Optimism

…influence later behaviour and how optimism can help people recover a sense of agency. Seligman is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Hosted by Shankar Vedantam and published by Hidden Brain Media on 21 September 2026, this is the first part of How to Make a Difference. The official episode page provides a public audio player.

A principle of modern decision theories is reference dependence, in which the subjective value of a reward is computed relative to an internal reference point that is thought to reflect expectations. Previous work often assumes that reference points are retrospective, deriving directly from past experiences. We used behavioral modeling to show that, instead, rats infer underlying task states in order to switch between multiple reference points. We designed a behavioral paradigm with partially observable states – uncued blocks of trials offering only small rewards (low blocks) or large rewards