Why speaking to yourself in the third person makes you wiser britannica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from britannica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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This article was originally published at Aeon on August 7, 2019, and has been republished under Creative Commons.
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.
Wisdom psychology wise thoughts words and deeds | Applied psychology cambridge.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cambridge.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A better approach to resolving interpersonal disagreements, according to new research published in the journal
Psychological Science, is to train yourself in advance to reason about interpersonal conflicts in a wiser manner.
“People typically fail to reason wisely when facing social conflicts, so we designed an intervention to help them,” said Igor Grossmann, director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and the lead author on the paper. “Our fundamental idea was to train people to see situations from a more detached, third-person perspective. This approach enables people to recognize the limits to their knowledge, acknowledge different ways the conflict may play out, and consider and balance multiple viewpoints.”