Dr. Timothy Wilson is the Sherrell Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. A prolific researcher, Dr. Wilson is a prevailing thought leader on the effects our unconscious mind has on behavior and decision-making. Dr. Wilson has also authored numerous published research papers on related social psychology topics. He is the author of one of my favorite books, “Redirect,” a book that takes a deep dive into the reframing concept of story editing. Dr. Wilson also penned the popular psychology book “Strangers to Ourselves.”
1) My personal summation of the construct of story editing goes like this, “story editing is a way for us to reframe our currently accepted narrative in ways that lead to positive outcomes.” Did I come close? In what ways do people misinterpret story editing?
I think that’s a good definition. I really like the story editing metaphor in some ways, but there are other ways in which it’s limited. I think the way in which it is limited is that the word “story” implies a fairly detailed narrative that people develop over time. But, as I say in “Redirect,” I believe it also applies to very quick interpretations of immediate situations. For example, someone says something to us that’s a little ambiguous. We’re not sure whether they’re being hostile or nice. We make an almost instantaneous construal of what they meant, which can be critical to how we respond. That doesn’t fit as well with the story metaphor because it’s not a story, it is our immediate interpretation.
Greg Walton and I went back and forth on what term to use in our recent Psychological Review article. Social psychologists love the word construal—it’s all about how we make meaning of ourselves and the social world, including immediate interpretations and more developed stories. In “Redirect,” I chose “stories” because it is a more recognizable word. But my misgivings about the word is that people might think story editing only applies to our long-term, developed narratives, when it also applies to people’s immediate construals of the social world.
2) What do you see as the most practical implications of your finding that for many of us we would rather be given an electric shock than being left alone with our own thoughts?
We’ve done a lot of research since the “shock” study was published and I believe we have since determined some ways that people can enjoy their thoughts. But it takes effort. The shock study shows me that when we are left to our own devices, people often don’t have good strategies for managing their thoughts in ways that are enjoyable. So at least some people revert to self-pain. If they had some better strategies, they might be more successful at enjoying their thoughts. People must have the willingness and the ability to concentrate on topics they enjoy. To make it a little easier, we’ve done some studies where we have people list some topics in advance that they would enjoy thinking about and then remind them of those topics during so-called “thinking periods,” which seems to make things a little more enjoyable.
3) Let’s talk about that more, you and your colleagues found that it becomes easier to focus on pleasure when we are given deliberate cues to do so. What have you found to be the best tactics to do just that, keep our focus on pleasurable aspects of life?
I personally find that having go-to topics to think about is useful, so that it doesn’t take a lot of effort to say, “Oh gosh, what am I going to think about?” One of my go-to topics is going for a hike on the Appalachian Trail and what that would be like … starting out in March in Georgia when it’s really cold and what if it snowed, and what kind of equipment would I have? I can pick up where I left off the last time I was thinking about it. And yeah, I can’t do that for a super long time, but if I’m waiting in line somewhere or trying to get to sleep, then these kinds of strategies are helpful.
I don’t necessarily agree with the idea that we are evolutionarily programmed to have negative thoughts. I don’t think there’s a great deal of evidence for that. I do think we’re evolutionarily programmed to engage with the world and look outward. Nonetheless, we’re one of the few species that is also able to put our attention to the world on hold and just think. This skill would be very dangerous for animals in the wild who must be alert to what’s going on around them all the time. Human beings have the luxury of having tamed our environment as well as having a huge brain to be able to be mindful. To be clear, our study didn’t show that people gravitate to negative thoughts—it’s the effort people don’t like, but it’s not the case that everyone was saying to themselves, “Oh my God, this is terrible,” and just thinking about negative things.
Roy Baumeister and his colleagues had an article called, “Bad is Stronger Than Good,” and he would say that negative things grab our attention more and are more impactful. I’m a little less convinced. I think it’s very hard to equalize good and bad things on all dimensions. Bad news is often more surprising and maybe more interesting because it’s unexpected. As such, you have to equalize the good side and make it equally surprising and interesting, before I’d be convinced it’s just the goodness or badness that matters.
4) In one of my favorite studies, you and your colleagues gave people a gift and explained to some recipients why they received the gift, while the other group was left to wonder why they got it. In this study, the people left wondering about the origins of the gift stayed in a positive mood for longer than those that did not. Why does wonder have such a positive effect on our mood?
This work was from several years ago and it’s based on the premise that the human mind has evolved to do its best to make sense of whatever’s happening to us and to come up with explanations. We’re really good at that, of finding some way to understand what’s happening to us. That’s a very good thing when it comes to negative events—we process them, we think about them. When processed effectively, those negative events eventually lose their power, as we assimilate them into what we know about the world. This is one reason Dan Gilbert and I have found that in predicting the future, people often overestimate the impact of negative events. This is because people do not take into account how much they will transform the events in their heads in ways that make the events lose their power.
For example, we did a study with college sports fans where we said, “How would you feel if your team lost this big game?” And most of them said, ” I’d feel pretty bad for at least two or three days afterwards.” Well, when their team lost and we got back to them, they were pretty much over it by the next day. The mind finds a way to understand the world in a way that reduces the impact of negative events.
When something really good happens to us, we have the same inclination to want to make sense of it and understand it. Assigning meaning can rob us of pleasure because what initially seems surprising and amazing and interesting becomes ordinary pretty quickly. We did some studies where we tried to interrupt that process, making it harder for people to understand the event. To the extent we succeeded, it did prolong the pleasure people experienced for a little bit, anyway.
In everyday life, there are some paradoxical implications. For example, suppose I’m watching a movie I’m really enjoying and I know that the story is going to be resolved in the last few minutes of the film, as is often the case. If I want to prolong the pleasure I’m experiencing from the film, maybe I should leave before I see those last few minutes because that will keep the intrigue alive. I’ll think about film a lot more. I’ll wonder how the story was resolved. But in reality, life’s too short to do that for every experience we have. Do we want to spend all our mental energy thinking about a movie? Resolutions are also fun, to see how things get resolved, so we do not want to keep all our pleasures unresolved.
Here’s a real-world example: There is a company that takes people on bus tours to fun places. But they don’t tell you in advance where they’re going. They cover up the windows with paper so you can’t see the route the bus is taking. All they tell you is, “We’re going somewhere. The trip will take a couple hours.” I suspect it’s really fun. Instead of finding the drive tedious, people try to guess where they are going and imagine different possibilities. It keeps the fun alive and can increase the overall pleasure people experience.
5) You mentioned one of your research associates is Dan Gilbert and I am a big fan of his book “Stumbling on Happiness”—in part because of his exploration of how our memories are malleable records of our past and are continually being reedited. This, of course, has positive and negative implications. Are there ways we can use story editing (or similar techniques) to more effectively index memories from the past?
I’m a big fan of Jamie Pennebaker‘s expressive writing technique because I think this is pretty much what it does. He has people write about traumatic events, typically for 15 minutes, three or four nights in a row. He finds amazing positive results from this writing exercise. People are in better health and they’re able to put the trauma behind them. I think that’s precisely because they’re reframing the memory. They’re finding some way to come to terms with the traumatic event and make more sense of it. A problem with negative memories is we often don’t do this naturally because we just don’t want to think about it … it’s painful.
In Jamie’s studies, people often find it very upsetting initially to focus on these events–they often cry while writing. But if they can get through it and write about it expressively, it has the effects you’re talking about. It is also important we learn from our experiences, though. So, if we put too positive a spin on an event, for instance, “You know, that person broke up with me and it wasn’t my fault. Actually, it was a good thing because that person was an idiot,” or whatever the hypothetical embellishment might be—we might not gain valuable feedback about ways we need to change our behavior to become better people. In other words, we don’t want to just reframe things positively, we want to learn from our mistakes. But I agree with you that it’s often a constructive exercise that has some benefit.
