How you explain failure predicted who would quit West Point
Cadets who saw setbacks as permanent and personal were the ones who left during six grueling weeks designed to break them.
Hidden Brain · How to Make a Difference: Part 1It is 4 in the morning in mid-July, and the new arrivals at West Point are already awake. They are sent out for a long run, hectored through the day, and put to bed knowing it will start again tomorrow.
This is Beast Barracks, the first six weeks for the military academy's newest class. Admission is highly selective, and the newcomers arrive with impressive records. For six weeks, the aim is to break them with early wake-ups, exhausting exercise, and steady abuse. By Martin Seligman's recollection, about a third decide to leave.
Seligman, a researcher who had spent years studying helplessness in the laboratory, measured how the cadets explained bad events on day one and used the pattern to predict who would quit.
The measure came from a simple laboratory observation. After experiences they could not control, about two thirds of people gave up, while a third stayed resilient. The difference, Seligman found, was in the stories they told themselves.
Suppose you fail an examination. One person thinks, "I had a hangover." That is temporary, and the next test can go better. Another thinks, "I'm stupid." That is permanent. Suppose you are rejected by a girlfriend. One person thinks, "That's her." That is local, confined to one situation. Another thinks, "I'm unlovable." That is broad, and it darkens every future meeting. A third question was fault, whether the cause was me or something else.
In the laboratory, the people who became helpless believed bad events were permanent, broad, and their fault. The resilient third believed the trouble was temporary, specific to that situation, and not theirs. He described the difference as optimism versus pessimism.
At West Point, the cadets answered the same kinds of questions before the shouting began. Then the six weeks did their work. When Seligman's team checked who was still there, the pattern held. The pessimists, the ones who reflexively thought, "It's me, it's gonna last forever," were the ones who left.
Questions people ask
Can a pessimistic explanatory style be changed?
Yes. In later work, Seligman and his colleagues developed training in what he called learned optimism, teaching people to argue against permanent and pervasive explanations and to consider temporary and specific causes instead. Programs based on those ideas have been used with schoolchildren, college students, soldiers, and salespeople.
Did the same pattern show up anywhere besides West Point?
Yes. In college, optimists tended to get better grades than their test scores would predict, while pessimists got worse. In life insurance sales, where rejection is constant, optimists sold more and stayed in the job much longer than pessimists.
What is Beast Barracks for?
It is now usually called Cadet Basic Training, a six-week introduction to military life for new cadets. The goal is to teach discipline, teamwork, and basic soldier skills under stress, and to test whether candidates want a military career.