deepstash
Beta
Self-Distancing: What It Is and How You Can Use It to Make Better Decisions
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.
210 SAVES
This is a professional note extracted from an online article.
Read more efficiently
Save what inspires you
Remember anything
IDEA EXTRACTED FROM:
3
Key Ideas
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 thinking about an event that you’ve experienced, where the self who is analyzing the event is considered to be distinct from the self who experienced it.
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.
SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
5
Key Ideas
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.
2 more ideas
3
Key Ideas
Sadness as a Person
A study found that people feel less sad if the feeling of sadness is personified, as it leads to a certain distance between the person and the emotion.
Detached from Sadness
By imagining that Sadness is a person, the sad person becomes detached from his/her sadness.
They can picture the sadness to have human traits or mannerisms, leading to an internal regulation of that particular emotion.
Not for the other Emotions
While this approach of humanizing the emotion appears to work for sadness, it can make a happy person less happy, if that feeling is humanized.
Other complex emotions like guilt and embarrassment may have any kind of effect and are yet to be studied.
6
Key Ideas
Awe brings perspective
Each of us is the protagonist of our own life. Our goals feel like the most important thing in our world.
But every now and then, a moment of awe challenges our understanding of the world...
Defining Awe
Awe is an emotional response to being in the presence of something greater than yourself, and that exceeds current knowledge structures.
Awe is a positive emotion and has a broadening effect on our thoughts and actions.
Awe-inducing stimuli
Feelings of awe have historically been recorded when individuals encounter contact with a "higher" power.
In modern times, the main triggers of awe are philosophical ones such as literature, music, paintings, and nature. Examples include natural wonders or events such as childbirth.
3 more ideas