CHAPTER TEN
Whose Fault Is It? Choice, Disappointment, and Depression
I HAVE SUGGESTED THAT WITH LIMITLESS CHOICE, WE PRODUCE BETTER results with our decisions than we would in a more limited world, but we feel worse about them. However, the stakes involved are considerably higher than just creating mild disappointment. Unlimited choice, I believe, can produce genuine suffering. When the results of decisions—about trivial things or important ones, about items of consumption or about jobs and relationships—are disappointing, we ask why. And when we ask why, the answers we come up with frequently have us blaming ourselves.
The American “happiness quotient” has been going gently but consistently downhill for more than a generation. While the American gross domestic product, a primary measure of prosperity, more than doubled in the last thirty years, the proportion of the population describing itself as “very happy” declined. The decline is about 5 percent. This might not seem like much, but 5 percent translates into about 14 million people—people who would have said in the seventies they were very happy would not say so today. The same pattern is present when respondents are asked more specific questions—about how happy they are with their marriages, their jobs, their financial circumstances, and their places of residence. It seems that as American society grows wealthier and Americans become freer to pursue and do whatever they want, Americans get less and less happy.
The most dramatic manifestation of this decrease in societal happiness is in the prevalence of clinical depression, at the opposite end of the “happiness continuum.” By some estimates, depression in the year 2000 was about ten times as likely as depression in the year 1900.
The symptoms of depression include
Loss of interest or pleasure in routine daily activities, including work and family
Loss of energy, fatigue
Feelings of worthlessness, guilt, and self-blame
Indecisiveness
Inability to concentrate or think clearly
Recurrent thoughts of death, including thoughts of suicide
Insomnia
Loss of interest in sex
Loss of interest in food
Sadness: feelings of helplessness, hopelessness
Low self-esteem
Aside from the obvious fact that victims of depression are miserably unhappy, depression also takes a major toll on society in general. The friends, coworkers, spouses, and children of depressed people suffer too. Children are less well cared for, friendships are neglected or abused, coworkers must take up the slack from inadequate job performance. In addition, depressed people get sick more. Mildly depressed individuals miss 1.5 times as much work as nondepressed, and severely depressed individuals miss five times as much. And depressed people die younger, from a variety of causes, including heart disease. Suicide is, of course, the most extreme consequence of depression. Depressed people commit suicide at roughly 25 times the rate of nondepressed people, and it is estimated that about 80 percent of suicidal people are significantly depressed.
Clinical depression is a complex phenomenon that comes in several varieties and undoubtedly has multiple causes. As our understanding of depression improves, it may turn out that what we now regard as a single disorder will be viewed as a family of disorders, with overlapping manifestations but distinct causes. So you should understand that the discussion of depression that follows will not capture the experience of every person who suffers from it. But certain themes have emerged that increase our overall understanding of the phenomenon.
Learned Helplessness, Control, and Depression
EARLIER WE DISCUSSED SELIGMAN AND HIS COLLEAGUES’ DISCOVERY of “learned helplessness.” They were conducting a series of experiments on basic learning processes in animals. The experiments required animals to jump over small hurdles to escape from or avoid electric shocks to the feet. The animals typically learn this quickly and easily, but a group of animals that were exposed to the task after having experienced a series of unavoidable shocks failed to learn. Indeed, many of them failed even to try. They sat passively and took the shocks, never venturing over the hurdle at all. The explanation for this failure was that when the animals were being exposed to the uncontrollable shocks, they learned that they were helpless. Having learned this helplessness, the animals then transferred the lesson to the new situation, one in which they actually did have control.
As the laboratory work on learned helplessness continued, Seligman was struck by a variety of parallels between helpless animals and people who are clinically depressed. Especially striking was the parallel between the passivity of helpless animals and the passivity of depressed people, who sometimes find trivial tasks like deciding what to wear in the morning overwhelming. Seligman speculated that at least some instances of clinical depression were the result of individuals’ having experienced one significant loss of control over their lives and then coming to believe that they were helpless, that they could expect this helplessness to persist into the future and to be present across a wide range of different circumstances. According to Seligman’s hypothesis, therefore, having control is of crucial importance to psychological well-being.
The fundamental significance of having control was highlighted in a study of three-month-old infants done more than thirty years ago. Infants in one group—those who had control—were placed faceup in an ordinary crib with their heads on a pillow. Mounted on the crib was a translucent umbrella, with figures of various animals dangling from springs inside. These figures were not visible to the infants, but if the infants turned their heads on the pillows, a small light would go on behind the umbrella, making the “dancing” figures visible for a little while. Then the light would go off. When the infants did turn their heads, just by chance, and turned on the light and saw the dancing figures, they showed interest, delight, and excitement. They quickly learned to keep the figures visible by turning their heads, and they kept on doing so, again and again. They also continued to show delight at the visual spectacle. Other infants in the study got a “free ride.” Whenever a “control” infant turned on the light behind the umbrella in its crib, that action also turned on the light behind the umbrella in the crib of another infant. So these other infants got to see the dancing figures just as often and for just as long as their controlling partners did. Initially, these infants showed just as much delight in the dancing figures. But their interest quickly waned. They adapted.
The different reactions of the two groups caused researchers to conclude that it is not dancing toy animals that are an endless source of delight for infants, but rather having control. Infants kept smiling and cooing at the display because they seemed to know that they made it happen. “I did this. Isn’t it great. And I can do it again whenever I want.” The other infants, those who got the display for “free,” did not have this exhilarating experience of control.
Young infants have little control over anything. They can’t move their bodies toward things they want or away from things that are unpleasant. They don’t have very good control over their hands, so that grasping and manipulating objects is not easy. They get poked, prodded, picked up, and put down at unpredictable and inexplicable times. The world is just a set of things that happen to them, leaving them completely at the mercy of others. It is perhaps for just this reason that the occasional bits of evidence that they can control certain things are so salient and so exciting.
The significance of control to well-being was also dramatically demonstrated by a study of people at the opposite end of the life cycle. One group of nursing home residents was given instruction on the importance of being able to take responsibility for themselves in the home, and a second group was given instruction about how important it was for the staff to take good care of them. The first group was also given several mundane choices to make every day and a plant to take care of in their rooms, while members of the second group had no such choices and had their plants cared for by the staff. The nursing home residents given a sm
all measure of control over their daily lives were more active and alert, and reported a greater sense of well-being than the residents without such control. Even more dramatically, the residents who had control lived several years longer, on average, than the residents who did not. Thus, from cradle to grave, having control over one’s life matters.
Helplessness, Depression, and Attributional Style
SELIGMAN’S HELPLESSNESS-BASED THEORY OF DEPRESSION WAS NOT without problems. Chief among them was that not everyone who experiences a significant lack of control becomes depressed. So the theory was modified by Seligman and coworkers in 1978. The revised theory of helplessness and depression suggested that important psychological steps intervene between the experience of helplessness and depression. According to the new theory, when people experience a failure, a lack of control, they ask themselves why. “Why did my partner end the relationship?” “Why didn’t I get the job?” “Why did I fail to close the deal?” “Why did I blow the exam?” In other words, people seek to understand the causes of their failures.
What Seligman and his colleagues proposed was that when people are looking for causes for failure, they display a variety of predispositions to accept one type of cause or another, quite apart from what the actual cause of the failure might be. There are three key dimensions to these predispositions, based on whether we view causes as being global or specific, chronic or transient, personal or universal.
Suppose you apply for a job in marketing and customer relations, but fail to get hired. You ask why. Here are some possible answers:
GLOBAL: I don’t look good on paper, and I get nervous at interviews. I’d have trouble getting any job.
SPECIFIC: I don’t really know enough about the kinds of products they sell. To look good at an interview, I need more of a feel for the business.
CHRONIC: I don’t have a dynamic, take-charge kind of personality. It’s just not who I am.
TRANSIENT: I had just recovered from the flu and had not been sleeping well. I wasn’t at my best.
PERSONAL: The job was there for the taking. I just couldn’t get it done.
UNIVERSAL: They probably already had an insider picked out; the job search was just for show, and no outsider would have gotten the job.
Having failed to get the job, and explained this failure to yourself in a specific, transient, and universal way, what will you expect at the next job interview? Well, if you look for a job in an area that you’re more familiar with, if you have been sleeping well and are more energetic and alert, and if the search is really open, you’ll do fine. In other words, your failure to get this job has almost no implications for how you’ll do when you go after the next one.
Imagine instead that you tend to identify global, chronic, and personal causes for your failures. If your résumé is unimpressive and you choke at interviews, if you’re a passive kind of person, and if you believe that the last job was really available for the “right” person (not you), then your expectations for the future are pretty bleak. Not only did you not get this job, but you’re going to have trouble getting any job.
The revised theory of helplessness and depression argued that helplessness induced by failure or lack of control leads to depression if a person’s causal explanations for that failure are global, chronic, and personal. It is only then, after all, that people will have good reason to expect one failure to be followed by another, and another, and another. What’s the point of getting out of bed, getting dressed, and trying again if the results are foreordained.
Tests of this revised theory thus far have yielded impressive results. People do differ in the types of predispositions they display. “Optimists” explain successes with chronic, global, and personal causes and failures with transient, specific, and universal ones. “Pessimists” do the reverse. Optimists say things like “I got an A” and “She gave me a C.” Pessimists say things like “I got a C” and “He gave me an A.” And it is the pessimists who are candidates for depression. When these predispositions are assessed in people who are not depressed, the predispositions predict who will become depressed when failures occur. People who find chronic causes for failure expect failures to persist; those who find transient causes don’t. People who find global causes for failure expect failure to follow them into every area of life; those who find specific causes don’t. And people who find personal causes for failure suffer large losses in self-esteem; those who find universal causes don’t.
I’m not suggesting that taking credit for every success and blaming the world for every failure is the recipe for a successful and happy life. There is much to be gained by arriving at causal explanations that are accurate, whatever the psychological cost, because it is accurate explanations that offer the best chance of producing better results the next time. Nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that for most people, most of the time, excessive self-blame has bad psychological consequences. And as we’ll see, it is much easier to blame yourself for disappointing results in a world that provides unlimited choice than in a world in which options are limited.
Helplessness, Depression, and Modern Life
THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS NOW EXPERIENCES CONTROL AND PERSONAL autonomy to a degree unimaginable to people living in other times and places. Millions of Americans can live exactly the lives they choose, barely constrained by material, economic, or cultural limitations. They, not their parents, get to decide whether, when, and whom they marry. They, not their religious leaders, get to decide how they dress. And they, not their government, get to decide what they watch on television or read in the newspaper. This autonomy, coupled with the helplessness theory of depression, might suggest that clinical depression in the United States should be disappearing.
Instead, we see explosive growth in the disease, what Martin Seligman describes as an epidemic. Furthermore, depression seems to attack its victims at a younger age now than in earlier eras. Current estimates are that as many as 7.5 percent of Americans have an episode of clinical depression before they are fourteen. This is twice the rate seen in young people only ten years earlier.
And the most extreme manifestation of depression—suicide—is also on the rise, and it, too, is happening younger. Suicide is the second leading cause of death (after accidents) among American high school and college students. In the past thirty-five years, the suicide rate among American college students has tripled. Throughout the developed world suicide among adolescents and young adults is increasing dramatically. In a study comparing rates in 1990 to rates in the 1970s and 1980s, UNICEF found that the incidence of suicide tripled in France, more than doubled in Norway, doubled in Australia, and increased by 50 percent or more in Canada, England, and the U.S. Only in Japan and what was then West Germany did youth suicide go down.
In an era of ever greater personal autonomy and control, what could account for this degree of personal misery?
Rising Expectations
FIRST, I THINK INCREASES IN EXPERIENCED CONTROL OVER THE YEARS have been accompanied, stride for stride, by increases in expectations about control. The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be. We should be able to find education that is stimulating and useful, work that is exciting, socially valuable, and remunerative, spouses who are sexually, emotionally, and intellectually stimulating and also loyal and comforting. Our children are supposed to be beautiful, smart, affectionate, obedient, and independent. And everything we buy is supposed to be the best of its kind. With all the choice available, we should never have to settle for things that are just “good enough.” Emphasis on freedom of choice, together with the proliferation of possibilities that modern life affords, has, I believe, contributed to these unrealistic expectations.
In the last chapter we saw that the amount of pleasure and satisfaction we derive from experience has as much to do with how the experience relates to expectations as it does with the qualities of the experience itself. People on diets evaluate weight loss relative to expectati
ons about weight loss. It feels great to find out you lost ten pounds when you were expecting to lose five, but not when you were expecting to lose fifteen. College students evaluate grades relative to expectations about grades. It feels great to get a B when you were expecting a C, but not when you were expecting an A. If I’m right about the expectations of modern Americans about the quality of their experiences, almost every experience people have nowadays will be perceived as a disappointment, and thus regarded as a failure—a failure that could have been prevented with the right choice.
Contrast this with societies in which marriages are arranged, so people have little control over whom they marry, or societies in which educational opportunities are limited, so people have little control over what they learn. The key fact about psychological life in societies in which you have little control over these aspects of life is that you also have little expectation of control. And because of this, I think, lack of control does not lead to feelings of helplessness and depression.
Rising Individualism and Self-Blame
ALONG WITH THE PERVASIVE RISE IN EXPECTATIONS, AMERICAN CULTURE has also become more individualistic than it was, perhaps as a by-product of the desire to have control over every aspect of life. To be less individualistic—to tie oneself tightly into networks of family, friends, and community—is to be bound, to some degree, by the needs of family, friends, and community. If our attachments to others are serious, we can’t just do whatever we want. I think the single most difficult negotiation that faces young people who marry in today’s America is the one in which the partners decide where their individual autonomy ends and marital obligation and responsibility take over.
The Paradox of Choice Page 18