Pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy is a dis­ci­pline tai­lor made for Amer­i­can cul­ture. Our cul­tur­al DNA inclines us towards opti­mism and pos­i­tive think­ing. These days we’ll even send pos­i­tive vibes your way, and what can be wrong with that? If you ask Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich, the author of the best­selling book Nick­el and Dimed, she’ll tell you what’s the prob­lem in 10 ani­mat­ed min­utes. Like the Philip Zim­bar­do video we fea­tured last week (The Secret Pow­ers of Time), this clip comes from the RSA YouTube Chan­nel, which we’ve now added to our col­lec­tion of Intel­li­gent YouTube chan­nels.

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Philip Zim­bar­do, a long­time Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor, is per­haps most well known for the famous Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment con­duct­ed in 1971. But, more recent­ly, he pub­lished a book called The Time Para­dox (2008) that makes some pret­ty intrigu­ing argu­ments about how our atti­tudes toward time, often uncon­scious ones, can strong­ly shape our per­son­al­i­ties and the kind of lives we lead. The video above takes one of Zim­bar­do’s lec­tures about the Time Para­dox and syncs it with some ani­mat­ed draw­ings. Great find by Yann. Feel free to send tips our way. Just click here.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Vik­tor Fran­kl, a trained Aus­tri­an psy­chi­a­trist, spent five long years in Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps dur­ing World War II, even­tu­al­ly end­ing up in Auschwitz. Dur­ing this time, he helped fel­low pris­on­ers cope with their ordeal and worked out a new approach to psy­chol­o­gy called Logother­a­py. This the­o­ry embod­ied Fran­kl’s belief that we’re all fun­da­men­tal­ly dri­ven by a “search for mean­ing.” It’s what makes us human, and we can con­tin­ue this search even in the worst of sit­u­a­tions. Not even the Nazis could take that away.  This belief sus­tained Fran­kl dur­ing his impris­on­ment, some­thing he wrote about in his epic work of sur­vival lit­er­a­ture called Man’s Search for Mean­ing. (It’s a must read.) The grainy footage above was record­ed at a con­fer­ence held in Toron­to (prob­a­bly dur­ing the 1960s). It gives you a quick intro­duc­tion to a man who, despite per­son­al­ly con­fronting the worst human­i­ty had to offer, still believed in our core good­ness and pos­si­bil­i­ties.

via TED Best of the Web