My theme for this year has been the
quality of optimism.
A decade ago, University of Michigan
psychology professor Christopher Peterson and his collaborator Lisa Bossio
surveyed the extensive literature concerning the relationship between optimism
and physical health. Their book, Health
and Optimism (Basic Books 1991), offers insights that can help us to
explore this terrain with greater specificity.
Peterson and Bossio define optimism in
cognitive, rather than emotional, terms.
Their definition entails a set of beliefs about the real world, beliefs
that lead people to approach the world actively, gathering information they can
use to solve problems. The authors
measure subjects’ optimism according to how they explain the causes of
misfortunes they experience.
Optimists are those who attribute bad events to causes that are external
to themselves, unstable (i.e., ephemeral), and specific to
the particular event.
Peterson and Bossio describe many
interesting studies that link optimistic thinking with such different health
attributes as reduced incidence of the flu and prolonged survival after breast
cancer. And they offer thoughtful
suggestions about how such a relationship might be explained.
I suspect, however, that lawyers would be
most interested in their discussion of the relationship between optimism and
problem solving. The authors first
discuss the experimental analysis of “learned helplessness.” Dogs and people were subjected to
unpleasant occurrences over which they had no control (electric shocks for the
dogs, problems that can’t be solved for the people). Those experiences made them less effective than their counterparts when they later
confronted other situations in which they had greater control.
Optimistic people were less prone to learned helplessness
than pessimists. The authors found
a significant difference between the two groups in the scope of the
learned helplessness effect.
Pessimists tend to generalize their experience of helplessness from one
kind of task to another kind.
Optimists, in contrast, tend to restrict the helplessness lesson to
domains that are closely similar to the domain of initial frustration.
It is reasonable to ask whether a law
school can help nurture that quality in its students. I suspect that we can.
Not by preaching, and perhaps not by the Socratic method. But perhaps we can model for our
students an optimistic approach to our
environment. We could consciously
look for realistic evidence that the causes of misfortune are external,
unstable, and specific, and resist the impulse to see them as internal, stable,
and general. We might thereby help
them to develop reflexes that will help them to be healthier and more
successful attorneys.
Just as this issue was going to press,
the Law School experienced a disappointing setback in the litigation over our
admissions policy: the district
judge issued an opinion concluding that our policy is unconstitutional. And it seems appropriate to modify the
ending of this message to think about what the research about optimism might
teach us about how to respond to that setback.
The first lesson is not to
overreact. We should resist any
impulse to think of the trial judge’s views as internal (reflecting the true
intrinsic nature of our policy), stable (reflecting some enduring understanding
of the law), or general (reflecting the consensus of contemporary view). And, indeed, there is ample
reason to believe the court’s reasoning is external (because it turns on
general ideas about college admissions rather than an accurate description of
our particular admissions policy), unstable (because it is inconsistent with
the Supreme Court’s decision in Bakke), and specific (because it is
inconsistent with the most recent decisions of another judge on the same court,
the Ninth Circuit, and the Fifth Circuit).
The second lesson is not to be
Panglossian. We should not believe
that things will simply work out for the best, regardless of what we do. Rather, animated by a belief that what
we do can make a differences, we must work assiduously to present the
best possible appeal. We must
document patiently the misdescriptions of our policy that found their way into
the trial court opinion.
Critically, we must honestly engage the arguments against us, crafting
direct and candid responses to the strongest criticisms that have been
made. And we must explain, simply
and directly, why the trial court opinion is ultimately grounded on a
misreading of governing legal doctrine.
That, in short, is what we intend to do.
