Category: Psychology

You and I can talk, we can reach out and touch each other on the arm and we can see each other, but we can never know exactly what’s going on in the other’s head.

It’s partly why psychological science is so hard and it’s why understanding how we are viewed by others is so hard.

Research shows that we normally try to work out how others see us by thinking about how we view ourselves, then extrapolating from that. The problem with this approach is that to varying degrees we all suffer from an ‘egocentric bias’: because we’re locked inside our own heads, we find it difficult to see ourselves objectively. In some ways all the information we have clouds our judgement.

Think abstract

In a new study published in Psychological Science, Eyal and Epley (2010) recommend using abstract thinking to get a better view of ourselves, as seen by others.

In one crucial experiment the researchers split 106 participants into two groups and asked them to judge how attractive they were to another person. The first group adopted the standard tactic of putting themselves in the other person’s shoes, while the second group were asked to imagine how they would be rated by the other person in several months’ time.

People trying to put themselves in the other person’s shoes were awful at the task. In fact there was no association between how they thought others would rate them and how they actually did rate them. It seems when trying to judge how attractive we are to others, putting ourselves in their shoes doesn’t work.

But, when participants thought about their future selves, a technique that encourages abstract thinking, suddenly people’s accuracy shot up. They weren’t spot on, but they did much better. A further experiment confirmed these findings in general evaluations, suggesting this effect wasn’t restricted to attractiveness.

Zoom out

The fine-grained, low-level way we tend to think of ourselves hinders us from understanding how others view us. You would think we would be able to judge how attractive we are to others – after all we’ve all got access to mirrors – but in reality we find it difficult. In some ways we are blinded by how much we know. Thinking about ourselves in the future, though, moves our mind to a more abstract level, allowing us to better see ourselves through others’ eyes.

Although not examined in this research, the technique of thinking abstractly is likely to work best for people we don’t know so well. On the other hand we are likely to have an accurate view of how our family or friends see us.

The yawning gap between the way we experience ourselves from the inside compared with how others see us is why we often have so much trouble working out how we are evaluated by others. When we look at ourselves, we can’t see the wood for the trees; thinking abstractly allows us to zoom out and get the big picture.

Image credit: David Guimarães

Professional athletes are particularly prone to superstitions, perhaps because so much rides on split-second timing, or what seems like luck.

Two dominant US sportsmen with superstitious behaviour are golfer Tiger Woods who always wears a red shirt on Tournament Sundays and basketball player Michael Jordan who wore the same blue underwear throughout his career.

We tend to think of this behaviour as irrational, despite feeling the pull of superstition ourselves (see: why rational people hate to tempt fate). New research published in Psychological Science, however, asks whether these superstitions are irrational if they work.

Damisch et al. (2010) wanted to see if simple superstitions like crossing your fingers or using a lucky charm improved performance on both motor and mental tasks. The answer was a rather surprising yes.

In the first experiment, 28 participants made, on average, 33% more 1m putts when handed a ball branded ‘lucky’ by experimenters (6.4 compared with 4.6 without).

In two further experiments the effect of participant’s lucky charms on both memory and puzzle-solving was tested. Once again participants performed better in the presence of their lucky charms.

Confidence boost

To see why these superstitions improved performance, the researchers measured their self-efficacy (roughly equivalent to self-confidence) and goal-setting. This suggested that,

“The increased levels of self-efficacy that result from activating a superstition lead to higher self-set goals and greater persistence in the performance task.”

In other words, the lucky charms appeared to be giving people the confidence to aim higher and keep trying. The belief, however tenuous, that there may be something to a particular superstition could help release nervous tension.

This may be because superstitions allow us the illusion of control in what is a scary, random world. Perhaps that’s why superstitious behaviours to bring good luck are so common: they can sometimes work.

Image credit: billaday

People often dislike, criticise and put themselves down for their procrastination.

In a new study, though, Wohl et al. (2010) wondered if this self-blame may be counter-productive. By following 119 first-year students through two midterm examinations, the researchers tested whether self-forgiveness about procrastination before the first midterm was associated with less procrastination before the second midterm.

Although we tend to think that letting ourselves off easy will lead to more procrastination, Wohl et al. found the reverse:

“Forgiveness allows the individual to move past their maladaptive behaviour and focus on the upcoming examination without the burden of past acts to hinder studying.”

This may work because:

“…forgiving oneself for procrastinating has the beneficial effect of reducing subsequent procrastination by reducing negative affect associated with the outcome of an examination.”

Another way of thinking of this is in terms of approach and avoidance behaviours. Because we tend to avoid things that make us feel bad, pent up guilt about a task will make us avoid that task in the future. Self-forgiveness, though, may reduce guilt and so make us more likely to approach the task.

This explanation highlights the fact that we don’t just have emotional relationships with people, we also have them with tasks. Some tasks we like and look forward to like trusted old friends, while others feel more like muggers stealing away hours of our lives.

The design of this study doesn’t tell us how easy it is for those who are hard on themselves to begin exercising self-forgiveness because it only examined what participants did naturally. Unfortunately psychologists have little evidence about the process of self-forgiveness, they only know it’s ‘A Good Thing’.

Perhaps just knowing that self-forgiveness is healthy is beneficial. I hope for all our sakes it is.

→ Also check out: how to avoid procrastination.

Image credit: Emilie Ogez

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