The Pollyanna Principle is a psychological phenomenon in which people tend to agree primarily with positive statements that apply to themselves.
The Pollyanna Mechanism is a defense mechanism by which the individual does not worry about anything and believes that everything is going well (normally), despite evidence to the contrary.
The essence of the phenomenon
The term was borrowed from the title of the cult American children’s writer Eleanor Porter’s book «Pollyanna», published in 1913. It described the situation that led to a detailed scientific development of this psychological phenomenon. Later psychological studies have shown that the mind of a person at an unconscious level is directly oriented towards the perception of exclusively positive messages, as if concerning him, as well as positively colored appeals addressed to him. The paradox lies in the fact that at the level of activity of consciousness, the human mind focuses on purely negative aspects (messages, news, statements and appeals with a negative characteristic addressed to them). Thus, by scientific observation, a direct contradiction between the tendencies of receptive activity in the unconscious and conscious planes can be revealed. Psychologists call the Pollyanna principle precisely the unconscious bias towards positive aspects.
For the first time in the psychological sphere of scientific knowledge, the concept of the Pollyanna principle was described in 1978 by psychologists Matlin and Stang, who turned to the archetypal literary image of the girl Pollyanna, the main character of the novel by Eleanor Porter, who was distinguished by a specific form of optimistic worldview, accustoming herself (more precisely, her mind) to joy and delight about every negative event that happened in her life. At the same time, this joy always turned out to be justified in words — the girl always found weighty arguments that, in the aspect of interpretation, turned a negative event into a positive one. She was brought up by a harsh and despotic aunt Polly, who in many ways limited her ward, but the fact that the girl enthusiastically reacted to any, even blatant injustice on the part of the teacher, led the latter into a stupor and confusion. Over time, her amazement grew into affection for the child, and Aunt Polly began to perceive the surrounding reality in the same way as her pupil Pollyanna.
At the same time, it is worth noting that the compilers of psychological tests for determining the type of personality claim (in particular, the compilers of the Mayer-Biggs test for type indication) that the most accurate tests are passed by individuals with a tendency to «pollyanism»; Naturally, there are special tests that can reveal this tendency.
Another interpretation of Pollyanna’s principle
It is related to the analysis of the mental activity of a person and a computer (electronic computers). Scientists who apply the Pollyanna principle to this area formulate the postulate that «machines must work, and people must think.» This axiomatic statement can be understood in terms of the idea of Pollyanism, since it voices the radical optimism of those who believe that the machine should do all the hard mental work for a person, freeing people from the need to think (hence the reference to Pollyanna). Also, the statement can be interpreted somewhat cynically — all the problems of mankind inevitably arise from the fact that machines are not able to do work, and people are not able to think, therefore, they must be reversed in functional terms.