Strangers to Ourselves

by Timothy D Wilson

  In one study, for example, the participants were college students who were either moderately depressed or nondepressed. In the rumination condition, the students were asked to spend eight minutes thinking about their emotions and traits-that is, to try to understand their feelings, why they felt that way, their character, why they turned out the way they did, and who they strived to be. In a distraction condition, the students spent eight minutes thinking about mundane topics unrelated to themselves, such as "clouds forming in the sky" and "the shiny surface of a trumpet." People's moods were measured before and after they completed the rumination or distraction task. Rumination caused depressed participants to become even more depressed, whereas the distraction task made them less depressed. Rumination had little effect on people who were not depressed.

  When the depressed students ruminated they focused on the negative side of things, as if their dysphoria was a filter that kept out any positive thoughts. Compared with the other groups-such as the nondepressed students who ruminated and the depressed students who did not ruminate-they brought to mind more negative memories from their pasts (e.g., "Everyone passed the test except me") and felt that negative events in their current lives, such as getting into arguments with their friends, were more common. In another study, people who reported that they often ruminated when they felt depressed were more likely to be depressed a year later, even after their initial levels of depression were controlled for. In short, unhappiness and ruminating about your unhappiness is a bad combination that leads to more depression.'

  FINDING MEANING THROUGH INTROSPECTION

  Imagine that you received these instructions:

  For the next three days, I would like for you to write about your very deepest thoughts and feelings about an extremely important emotional issue that has affected you and your life. In your writing, I'd like you to really let go and explore your very deepest emotions and thoughts. You might tie your topic to your relationships with others, including parents, lovers, friends, or relatives; to your past, your present, or your future; or to who you have been, who you would like to be, or who you are now."

  Jamie Pennebaker and his colleagues have given these instructions to hundreds of people, including college students, community members, maximum-security prisoners, people laid off from their jobs, and new mothers. Most people take it quite seriously and write about personal, often deeply troubling incidents, such as the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, or sexual and physical abuse. Not surprisingly, people find it upsetting to write about such events and, right after doing so, report more distress than do control participants who write about superficial topics (such as their plans for their day).

  As time goes by, however, people show remarkable benefits from the writing exercise. Compared with people in the control condition, those who write about emotional experiences report better moods, get better grades in college, miss fewer days of work, show improved immune system functioning, and are less likely to visit physicians. Writing about emotional experiences is distressing in the short run but has quite positive long-term effects."

  Why does writing about emotional experiences-often very painful ones-have more beneficial effects than the other kinds of introspection we have discussed? One possibility is that people tend to hide or suppress their negative emotional experiences, and that the stress caused by constant inhibition takes its toll on their mental and physical health. Having the opportunity to express traumatic events might have a cathartic effect, improving people's well-being by removing the stress caused by inhibition. Although inhibition may well cause stress and contribute to health problems, there is no evidence that Pennebaker's writing exercise works by lowering inhibition. For example, people who write about events that they have already discussed with others do as well as people who write about events they have kept secret.

  Rather, writing seems to work by helping people make sense of a negative event by constructing a meaningful narrative that explains it. Pennebaker has analyzed the hundreds of pages of writing his participants provided, and found that the people who improved the most were those who began with rather incoherent, disorganized descriptions of their problem and ended with coherent, organized stories that explained the event and gave it meaning.

  Why is rumination harmful whereas Pennebaker's writing exercise is beneficial? One key is that people often ruminate when they are depressed, and the depression focuses their attention on negative thoughts and memories, making it difficult to construct a meaningful, adaptive narrative about the problems. Rumination is a repetitive, spiraling kind of thought whereby people can't stop thinking about things in a negative light, like Mr. Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter: "He kept vigils, likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter darkness; sometimes with a glimmering lamp; and sometimes, viewing his own face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he could throw upon it. He thus typified the constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not purify, himself."" In contrast, Pennebaker's participants, who are typically not depressed, are able to take a more objective look at their problems and to construct a narrative that helps explain it in a more adaptive manner. In fact, Pennebaker's technique does not work as well right after a severe trauma, when people are too upset to examine their situation objectively.2'

  Constructing a meaningful narrative can also keep people from trying to suppress their thoughts about a distressing topic. If an event has no coherent explanation it is likely to keep coming to mind, leading to further rumination, or possibly to an attempt to push the thoughts away. Deliberate attempts at thought suppression is a losing exercise, as Daniel Wegner and his colleagues found. People may be able to succeed in not thinking about something for a short time, but often thoughts about the unwanted topic come flooding back. Under some circumstances, such as when people are tired or preoccupied, thought suppression backfires, leading to even more thought about the unwanted topic. An event that has been explained and assimilated into one's life story is less likely to keep coming to mind, triggering attempts to suppress it.Z'

  The narrative metaphor helps explain all the examples of everyday introspection we have considered. Analyzing reasons focuses people on bad "data," information that is easy to verbalize but may have little to do with true feelings. Consequently, people construct stories about their feelings from faulty information. Rumination and thought suppression can be harmful in at least two ways: they can make it difficult to engage in the construction of a new narrative, because people are preoccupied with uncontrollable, unwanted thoughts; and, to the extent that people do construct new narratives, they can focus people's attention on negative, pejorative thoughts. Pennebaker's writing exercise is the only kind of introspection we have seen so far in which people are able to construct meaningful stories that have beneficial effects.

  PSYCHOTHERAPY: THE CONSTRUCTION OF BETTER NARRATIVES

  The psychiatrist Anna Fels relates the story of an elderly patient who came to see her, not with the common complaint of being depressed or anxious, but of having difficulty coping with his impending death. He was suffering from terminal cancer and claimed that it was not thoughts of dying that bothered him, but the process of dying itself. The narrative that he had used to explain his normal life no longer applied, and he was struggling with the construction of a new story to explain his final days. "I'm becoming someone else," he said. "But I don't want to endlessly talk about it, particularly with my wife. She's got enough to deal with."

  Dr. Fels asked him to tell the story of his illness, beginning with his diagnoses and leading up to the present time. Gradually the man found meaning and coherence in his final challenge: "Over several sessions his story continued, and I think both the patient and I were surprised at how much better he began to feel ... What were we doing? Surely it was not classic, psychodynamic psychotherapy aimed at insight into unconscious motives and wishes. Nor was I doing the psychological equivalent of hand-holding. Something else was going on."22

&
nbsp; Part of what was happening, Fels relates, is that the man had become extremely isolated, with no one to speak openly with about his disease. The bond he was able to form with Fels, as he spoke openly of his new life, was extremely comforting. In her words, their sessions "brought him back into the shared social world."

  I suspect that there was more to it than forming new social ties, as important as this surely was. By talking freely about his struggles with his disease, the man was able to construct a coherent narrative that made better sense of his new life, much like the people in Pennebaker's studies who benefited from writing about traumatic events. I do not mean to imply that psychotherapy and the Pennebaker writing exercise are interchangeable. It would be absurd to suggest that writing about a trauma by oneself, fifteen minutes at a time for three days, is a substitute for intensive psychotherapy, in which people spend months or years exploring their problems with the help of a trained therapist. For one thing, psychotherapy is an intensely social experience, allowing for the kinds of social bonding that Fels discusses. Nonetheless, psychotherapy and the writing process have an important commonality. In both cases, people succeed in developing new narratives about themselves that are more beneficial than the narratives they held before.

  The evidence that psychotherapy works by changing people's narratives can be summarized quite succinctly. First, psychotherapy has been proved to be beneficial in well-controlled studies, but the exact form of psychotherapy does not matter much. This is true even for therapies that, on the face of it, hold fundamentally conflicting views about how to treat psychological problems, such as psychodynamic therapy (with its emphasis on childhood memories, unconscious thoughts and feelings, and insight) and behavior therapy (with its emphasis on current behavior and what maintains it). In a classic study of the treatment of depression, for example, Bruce Sloane and colleagues found that psychodynamic and behavior therapies were equally effective (both were superior to a no-treatment control group).

  Second, therapists of all persuasions provide their clients with a new narrative to explain their problems. A key finding in Sloane's study was that the psychodynamic and behavior therapists offered their clients the same number of interpretations about the causes of the clients' problems (albeit quite different interpretations). Finally, clients who adopt the views and interpretations offered by their therapist improve the most in therapy."

  In short, psychotherapy seems to be a beneficial process whereby clients adopt a new narrative about their problem that is more helpful than the story they told before, like Fels's patient who was able to find meaning in his struggles with cancer. To be sure, a major revision of one's life narrative can be a difficult journey that requires the guidance of a skilled therapist. There may not be one "true" story that people must adopt to get better, however; there may be a range of healthy narratives.

  On what basis can we say that one self-story is healthier than another? Self-stories should be accurate, I believe, in a simple sense: they should capture the nature of the person's nonconscious goals, feelings, and temperaments. But how can people go about constructing stories that correspond to their adaptive unconscious? What kinds of information should they use?

  Looking Outward to Know Ourselves

  -Robert Burns, "To a Louse" (1786)

  How do people know what story to tell? "Inside information" is not the only source material for self-biographies. There are various kinds of "outside information" that people might use as well-information that, in some cases, might be superior to what people can learn by looking inward.

  Knowing Ourselves by Studying Psychological Science

  Many people learn about their bodies by reading about medical research, such as studies on the dangers of tobacco, saturated fat, and ultraviolet radiation. Given that we have no direct, privileged access to how our pulmonary or cardiovascular systems work, we are at the mercy of such outside sources of information to inform us about how things like smoking tobacco influence our health. I suggest that the same is true in the psychological realm. People can learn a lot about themselves from reading reports of controlled psychological studies.

  It can be quite a leap, of course, to infer something about ourselves from research that reports the mean response of a large group of people, especially if the group is unlike us in important respects. Many of us do not want to think that we are like "the average person." But the same problem exists when we read about medical research. We cannot be certain that we will respond the same way to tobacco or saturated fat as the average person did in a study conducted in Norway, and in fact might prefer to believe that we are not "average" in this respect. In many medical and psychological studies, however, the amount of individual variation is relatively small, such that the findings hold true for most people. In other cases there is a considerable amount of individual variation; for example, some people can smoke cigarettes their entire lives and not get cancer, whereas other smokers get cancer at an early age. But even in these studies, the response of the average person is informative in a probabilistic sense. We cannot be certain that we will get cancer if we smoke, but we know that smoking increases the odds that we will.

  By the same token, there is a lot to be learned by reading about psychological research, even if it reports the responses of the average person. I offer two different examples: the extent to which people are influenced by advertising and whether people are prejudiced toward members of minority groups.

  ARE YOU INFLUENCED BY ADVERTISING?

  Suppose a new kind of television broadcasting is introduced from which all advertising as we know it has been eliminated. Yes, it's really true; you can watch your favorite television programs with absolutely no interruptions. Sounds great, doesn't it? The catch is that advertisements are still present in the form of subliminal messages. Pictures and slogans, such as images of political candidates and the message "Vote for Binkley" are flashed so quickly that you do not consciously see them.

  Recognizing that such a drastic change in advertising will be controversial, the networks give you a choice. By pushing a button on your remote control, you can watch programs the old-fashioned way, in which regular, everyday advertisements interrupt the program every fifteen minutes or so, or the new, futuristic way, in which all the ads are broadcast subliminally. Which kind of advertisements would you choose to watch?

  When I posed this question to a sample of college students, 74 percent said they would prefer the old-fashioned advertisements. A typical response was "I want to be aware of the choices I make instead of letting other people make the choices for me." Makes sense, doesn't it? Why would we want to let messages enter our minds that could influence us in ways we can't control, without even knowing that we are being influenced? Sounds like an Orwellian nightmare come true.

  The only problem is that if people want to avoid being controlled by advertising, then they are making precisely the wrong choice. Subliminal messages have little or no effect on consumer behavior or attitudes when used in ad campaigns, whereas there is considerable evidence that everyday, run-of-the-mill advertising does.

  But how could individual consumers possibly know this? By definition they could not know whether they were influenced by subliminal ads, because they would not even know when they had "seen" one. However, it is also difficult to know how much we are influenced by everyday ads we see on television and in the print media, for all the reasons I have discussed. People cannot discover through simple introspection the extent to which seeing an ad for Tylenol influences their purchases the next time they go to the grocery store, just as they cannot easily judge, through introspection, whether smoking cigarettes will give them cancer. It is quite possible that they are being influenced more than they think.

  What can we learn from psychological research? Words hidden in movies do not cause people to line up at the concession stand, and subliminal messages in self-help tapes do not (unfortunately!) help us to quit smoking or lose weight. Nor is there any evidence that implanting se
xual images in cake icing increases sales, despite popular claims to the contrary.'

  This is not to say that subliminal messages never have an effect-just that they have not been shown to do so in everyday advertising. Under very carefully controlled laboratory conditions, subliminally presented information can have subtle effects on people's emotions and judgments. We encountered such a case in Chapter 2, in a study by John Bargh and Paula Pietromonaco. The researchers flashed words having to do with certain personality traits on a computer screen at subliminal levels, and found that people used these traits when subsequently interpreting another person's behavior. When the words "hostile," "insult," and "unkind" were flashed, for example, people were more likely to interpret another person's behavior in a negative light than when these words were not flashed-even though people had no awareness of having seen the words. Indeed, studies such as this demonstrate the ability of the adaptive unconscious to guide people's interpretations of the world behind the mental scenes.

  Replicating such effects in everyday life, however, in ways that would influence people's consumer behavior has proved very difficult, because the conditions necessary to get subliminal effects in the laboratory are very hard to duplicate in advertisements. The illumination of the room has to be exactly right, people have to be seated just the right distance from the screen, and there can be nothing else competing for their attention. I am unaware of any well-controlled study that succeeded in influencing people's behavior by placing subliminal messages in everyday advertising or audiotapes, despite many efforts to do so.