Why Speaking to Yourself in the Third Person Makes You Wiser

[humble3d]

Why Speaking to Yourself in the Third Person Makes You Wiser

 

Give it a try, you might be surprised.

 

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.

 

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-speaking-to-yourself-in-the-third-person-makes-you-wiser

 

[aum]

The wisdom acquired with means external is lost quickly.  😉

[Dodel]

You can achieve the same effect by being married, I've spent years talking to myself.