Top psych prof proves success is in the cards

In the 1960s, Psychology Professor Martin Seligman could have teamed up with Mark Blumenthal, at the time a Penn student, to become a professional bridge player. Luckily for Penn students, he chose not to. Seligman was captain of Princeton University's undergraduate bridge team in 1964, and Blumenthal was Penn's captain. After graduation, Blumenthal asked Seligman to turn professional with him, but Seligman was adamant about going into psychology. While Blumenthal went on to become one of the world's best professional bridge players, Seligman earned his doctorate, joined Penn's faculty and became a well-known and accomplished author and professor. But Seligman, who has been teaching at Penn since 1970, may have gotten the last laugh. He recently participated in the first Worldwide Bridge Championships of the Internet. Teams around the world competed until they were narrowed down to Russia and America, which was represented by Seligman and his teammate, Paul Soloway. When the two teams competed in Boston, Seligman and Soloway vanquished their opponents to become the world champions. Seligman learned to play bridge from his parents when he was 7 years old. And though he may teach psychology here at Penn, Seligman says that in bridge he began, and will always be, Soloway's student. "I go back to school [with Paul]" he said. Soloway is generally thought to be the best bridge player in the world and holds more master points than any other player. Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1996, and he served as director of the clinical training program at Penn for 14 years. His areas of concentration are in studying learned helplessness, depression, optimism and pessimism, and he has written more than 15 books on these subjects. In one of his more widely acclaimed works, Learned Optimism, Seligman writes that optimistic people tend to win more. But he is a self-proclaimed pessimist when it comes to his bridge playing, explaining that when he plays badly he dwells on it but isn't "very good about doing anything about it." "I do what my book says you shouldn't do," he added. Going against his own advice must be working somehow, because in addition to being a renowned professor and published author, Seligman has fulfilled a high school prophesy by becoming a world champion in bridge.