"You Can't Sink A Howe"

Martin Seligman is a leader in the positive psychology movement. Basically, this movement holds that optimism and other positive emotions help people lead healthier and better lives. Dr. Seligman has used these ideas to forecast the success of medical patients’ recovery, job candidates in the workplace, teams in sporting events, and the success of candidates in political elections.

C.D. Howe was a top political leader in Canada during the 1940s and 1950s and was known as the “Minister of Everything”. During the early part of the Second World War, his ship was sunk by a submarine, but he managed to climb aboard a lifeboat. When rescued by a passing boat, he told his rescuers, “You can’t sink a Howe”.

C.D. Howe’s comment when rescued is interesting. In those days during World War Two, it was usually too dangerous to rescue victims of a ship sunk by a U-boat. In fact, the discovery of the lifeboat in the choppy waters was only by chance, and the tramp steamer that rescued him had disobeyed a direct order not to try to retrieve survivors. Given that the policy of non-rescue was well known, and given that he still had the presence of mind to take command of the lifeboat and express bold macho comments when rescued unexpectedly, this suggests he was a person possessing extreme self-confidence. Does this mean that Martin Seligman’s theories are accurate? After all, C.D. Howe was a successful businessman and politician who sometimes succeeded against all odds.

The theory appears plausible, but it is a bit simplistic. There are many reasons for success in life and optimism is probably only one of many reasons. Success is often accidental and circumstantial. In terms of electoral success, people vote for many different reasons and the criteria of optimism in a candidate is simply only one reason in probably hundreds of reasons why voters select candidates. You would have to survey millions of individual voters to determine why they voted the way they did, and the optimistic persona of a candidate is likely not going to be the only reason.

Intuitively, his ideas make sense and probably a lot of people want his ideas to be accurate. There is probably some truth to his theories, but again they appear too simplistic and should not be held as the sole explanation for a political candidate’s success. Like a lot of social scientists, he uses the mathematical technique of regression to predict events. This technique has been criticized by mathematicians for a number of reasons: it sometimes yields implausible results (e.g. “more guns on the street means less crime”), it examines only a few variables when hundreds of variables may be relevant, and data dredging and rejiggering of data to make the study appear more impressive is fairly easy to do.

Dr. Seligman also uses content analysis. This is a research tool (usually involving software, but in Seligman’s case, a pencil and paper survey) that is used to determine the presence of words and concepts within text. Researchers analyze the results and then make inferences about messages within the text. Paul Ekman, a respected psychologist who uses facial configurations to analyze emotion, argues that text or transcripts of conversations do not help researchers glean accurate ideas about a person’s emotions. Moreover, people often lie about their intentions and emotions, or exaggerate or downplay these feelings. Also, politicians often recite rehearsed comments or speeches written by others.

However, as an experiment, I have used Dr. Seligman’s content analysis instrument to determine how optimistic our politicians are, which as far as I know has not been done before. Because it often involves thousands of hours of work when used properly, I have used it in a superficial way, only analyzing brief portions of transcripts of interviews, speeches or comments by seven political leaders. Admittedly, this is an experiment and should not be construed as a definitive verdict of Dr. Seligman’s theories. Some of the politicians one would expect to be optimistic turned out to be quite the opposite. However, somewhat unexpectedly, there was not really a correlation between optimism and electoral success. Pierre Trudeau and C.D. Howe were highly optimistic. Mackenzie King and Brian Mulroney scored low in terms of optimism and yet had a lot of electoral success. Joe Clark and John Turner displayed moderate amounts of optimism, but experienced poor rather than moderate levels of electoral success. Jack Layton, on the other hand, was very optimistic. In fact, anecdotal observations by journalists also suggest Jack Layton is extremely optimistic and more optimistic than most politicians, but he has yet to come even close to forming a government. This is probably due to the fact that most Canadians are not socialist, and we have a multi-party “first past the post” electoral system. So optimism does not apply here, except that it mayve helped him get elected as NDP leader.

Probably the best way to test this theory would be Paul Ekman’s FACS theory which is accepted by most researchers. Dr. Ekman analyzes facial muscle movements and then determines the emotions that these facial actions represent. Because these muscle movements have been shown to be universal in depicting the same emotions and the facial expressions are not easily faked nor are they well-known outside academia, a savvy researcher might use them to test Seligman’s optimism theories. Unfortunately, I have not studied this system, so I cannot use it here.

Optimism probably should not be the sole criteria for forecasting success. However, it still remains a vital item that people should include in their toolkit when navigating life’s bumpy seas or when seeking a captain. When being wheeled into the operating room for heart surgery, I think you would like to hear the doctor say “You can’t sink Dr. Howe” rather than “Gee, I don’t know about this operation. I am not sure I can do this…”

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Tags: c.d. howe, election, martin seligman, political leaders

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Federal Government, Our Country. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.