A powerful tool to break out of negative thinking

The David Attenborough Effect | Overconfidence and mansplaining

Hello and welcome to the 10th edition of 60-Second Psychology from David Robson.

Today I’d like to write about a simple tool to break ourselves out of rumination – the cycles of negative thinking in which we keep chewing over the same concerns. Rumination often churns up uncomfortable feelings, as we relive our shame, fear or sadness, and it’s usually focused on the fine details of a situation – who said exactly what – rather than the bigger picture. As the name suggests, ruminative thought is repetitive and long-lasting, without a positive resolution at the end.

This makes it very different from reflection, which tends to involve viewing a problem in its wider context. Even if we have felt very unhappy, we manage to gain some useful insights from what we have experienced, and the lessons it might hold for the future. Whereas people tend to feel a lot worse after a period of rumination, reflection brings a sense of closure and relief.

(Joseph Guichard, "La mauvaise pensée", 1832)

Once we have descended into rumination, we may find it very difficult to escape, but even short breaks in nature can offer a route out. A 30-minute walk in a city park helped to jolt people out of their negative spirals so that they no longer felt overwhelmed by their problems, for instance. People who walked through built-up areas did not experience the same relief, despite spending the same amount of time being physically active.

According to one recent paper, we may not even need to leave our armchairs to glean the benefits. Liesbeth Bogaert at KU Leuven in Belgium and colleagues recently recruited a couple of hundred participants who were encouraged to watch short nature clips each day for a week. Over the trial, they experienced significantly less negative thinking than they had reported at the start of the experiment – an effect that lingered for a further seven days. You could call it the David Attenborough Effect.

Why would this be? One reason may be mere distraction: even temporary relief from rumination may help us to return to our problems with a clearer head. Another is awe. When we witness grand visions of nature – the height of Everest or the depth of the Grand Canyon, the sheer expanse of the Milky Way in the night sky – we are reminded of our tiny place in the wider universe, which gives us a new sense of proportion for the immediate challenges that we’re facing. At this scale, they may begin to feel more manageable. For this reason, people who experience more awe in their lives tend to have better well-being – and spending time contemplating nature may be a good way of achieving this.

Awe shrinks our sense of self, and helps us to view our problems from a new perspective. (Photo by Christopher Ruel on Unsplash)

This is unlikely to be the whole story, though, since some of the Belgian participants were assigned relatively mundane scenes that were unlikely to inspire awe, but they still experienced the same kind of lift out of their negative thinking cycles. So perhaps there is something undefinably special in nature itself – whether that’s sweeping mountains or pretty visions of pastoral life. This would fit with the “biophilia hypothesis”, which proposes that humans have an “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes”. According to this idea, any return to the wild – be it physical or virtual – brings mental restoration.

Whatever the reason, this latest research gives us one more tool to cope with stress. When we feel abnormally preoccupied and struggle to shake the weight of the world from our shoulders, we might find some relief from the greener corners of the internet.

If you feel like taking your nature break now, here’s a stunning video of the ocean’s “midnight zone”, courtesy of BBC Earth:

Mansplaining and the illusion of knowledge

I’ve been thinking a lot about overconfidence lately, thanks to some comments from a reader called Karl. I think we’ve all experienced someone lording it over us, despite knowing next to nothing about the topic at hand. One problem is that people mistake feelings of familiarity for knowledge. If we hear a particular term a few times, or see someone performing a particular skill, we begin to overestimate our understanding of the details, and take ourselves to be a real expert. The effects can be absurd. As I described in a piece for the BBC:

Michael Kardas asked participants to watch repeated videos of various skills, such as throwing darts or doing the moonwalk dance, up to 20 times. They then had to estimate their abilities, before trying the task for themselves. Most participants assumed that simply observing the film clips would have helped them to learn the skills. And the more they watched the films, the greater their initial confidence.

The reality, however, was distinctly disappointing. “People thought they’d score a greater number of points if they watched the video 20 times compared to if they’d watched it once,” says Kardas. “But their actual performance did not show any evidence of learning.”

Quite astonishingly, passive observation can even increase people’s confidence in their abilities to perform complex life-or-death tasks, such as landing a plane. Kayla Jordan, a PhD student at the University of Waikato, New Zealand, who led this study, was directly inspired by Kardas’s research. “We wanted to test the limits of the phenomenon – whether it could apply for really expert skills.” She points out that piloting requires hundreds of hours of training and a deep understanding of physics, meteorology and engineering, which people are unable to pick up through a short video.

The participants were first told to “imagine you are on a small commuter plane. Due to an emergency, the pilot is incapacitated, and you are the only person left to land the plane”. Half were then shown a four-minute video of a pilot landing a plane, while the rest did not see the clip. Crucially, the film did not even show what the pilot’s hands were doing during the procedure – it could not have been of any instructional use. Many of the people who had seen the clip, however, became much more optimistic about their capacity to safely land a plane themselves. “They were about 30 percent more confident, relative to people who didn’t watch that video,” says Jordan

It's not hard to see how the “illusion of knowledge” applies to real life, as our passive familiarity with others’ professions leads us to undervalue their skills. “It can’t be that hard!” we think, or say – and go on to patronise them about all the things we might do differently, while remaining completely oblivious to the hidden complications of the job. It’s just one more reason to practise intellectual humility - constantly questioning our assumptions and actively probing the limits of our understanding.

That’s all for this week! If you like what you’ve read, please do hit subscribe or share below, and forward to anyone who might resonate with its message.

David x