Give it a try, you might be surprised.
 |
| Photo by Martin Barraud, Getty Images |
By David Robson, Aeon
We credit Socrates with the insight that ‘the
unexamined life is not worth living’ and that to ‘know thyself’ is the
path to true wisdom. But is there a right and a wrong way to go about
such self-reflection?
Simple rumination – the process of churning your
concerns around in your head – isn’t the answer. It’s likely to cause
you to become stuck in the rut of your own thoughts and immersed in the
emotions that might be leading you astray. Certainly, research
has shown that people who are prone to rumination also often suffer
from impaired decision making under pressure, and are at a substantially
increased risk of depression.
Instead, the scientific research suggests that you
should adopt an ancient rhetorical method favoured by the likes of
Julius Caesar and known as ‘illeism’ – or speaking about yourself in the
third person (the term was coined in 1809 by the poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge from the Latin ille meaning ‘he, that’). If I was
considering an argument that I’d had with a friend, for instance, I
might start by silently thinking to myself: ‘David felt frustrated
that…’ The idea is that this small change in perspective can clear your
emotional fog, allowing you to see past your biases.
A bulk of research has already shown that this kind
of third-person thinking can temporarily improve decision making. A preprint at PsyArxiv
finds that it can also bring long-term benefits to thinking and
emotional regulation. The researchers said this was ‘the first evidence
that wisdom-related cognitive and affective processes can be trained in
daily life, and of how to do so’.
The findings are the brainchild of the psychologist
Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Canada, whose work on
the psychology of wisdom was one of the inspirations for my book on intelligence and how we can make wiser decisions.
Grossmann’s aim is to build a strong experimental footing for the study of wisdom,
which had long been considered too nebulous for scientific enquiry. In
one of his earlier experiments, he established that it’s possible to
measure wise reasoning and that, as with IQ, people’s scores matter. He
did this by asking participants to discuss out-loud a personal or
political dilemma, which he then scored on various elements of thinking
long-considered crucial to wisdom, including: intellectual humility; taking the perspective of others; recognising uncertainty; and having the capacity to search for a compromise. Grossmann found
that these wise-reasoning scores were far better than intelligence
tests at predicting emotional wellbeing, and relationship satisfaction –
supporting the idea that wisdom, as defined by these qualities,
constitutes a unique construct that determines how we navigate life
challenges.
Working with Ethan Kross at the University of
Michigan in the United States, Grossmann has also looked for ways to
improve these scores – with some striking experiments demonstrating the
power of illeism. In a series of laboratory experiments,
they found that people tend to be humbler, and readier to consider
other perspectives, when they are asked to describe problems in the
third person.
Imagine, for instance, that you are arguing with
your partner. Adopting a third-person perspective might help you to
recognise their point of view or to accept the limits of your
understanding of the problem at hand. Or imagine you are considering
moving jobs. Taking the distanced perspective could help you to weigh up
the benefits and the risks of the move more dispassionately.
***
This earlier research involved
only short-term interventions, however – meaning it was far from clear
whether wiser reasoning would become a long-term habit with regular
practice at illeism.
To find out, Grossmann’s research team asked nearly
300 participants to describe a challenging social situation, while two
independent psychologists scored them on the different aspects of wise
reasoning (intellectual humility, etc). The participants then had to
keep a diary for four weeks. Each day, they had to describe a situation
they’d just experienced, such as a disagreement with a colleague or some
bad news. Half were prompted to do so in the first-person, while the
others were encouraged to describe their trials from a third-person
perspective. At the end of the study, all participants repeated the
wise-reasoning test.
Grossmann’s results were exactly as he’d hoped.
While the control participants showed no overall change in their
wise-reasoning scores, those using illeism improved in their
intellectual humility, perspective-taking and capacity to find a
compromise.
A further stage of the study suggested that this
newfound wisdom also translated into greater emotional regulation and
stability. After they had finished the four-week diary intervention,
participants had to predict how their feelings of trust, frustration or
anger about a close family member or friend might change over the next
month – then, after that month was up, they reported back on how things
had actually gone.
In line with other work on ‘affective forecasting’,
the people in the control condition overestimated their positive
emotions and underestimated the intensity of their negative emotions
over the course of the month. In contrast, those who’d kept a
third-person diary were more accurate. A closer look revealed that their
negative feelings, as a whole, were more muted, and that’s why their
rosy predictions were more accurate. It seems their wiser reasoning had
allowed them to find better ways to cope.
I find these emotion and relationship effects
particularly fascinating, considering the fact that illeism is often
considered to be infantile. Just think of Elmo in the children’s TV show
Sesame Street, or the intensely irritating Jimmy in the sitcom Seinfeld
– hardly models of sophisticated thinking. Alternatively, it can be
taken to be the sign of a narcissistic personality – the very opposite
of personal wisdom. After all, Coleridge believed that it was a ruse to
cover up one’s own egotism: just think of the US president’s critics who
point out that Donald Trump often refers to himself in the third
person. Clearly, politicians might use illeism for purely rhetorical
purposes but, when applied to genuine reflection, it appears to be a
powerful tool for wiser reasoning.
As the researchers point out, it would be exciting
to see whether the benefits apply to other forms of decision making
besides the more personal dilemmas examined in Grossmann’s study.
There’s reason to think that they might. Previous experiments
have shown, for instance, that rumination leads to worse choices in
poker (hence why expert players strive for a detached, emotionally
distanced attitude), and that greater emotional awareness and regulation
can improve performance on the stock market.
In the meantime, Grossmann’s work continues to prove
that the subject of wisdom is worthy of rigorous experimental study –
with potential benefits for all of us. It is notoriously difficult to
increase general intelligence through brain-training, but these results
suggest that wiser reasoning and better decision making are within
everyone’s power.
