The cure for self-consciousness
Stop being so Conscious of yourself
Can psychological research change your life? Most of the time, no, the findings of psychologists do not usually affect everyday concerns. My colleagues at Yale, for example, study topics such as memory neuroscience, how babies reason about social groups and decision making in psychopaths. The objective of these studies is to explore how the mind works, and while its findings could ultimately make the world a better place, at least this is what we say in our grant proposals, that is not your immediate focus.
But there are exceptions, and many of them come from social psychology. The classic research in this area generates surprising and useful ideas that have to do with persuasion, racial bias, personality, romantic attraction and much more. The social psychology studies that have most changed my own life refer to consciousness and self.
Problem with self-consciousness?
Self-consciousness can be an important factor and a cause of lack of self-confidence. First, we are going to Define what is self-consciousness and then go on to describe how it affects your performance in social situations and what you can do to help yourself with this knowledge and understanding. The result I hope it is - better self-confidence!
Gilovich and his colleagues called this the "projector effect." We are naturally Conscious of ourselves, what we are thinking, how we see ourselves and what we are doing. As David Foster Wallace put it: "There is no experience that you had in which you were not in the absolute center of". And, therefore, it is difficult to block conclusion that others share this approach. If I wear a ridiculous shirt, I'm thinking about it and I suppose you do too.
Or consider the ups and downs of everyday life. I said something inappropriate at a party last week, and I'm still a bit mortified. Yesterday I gave a great talk; Today is a really bad day for hair. This year I worked hard in my introductory psychology class; Last year, I called him on the phone. Because such contracts are so remarkable in our minds, we believe that others are also sensitive to them; We believe that they realize. But research finds that they do not, at least not to the extent that we believe they do.
Other experiments explore the illusion of transparency. When asked to lie or hide information, people overestimate how well others can guess the content of their minds. Once again, the focus of consciousness is missing. If I stole the diamonds and put them in my pocket, and then I lied and said I do not know where they went, I am acutely Conscious that the diamonds are in my pocket. This intensity of consciousness makes me think that the truth is clear to others. It usually is not; We are better liars than we think.
A practical message of this investigation is that of liberation.
When we look back on our lives, we often regret our failures to act, and one of the reasons for these failures is our concern for shame, what others will think of us.
We can combat the effect of the foci by putting ourselves in circumstances that reject the dial of self-consciousness. As he pointed the social psychologist Gustave Le Bon in 1895, being in a group can make the consciousness of the self partially disappear: "An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand in the middle of other grains of sand, which the wind waves at will". In the wrong circumstances, being part of a crowd can make people do stupid and cruel things. But it can also be a source of great pleasure, as when the movement is synchronized with others (in a rave, a concert or a really good Bar Mitzvah) it blurs the limits of the self and the other.
You do not need other people to lower the dial; this type of " deindividuation "It can be as close as the kitchen or the medicine cabinet. Alcohol and drugs can diminish self-consciousness; This is part of your attractiveness. You can lose yourself in "flow" experiences in which you immerse yourself totally in an activity or through certain meditative practices. And I can assure you, from personal experience, that video games also do the trick.
To raise the dial, to increase your self-consciousness, help situate yourself in circumstances in which others observe it. This is common sense, but what is more surprising is that even being in The presence of simple line drawings of eyes increases the sense of self and that this can promote good behavior, making people less likely to cheat.
There is a case, then, to increase our self-consciousness. But it is not an easy call. Some would say that escaping the focus of attention not only makes us more spontaneous and less inhibited, but also has other positive effects. There is evidence, for example, that participating in meditative practices that diminish the focus on the self can make people less partial and more compassionate. We could be better, in every way, when we managed to mark the experience of being the center of the universe.
