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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
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People can change — but how? This is the central concern of “Redirect,” a new book by Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Wilson offers a tour of recent scientific work on psychological change, with a focus on techniques that help a person who is struggling — bad behavior, bad grades, bad attitudes — find a new, better path. Again and again, Wilson asks: What actually works? The answers can be surprising. He spoke recently with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
COOK: A central concept in your book is “story editing.” Can you please explain what you mean by this?
WILSON: We all have personal stories about who we are and what the world is like. These stories aren’t necessarily conscious, but they are the narratives by which we live our lives. Many of us have healthy, optimistic stories that serve us well. But sometimes, people develop pessimistic stories and get caught in self-defeating thinking cycles, whereby they assume the worst and, as a result, cope poorly. The question then becomes how to help people revise their negative stories.
One approach is psychotherapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), for example, which is designed to identify and change people’s negative thinking patterns about themselves and the social world. CBT is an effective way of helping people, especially those with serious problems such as depression or anxiety disorders.
But social psychologists have discovered another approach that is simpler and can help people with less serious problems. I call this “story editing,” because people are encouraged to edit their personal stories in beneficial ways. There are a variety of ways of doing this. In one, called “story prompting,” people are given information that suggests a new way of interpreting their situation. This is particularly effective when people haven’t settled on the narrative they will tell about what is happening to them.
For example, I did a study with first-year college students who were not doing well academically. They were at risk of adopting a negative, self-defeating thinking pattern in which they blamed themselves and concluded that they weren’t “college material.” We randomly divided the students into two groups. One group got information indicating that many people do poorly their first year but do better after they learn the ropes, and watched videotaped interviews of upperclass students who reinforced this message. The idea was to encourage students to change how they interpreted their own academic difficulties, redirecting them away from the negative, self-defeating idea that they weren’t cut out for college, to a more positive interpretation that they needed to learn how to do better. It worked: This group of students, compared to the control group (who got no information), achieved better grades the next semester and were less likely to drop out of college.
There are other ways to help people edit their stories. A variety of writing exercises have been developed that help people reinterpret troubling events from their past in ways that speed recovery from these events. Another approach is to get people to change their behavior first. This “do good, be good” approach was well-known to Aristotle, who said, “We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlling by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.” One of the best ways of preventing teenage pregnancies, for example, is to get teens to do volunteer work in their communities. Doing so changes them from alienated kids who don’t care about the adult world to kids who feel like they have a stake in their communities.
What all of these approaches have in common is that people are encouraged to edit their personal stories in ways that lead to sustained changes in their behavior and well-being.
COOK: Why does story editing work better than other approaches to changing behavior?
WILSON: Some approaches go wrong by trying to change people’s behavior without considering what this is doing to their personal stories. For example, economists are fond of trying to change people’s behavior by giving them incentives, such as paying kids to do well in school, or fining parents who are late to pick up their children from day care. But these approaches can backfire by changing people’s stories in unintended ways. Rewarding kids can actually undermine their intrinsic interest in academic work by convincing them that they are “doing it for the money,” not because they like it. As for fining parents, well, one study found that doing so actually increased the number of times they were late picking up their kids, because it changed their interpretation of the situation from, “It would be rude to be late too often” to “This is a fair exchange—I can stay at work for another 30 minutes and pay the day care center for that privilege.” It’s what’s inside people’s heads that really matters.
COOK: How can parents use this?
WILSON: One of the most important things parents do is to shape their kids’ narratives about the world, and there is a chapter in the book on how parents can use story-editing techniques to do this well. For example, parents should use “minimally sufficient” rewards and punishments—ones that are strong enough to shape their kids’ behaviors but not so strong that the kids attribute their behavior to the rewards and punishments.
COOK: What implications do you think this has for government as it tries to fix social ills?
WILSON: I certainly don’t claim that story-editing techniques are the answer to all of society’s ills. These techniques have, however, been shown to lower the rate of teenage pregnancy, reduce teenage violence, lower the use of alcohol and drugs, improve relationships between members of different ethnic groups, and reduce the achievement gap.
A theme of the book is that whatever approach we take to address these and other problems, we should test the effectiveness of interventions scientifically with the experimental method. All of the story-editing techniques I review have been shown to work in rigorous experimental trials. Too often, government-backed programs are widely adopted before they are adequately tested. One example is the D.A.R.E. drug abuse resistance program, which is used in 75 percent of school districts in the United States and in more than 40 countries, but has never been shown to work (a new version of D.A.R.E. is being tested now). Another example is Healthy Families America, which is a home visitation program designed to prevent child abuse in at-risk families. This program has been widely implemented throughout the United States, even though rigorous studies show that it doesn’t work. What is especially galling about these examples is that there are well-tested, effective, story-editing interventions that work to reduce alcohol and drug use and prevent child abuse.
COOK: Can you please give an example of how you have used the book’s techniques in your own life?
WILSON: Well, I have two adult children who have turned out wonderfully, and while I am certainly not the perfect father, I like to think that my knowledge of story-editing techniques made me a better parent than I otherwise would have been.
I also think that my knowledge of social psychological research has made me more tolerant of people who have different points of view than I do, or disagree with me about something. As much as I want to believe that I am right and they are wrong, it helps to try to get inside their heads and understand how they are viewing things—how their story differs from mine. That gives us a common place to start in working out our differences.
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.
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10 Comments
Add CommentMy experiences are that story telling or writing you are revealing your unconscious mind so beautifully,some time you also amazed how this untold truth came out.Freud` s free association technique based on this principal and most effective,even neuroscience also given consent to this technique.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLOL OBagle!!! Can you get anymore negative?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIronically, your comment makes you come across as someone desperately in need of this therapeutic technique.
Good luck with your attitude friend.
Narrative techniques, where the intention is 're-authoring', have been around in therapy since the 1980's, and reframing is a common counselling technique. Based on reading this interview I'm struggling to understand what is being offered in the concept of 'story editing' that is new?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps the 'added value' of "Redirect" is the effort to take knowledge out of what is essentially a closely protected professional domain and placing it into the public domain? This has value, especially in the area of effectively managing change.
If that's the impression you got from this article then I suppose that's a failure on the magazine's part.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWilson's books are popular explanations of recent scientific advances. He argues against the kind of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo you are talking about using real science.
The other commenters seem to be making the same mistake, thinking that Wilson is presenting some kind of "new technique" he developed rather than explaining the current understanding of scientists in this area to the public so I guess you aren't alone.
I plan to read this book. This is a great idea. If we can get a handle on what causes us to feel the way we do, why we do what we do, or don't do what we wish we would do, then we can certainly, with a new outlook, begin to implement the changes we want in our lives.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm amazed at the self righteous comments here. There are so many people out there who are unable to keep from trying to bolster their self esteem by putting someone else down. It would be nice if they would put that energy to better use.
I have to agree with you here. I recently read Timothy's book "Strangers to ourselves". This is an amazing book from Timothy which again has the basis of this article. I was dumbfounded when I read about how we confabulate our own behavior. Somehow that essence is not seen in this article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOver the period of several years I have come to understand part of this story editing concept. None of this is new, so much as not well publicized. A number of teachers and mental health professionals tried to teach me how to use this process but all had limited time to do so. I suppose there are some that just pick up on it easily but for me it is a constant challenge. It does work though.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've broken the cycle of continual deterioration but improvement is a constant challenge. It gets a little better over time.
While I agree and am in general an advocate of psychology research and usually see the findings in my own life. I think that OBagle wasn't t believe that motivation is the most overrated concept in psychology. In my own words "Motivation is a veil of happiness which is put over the impending failure". While I don't think that Wilson is entirely wrong in his thinking, I do believe that there is a high probability that this does not work. I believe that negative feelings do not have a correlation to things that you have learned, have been told, or have told others, as all of this can be just part of a 'mask' used to hide true feelings. This is alaso the reason that I hate "Personality" quizes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWho is this "OBagle" and where is his comment??? G
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour study on "first-year college students who were not doing well academically" is similar to the approach taken by the "It Gets Better Project" in the lesbian, Gay, GLBTQ community aimed at preventing teen suicides and depression by sending a message to young people who are coming to terms with their sexuality or gender identification in communities that are less than accepting. The "It Gets Better Project" encourages people in the gay, lesbian and GLBTQ community who are living full, successful, happy lives to share their stories, their lives, their hopes and dreams and by doing so show those struggling that it does indeed get better. Here is part of my story (Kimberly Burnham, PhD) http://www.imfromdriftwood.com/im-from-provo-ut/#more-8180 and http://www.ThatIntersectionPoint.com
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