Leveraging Wisdom

Social psychology is most famous for a handful of experiments that illustrate some of the darker elements of our nature.

The Kitty Genovese case (though there's still some uncertainty about all the details) demonstrated that people tend to shirk responsibility for doing the right thing when they're in groups, wrongfully believing someone else will take care of it.

The Robber's Cave experiment, termed a "real-life lord of the flies" in which two groups of young boys were pitted against each other, showed how in-group/out-group thinking leads to some harmful behavior (and, that if you introduce superordinate goals, even enemies can learn to cooperate).

The Asch Conformity studies showed that, even when people clearly can recognize that something is out of place or incorrect, if enough other people pick incorrectly, people will forego being right to fit in.

Asch conformity experiment lines. Participants were asked to name which line most closely resembled the target, and a group of confederates would consistently guess wrong. Unknowing participants often conformed and selected the wrong answer, despite the obvious misstep.

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What social psychology teaches us, and what each of these studies demonstrates, is the power of our environment. The world around us shapes the way we think, feel, and behave. It has an outsized influence on our performance. Context shapes the meaning we make of situations and the way we understand ourselves.

We're generally terrible at appreciating the full gravity of what this means for our everyday life.

For example, most people imagine that, if they were placed inside those experiments, they'd behave the opposite of the average person. They'd help in the case of Kitty Genovese, or they'd buck the trend and pick the right line in the Asch experiments. Yet time and again, when the situation arises, most people repeat the same patterns demonstrated in the experiments.

It's not that people misunderstand themselves. It's that they misunderstand how much the environment impacts the way they make sense of the world.

Thankfully, there's an emerging branch of social psychology exploring the frontiers of how we use the powers of the environment and meaning-making for good.

Pioneered by Dr. Timothy Wilson at University of Virginia, "wise interventions" are social psychology experiments developed to help promote a more adaptive response to the environment, to understand ourselves better, and to help people think, feel, and perform better over the long-term. If you want to promote a culture that fosters high performance and set expectations that bring out the best in people, wise interventions give you an evidence-based blueprint for bringing that to life.

The main idea behind wise interventions is that the best predictor of future behavior isn't past behavior; how people make sense of themselves and their social situations is actually what matters most. These meanings are malleable and changing them in the right ways can lead to lasting benefits.

To correctly predict behavior, we have to accurately assess how people understand themselves and their circumstances - and we can anticipate good changes by changing people's meaning for the better.

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What makes an intervention "wise"

Good "wise interventions" share a few key features that prompt lasting change. Here's what you can do to more wisely coach, support, or elevate the performance of those you serve.

Alter meaning

The first principle of good wise interventions is that they alter specific meanings that people have to promote change. They change the ways that people understand themselves or their social situations.

The keyword here is specific.

That means avoiding the general, vague platitudes you often hear in workplaces or sporting events - things like "think positive!" are nice sentiments but unlikely to promote more adaptive behavior.

Instead, focus on the core psychological challenge that someone may be facing. In the studies on wise interventions, this specificity showed up in researchers doing things like giving specific feedback on emotions like "belonging," or helping people understand that it's normal to feel a certain way and that it'll pass over time.

Create the conditions for new meaning to arise

Even if you give specific feedback and promote a specific change, the rest of the environment has to be able to support it. If you want people to become more open about their failures or shortcomings, for example, you have to create an environment where people are not only safe for doing so but rewarded.

The environment has to offer opportunities for people to make good use of their new self-understanding. That means setting and managing new expectations, ensuring that the right support is in place to catch people when they fall, and reinforcing the new meanings we want people to make.

Rewrite your story

People have a tendency to behave in ways that confirm what they believe about themselves.

When those beliefs are maladaptive or problematic, people tend to think and act in ways that confirm that they are "bad". This is what happens to most contestants on The Bachelor/Bachelorette who think of themselves as "unlovable." They become unlovable by acting in unlovable ways.

Good wise interventions also allow people to make new sense of themselves and thus promote new, positive self-fulfilling prophecies. We can create a snowball effect if we do this right. When we redirect people into more positive views of themselves, they start to behave in ways that confirm this new view.

The best part of these interventions is that they don't have to be longstanding, 8-week programs to radical change.

Wise interventions can create lasting change in remarkably short periods of time - sometimes as little as one interaction.

Meaning-Making

The research on wise interventions suggests people have 3 basic motivations when they're engaging in making sense: making sense of themselves, making sense of others, and making sense of social situations.

Basically, it boils down to:

• The need to understand
• The need to think positively about ourselves
• The need to belong

The Need to Understand

When we need to understand, what we're really trying to do is guide ourselves and make the world around us more predictable.

Consistent with Lisa Feldman Barrett's work on predictive processing, this need to understand helps minimize the discrepancy between how the world is and what we predict it ought to be. Reducing this discrepancy makes for more efficient processing and more adaptive, context-sensitive behaviors in the moment.

The challenge is, sometimes the way we make sense of the world leads us to draw some pretty bad conclusions. We come to see ourselves as losers, incapable, not good enough, or worse. Most of the time, this sense-making is actually a reasonable response to the world as the person sees it. The big opportunity, then, is to help people draw more adaptive inferences from the data they detect from the world - either by changing how an experience is presented (e.g., framing) or encouraging a new view (e.g., reappraisal).

The Need to Think Positively About Ourselves

We all want to believe we are generally "good." This idea of ourselves - that we are capable, competent, and virtuous - is a driving motivation for our behavior.

This is where people "getting defensive" comes from. We have an innate need to defend this image of ourselves, and threats to this image hurt our performance.

This need, termed the need for "self-integrity", is what coaches and leaders typically undermine or threaten when they provide feedback. I've been to a few too many youth sporting events where a parent or coach is denigrating a young kid for their inability to do what the adult thinks they should do, all in the name of "helping" them. When this kind of feedback is repeated over time, the way to maintain self-integrity is to actually come to understand yourself (see need 1) in a more maladaptive light. The end result is consistent underperformance, withdrawal, or worse.

We can use this same need for self-integrity to elevate performance, too. By providing regular coaching or guidance that helps people see themselves as competent and worthy, while also helping people recognize gaps that they can fill to continue improving, we can drive a need to understand that's more positive, and as a result a sense of self-integrity built on a more adaptive self-concept.

The Need to Belong

From the time we are born, much of our behavior is motivated by the need to connect with others. We've evolved as social creatures, with each of our individual capacities expanded 10 fold by the creation of a robust social network.

When our belonging feels threatened, our performance and health suffer considerably. Social isolation is one of the main symptoms and risk factors for mental health concerns. Loneliness is currently trending as a major health risk, much like obesity. People need other people to live a rich, full, meaningful life.

Unfortunately, our culture is often much more quick to call out and ostracize than to promote positive social relations. Over time, increasing isolation leads to a range of mental health concerns and social or developmental concerns that, if not counteracted, lead to progressively worse performance.

If we want to build a more adaptive need to belong, we can talk about the behaviors we want to see and indicate how those behaviors lead to stronger social standing, stronger relationships, or stronger fit with the team. When coaches say things like "giving 100% effort is the way we do it around here," they send a signal about high-impact behaviors that are likely to drive belonging. This type of framing leads to more approach behavior and thus increases the likelihood of the players doing what the coach wants - giving great effort.

How to Act Wise

Thankfully, there are four simple things we can do to regularly behave wisely and elevate the performance of those around us. These 4 strategies are regularly used by great coaches and therapists to help people make new meaning of their circumstances and can be used by anyone looking to bring about more productive, adaptive behavior in someone they are working with.

Direct Labeling

Call it like you see it. That means, in an ambiguous situation, choosing to label something positively (like calling a stressor a "challenge" versus a "threat") gives people a clear recipe for how to behave. For example, if something is a "challenge," that often evokes behavior like giving greater effort, trying several strategies, and feeling engaged. If that same thing is labeled a "threat," people naturally engage in behavior like running away or withdrawing.

When you use direct labeling, it's most effective to identify a behavior and then put it into a larger context so that someone can effectively integrate that label into their identity.

When you tell an athlete that the best players always make the small, effort plays, you give them a direct link between greatness and effort.

When you tell a direct report that the people with the most impact on the organization ask thoughtful questions and listen before offering advice, you create a connection between impact and thoughtfulness. In each instance, the player or direct report can draw links to other behaviors that might fit effort and thoughtfulness and organize new behaviors around those identities.

Prompt New Meanings

Identities are hard to change. If you want people to really internalize a new sense of self and their surroundings, great coaches encourage the people they are working with to draw new conclusions through effective questions.

This strategy is a complement to direct labeling. If direct labeling is giving someone the answer to how to make sense of things, prompting new meanings is helping someone derive new ways of understanding by guiding them in the right direction.

Often this can be as simple as getting someone to stop and reflect more deeply about a situation and what it might mean. People often default to the easiest answer based on their own history without considering the many possible permutations of meaning they could find. By getting people to reflect and explore possible alternative meanings to a behavior or situation, we can help them find a more adaptive way to think about otherwise difficult circumstances.

This strategy is best used when people are making assumptions that could be grounded in reality but may miss the full picture. In my coaching, I often find these assumptions come up in relationships between people. An athlete or executive thinks someone else is "doing something to them," and without seeing the full scope or picture, misses potential alternative explanations, like the other person being tired or preoccupied with something much more personal.

I often tell the story of an interaction I witnessed when I worked in college sports. A staff member walked by the head coach and said good morning. The head coach appeared to ignore them. Moments later, I overheard the staff member talking to a colleague about the interaction. They were worried they were in trouble or were going to get fired.

I went to talk to the head coach about this interaction and asked if there was an issue with the staff member.

The coach just shook their head no... and waited for a few seconds to answer. It turns out the head coach had a few too many glasses of wine the night before and didn't even hear the staff member because of their screaming headache.

Increase commitment to a new meaning via action

Manufacturing situations in which people can freely act in line with new meanings or new ideas can crystallize changes.

The way this often happens in research is through a technique called "saying-is-believing", in which people are provided new information in a way that feels natural and intuitive. Because it's presented this way, the information seems like something they'd readily endorse. Then, people are asked to explain the idea to other people, kind of like they were giving advice to younger people or less experienced people, using examples.

This strategy forces people to interact with an idea or concept, which increases learning. It also encourages people to help others, so it leverages our general desire to be good and giving, rather than being the "target" of an intervention. "Saying-is-believing" encourages people to advocate for an idea, which makes it more persuasive to themselves, and finally, it helps people personalize and take ownership of the idea.

You can leverage this type of intervention by asking the people you work with to give advice to their younger selves or a more inexperienced person - frame the advice around an idea you want them to internalize.

Promote active reflection

Writing is an incredible mechanism for helping people reframe their experiences. There's an abundance of evidence supporting writing as effective for a range of issues, from grief and loss to trauma to positive experiences. Writing in open-ended ways to structured prompts can help people reinterpret events all on their own.

For example, you might ask people to think and write about the positive aspects of themselves or their connections with others. You could also ask them to write about how they'd achieve goals, and in so doing help people cultivate the qualities they need to make progress.

Conclusion

The science of wise interventions suggests that we don't have to be direct, overbearing, or controlling to get people to make more helpful sense of their situations and their identities. The best coaches and therapists regularly leverage wise interventions to help their clients, athletes, or whoever they work with get the most out of themselves by changing the way they understand who they are.

If you want to learn more about wise interventions, check out the original research cited below.

Walton, G. M., & Wilson, T. D. (2018). Wise interventions: Psychological remedies for social and personal problems. Psychological review, 125(5), 617.