and more, particularly at these parties. I’d never been good at small talk and attributed this to my lack of empathy or slowness of repartee. But another candidate suggested itself.
I volunteered for a “signal detection” experiment in an acoustic chamber. I put on earphones and waited for the “ready” signal. I waited and waited. Finally, the door opened, and the experimenter dismissed me, suggesting that I go to the hospital and have a hearing test. I didn’t hear even the loud ready signal. The hearing test confirmed that I was quite deaf. My guess is that my deafness dates back to about age twelve, since I know the lyrics of the rock songs only through 1954 (“Ohhh, yes, I’m the great pretender, laughing and gay like a clown”).
So while I had a bit of a physical excuse for my social ineptness at parties, this did not help my lack of rapport with ordinary undergraduates. By the time I stepped down in May 1983, my self-identity had morphed from teacher of young people to teacher of their elders: graduate students, postdocs, and professional psychologists. Moreover, I considered myself a failure as housemaster—the only job I ever had that I completely failed at.
IF SERVING AS housemaster weren’t bad enough, Randy Gallistel, the newly elected chairman, asked me to take the most thankless job in the psychology department: director of clinical training. This post had a very troubled history that explains the tightrope I walked for the next fifteen years.
Clinical psychology was the orphan of the great academic departments of psychology. At the decisive 1946 meeting of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the chairmen of Harvard, Princeton, and Penn declared that they would hire no applied psychologists, and psychology would be a basic science, just like physics. They would bring on no more clinical or industrial psychologists, only psychologists who studied basic, underlying processes. The rest of the prestigious North American departments followed suit. This coincided, however, with massive funding pushing psychology in the opposite direction: the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) began to award grants for research on mental illness, and the Veteran’s Administration began to hire psychotherapists to treat psychologically wounded soldiers. At the same time as receiving the injection of funds that clinical psychology brought to otherwise strapped psychology departments, the basic academic researchers looked down their noses—with good reason—at these upstarts “pretending” to apply science to troubled people. The good reason was that the therapists were all Freudians—Freud was the only game in therapy-city—and the academics were empirical scientists, the archenemies of the empirically untethered Freudians. This cast a shadow of suspicion over even those people, like Hans Eysenck, Joe Wolpe, Jack Rachman, and Norman R. F. Maier, who did respectable empirical science but applied it. This shadow was (and still is) the basic source of contempt, tension, and misunderstanding between experimental and clinical psychology on the one hand and between psychology and psychiatry departments on the other.
Of all American psychology departments, Penn’s was just about the most contemptuous of application when I arrived in 1964, and little changed over the next decade. It included a smattering of clinical graduate students, looked down upon as inferiors by the mathematical psychologists and natural scientists. It was the booming voice of one faculty member, Julie Wishner, the director of clinical training, who I heard opining, “On balance, Seligman should be tenured.” Julie had migrated from the frying pan of the psychiatry department, chafing at his second-class citizenship there, only to find himself in the fire of being an applied psychologist in the least applied of psychology departments. In order to make any headway in this lonely role, he had to out-science the scientists. So he adopted the posture of a psychophysiologist, who just happened to be interested in schizophrenia, and bad-mouthed the looseness of clinical thinking at every public opportunity. This might have worked before the days of Bob Bush and the very sharp group Bob recruited, but the new guys saw through Julie’s act, and the prestige of clinical psychology at Penn sank to a new low.
At the same time as clinical psychology became the sick man of the department, the science behind it (and behind social science generally) was actually getting much, much stronger. When hired in 1972, I had the experimentalists’ support (albeit with mixed feelings), because they hoped I was a natural scientist at heart. I had the support of Julie Wishner and the social science wing because the natural scientists (“natural science” being the Penn psychology department’s official designation) had certified me kosher but they hoped I was an applied social scientist at heart.
Unlike in the 1960s, when it hired toadies, in the 1970s Penn made junior appointments that greatly raised the scientific profile of my young, applied colleagues. Ruben Gur, an Israeli war hero, along with his MD/PhD wife Raquel, worked at the intersection of neuroscience, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Myrna Schwartz pioneered the new cognitive science to identify the locations of brain damage after a stroke. These individuals did unimpeachable science, but their applied slant tainted them in the eyes of the department.
When Ruben and then Myrna came up for tenure, the natural scientists slaughtered them, even though inferior pure experimental scientists got promoted with relative ease. I worried that we were becoming a department of the retina rather than a department of psychology. Ruben and Myrna got such unfair treatment that I contemplated quitting and interviewed at NIMH for a laboratory chief’s job. Their fate was a warning to me as I thought over Randy’s offer.
If I became director of clinical training, I could no longer straddle the natural and social sciences or basic and applied science. In the zero-sum game of hiring new professors, I would become, in the eyes of my natural science colleagues, a defector, a relentless and annoying advocate for applied social and clinical science. I’d watched a decade of this losing battle in department meeting after department meeting. I would have to sacrifice what local prestige I had accumulated and become a whipping boy.
But at bottom, and in this case decisively, I believed that scientific psychology is meaningful only if it applies to human problems. This was the unspoken bone of contention in my last conversation with Bob Bush before his suicide. When Bob said that if I was right, he had “wasted his life,” we were arguing about the fundamentals. For Bob mathematics was the king of psychology, and the experimental method was the queen, just as in physics. But for me, psychology first needs to discover sound premises that researchers can only then mathematize and experiment upon. These premises get discovered not from the bottom up but from the top down based on what actually works in the world. Psychology had no convincing application to human problems, so what got considered “basic” was, to put it gently, arbitrary and untethered from reality. Wanking, basically.
My thinking about Pavlovian conditioning and instrumental learning as “basic” processes convinced me of this. What made work on these processes so appealing was the possibility that they might underlie human learning: this was a decent a priori guess, and huge effort (some of it mine) was devoted to understanding both of them. Indeed, these were the premises that Bob Bush had mathematized in his life’s work. But such effort was only worthwhile if these processes actually do underlie human learning. If it is not worth doing, it is not worth doing well. To test out that it was worth doing, one needed to reconstruct, to synthesize real learning from these basic “elements.” So, for example, take bridge, an instance of actual human cognition. Computer programs that rely only on associations do not get very far playing bridge. Their brute-force approach of merely piling one association on another is too lengthy and too cumbersome. The bridge brain does not work like this. The computer must take radical shortcuts and generate only a few likely hypotheses (e.g., this is either an endplay or a finesse), then test the evidence in order to win at bridge. Brute-force associationism does not work well at chess either. Or in language learning. Or in concept learning. Or in intuition. Or even in perception. So I was still waiting for any convincing evidence that instrumental learning or Pavlovian conditioning were the building blocks of human learning. Without it, I did not believe that these processes warranted great investment.
Almost all the fiery tussle of department politics was about whether to hire this basic scientist or that applied scientist, and voices for the former consistently won—even when the basic science was untethered from reality. So becoming the advocate of applied psychology may have been a losing battle, but it was my battle.
I accepted Randy’s offer, and this was the point of no return. Indeed, as I expected, I tried, in one heated faculty meeting after another over the next two decades, to persuade my basic science colleagues to hire talented applied psychologists, and I usually lost the vote. It was a source of 4-a.m. teeth grinding and the gradual erosion of my influence and even some of my friendships. Being born a decade or two after 1942 would have made my job a lot easier, since by about 2010 the corner was turned, and the importance of applied work in psychology dawned (or was forced by undergraduate demand as well as congressional funding) on basic experimental psychologists. The Psychonomic Society, a most intransigent bastion of basic research, came out in favor of “Pasteur’s Quadrant,” the notion that applicable, but nevertheless very rigorous, research was highly desirable. The British government by the turn of the millennium decided to evaluate and fund its academic departments by impact as well as the traditional, more inbred criteria. (Oh, had I only thought to argue for “impact” rather than “application.”) As a result, the great British departments were now snapping up the psychologists they once would have shunned. As I write, a distinguished clinical psychologist occupies the venerable chair of experimental psychology at hoary Oxford.
But “I told you so” is one of the least satisfying phrases in the lexicon.
MY RESEARCH TOOK some very new turns: one was my first venture into the world of business, and the second was predicting sports. My old research team had gone the way of success, with each of the leaders getting the best academic jobs: Chris Peterson became associate professor at the University of Michigan (and eventually director of clinical training and chaired professor), Lyn Abramson became assistant professor at Stony Brook (and eventually chaired professor at the University of Wisconsin, her alma mater), Lauren Alloy eventually filled her father’s shoes as chaired professor at Temple, and Judy Garber went to Minnesota, where she finally got her PhD (eventually becoming a chaired professor at Vanderbilt). My pride in their accomplishments and my expectation that they would carry forward the future of depression research dwarfed my temporary sadness at the loss of their company just down the hall.
A new generation of young scientists who wanted to work with me on the topic of control was forming.
“This is what I want to do with my life,” said Peter Schulman. I was teaching abnormal psychology and usually gave an A+ to the best two or three students out of three hundred Penn undergraduates in each class. Along with the A+ I volunteered to help them in their careers. Peter got one of the A+s and came to me to do the volunteering. “I don’t want a PhD; I want to help your vision become reality.”
Peter became my research coordinator, eventually managing a staff of fifty people and several multi-million-dollar grants. He created structure out of my throw-ten-balls-in-the-air (and-hope-two-will-bounce) approach to science. He was my right arm, the one indispensable person in my scientific life. Without Peter, who is still a crucial part of my life in 2018, I would have retired years ago, since I cannot bring myself to do what he does: negotiate with bureaucrats, broker peace between sparring interests, write progress reports that no one will read, deal with ethics boards, and wade through the swamp of policy in order to help me operate at near light speed.
“Marty,” Peter told me just the other day, “what you find soul shriveling and avoid, I find soul enhancing and embrace.”
MY FRIENDS IN “AGING” worked by “old-boy” networking, and I found myself a beneficiary. Jack Riley was the husband of Matilda Riley, the second in command at the National Institute of Aging and organizer of the group at the Center for Advanced Study. Jack thought well of me and, unbeknownst to me, was wealthy and influential. He wanted to make me wealthy, a prospect I had never even entertained.
Peter Schulman became my research coordinator, eventually managing a staff of fifty people and several multi-million-dollar grants. He created structure out of my throw-ten-balls-in-the-air (and-hope-two-will-bounce) approach to science. He was my right arm, the one person in my scientific life who was indispensable. Photo courtesy of Peter Schulman.
I received a mysterious invitation to the Rockefeller Estate in Pocantico Hills for the annual meeting of the heads of the big insurance companies. Jack phoned me and told me to accept, which I did. I was impressed by the influence on parade. The CEOs came in limousines, except for the CEO of Prudential, who came by helicopter.
I led a small discussion group, and John Creedon, the CEO of Metropolitan Life, befriended me. John listened well and asked me whether pessimistic people fail more at work. He told me he couldn’t abide the pessimists at Met Life, who got in his way whenever he wanted to do something new. He also mentioned that his salesmen were quitting in droves and that Met Life had a huge retention problem. I had never been this close to a CEO before and was flattered. I was also impressed by John’s humility and curiosity.
A few weeks later, I came home from a long day at the office to a ringing telephone. It was a life insurance salesman, and I hung up on him as soon as I figured this out. As I was putting the phone down, it occurred to me what a tough job he had. How did he cope with rejection after rejection? I wrote John and asked him how Met Life inured its salesmen to near-perpetual rejection. He phoned and asked me to come to New York to chat.
“We hire five thousand new salesmen a year, Marty,” said John, “and it costs us five thousand dollars to train each one. Half of them quit in the first year, and by the end of three years, eighty percent are gone. Almost no one can take all the rejection.”
“So how do you select your salesmen?” I asked.
“We have an IQ of life insurance, called the Career Profile. It asks, ‘Do you want to make a lot of money?’ ‘Do you like to go to parties?’ and ‘Do you have a lot of relatives?’ If you pass, we offer you the job. You mentioned that you have devised a test for pessimism. I wonder if this would help our selection process.”
“It does predict who will get depressed in the face of setbacks—the pessimists. So maybe it’s the optimists who can brush off rejection best,” I ventured.
“Would you try it on some of our sales force? We’ll pay you to do it.”
Peter Schulman and I went to work. First we found that the top salesmen were much more optimistic on the ASQ than the worst salesmen. Of course their success could be making them more optimistic rather than their optimism making them more successful.
So Met Life underwrote a longitudinal study with three groups, one group very risky indeed. The first group included the five thousand regular salesmen hired after passing the Career Profile. They had also taken the ASQ on being hired, so we could track their sales as a function of optimism as well. Second, Met Life hired a group of about one hundred salesmen who had failed the Career Profile and done badly on the ASQ, but the managers liked them and thought they had great sales potential. Third, Met Life hired 140 extreme optimists who had failed the Career Profile and did not have the managers’ endorsement. They would not have been hired without the study. These were Frankensteinian optimists, since even a “pessimistic” life insurance salesman was way above the national average in optimism. Real pessimists do not apply.
We followed their sales for three years and found that among the regular force, the optimists outsold the pessimists. We also found that the salesmen who only had the managers’ endorsement and did badly on the tests failed abysmally. Most importantly, the special force of extreme optimists outsold everyone; at the end of three years, they were still banging away.
So Met Life adopted the ASQ for regular use in hiring its sales force—and paid me royalties.
“I’m rich!” I announced to my mother on the phone.
MY FIRST VENTURE into sports followed from the mechanism of learned helplessness: not trying. A person’s belief that nothing he does makes any difference erodes voluntary response initiation. He thinks, “Why bother?” and conserves energy, not attempting difficult voluntary actions. Thus, after defeat, pessimistic individuals will not try as hard and so will do worse than they usually do.
“Whom should we put in the relays?” Nort Thornton and Karen Thornton, the coaches of the US Olympic swimming teams, asked me in 1987. “Bitter experience tells us that the routine move of just putting our fastest swimmers in does not work. The relays follow the individual events, and sometimes if a swimmer—even a great swimmer—flops in the individual events, he [or she] does very badly in the relays. Can you predict who will collapse and who will rise to the occasion after doing badly in the individual events?”
I put this question to Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, newly arrived after finishing at the top of her undergraduate class at Yale. Bob Sternberg, my friend and a professor at Yale, wrote me privately during the admission process and opined that Susan was “headed for greatness.” (She eventually became full professor at Stanford and finally at Yale.) Susan had open-heart surgery as a child, and I sensed a fragility about her, underneath her steely exterior and indefatigable work ethic.
“You used the ASQ to predict life insurance success,” Susan said, “so let’s use it to predict Olympic swimming. The pessimists might, like rejected salesmen, collapse after defeat, and the optimists might just be energized after defeat.”
With Susan, the coaches gave the ASQ to the male and female candidates for the US teams for the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea. The coaches then had swimmers go all out in their best events, then told the swimmers their times were slow by just enough to be undetectable but very disappointing nevertheless. Each swimmer rested up and swam the same event again. As predicted, the pessimists swam the second event about 1 percent slower, and the optimists swam the second event about 1 percent faster.1 Nort and Karen used this in Seoul, and the United States swept the relays.
Karen Reivich led our next foray into professional sports. Karen was already an undergraduate legend by the time I met her as a student in my huge abnormal psychology course. I knew about her from Penn’s director of admissions: in the year she applied, applicants were required to write an essay about the world problem they would solve. Karen wrote her essay about “static cling,” an issue trumped up by Madison Avenue to sell laundry detergent. She succeeded Peter Schulman as my A+ student and entered my laboratory after she graduated.
The Olympic swimmers were kind enough to take our questionnaire when asked by their coaches. But most sports heroes, professional basketball players and major league pitchers, would not take questionnaires. So Karen decided to use the CAVE technique on sports page quotes to get their explanatory style. This was immensely tedious, requiring reading the sports pages daily in dozens of national and hometown newspapers for a whole season and extracting and rating every causal statement a player made. Karen was up to the task.
For baseball, Bill James, in his encyclopedic books, had assembled exactly the statistics we needed. We predicted that in tight games, pessimistic pitchers would do worse than they usually did, whereas optimistic pitchers would do better than usual. So Karen formed a CAVE profile on major-league pitchers from sports page quotes in the first season and then looked at their earned run average (ERA) during the final three innings of close games in the next season. We found that pessimistic pitchers got worse (their ERAs went up) in the final innings of close games, whereas optimistic pitchers showed the opposite: they got better (their ERAs went down) in the final innings of close games.
Karen Reivich was already an undergraduate legend by the time I met her as a student in my huge abnormal psychology course: in the year she applied to Penn, applicants were required to write an essay on the world problem that they would solve. Karen wrote her essay about “static cling,” an issue churned up by Madison Avenue to sell laundry detergent. Photo courtesy of Karen Reivich.
We then tried to predict professional basketball: we took two teams from the National Basketball Association (NBA)—the Boston Celtics and our hometown Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers—and we CAVE’d all the sports page quotes from the first season for both teams. The Sixers turned out to be dire pessimists, while the Celtics were sunny optimists. We then looked at the next season and had a tool even better than Bill James’s statistics for baseball: handicappers for each NBA game. When one places a bet on a basketball game, one tries to beat the “line,” the margin by which the handicappers predict that the team will win or lose. So, for example, the Celtics were basically better than the New York Knicks, and in a given game between the two, handicappers might predict that the Celtics would win by eight points, the line. If you bet on the Celtics, in order to win you had to bet that they would beat the line (e.g., that they would win by nine or more points).
The line was an exquisite target for us since it took into account all known advantages and disadvantages—for example, the home court advantage or the disadvantage of an injured player. It did not, however, take into account the teams’ pessimism or optimism. So we predicted that an optimistic team, in this case the Celtics, after a defeat would rise to the occasion and beat the line, whereas the pessimistic Sixers would collapse after a defeat and lose to the line. This was exactly what happened.
After all the hundreds of hours of reading sports pages, we discovered one more fact. For the Celtics and the Sixers, we need not have worked so hard. Just CAVEing the coaches would have sufficed. The Celtics’ coach was an optimist, and the Sixers’ coach was a pessimist. So maybe the players got their explanatory style from their coach, and merely knowing about the leader, generally, would predict the performance of followers.
THE OTHER ADVANCE in my research program had to do with cancer and helplessness. Joe Volpicelli and Madelon Visintainer joined my group from the world of medicine. Joe was a Penn MD, a genuine South Philadelphian from a line of proud Italian stonemasons. Madelon was a committed nurse-practitioner from the University of Utah who aimed to make nursing a research-based academic profession. Both believed that helplessness weakened and mastery strengthened the body. I had collected more and more anecdotes in which helpless patients died suddenly and unexpectedly, in contrast to optimistic, masterful patients who beat all the odds and lived despite dire prognoses. But anecdotes are not science: they may be highly exaggerated and, even if truly reported, can involve many other uncontrolled factors. So Madelon and Joe carried out a pioneering rat experiment using the triadic design to test whether helplessness and mastery influenced tumor growth.
Each of three groups of rats got the usual escapable, inescapable, or no shock experience. But before any shock occurred, a malignant tumor with a known “take rate” of 50 percent was implanted on each rat’s flank, and thereafter tumor growth was observed. Of the rats that had no shock, 50 percent rejected the tumor, and 50 percent grew the tumor and died. Of the rats that had inescapable shock, only 25 percent rejected the tumor, and 75 percent died. Of the rats that had escapable shock, the results were reversed: 75 percent rejected the tumor, and only 25 percent died.2
We published the resultant article in the journal Science. It was the only one bearing my name—out of about ten lifetime submissions—that made it into this prestigious venue. Perhaps this was the price of being an adventurous interloper. I have a lifetime batting average (articles accepted by the top journals or grants funded) of about .333. That’s a good average for baseball but not for science. In contrast, my colleague Bob Rescorla, a scientists’ scientist, has a batting average of 1.000. As far as I know, he has never had either an article or a grant request rejected.
How to explain this vast difference? It is assuredly not because Bob is an optimist—he is not. Rather I think it goes back to Peter Madison’s admonishment at Princeton about not being wrong versus not being boring. I’ve attended faculty meetings with Bob for decades. He has very strong opinions, but he rarely talks, and when he does, everyone listens because he almost never says anything false. He founded the modern field of Pavlovian conditioning and is the best Pavlovian ever, better even than Pavlov. But his field has shriveled and is now dying. Bob retired, resting on his laurels. He did unimpeachable, conclusive science. Few Pavlovians would get into the ring with Bob, and he never tried to reach beyond his grasp. He never tried to extend Pavlovian conditioning beyond its narrow confines. Bob chose not to be wrong. One of his critics said, “Bob is the brightest dull person I ever met.” I am forever reaching beyond my grasp. I want to know the furthest boundary of my idea. I often turn out to be wrong, but I am resilient and an optimist about my own work. One of my critics said of me, “Marty is not afraid to be wrong or to sound silly.” I chose not to be boring.
The price of being an interloper who tried not to be boring was not just a lot of rejection but also a lot of being ignored. I mentioned before that my learning theory colleagues never thanked me for learned helplessness or for preparedness, and they mostly reacted by ignoring the findings. The tumor-growth article demonstrated conclusively that psychological factors strongly influence malignancy, but the very same thing happened, as impeccable as it was. I thought it was stunningly important, but it was barely followed up (ranking only ninety-fourth in citations of all my three hundred articles), and it forked no lightning.