The Science of Optimal Love | Big Think

The Science of Optimal Love

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Optimistic people tend to live longer than pessimistic people. That's true whether you're rich or poor, young or old, and no matter your race, says sociologist William Magee. As part of a five-year study on hope and optimism—a collaboration between the Templeton Foundation and Notre Dame, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania—Magee looked at what personal characteristics overlap with having an optimistic worldview. Are the well-educated naturally more optimistic? What about those who have a financial advantage in life? As Magee explains, reverse causality can obscure the relationship between education, class and optimism (does good education produce optimism, or vice versa?), but more immutable factors such as age, race, and gender paint a more realistic picture.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WILLIAM MAGEE:

William Magee is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He is especially interested in the moral and emotional aspects of social and personal problems. He teaches courses on the sociology of health and illness, quality of life, and emotions.

His study, “OptP and PessN Among American Adults: A Longitudinal Analysis of Effects of Birth-Cohort, Age, Gender, and Race” was made possible by a grant from the Hope and Optimism initiative, which supports interdisciplinary academic research into significant questions that remain under-explored.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

William Magee: It’s clear that in terms of optimistic positivity as a predictor of mortality it does predict mortality, and it predicts mortality when you control for lots of different self-reported health problems, depression, scales that have been validated, self-reported health.

If you’re interested in predicting things from optimism—or optimistic positivity—you want to look at what predicts it. And that’s what I was focusing on in that first paper. So we have three papers already started. Basically we’re looking at explicit measures of optimism as well as these—we’re using wording effects to measure what we’re calling implicit measures of perceptual optimism and pessimism.

That positive wording bias is a form of optimism. But if you’re looking at the world in more positive ways you’re taking information in and you’re framing it in positive ways. And you’re seeing it so you’re reacting to it in positive ways. Sometimes in a way that you don’t even know that you’re doing, right? It’s so subtle, it’s like a wording effect that you couldn’t say—it’s not like I’m asking you: Are you responding this way to these words or that way to those words? We can detect it statistically over people.

So when you’re asking people to say things about themselves on a survey, for example, you’re asking them: “Are you a good person? Are you a competent person?” There’s a whole series of questions you can ask them. Some of them are worded positively, some of them negatively, and usually those wordings, those survey questions are used to create scales of things like self-esteem, self-efficacy, mastery.

And there’s a latent variable. The idea is that there’s something out there that is latent, and it explains some variance in how people answer these questions.

And we’re putting that together with some measures that ask people about how optimistic they are using language, explicitly, and saying that together those things create this phenomena. And we’re saying that the phenomena goes deep, to the level of perception.

Is it itself a form of stratification? Is there something about optimism that’s a resource that we can understand as a psychological good, like happiness, right. And so if it’s stratified in a population how is it associated with other kinds of stratification—income and so forth, education? And so you’re saying, well: class. The real interesting one is class, right? Everybody wants to know: "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, think positively, you’ll be successful. If you’re optimistic you’ll be successful." But of course if you’re successful you’re going to be optimistic so there’s the reverse causality thing, and so taking a class and looking at classes is a really interesting part that I want to get to.

And I think that’s an interesting question because there’s a lot of theory around sociology and emotions, around the idea that expectations are created. The ability to meet expectations generates energy. That energy is what allows people to do things, that emot...

For the full transcript, check out