The US military just ended a 16-year, $500mn experiment in 'resilience training'
And the final results are...
Last year, the US military quietly ended one of the biggest-ever experiments in psychological training. Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) was a resilience training program that launched in 2009, cost somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, was designed by Professor Martin Seligman of Penn University (the inventor of Positive Psychology) and aimed to train every soldier in the Army, and their families, in Positive Psychology and CBT-style coping techniques, in order to improve resilience, and reduce PTSD and suicides.
Did it fail? By one important measure, yes. Veteran suicides kept on rising in the years after the program was rolled out. But by other measures, the truth is, we don’t have a clear answer. One of the biggest-ever psychological training programs in history launched without a pilot, and was never independently and rigorously evaluated.
The rise and fall of CSF is an illustration of the power of the hype cycle in psychological theories. Psychology is an incredibly faddish discipline, arguably more so than other social sciences, because it overlaps with self-help and life-coaching, and because the media and celebrities love to amplify the incredible new way to fix yourself. Fashions rise then disappear - anyone remember the self-esteem movement? Or ‘hysteria’? Or ‘lovesickness’?
The end of CSF is further evidence that well-meaning attempts at mandatory training in wisdom / emotional intelligence / mindfulness / resilience or other psychospiritual goals always seem to fail, based on a lot of evidence over the last 25 years. Does that mean Positive Psychology was a pointless waste of time, effort and money? No. Some findings from the field appear to replicate, and it could intersect with psychedelic science in interesting ways. It’s the grander ambitions of the movement - resilience classes in every school, resilience training for every US soldier, well-being targets for entire nations - that didn’t stand up.
A brief history of Positive Psychology
Positive Psychology evolved out of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which was developed by Professor Aaron Beck at Penn University in the 1960s. Beck was influenced by Albert Ellis, the cranky founder of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, who was in turn inspired by Stoic philosophy. The Stoics taught that our emotions contain judgements about the world or ourselves, which are often unconscious. If you make these judgments conscious, analyse them rationally, and then choose a more rational or wise way of seeing the situation, it will change your emotional response. As Epictetus put it, ‘It’s not events, but our opinion about events, which cause us suffering’. Change your habitual opinions through philosophical training, and you can change your emotions and whole experience of life, thereby becoming more resilient to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. That’s Stoicism in a nutshell, and millions of people over the millennia have found this philosophy to be literally a life-saver, including me.
Beck and his colleagues took the insights of Stoicism, dropped the ethics and metaphysics, and turned it into a brief secular eight-session therapy for depression, and then anxiety, and then a whole host of other emotional problems. And (unlike Albert Ellis) they tested out the efficacy of these interventions with measures like the Beck Depression Scale, seeing if people rated as less depressed or less anxious after a brief course of CBT. They found response rates of between 30-50%, depending on the trial and the disorder. CBT built up an enormous evidence base - there were 400 RCTs in 2014 alone, compared to two RCTs of Internal Family Systems ever. This evidence base was very impressive for insurers and regulators, and CBT became the ‘gold standard’ of psychotherapy. Its superiority to other therapies was probably over-emphasized, but at least insurers or regulators knew that clients of CBT wouldn’t be told they had ‘unattached burdens’ or ancestral trauma or perinatal trauma or ‘the Death Instinct’ or any of the other unfalsifiable and supernatural ideas floating around the psychotherapy world.
Martin Seligman was a younger colleague of Beck’s at University of Pennsylvania who made his name electrocuting German Shepherds to prove that they ‘learn helplessness’. When he was made president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, Seligman used the platform to launch a grand new vision for psychology. Why was it just focusing on pathology and misery? Why not study what makes people happy and flourishing? He called his new movement Positive Psychology.
At its heart, PP is based on the same optimistic idea you find in CBT - your reality is constructed through your habitual opinions, and you can change your habitual way of interpreting the world and train yourself to be happier and more resilient. That’s the promise of Socrates, Stoicism, Scepticism, Epicureanism, Aristotelianism and other Socratic philosophies. In Positive Psychology, people learn interventions to avoid catastrophising and to develop a more optimistic or resilient mind-set. PP also included the science of ‘flow states’ developed by Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the scientific study of ‘character strengths’, daily interventions like the Gratitude Journal or making yourself smile, and a whole adjacent field in economics seeking to measure national well-being. If CBT was Stoicism turned into secular therapeutic techniques for emotional disorders, then Positive Psychology was, as Seligman put it to me in an interview back in 2009, ‘Aristotelianism with a seven-point scale’ - a science of flourishing.
Seligman is a great salesman, and he had a fantastic sales pitch - finally, after 2500 years of human suffering, confusion and philosophical dispute over how to be happy, here’s Marty and his army of peppy Positive Psychologists to clear up the existential confusion and discover, once and for all, the ‘happiness formula’. What journalist or philanthropist could resist that? If you think psychedelics are hyped today, you should have seen Positive Psychology circa 2010. There were TED talks by figures like Seligman or Carol Dweck (mindset), Angela Duckworth (grit), Barry Schwartz (the paradox of choice) or Dan Gilbert (the science of happiness) which each got millions of views. There was a cover story in Time magazine, a six-part BBC series, and predictably insipid movies inspired by Positive Psychology like Mike Leigh’s Happy or Hector and the Search for Happiness.
All that hype led to philanthropic largesse. Martin Seligman’s 2011 book, Flourish, begins with an anecdote of Marty receiving a mysterious email from an anonymous foundation. He meets the donor, identified only as PT, who promptly writes him a cheque for $1.5 million. Why would you start your book with that anecdote? Presumably because the moments that truly stand out to you as you reflect on your scientific achievements of the last 20 years are the moments when very rich people write you a big fat cheque. The Templeton Foundation alone may have given around $100 million to Positive Psychology projects. Jeffrey Epstein also tried, by the by, but Seligman wisely demurred.
Positive Psychology, like psychedelic science, is perfectly designed for wealthy donors who discover money hasn’t made them happy - they will write big cheques to any scientist or shaman who promises to show them the secret of authentic happiness. Positive Psychology also took off because it resonated with life coaches, business coaches and HR departments, and could easily be rolled out in business or personal development workshops. Positive Psychology experts like Seligman charged companies and conferences $50,000 for one talk. Some businesses adopted a whole-organisation well-being strategy, like Zappos, led by its Positive Psychology-obsessed CEO Tony Hsieh (he later got addicted to ketamine, went mad, and died on nitrous oxide).
Many universities launched popular undergraduate courses in the science of happiness, or Positive Psychology research centres, like UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Centre or the Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues at Birmingham University. There were also attempts to introduce Positive Psychology classes into school curricula, including a three-year trial in UK schools of the Penn Resilience Program.
In fact, there was a whole political movement inspired by Positive Psychology, which was dubbed the ‘politics of well-being’. Political leaders from UK prime minister David Cameron to EU president Herman van Rompuy suggested their citizens should adopt the science of happiness. There was a brief period where this was a serious international political movement, although the wind got taken out of its sails by the 2008 economic crash and the rise of populism. The politics of well-being was, after all, very much a technocratic project - the experts educating the masses how to be content with their lot. Turns out the masses preferred rage.
I covered these initiatives from 2007 until about 2015, in articles, in my blog The Politics of Well-Being and in my first book Philosophy for Life, which featured interviews with Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, Martin Seligman and others. I was personally helped by CBT, and it inspired my love of Stoicism. I thought Positive Psychology was interesting up to a point - it seemed a good idea to teach basic CBT techniques to people to help them understand their emotions and how to change them. But Positive Psychology was more ambitious than that. It claimed to have discovered the scientific formula for happiness. This was often bad science (Professor Barbara Frederickson’s ‘happiness ratio’ was exposed as bunk by a British post-grad) and it often overstepped into terrible moral philosophy, over-claiming on what science can prove.
For example, Martin Seligman claimed to have discovered the key to flourishing: PERMA, which stands for Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment. Then he claimed scientists could quantify and accurately measure someone’s PERMA score. That is scientistic nonsense. As I often wrote, a person could score high in PERMA and still live what many would consider a bad life. Osama bin Laden would have scored high in PERMA. There is a limit to what science can objectively prove - you simply can’t quantify or prove to what extent a person is flourishing, because it is too subjective and involves unquantifiable things like closeness to God or impact on the lives of others. As George Eliot put it in the beautiful last lines of Middlemarch:
the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
In this sense, Positive Psychology reminded me of Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology in the 1960s. Maslow was an incredibly-ambitious, somewhat egotistical psychologist who became a media darling, and rabbinizing ‘life expert’, but who used the authority of science to pretend his banal moral truisms were proven and therefore everyone should listen to him and give him funding. For example, Maslow claimed to have scientifically discovered the values that ‘self-transcendent personalities’ always possess, simply based on his judgements of people he happened to admire.
This sort of scientism quickly becomes illiberal when you impose it on others in schools, prisons or organisations, because you’re telling people ‘we the scientific experts know the secret of the good life, we can tell you your flourishing score, you must know follow our advice’. That’s illiberal scientistic bullshit. There is no one model of the good life that fits everyone and, as Sir Isaiah Berlin argued, governments become tyrannical as soon as they try to insist there is. Let people discover their own versions of the good life, encourage them to experiment and think for themselves rather than being spoon-fed. That’s the basis of the First Amendment. That’s what John Stuart Mill decided, after an upbringing in which he was force-fed Utilitarianism.
Training the US Army in resilience
This brings us to Comprehensive Soldier Fitness and Master Resilience Training, the ambitious program to teach resilience to every person in the US military. Seligman writes in his book Flourish:
In late November 2008, I got invited to lunch at the Pentagon with the chief of staff of the army, the legendary George Casey, former commander of the multinational force in Iraq and former Delta Force hero. General Casey, lithe, short, late fifties, buzz-cut graying hair, walked in, and we all stood to attention. We sat, and I noticed that the three-star general on my left had headed his notes ‘Seligman Lunch.’
“I want to create an army that is just as psychologically fit as it is physically fit,” General Casey began. “The key to psychological fitness is resilience, and from here on, resilience will be taught and measured throughout the United States Army. Dr. Seligman here is the world’s expert on resilience, and he’s going to tell us how we are going to do it. Report back to me in sixty days.”
