Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Now, the first study I want to tell you about, uh, is by Matthew Stanley, Paul Henn, Vijeth Ivengar, quite a few here, uh, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and as I've mentioned, Philippe de Brigard.

Published in twenty seventeen, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, and the title tells you where it's going.

Quote, "I'm not the person I used to be.

The self and autobiographical memories of immoral actions." Now, here's what I like about the method.

They absolutely have the data.

A, a massive 2024 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, and specifically the general section, looked at 70 different independent experiments on this exact topic.

Seventy experiments.

That's huge.

It was like 2011.

It's the issue of Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Listen to this.

They said if a person just gave thanks or said something positive out loud about a person or a situation, it tended to alter their emotions towards it.

It does give us practice following other people's thoughts, emotions, and intentions.

In 2018, there was a paper called Fiction Reading Has a Small Positive Impact on Social Cognition, and Meta-Analysis Combined Results from 14 Experimental Studies, written by David Fetter and Diana Tamir, and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, General.

They found a small average improvement in social cognitive performance after people read fiction compared to nonfiction or no reading.

The key word is small.

According to McGonigal, the researchers estimated that over that eight-year period, 182,000 people did not die prematurely due to stress, but from the belief that stress was bad for them.

Other research backs that up, A study published in Journal of Experimental Psychology found that when people view their stress response as helpful, seeing their body's natural responses to stress, like increased heart and respiration rate, as a signal their body is rising to a challenge, their blood pressure didn't rise.

In fact, McGonigal says their physiological profiles resembled what happens in moments of joy and courage.

Thinking about stress differently, seeing stress as a good thing, changes how your body responds to it.

There's an interesting article by my colleague, uh, at the Harvard Business School, Allison Wood Brooks, uh, with a bunch of her co-authors.

She has a 2019 study on entrepreneurs in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that where when participants in her study were honest, not just about what they did right, but what they, how they failed along the way, observers experienced less malicious envy toward them.

So this is really important.

Show your unenviable self.

There's actually a name for this in neuroscience, something called a switch cost, which means every time you switch tasks, your brain experiences essentially like a cognitive tax that will slow you down and make you more likely to make mistakes.

A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that switching between tasks can reduce productivity by up to 40%.

Who has the time to let go of 40% of their productivity? I know we all task switch all the time, and sometimes we have to.

We're checking our inboxes while we're on Zoom calls.