Speaking to Yourself in the Third Person Makes You Wiser
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
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. Now 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 recent book on intelligence and how we can make wiser decisions.
-- submitted from IRC
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