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Optimists outsold everyone at MetLife
The dropout problem
Selling life insurance means hearing no all day. Metropolitan Life hired about 5,000 new salesmen a year, and after one year 50% of them had dropped out. After four years, 90% had quit because they could not take the rejection.
The phone call
The idea started after a long day of looking at Olympic swimming data, when a call from an insurance salesman interrupted and psychologist Martin Seligman hung up on him. He wondered how anyone survives a job where people hang up all the time. A month earlier he had become friendly with the CEO of Metropolitan Life, who had told him to call if he ever had an application for life insurance.
The optimism test
So he offered an optimism test that had already predicted grade point averages and Olympic swimming success. Even the pessimistic salesmen turned out to be more optimistic than most people, since it takes extreme optimism to start the job at all. The company then hired a special force of 140 people who scored at the very top of the optimism scale. They outsold everyone at the company, and by the end of four years 75% were still working, compared with 10% of everyone else.
Why does rejection feel physically painful?
In 2003, Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman at UCLA scanned people's brains while they played a ball-tossing video game in which the other players stopped passing to them. Being left out activated the anterior cingulate cortex, a region also involved in the distress of physical pain. The more distress people reported, the stronger the activity was.
How does an optimism test work?
The Attributional Style Questionnaire, developed by Christopher Peterson, Seligman, and colleagues in 1982, describes twelve hypothetical events, six good and six bad. For each one, the person writes down the single main cause and rates whether it is permanent, whether it affects everything, and whether it is personal. Pessimistic scores come from explaining bad events as lasting, wide-reaching, and self-caused.
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