Polyanna Principle Poem by gershon hepner

According to the Polyanna principle
we think we are invincible
when we about ourselves are told
good things. Bad things will leave us cold,
which is the anti-Polyanna
principle. Please do not throw a spanner
into my works, by telling me
about my faults, since I’m fault free,
at least that’s what I always think
as soon as I have had a drink.
The Pollyanna principle or Pollyannaism describes the tendency for people to agree with positive statements describing themselves. It is sometimes called positivity bias. The phenomenon is similar to the Forer effect. Research indicates that, at the unconscious level, our minds have a tendency to focus on the optimistic while, at the conscious level, we have a tendency to focus on the negative. This unconscious bias towards the positive is often described as Pollyanna Principle. The concept as described by Matlin and Stang in 1978 used the archetype of Pollyanna, a young girl with infectious optimism (M. W. Matlin, D.J. Stang, The Pollyanna principle: selectivity in language, memory, and thought (Schenkman,1978) .

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