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Hamish Joy
@hjoy2020
Psychological Distancing As A Tool
The executive functioning also allows us to perform the following processes important for psychological distancing.
- Shifting: The ability to redirect our attention to another aspect of a problem, or from one item to another.
- Response inhibition: The ability to restrain our emotional response.
- Updating: The ability to 'update' the information we are using after shifting our attention and inhibiting our initial response.
The act of psychological distancing is mostly atheoretical, meaning very little research describes how psychological distancing as a tool develops and functions in humans.
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Graham A.
@gra_maa136
Self-Distancing: What It Is and How You Can Use It to Make Better Decisions
Self-distancing
The act of increasing the psychological distance from your own subjective perspective when assessing events that you experience.
Is an external perspective that you can use when th...
Benefits of self-distancing
- It can help people cope with difficult events from their past.
- It can help people deal with socially distressful situations.
- Useful because of our tendency to display high levels of wise reasoning when we give advice to others, but not when we decide how to act for ourselves.
- It reduces decisional biases and improves decision-making during times of information overload.
How to create self-distance
- Use self-distancing language: refer to yourself in the second or third-person.
- Try to view the situation from an alternative viewpoint, that is different from your own.
- Try to visualize the perspective of someone you admire, and then ask yourself what would they do in that situation.
- Try expressive writing: write about your thoughts and feelings when you’re trying to analyze an event that you’ve experienced.
Laksh Bedi
@lakshbbd
The Egocentric Bias: Why It's Hard to See Things from a Different Perspective
The egocentric bias
It is a cognitive bias that causes people to rely too much on their own point of view when they examine or remember events in their life.
This means that people tend to either underest...
Examples of the egocentric bias
- When you are giving a public talk, you assume that your nervousness is more apparent to others than is actually the case.
- You overestimate the amount of work that you contributed to a group project.
- You might believe that your colleagues all share your political beliefs and social values.
- You might remember yourself as having been the key player in a past event, despite the fact that you only played a relatively minor role in it.
What causes the egocentric bias
It occurs primarily due to the fact that we tend to naturally examine and remember events primarily through our personal point of view.
Even when we realize that we should adjust our perspective to see things through other people’s eyes, we tend to anchor this new perspective to our own, and we often fail to adjust from our original viewpoint enough to properly assess how other people feel.
Michael Frost
@mrfrost
The ‘Batman Effect’: How having an alter ego empowers you
The creation of an alter ego
Creating a fictional persona is a strategy that involves taking a step back from our immediate feelings to allow us to think rationally about a situation. It allows us to rein in feelings like anxi...
Changing perspective and emotion regulation
Research shows that small shifts in perspective can help people in controlling their emotions.
In an experiment, when people viewed themselves as "distanced" from a situation, they were less anxious than the group that viewed themselves as in the middle of the situation.
Thinking in the third person
Self-distancing enables people to focus on the bigger picture rather than concentrating on immediate feelings. It improves the sense of emotional regulation, self-control, and general poise.
In a study, participants were asked to practice self-distancing when faced with various kinds of food - for example, fruit instead of candy. When participants asked, "What does David want?" instead of "What do I want?" they were more likely to choose the healthier option.
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