The research behind Self-Distancing
It is often surprisingly easy to see what someone else should do.
A friend describes a relationship that has been making them unhappy for months and the pattern seems obvious. Someone is panicking about a mistake at work and you can immediately see that one bad meeting is unlikely to destroy their career. A person you care about is agonizing over a decision and you can identify the relevant trade-offs within ten minutes.
Your own problems rarely feel this straightforward.
When the situation belongs to you, there is considerably more information competing for attention. You know the history. You remember every conversation. You can imagine everything that might go wrong. Your emotions are part of the problem you are trying to analyze.
Psychological research on self-distancing suggests that the difference between thinking about your own problems and someone else's may partly involve perspective. Changing the psychological distance from which we examine an experience can change the way we reason about it.
THE RESEARCH
Psychologist Ethan Kross and his colleagues have conducted a series of experiments examining what happens when people reflect on emotional experiences from different perspectives.
In one line of research, participants were asked to recall an upsetting experience. Some were instructed to think about the event from a self-immersed perspective, essentially reliving it through their own eyes. Others were asked to adopt a self-distanced perspective, imagining themselves observing the event from the perspective of an outside observer.
The event itself did not change. Participants were thinking about the same experience.
What changed was the vantage point.
Researchers found that people using the distanced perspective tended to show lower emotional reactivity and were less likely to become caught in a simple replay of what had happened. Their reflections were more likely to contain broader interpretations and attempts to understand the experience rather than repeatedly recounting the details.
Later research examined whether the same principle could influence reasoning about difficult decisions.
In a 2014 study, psychologists Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross investigated what they called Solomon's paradox, named after the biblical King Solomon, who was known for giving wise advice while having considerably more difficulty managing aspects of his own life.
Participants were asked to reason about relationship problems. Some considered a situation involving their own romantic partner while others considered an equivalent problem involving another person.
The researchers measured forms of reasoning associated with wisdom, including recognizing the limits of one's own knowledge, considering other perspectives, acknowledging uncertainty and searching for compromise.
People tended to reason more wisely about another person's relationship problem than about their own.
But the researchers also manipulated perspective.
When participants were encouraged to think about their own problem from a more distanced point of view, the difference became smaller. Changing perspective appeared to improve the quality of reasoning about personally relevant situations.
THE FINDING
The research suggests that psychological distance can alter what becomes available to us when we think about a difficult experience.
When you are immersed in a problem, immediate details can dominate attention. What exactly did they say? Why haven't they replied? What if the meeting goes badly? What will people think? What happens if you make the wrong decision?
These details may be relevant. But they can also make it harder to identify the larger pattern.
Distance changes the information that receives emphasis.
Thinking about another person's problem naturally creates some of this distance. You are not experiencing their immediate emotional response. You can consider what is likely rather than only what is frightening. You can notice inconsistencies without needing to defend the choices that created them.
Self-distancing attempts to introduce some of that perspective into reasoning about your own life.
It does not require pretending the situation belongs to someone else. It involves temporarily changing your relationship to the information so that you can examine it from a wider vantage point.
THE THEORY
One reason self-distancing may be useful is that emotional experiences can encourage self-immersion.
When something upsetting happens, people often replay the event from a first-person perspective. Attention remains close to the details of what happened and the emotions associated with them.
This can become repetitive.
You remember the conversation. Then you remember it again. You imagine what you should have said. You reconstruct the other person's tone. You think about how angry or embarrassed you were.
It feels like analysis because you are spending a great deal of time thinking about the problem.
But thinking repeatedly about an experience is not necessarily the same as gaining new information from it.
Kross and colleagues have distinguished between simply recounting an event and reconstruing it. Recounting focuses on what happened. Reconstruing involves developing a broader understanding of why it happened, what it means and how it fits into a larger context.
Self-distancing appears, under some conditions, to make this second form of processing easier.
NOT THE SAME THING
Distance is not avoidance
There is an obvious risk in turning psychological distance into a rule that emotions should be observed calmly from afar.
That is not what the research demonstrates.
Avoidance involves refusing to engage with an experience. Self-distancing still requires engaging with it. The difference is the perspective from which the engagement occurs.
You can acknowledge that you are angry while also asking what an outside observer would notice about the situation. You can recognize that a decision frightens you while considering what advice you would give someone else facing the same probabilities.
Distance also isn't always the appropriate response. Emotions contain information and some situations require us to experience them rather than immediately analyze them. Grief, excitement, affection and disappointment do not need to be converted into detached intellectual exercises.
The goal is not to become an observer of your entire life.
Psychological distance is a tool for situations in which being very close to the problem is making it harder to think.
WHY IT MATTERS
Self-distancing helps explain why advice can be easier to give than to follow.
When a friend comes to you with a problem, you automatically possess something they do not: distance.
You can see that the person they have been dating for three weeks probably does not determine their entire romantic future. You can see that an embarrassing mistake is unlikely to matter as much in six months as it does today. You can recognize that two imperfect options can both lead to perfectly workable lives.
When the situation belongs to you, those conclusions become harder to access.
This is not necessarily because you become less intelligent when dealing with your own life. You are reasoning under different psychological conditions.
The research also connects with studies of distanced self-talk. Kross and colleagues have examined what happens when people refer to themselves using their own name or non-first-person language while thinking through stressful situations.
Instead of thinking, What am I going to do?, someone might ask, What should Anna do here? or What does Anna need to focus on right now?
This tiny linguistic change creates a small amount of distance between the person experiencing the situation and the person evaluating it. Experimental work suggests that this form of self-talk can influence emotional regulation and performance under stress.
It sounds slightly strange because most people do not ordinarily address themselves by name.
But psychologically, the mechanism is familiar. You are trying to give yourself access to some of the perspective you naturally have when the problem belongs to someone else.
TRY THIS
The next time you are stuck on a problem, write down the situation as if someone you care about had described it to you.
Keep the important facts the same.
Then use your own name and ask: What does [your name] actually know about this situation? What is [your name] assuming? What would I tell [your name] to do next?
Pay attention to whether your answer changes.
You may notice that you become less certain about catastrophic predictions. You may recognize information you have been ignoring. You may see that the problem is real but smaller than it feels from inside it.
Or you may arrive at exactly the same conclusion.
That is useful information too.
The purpose of self-distancing is not to convince yourself that your problems do not matter. It is to create enough psychological space to examine them without every immediate thought and emotion receiving equal authority.
Sometimes another person's problem looks easier because it actually is easier.
Sometimes you can simply see more of it from where you are standing.
References
Grossmann, I., & Kross, E. (2014). Exploring Solomon's paradox: Self-distancing eliminates the self-other asymmetry in wise reasoning about close relationships in younger and older adults. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1571-1580.
Kross, E., & Ayduk, O. (2011). Making meaning out of negative experiences by self-distancing. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(3), 187-191.
Kross, E., Ayduk, O., & Mischel, W. (2005). When asking "why" does not hurt: Distinguishing rumination from reflective processing of negative emotions. Psychological Science, 16(9), 709-715.
Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304-324.