What’s Your Optimism Ratio?
February 25th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina
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In his famous book Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman points out how our present use of language can be a fairly accurate predictor of future success. Seligman explains how he was able to predict outcomes of sporting events with reasonable accuracy by comparing the language used by the coaches and players in interviews before the event. Basically what he did was count all the positive words and the negative words in published pre-game quotes from the players and coaches, and then he calculated the ratio of positive words to negative. The team with the higher ratio was the one picked to win. There is some subjectivity in deciding whether a word is positive, negative, or neutral, but if you try it yourself, I think you’ll find that most of the time it’s fairly easy to classify words. Seligman also explains using a similar process to predict the winners of political elections.
Try this for yourself. Here’s a sentence I grabbed from Yahoo News on Feb 23:
Scientists fear the avian flu that has killed 46 people in Asia could be the strain that will cause the next global pandemic but said more evidence is needed about how infectious it is in humans.
How many positive and negative words do you count? I count zero positive and four negative (fear, killed, pandemic, infectious). So this sentence has a ratio of 0/4 = 0.
Let’s try the same process on all of the headlines from Yahoo News (I’m using the Feb 23 version). I count 6 positive words (eases, adds, new, found, right, wealthy) and 15 negative words (denounce, fight, die, soak, death, somber, slain, fears, concerns, dismissed, defiant, avoids, risk, pandemic, handouts) for an overall ratio of 6/15 = 0.4.
My picks are subjective of course, so yours may be different, but try it for yourself on any news site. If you find one with a ratio above 1.0, please tell me about it!
Try this on yourself as well. Go over some text you wrote recently — emails, forums posts, whatever. What’s your ratio of positive/negative words? Seligman would argue that this is a powerful predictor of future success. Some personal development experts believe that by intentionally choosing more optimistic words in the language you use, you’ll start to become more optimistic in your thinking, which will in turn lead to better results. Anthony Robbins has a whole chapter about it in one of his books; he refers to it as “transformational vocabulary.”
Have some fun and try this on your friends and co-workers. Grab something they wrote, and compute their ratio. Is their language predominantly optimistic (>1.0) or pessimistic (<1.0)? Who has the highest score? The lowest score? Any interesting patterns?
What kind of boss do you work for? What about your company’s brochures? If you run your own business, how’s your marketing material, your web site, your business plan? Are you projecting confidence or self-doubt to your customers? What about your journal entries? Your to do list?
You’ll often see a pattern where like attracts like. Pessimistic news sources will attract pessimistic readers, partly because those are the best targets for advertising — negative people are more likely to believe that buying products will change their emotional state. A pessimistic company will attract and breed pessimistic employees — the high-energy positive people will go where their enthusiasm is welcome. So there’s a good chance you’ll see similar ratios to your own when you look around your environment.
February 25th, 2005 at 10:36 am
Steve, this is very interesting. However, I have found that in soccer, this doesn’t hold true.
Let’s say team A plays with team B.
Case 1: Team A declares: “We shall win the match against team B. Our players are very well trained, and we shall win the match. It will be an easy victory for our team”. Team A will usually lose!
Case 2: If team A declares: “We shall die on the field playing, if necessary, in order to win the match.” Team A will usually win!
Case 2 happened recently in the game of Steaua (a Romanian soccer team) against Valencia (the last winner of the UEFA european championship). Steaua declared they will die in the field playing if necessary in order to win, and then dominated the game against the very strong Valencia team and won with a 2:0 score.
I’m not an avid soccer watcher, but from what I noticed, the above cases hold true most of the time.
I have also discovered that the cases above also apply to my work. If I say “hey it’s easy”, then I won’t get things done. If I say “No matter how hard this is I would rather die in front of my computer rather than not get things done”, then I usually get things done successfully.
February 25th, 2005 at 12:27 pm
You have to consider each word in context — does it reflect genuine pessimism or optimism or neither? Saying that something will be an easy victory doesn’t reflect genuine optimism to me — that’s just posturing, and it may in fact be used to cover self-doubt. But saying that you’ll “die on the field” to win — to me that’s optimism, since the context implies total commitment as opposed to self-doubt.
The same word can be optimistic in one context but pessimistic in another. I usually ask, “Does this word/phrase imply a feeling of certainty (optimism) or one of doubt (pessimism)?”
Also, the research in the book wasn’t done with just a single quote from each team. The authors considered every quote they could find from a variety of media sources. One line just isn’t enough data to go on — you need to look at the long-term pattern.
February 25th, 2005 at 12:33 pm
I actually ran this optimism test on the last two speeches I gave. The first one (a speech about death and mortality) scored a 0.75 (negative), and the second (a speech about keeping life balanced) scored a 0.87 (still a bit negative). The second speech got a much better audience reaction.
Then I ran this same test on Jim Key’s speech which won him the 2003 World Championship of Public Speaking — he has a PDF of the speech on his web site. His speech scored a 1.25 (positive). But I also noticed that his speech started out negative and became more positive as it went along, as if he was gradually taking the audience to a point of greater optimism. I wish I could get copies of the other 8 speeches at that contest to see if there was any correlation between the speech’s optimism score and the finishing position.
February 26th, 2005 at 12:12 pm
Steve, my post is not a generalization from one soccer game, it is a generalization from several soccer games. The example I gave (Steaua vs. Valencia) is just one example. I have observed the same thing in several cases.
Saying “we will win” is not always posturing. In the case I’m talking about all “sports analysts” (I’m not sure how to call them in English) decided that one team was a lot stronger than the other. And taking into account past performance in that season, it really was so. The strong team also expected to win, and they were not “posturing”, they really believed what they were saying.
I watched the game expecting the strong team to win. And the strong team, which was very optimistic about the outcome, LOST!
So, in my opinion:
If a team has an optimistic attitude, and they say they will win, then they lose.
If a team has a pessimistic attitude, they believe that they have a low chances of winning the game, but at the same time they are very committed to do everything in their power in order to win, then they are most likely to win.
February 26th, 2005 at 12:24 pm
My experience playing soccer for 3 years, one season on the last place team in the league, one season on a middle-ranked team, and one season on the first place team, had the opposite results. The more optimistic teams won fairly consistently. Teams that expressed consistent self-doubt and uncertainty usually had good reason to do so.
What sports analysts or other outsiders say is irrelevant to this concept. It’s what the players and coaches are saying over a long period of time: multiple interviews in a variety of media.
And keep in mind that Seligman makes it clear in his book that this predictive measure is nowhere near 100%, so it’s easy to find plenty of matches where it fails to predict the winner.
February 26th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
You have to remember that correlation isn’t causation, so optimism alone isn’t necessarily *making* the teams win. A team with a winning record, good players, etc. will be more likely to win and also more optimistic — it has the raw material to win and those involved know it. So even if optimism didn’t improve a team’s chances, the more optimistic teams would tend to win. That’s not to say optimism doesn’t have an effect, of course.
The speech thing is very interesting, since clearly speech content is more a cause of audience response than an effect.
February 27th, 2005 at 8:01 pm
Will you post some of your speeches online (Audio & Video if possible). After hearing about your successes in speech competitions I would find it very informative too see your speeches (and a commentary by you about what you’ve done right, and what you may have done wrong).
Thanks!
February 28th, 2005 at 12:48 am
This has been a very interesting discussion. Thank you!
June 3rd, 2005 at 5:41 am
Read “The Role of Positivity and Connectivity in the Performance of Business Teams”, American Behavioral Scientist, February 2004.
June 13th, 2005 at 3:23 pm
What an intriguing theory! I live in Vegas, I can’t wait to try it out.
But, what makes anyone think that by changing the words one becomes another person. Do words create the person, or does the person the words? Mr. Robins and his colleges tend to forget that if you are in a hole, pulling on your bootstrap is the least productive thing you can do. I consider these so-called motivational speakers con artists. Stop deceiving people and get a real job!
July 17th, 2005 at 1:18 pm
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