Capitalizing on Positive Technology: An Interview with Lyle Ungar, PhD

In a recent address to students in the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania, field pioneer Martin Seligman (personal communication, April 23, 2023) commented that if he had an opportunity to do his studies again, he would explore the intersection of positive psychology and artificial intelligence (AI). Seligman is hardly alone in his fascination with AI. For example, just days after its launch in November 2022, consumer-facing AI chatbot, ChatGPT, which in response to prompts can generate humanlike text and conversation, hit one million users (Buchholz, 2023). Two months later, the application soared to 100 million users, and industry estimates suggest that as of last month, the site had 1.8 billion all-time views (Ruby, 2023).

Hot topics not only in the tech world, but also across classrooms, business sectors, social media, and smartphones alike, new technologies, including AI and machine learning are already disrupting life and work as we’ve known it. They’re evoking both curiosity and concern in a field focused on well-being. And even within this issue of MAPP Magazine, you’ve encountered diverse perspectives about the challenges and opportunities where technology and well-being collide.

This Spring, we had an opportunity to meet with positive technology scholar, Lyle Ungar, to discuss some of our own questions about the future of the field. Here are excerpts from our interview on May 2, 2023.

MAPP Magazine (MM): Can you please tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to positive psychology?

Lyle Ungar (LU): I was working at Google when I met this guy, Marty Seligman, who has this Positive Psychology Center. I was working on measuring flu trends when Marty asked, “Why don't we measure the change in well-being the same way we measure flu trends—by searching Google searches?” 

Marty and I have given talks about how we could analyze language and understand people better. It’s harder than we thought, but if I look at your Facebook posts, with your permission, and look at your scores on the VIA Character Strengths (Peterson & Park, 2009; Peterson & Seligman, 2004), I can see your character strengths from the language you use. We try to help people to understand how they can take their own language and hold it up as a mirror to themselves. 

Marty, Johannes Eichstaedt (C‘11), and I co-founded a group called the World Well-Being Project in the Positive Psychology Center at Penn and started collecting people's language use. Since then, we’ve written probably 100 papers.

Increasingly, these days, we are looking at how we can use chatbots in ways that foster positive interventions. This got me started on positive technology.

MM: What is positive technology, and how do you use it?

LU: We all hear about the hype that cell phones have destroyed a generation of teenagers. Maybe. But, there's a positive side too. There are lots of good ways to use apps to foster connection. In friendship and for many people, the best way to make friends is to physically go out and spend time with them. But not everybody can leave their house. Particularly, the extreme elderly tend to be housebound. But a phone or an iPad can help them to connect and escape isolation.

There are lots of ways technologies foster things like learning. Most of the world can't afford the tuition at Penn. Can we get at least some semblance of that otherwise? First, through simple technologies like YouTube videos and then through better technologies like interactive technology. I think there are lots of cases where we'll see these sorts of interactions.

I'm interested in trying to take a lot of the simple positive interventions like [writing] three things that you're grateful for and have an interactive system that helps remind you. It looks at your calendar that says, it's Sunday night, hey, I've opted in to do this, and it sends me a little message if I haven't done my gratitude. 

What are the ways that I can take the technology and have it help me be the person I want to be? One of the obvious things we found is to use your calendar. I'd like to go to the gym and exercise. Great, why don't you put it in your calendar? Which days? What times? Should I send you a reminder? Yes? No? Okay. Opt in, opt out. Great. That's a super simple technology. If you put it in your calendar, big studies show you're more likely to actually go to the gym (e.g., Bharmal et al., 2020).

People want technology to be fancy. I'm happy with advanced technology; I use ChatGPT-4 all the time. But don't neglect calendars. Don't neglect email. Don't neglect just being able to FaceTime someone. There are lots of positive technologies. Is the time on Tik Tok making me feel more connected to my family or not? Okay, maybe that's not a positive technology. Is that text message that I send my daughter when she's in finals making her feel more connected? I think so. I hope so.

I think lots of these are quite positive and people forget that having a cell phone is both a distraction and a great way to stay connected to people. It’s definitely out of the bag, as they say. We're not going to put it back in, so can we use it to help drive reminder systems to connection?

Barbara Frederickson says that you get a better connection physically (Kok & Fredrickson, 2010). Would I rather see you face to face? Yeah. It's crappy that you're not sitting across the table for me. I have a little low-resolution image of you on my Mac. But you know what? It's still better than not being able to talk to you. This is a positive use of technology, right? Absolutely.

 Connection is so important, and we know that it's good for physical and mental health. Let's try to foster it.

MM: In a recent blog, Bill Gates offered ideas about how AI may help to advance and reduce inequities in fields including health care, medical care, and education. What are some ways you anticipate AI will augment our work as positive psychology practitioners?

LU: I think the biggest single one—but maybe it's biased since I'm in the field—is education. [AI] is going to help democratize education. Already Khan Academy has made it really easy for motivated high school students who don't have the best teachers to get feedback on their essays, support, and encouragement. 

Interactive support, planning, and social planning will be huge. . . I certainly think information access will help.

I do worry about the negative side where the rich get richer. Those who are able to access these systems more freely and know more about them are going to become more productive and get more money. On the other hand, I like the notion that says that rather than being wealthy and having your high school kid be able to buy an expensive tutor to write those college application essays, someone who's poor can run the essay through GPT and get similar editing advice. That seems a bit of an equalizer.

It can be a huge win for people who are non-native English speakers. A lot of my students are speaking English as a second language. Historically, people look at them and say things like, “That's obviously written by someone who doesn't speak English well,” and there's discrimination. They'll be able to run their [papers] through Grammarly or ChatGPT. [Their papers] will come out in fluid English. Now they're judged based on the quality of their ideas rather than whether they speak the English that people are looking for. I think that sort of piece is going to be super good. 

MM: You spoke a bit about this, but can you share any concerns you have about the negative impact of these emerging technologies on human flourishing and well-being? 

LU: I have three enormous concerns. One is misinformation. It's going to be harder and harder to tell if this video is real, if this text message is real, if this is in fact a call from my daughter, or if this is a bot. Is this really what Trump said or is this what someone said Trump said? I think this is a huge problem which is going to lead potentially to a lot of distrust and lack of generalized trust, which turns out to be one of the things that makes societies good.

A positive attribute of society is if you meet a stranger, in general, you trust her. America is a fairly trusting society. [Despite] whatever things you may hear, most people think that most people are good. Most people are trustworthy and honest, but in a world where it becomes much easier to fake things, I worry that's going to erode trust, and it's going to be really hard to have election discussions.

The second concern I worry about is synthetic friends. 

If you look at companies like Replika, you can get a nice friend. This happens all over the world. They're more popular in Japan and China, but the US has plenty of them. Rather than going through the annoying hassle of actually talking to humans who aren't perfect—sometimes they tell me things I don't want to hear, and they aren't always available. I can have something that always tells me everything I want and is nice and friendly and supportive.

Maybe that's partly good in the short run, but I worry a little bit that it's like having that nice buttery sugary dessert that is [also] good in the short run. Don't get me wrong, I love sugary buttery desserts, but if you eat too many of them, you will die younger.

I worry that the same thing is going to happen in human relations, that we will become so

accustomed to having that agreeable assistant [who] says whatever you want. We [may] lose the ability to have the social skills or the motivation. It’s just too easy. Teenagers in particular won’t have to deal with the annoying factor of dealing with humans and will get incredible rewards of building long-term relationships.

 The third concern is job displacement. These tools may make you 20%-30% more productive; maybe that’s awesome. We can stop spending so much time drafting up and quickly summarizing information. This may be good for education. We’ll shift on the positive side even more away from memorizing stupid facts and more toward asking interesting questions. I think education will be so much better. Students don’t need to worry anymore about grammar or need to worry about memorizing times tables [or calculating] the square root by hand.

But there’s going to be a lot of displacement. If you’re 30% more efficient, maybe we need 30% fewer employees. That’s a bunch of people who now need to get re-skilled and do something different. I worry that we’re not well set up for that transition.

MM: In your work in the World Well-Being Project, you use words to help measure and even predict well-being. If we change the words we use, do we know if this will impact our well-being?

LU: This is partly unclear and partly, yes. So, if you look at communities where everybody is angry and frustrated you’re going to have more heart disease and more unhappiness. There [are] a lot of studies that show that if your friends are positive and happy, you’re more likely to be happy (Fowler & Christakis, 2008). And if they are depressed and grumpy, you’re more likely to be depressed or unhappy. These things are somewhat contagious, and you catch moods.

You should be concerned about other people. Helping other people’s good for your well-being; this is empathy. On the other hand, there is contagious empathy, that is, if your friends are upset and you share their upset and their pain and their anger, you are less effective at helping them, and you’re probably less well-off too.

I like to make a distinction between helping people, catching their unhappiness, and [being] cautiously optimistic. I want something for my text messages that says “Hey Lyle, would you like me to make this just a little bit friendlier and warmer?” There are lots of products—things like Grammarly and Crystal—that are coming out to offer these pieces. Microsoft will soon have these [tools] built in. I think it’s going to be positive.

If I’m inadvertently curt, my messaging system will make [my text] a little longer and friendlier. My wife and my students will be a little happier. I’d be perfectly happy to have my [devices] say “Hey, Lyle you haven’t complimented your students in a while, wouldn’t you like to do that?”

With these little nudges, will they be better off if I compliment them? Probably, yes. So does language matter? If we can make our language better, we’re going to be better off.

MM: For the positive psychology practitioners who don’t have access to the programs you use to analyze language, do you have any insights on how we can leverage technology or awareness of language to help us foster well-being?

LU:  I think people will have these tools soon. Again, Microsoft is rolling out these tools within a year. All this stuff will become way, way more common. Watch for the tools coming out. If you’ve got a cell phone, you’ll have these tools available soon. The second piece is to pay attention. What effects does your language have on others? And conversely, what effects does others’ language have on you? For me, this is particularly relevant in text messages. When I’m talking with someone face to face, I get that immediate feedback. Whereas [with] emails and texts,  it takes a moment to think, “How does this come across? How will the recipient feel?” It’s important to pay attention particularly if there is no immediate feedback. If things go wrong, pick up the phone so you get feedback.

MM: Is there anything else we should have asked or anything more you want to share?

LU: One piece is language and another is the process of making your life [better]. I think people underestimate the value of fairly simple technology. When I was a boy, we didn’t have phones, and we had to remember to get together in two weeks. We’d forget, and we’d lose touch with each other. My daughter is so much better with keeping in touch with her friend that she has known since she was four because at age six, she could FaceTime them. Some of the older generation needs to be reminded that some of these technologies can be used as simple reminders to do the things that are important. It’s not a crutch, it’s a way to make your life more efficient. You will see the tools coming out to make your language more efficient, but people are already forgetting to use the tools they have. Your calendar is your friend.

MM: If our readers want to learn more, where should they go?

LU: The World Well-Being Project has lots of stuff. Or feel free to email me with questions.

References

Bharmal, T., Hassenzahl, M., & Laschke, M. (2020). From intentions to successful action: Supporting the creation and realization of implementation intentions. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1–8). https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3383018

Buchholz, K. (2023, January 24). ChatGPT sprints to one million users. Statista. https://www.statista.com/chart/29174/time-to-one-million-users/

Fowler, J. H., & Christakis, N. A. (2008). Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network: Longitudinal Analysis of the Framingham Heart Study Social Network. British Medical Journal, 337(a2338). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.a2338

Kok, B. E., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2010). Upward spirals of the heart: Autonomic flexibility, as indexed by vagal tone, reciprocally and prospectively predicts positive emotions and social connectedness. Biological psychology, 85(3), 432–436.

Peterson, C., & Park, N. (2009). Classifying and measuring strengths of character. In S. J. Lopez & C. R. Snyder (Eds.), Oxford handbook of positive psychology, 2nd edition (pp. 25–33). Oxford University Press.

Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. Oxford University Press and American Psychological Association

Ruby, D. (2023, May 18). 57+ ChatGPT statistics 2023 (Updated data with infographics). DemandSage. https://www.demandsage.com/chatgpt-statistics/

About the Expert: Dr. Lyle Ungar is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a B.S. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from MIT. Dr. Ungar directed Penn's Executive Masters of Technology Management (EMTM) Program for a decade, and served as Associate Director of the Penn Center for BioInformatics (PCBI).  He has published over 400 articles, and is co-inventor on ten patents.

Lyle’s current research focuses on using natural language processing and explainable AI for psychological research, including analyzing social media and cell phone sensor data to better understand the drivers of physical and mental well-being.