[R]aising children ... was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these po… - Martin E P Seligman

For example, if I promise you one thousand dollars to turn to this page, you will probably choose to do so, and you will succeed. If, however, I promise you one thousand dollars to contract the pupil of your eye, using only willpower, you may choose to do it, but that won’t matter. You are helpless to contract your pupil. Page turning is under your voluntary control; the muscles that change your pupillary size are not.

Expectation always introduces an element of bias, because it anticipates outcomes without waiting to see what actually happens. However, if expectations are consistently modified in the face of experience in a (*)-like or Bayesian manner, then over time, the influence of initial expectations will tend to diminish as new experiences “tune” expectations to actual frequencies through the reduction of prediction error. As experience grows in magnitude and diversity, Bayesians point out, initial expectations tend to “wash out,” and individuals who began from different starting assumptions, but encountered similar experience, will tend to converge in their expectations. And importantly, they will tend to converge on the actual “natural statistics” of their environment

They argued that these perpetrators have high self-esteem, and that their unwarranted self-esteem causes violence. Baumeister’s work suggests that if you teach unwarrantedly high self-esteem to children, problems will ensue. A sub-group of these children will also have a mean streak in them. When these children confront the real world, and it tells them they are not as great as they have been taught, they will lash out with violence. So it is possible that the twin epidemics among young people in the United States today, depression and violence, both come from this misbegotten concern: valuing how our young people feel about themselves more highly than how we value how well they are doing in the world.