Top Quotes: “Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change” — Timothy D. Wilson

“New generations of social psychologists have refined Lewin’s idea into an approach that I call story editing, which is a set of techniques designed to redirect people’s narratives about themselves and the social world in a way that leads to lasting changes in behavior.”

“This is exactly what the writing exercise does — it allows us to take a step back and reframe what happened. In fact, the people who benefit the most from the exercise are those who begin by writing a jumbled, incoherent account of the traumatic event, but in the end tell a coherent story that explains the event and gives it meaning. At this point, the event is less likely to intrude into people’s thoughts, and they don’t have to spend psychic energy trying to suppress it.

This is story editing in its simplest form: inducing people to make sense of an event that has gotten under their skin.”

“If time goes by and we are still bothered by a traumatic event, we probably haven’t succeeded in making sense of it and we might need the extra boost the writing exercise can give us. In short, one reason CISD fails is that it makes it harder for people to take that step back and gain some perspective on what happened. Forcing people to talk about the traumatic event right after it happened can even solidify memories of it, which makes it harder for people to reinterpret the event as time goes by.”

“Labeling kids as “helpful people,” for example, encourages them to internalize this view of themselves.”

“We figured that the simple message that lots of people struggle at first but do better later might make a lightbulb go off in the students’ heads, triggering the thought, “Maybe I’m not an admissions error — I just need to learn the ropes and try harder, like those students I heard about.” In other words, it might have prompted students to think more like Sarah than Bob.

The results indicated that the story prompt worked. Compared to a randomly assigned control group of students who didn’t get any information about grade improvement, those who got the story prompt achieved better grades in the following year and were less likely to drop out of college. These results are particularly dramatic considering how small and seemingly inconsequential the intervention was — the students took part in a thirty-minute psychology experiment in which they were shown some statistics and saw some brief videotapes about other people’s grades.”

“People’s behavior shapes the personal narratives they develop. If they act kindly toward others, they begin to see themselves as having kind dispositions, and the more they view themselves as kind, the more likely they are to help others — thereby strengthening their new narrative.”

“An American journalist, during a visit to Prague in 2009, gave this explanation of why Czech citizens seem so dour:

On the tram and the metro no one was listening to music, or reading, or smiling. Almost everyone was staring, downcast, at a spot on the floor. Richard [the tour director] explained that this was a hangover from decades of Soviet rule. When tourists started flocking to the city in the ‘90s, they noticed that no one in Prague laughed. It was the result of decades of conditioning. “If you stood out, if you drew attention to yourself, you were suspect. And you never knew who was looking, so people just retreated.””

“People who were 100 percent sure that they would get the disease and die prematurely were happier and less depressed than people who were 50 percent sure that they were healthy and disease-free.

This study illustrates, I think, how adept people are at making sense of even the worst news. Those who learned that they had inherited the Huntington’s gene found a way to come to terms with it, by incorporating this news into their narratives and finding some meaning in it.”

“People wait until they have some distance from a problem, then write about it for at least fifteen minutes on each of three or four consecutive days. As we saw, this is a simple yet powerful way of making sense of confusing, upsetting episodes in our lives, giving us some closure and allowing us to move on.

Subsequent research has found that the writing exercise works best when two conditions are met: people gain some distance from the event, so that thinking about it doesn’t overwhelm them, and they analyze why the event occurred.”

“Suppose you adopt another approach. Instead of immersing yourself in the original experience, you take a step back and watch it unfold from the perspective of a neutral observer. Then you focus on why you feel the way you do, rather than on the feelings themselves. Here is an excerpt from the instructions people are given in research studies testing this step-back-and-ask-why approach (the full instructions are at the end of this chapter): “Go back to the time and place of the experience you just recalled and see the scene in your mind’s eye. Now take a few steps back. Move away from the situation to a point where you can now watch the event unfold from a distance and see yourself in the event…As you continue to watch the situation unfold to your distant self, try to understand his/her feelings. Why did he (she) have those feelings?””

“Just as understanding and explaining negative events blunts their impact, so does understanding and explaining positive events. That is, as we have seen, reducing uncertainty about negative events, and understanding them as best we can, is a good way to bounce back from these events. But the same holds for the pleasures of life: if we reduce uncertainty about them, and understand them too well, we rob these events of the pleasure they bring us.”

“In our research we ask people to mentally subtract from their lives something they cherish. In one study, for example, happily married participants imagined what life would be like if they had never met their spouses, had never begun dating them after they met, and had not ended up together after starting to date.”

“The participants randomly assigned to do just that — those in the George Bailey condition — reported greater happiness with their relationship than did people randomly assigned to tell the story of how they had met their spouses. The latter participants had undoubtedly told that story countless times, and telling it again had little impact. But imagining how one of the most important things in their lives might not have happened made it seem surprising and special again, and maybe a little mysterious — the very conditions that prolong the pleasure we get from the good things in life.”

“What really sets optimists apart is that they have better coping strategies in the face of adversity — they confront problems rather than avoid them, plan better for the future, focus on what they can control and change, and persist when they encounter obstacles instead of giving up.”

“Research shows that people who focus on the process of achieving a desired outcome are more likely to achieve it than those who simply think about the outcome itself.”

“In one study, students who were starting seventh grade, in the United States and China, were asked how decisions were typically made in their families — namely, whether they were most likely to decide things for themselves or whether their parents decided for them. The questions covered several areas that are important to seventh graders, such as who they make friends with, how much time they spend with their friends, what time they go to bed, how much time they spend studying, and what they do in their free time. In both countries, some kids reported that they had considerable latitude in making these choices, some reported that their parents decided for them in most of the areas, and some reported that it was in between — i.e., that they decided what to do in certain areas and their parents decided for them in others. The researchers then tracked the kids for the next two years and measured their emotional well-being. The main result was that the more controlling the parents were (at least in the eyes of their kids), the worse off their children were emotionally over the next two years.”

“There is a better approach, called autonomy support, in which parents try to see things from their children’s perspective, helping them understand the value of the different alternatives with which they are faced and convey a sense that they, the children, are ultimately the ones choosing which path to follow. The idea is to gently guide one’s kids in the right direction while giving them the sense that they are making the choices themselves. To measure this parenting style, the researchers in the Israeli study asked the ninth graders what typically happens when they disagree with their parents; e.g., when “I think that my investment in school is adequate, but my father thinks it is not.” Teens who reported that their parents understand them, but also that their parents provide a rationale for their (the parents’) perspective, were classified as receiving a high amount of autonomy support. As the researchers predicted, these kids were better off than the kids whose parents used the other two parenting styles. They reported the highest amount of control over their feelings and behavior, were better able to regulate their emotions, and their teachers reported that they had the most intrinsic interest in academics.”

“In the mild threat condition, however, the children could not as easily use the threat to explain why they didn’t play with the robot. After all, the researcher only said he’d be a little annoyed, so what’s the big deal?

The fascinating thing about the mild threat is that it was strong enough to prevent the kids from playing with the toy, but not so strong as to convince them that it was the reason they weren’t playing with it. Instead, the kids inferred that they must not like that robot as much as they thought. That is, they assumed that they weren’t playing with it because they didn’t really like it very much — not because of the researcher’s threat. We know this because at the end of the experimental session, the kids in the mild threat condition reported that they liked the robot significantly less than did kids in the severe threat condition.

The kids in the mild threat condition didn’t stop with devaluing the robot. They found another reason to explain their good behavior, namely, that they must be especially honest kids who are good at avoiding temptation. After all, they could have played with the robot — the researcher would only have been a little annoyed so why didn’t they?”

“There isn’t much risk of undermining kids’ intrinsic interest when it is zero to begin with. If your child shows absolutely no interest in reading he hasn’t touched a book in months then a small reward to get him started can’t do any harm.”

“If the goal is to get kids to internalize desired attitudes and values, then parents should use threats and rewards that are minimally sufficient to get kids to do the desired behaviors, but not so strong that the kids view the threats or rewards as the reason they are acting that way. Minimally sufficient threats and rewards are an effective story-editing technique, convincing kids that they are doing the right thing because they believe in doing the right thing.”

“The best approach is to start with threats or rewards that are strong enough to get kids to do the desired behavior, but then, on future occasions, dial them back a bit, making it harder for kids to attribute their actions to the threat or reward.”

“It turned out that the label the researcher had provided did sink in. The kids who had been encouraged to attribute their earlier transgression to guilt spent significantly more time watching the race car than did the kids who had been encouraged to attribute their behavior to disappointment over being caught. The former kids seemed to be thinking, “I’d better keep an eye on the car, because I sure would feel guilty if I screwed up again, even if no one finds out.” But the latter kids seemed to be thinking, “So what if the car jumps the track — no big deal. I can just put it back on the track before that guy comes back.” If you want your kids to internalize the motivation to be good, then when they screw up. label their feelings as guilt.”

“The researcher tried to interrupt this negative cycle, beginning when the infants were six months old. During each of three two-hour visits, she attempted to get the mother to be more attentive to the signals the infant was giving about his or her needs, to interpret the signals correctly, and to respond appropriately. When the baby fussed and cried, the mother was encouraged to try a variety of techniques to soothe him or her, because some babies prefer close contact and others do not. Mothers were encouraged to engage their babies in positive ways, rather than respond only to negative signals. For example, mothers were taught to make eye contact with their babies and coo at them when their babies held their gaze (because eye contact is a sign that the baby is engaged and interested in interacting), but to be silent when the babies looked away. The intervention was tailored to each individual mother-infant pair, with the overall goal of getting the mother to be more attentive to her baby’s signals and needs.

Compared to mothers randomly assigned to a control group, those who received the intervention did indeed become more responsive to their infants’ needs. As a result, their infants became less irritable, more sociable, engaged in more exploration, and were better able to soothe themselves when upset. At twelve months of age, only 22 percent of the infants in the control group were classified as securely attached to their mothers, but this number nearly tripled to 62 percent in the intervention group — an amazing difference given that the intervention consisted of only three home visits.”

“Social psychologists have noticed something curious about parents who abuse their children: they seem to blame the children for being difficult. When their kids act up, these parents often think, “It’s his fault” — he has a bad disposition, he’s stubborn, he was born that way, or he is deliberately trying to provoke them. Parents who don’t abuse their children are more likely to attribute their kids’ crankiness to something about the situation that is easily addressed the child is hungry, tired, or needs a hug. Further, researchers suggest that these attributions are not necessarily conscious, and in fact may be part of parents’ implicit narratives that they cannot fully verbalize, even to themselves.”

“Consistent with previous studies, the Healthy Family home visits alone had little impact. Twenty-three percent of the children in this condition were physically abused, compared to 26 percent in the control condition — a difference that is not statistically significant. But, as the researchers predicted, the story-editing intervention worked: only 4 percent of the children in this condition were physically abused. Similar results were found on measures of corporal punishment that do not meet the legal definition of abuse, namely, slapping and spanking: 42 percent of parents in the control and Healthy Families group reported using these punitive techniques, compared to only 18 percent of parents in the story-editing condition. In follow-up studies, the story-editing intervention was found to reduce child injuries, lower the levels of cortisol in the children (cortisol is a hormone that is an indicator of stress), and improve cognitive functioning in the children. Consistent with many other story-editing interventions, redirecting people’s narratives — in this case, encouraging parents to reinterpret why their children act up — reaped huge benefits down the road.”

“In the United States, about 25 percent of teen mothers give birth to another child before reaching the age of twenty.

Some programs have thus targeted teen mothers in an attempt to prevent second pregnancies. Two such programs, one in North Carolina and another in Colorado, came up with an approach that would be applauded by economists: pay teen mothers not to get pregnant.”

“Feeling alienated is likely to put kids at risk in many ways, influencing who they hang out with and how much they plan for their futures. Put differently, kids who feel like they have a stake in their communities and have clear goals for the future are less likely to put themselves at risk by having unprotected sex.

How, then, can we change teens’ narratives from a sense of alienation to one of engagement — from the belief that “I don’t fit in here” to “I’m a valued member of my school and community”? It turns out that an effective approach is to have teenagers engage in regular volunteer work in their community.”

“LifeSkills Training (LST) was developed in the early 1980s as an antismoking program and was soon expanded to target the use of alcohol and drugs as well. It is a school-based program that begins in the sixth or seventh grade, the point at which kids are most likely to begin experimenting with alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. Students attend fifteen class sessions of forty-five minutes each, followed by ten sessions the next year and five sessions the year after that. The curriculum is multifaceted, including units on personal self-management skills, social skills, and information about various drugs and their dangers. In the personal self-management unit, for example, the students engage in a self-improvement project in which they choose something about themselves that they want to change and then work on doing so. In the social skills unit, students work on how to get along better with others and receive tips on how to overcome shyness and be more assertive. In the drug-related information unit, students learn about drugs and how to resist influence from their peers and the media (e.g., cigarette advertising). In addition, students receive information about two kinds of social norms: the actual levels of drug use by adolescents and adults (which are often lower than people think) and the fact that social approval of cigarette smoking and other drug use is declining. As we will see shortly, conveying these norms to people is an important part of story-editing interventions.

LST has been evaluated extensively with positive results.”

“LST helps kids avoid alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs in at least three ways. First, it is not enough to tell kids to “just say no”; it’s important to teach them how to say no, and LST does this by teaching assertiveness skills. Second, the program imparts a general sense of well-being in kids, which makes them less interested in using drugs. And finally, as mentioned, the program helps combat the notion that using alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs has social benefits. That is, kids who take part in the program are less likely to believe that their peers think it is cool to smoke and drink and use drugs.”

“Such blatant racism is not limited to the deep South, as illustrated by what happened at a swim club in suburban Philadelphia in the summer of 2009. A city day camp contracted with the club to use its pool on Mondays, because budget cuts had shut down the public pool they had been using. But when the sixty-five black and Hispanic kids got off the bus and walked into the club, towels in hand, most of the white kids got out of the pool. The white kids’ parents “were standing there with their arms crossed,” said Alethea Wright, the director of the day camp. “I was hearing comments like, ‘They won’t be back here.’ One of the campers, nine-year-old Kevina Day, heard a white mother complain about the influx of campers. “She was saying a lot of racist words,” Kevina reported. “The lady who said the bad things is a grown woman. We’re just kids.” A few days later, the director of the pool refunded the day camp’s money and told them not to come back. “There is a lot of concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion… and the atmosphere of the pool,” he said.”

“You go to sit and notice that there are empty places at only two tables. At one are three white coworkers, and at the other are three black coworkers, all of whom you met earlier at the orientation session. You hesitate, unsure what to do. Should you join your white or black colleagues? Research shows that people are reluctant to cross racial lines in situations such as this one; if you are white you would likely join the white coworkers, and if you are black you would likely join the black coworkers.

The reason for your choice, however, is not necessarily that you are prejudiced. In fact, you might be interested in getting to know the black coworkers (if you are white) or the white coworkers (if you are black), but are unsure whether they are interested in getting to know you. “I’d really like to sit with Mary, Jason, and Janelle,” you might think. “But it could be awkward; they probably want to be by themselves.” Ironically, they might be thinking the same thing that they wouldn’t mind if you sat at their table but they aren’t sure whether you really want to. One series of studies, for example, found that white and black college students were both interested in forming interracial friendships but each believed that the other group would likely spurn such overtures.”

“Maybe we can redirect their narratives from “I don’t have much in common with blacks and they probably won’t want to get to know me” to “Maybe we do have a lot in common and they are as open to being friends with me as I am with them.”

Here is how we tried to do it: we showed white University of Virginia students, at the beginning of their first semester of college, a videotaped interview of two other UVA students who had become friends. In the course of the interview, the students mentioned that they didn’t think they would become friends at first, but that they discovered that they had a lot in common and enjoyed spending time with each other. Some participants saw a version of this interview in which the friends were of different races (one white, one black), whereas others (randomly assigned, of course) saw a version in which both the friends were white. We figured that white first-year students who saw the interracial friends might change their views of what it would be like to make friends with someone of another race, because, after all, it went well for the students in the video.

Hearing about one successful interracial friendship might not be a strong enough story prompt, however, because the participants could easily explain it away as a special case that doesn’t apply to them. To increase the likelihood that the message would hit home, we asked some of the students to write about a time when they didn’t think they would become friends with a person but were wrong. We hoped that seeing the video of the interracial friendship, and connecting it to themselves by writing about a time when they formed an unexpected friendship, would make first-year students more open to interracial friendships in their own lives.

To find out, we included several measures of participants’ openness to interacting with members of other races. First, at the end of the session, we videotaped participants (with their permission) while they were interviewed by an African American research assistant. We then coded the videotapes to see how nervous participants appeared during this interview. As we expected, the students who saw the interracial video and completed the writing exercise were the least nervous, compared to those who did neither of those things or just one of them. Further, this openness generalized beyond the experimental session. The participants in the interracial-video-and-writing condition, compared to participants in the other conditions, were more likely to become friends with people of other races in the weeks after the experiment.

How do we know this? We didn’t, of course, follow our participants around with clipboards, observing whom they talked with at parties or whom they sat next to in the dining hall. Instead, participants responded to an Internet survey on which they wrote down the initials of people they had met during the week after the study whom they thought were potential friends, and then indicated the race of each of these people. The participants who had seen the interracial video and completed the writing exercise wrote down a higher proportion of minorities on their lists of potential friends than did the participants in the other conditions.

It is possible, of course, that our participants were not being completely honest; maybe they exaggerated the number of their black potential friends to make themselves look open-minded. To rule out this possibility, we used a more subtle way of measuring participants’ friendship patterns — we looked at their Facebook pages. We asked participants for permission to access their Facebook profiles, though we did not tell them that we would be checking on the race of their friends (nor did participants know that the study was about cross-race friendships). About two weeks after people participated in our study, we checked their Facebook profiles and counted how many friends they had who shared their university affiliation. We assumed that because students had only been enrolled in college for a few weeks, most friends with the same university affiliation would be new ac-quaintances. Adding a friend on Facebook automatically adds a picture of the new friend to the student’s profile, and we used these pictures to categorize each new friend as white or nonwhite. As we anticipated, participants who saw the cross-race friendship videos and did the writing exercise had a higher proportion of nonwhite friends on their Facebook pages than did participants in the other conditions.”

“In Tanzania, for example, population growth has been a problem; the number of residents of the country more than tripled between the years 1948 and 1992. To address this problem, the ministry of health sponsored a radio drama in which popular characters engaged in family planning. The program was broadcast nationally for two years in the 1990s, except to an area of the country that served as a control group. People living in the areas in which the program was broadcast increased their use of family planning significantly more than people in the area that was blacked out.”

“A radio drama in Rwanda attempted to promote ethnic reconciliation ten years after the infamous 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which a staggering 75 percent of the country’s Tutsi ethnic minority were killed. Considerable distrust remains in the country, as former killers, victims, and refugees try to live together and deal with their tragic past. The radio drama portrayed conflict between the majority Hutu population and the minority Tutsis in a manner that paralleled the actual events, but in the drama, members of the different groups banded together and spoke out against violence. There was an open discussion of the roots of violence and prejudice, and friendships between Hutus and Tutsis were portrayed. There was even a Romeo-and-Juliet-like romance between a pair of Hutu and Tutsi lovers, though instead of meeting a tragic end, the couple thrived and founded a youth group that promoted peace and cooperation.

Did the radio drama influence people’s attitudes and behavior? To find out, a researcher randomly assigned residents of Rwandan villages to hear either the drama about reconciliation or a different radio drama about health. The villagers who heard the reconciliation drama, compared to those who heard the health drama, subsequently expressed more empathy and trust toward their fellow Rwandans and became more in favor of marriage between members of different ethnic groups.

These interventions would be even more powerful if they helped viewers and listeners connect the dramas to their own experiences — as Robyn Mallett and I tried to do with our writing exercise. Some television and radio dramas have, in fact, attempted to do just this, by including epilogues in which a famous actor explains how people can apply the lessons to their everyday lives.”

“Stereotype threat wields its insidious effects by triggering a vicious cycle of thinking. People start thinking about the stereotype and whether they will confirm it, which takes them anxious and aroused. This leads to further rumination and self-doubt, as people monitor their performance (e.g., “Oh no, I’m having trouble with this math problem; maybe the stereotype is true!”). Next, people use mental energy to try to suppress these disrupting thoughts. The problem is that all these steps — becoming anxious and aroused, monitoring one’s performance for signs of stereotype confirmation, and attempting to suppress thoughts about the stereotype — use up mental resources, leaving less room to concentrate on the test. And the harder it is to concentrate, the worse people do, triggering the whole process over again.”

“One remarkable thing about these deficits in performance is how easily they are corrected. A simple reinterpretation of the meaning of a test can eliminate the achievement gap, as seen in the examples above. So can attempts to reduce the salience of the negative stereotype — by, for example, emphasizing positive aspects of one’s group or introducing people to a positive role model from the stereotyped group (for example, a female math whiz). Teaching people about the nature of stereotype threat can also help.”

“If music is important to us, for example, then thinking about what great musicians we are can take the sting out of doing poorly at school.”

“Similar story-editing interventions have been found to help minority college students. Black students at a predominantly white university, for example, might be particularly prone to feel that they don’t fit in or belong at that university, especially if they experience an academic setback, as many students do in their first semester. If so, then an intervention designed to redirect their narratives from “I don’t fit in here” to “Everyone experiences bumps in the road” might increase their sense of belonging and improve their academic performance. To find out, researchers conducted a study with black and white first-year students at a predominantly white university. In the treatment condition, the students received statistics and read interviews with upper-class students indicating that most students worry that they don’t belong when they begin college, but that these worries lessen over time. To reinforce this message, the students wrote a speech illus trating how this lesson applied to them; that is, how their own worries about belonging were likely to be temporary They delivered this speech in front of a video camera, ostensibly so that it could be shown to future students at their school. Participants in the control group underwent the same procedure, except that they learned that social and political attitudes change over the course of one’s college career — they heard nothing about changes in one’s sense of belonging.

The entire session lasted only an hour. Yet, as with other story-editing interventions, it had dramatic long-term effects on the black students’ performance and well-being. Those who got the message about belonging, relative to those in the control group, believed they fit in better at college, became more engaged in college academically (by studying more, attending more review sessions, and asking more questions in class), and achieved better grades in the rest of their college careers. Not only that, but on a questionnaire they completed right before they graduated, black students who had received the “belonging” intervention reported that they were in better health, had visited a doctor fewer times, and were happier than did black students in the control group. The “belonging” message had no effect on the white students, because most of them already felt that they fit in at their university.”