Presto

Hey everyone!

Have you ever felt that you aren't completely satisfied with your personality? Or maybe you're satisfied with it, but someone close to you has suggested you shouldn't be? Or maybe you're just curious what it'd be like to be different for a while.

Today's blog highlights my experience with this.

I've always been a reserved man. The "strong, silent type." A stoic person who never lets his true feelings show through. Always taking the rational approach, only making decisions that maximize an automatic, unconscious benefit/cost analysis.

Or at least, that's what introspection tells me I am. This is the process of thinking about ourselves and our actions, and drawing conclusions from them. Except in reality, they aren't conclusions. They're guesses. According to Nisbett and Wilson (1977), we rarely know the real reasons for our actions. He let people sample four pairs of panty hose on a table and pick the one they thought was best. People tended to pick the one on the far right. They would say, "Oh this one's softer," or "It has a better texture." Except there was a catch. The panty hose were all the same. So when people thought that one pair had better qualities, they were wrong. It turned out people just like things that are located to the right.

So maybe my guesses about myself aren't right. Maybe I'm not so rational in my thinking after all. Maybe it leads me astray. Besides, my girlfriend has told me for years that I should be less inhibited and not think about everything.

That's what I decided to change.

I tried to keep from keeping such control over myself. I attempted to just "go" for things that didn't matter. Carpe diem. YOLO. It made me more outgoing, impulsive, emotional. I also had a great time acting, which put me in a good mood. (I probably just seemed drunk throughout half of this.)

In the locker room before weight training, an older man came in while I was changing. We exchanged hellos, which is where I'd ordinarily leave it. But emboldened by my newfound carefree nature, I introduced myself and talked to him for a few minutes before I had to go. Absolutely nothing came of it, but he seemed grateful for the conversation. While I never had any other interesting events happen from my outgoing nature, I felt happier in general.

I attribute this increase in happiness to the fact that I attempted to make eye contact with and smile at everyone I saw. There's a concept known as the facial feedback hypothesis, which suggests that smiling actually causes you to be happier (Laird, 1974) Essentially, if you make yourself smile enough, your brain thinks to itself, "Why am I smiling? I only smile when I'm happy. Therefore, I must be happy," and presto, you're happy. It is a fascinating phenomenon. If I learned one thing from this experience, it would be that this trick works. And I will probably employ it for the rest of my life.

The next big behavior change resulting from my intentional disinhibition, impulsiveness, was also fun. That is probably not a surprise to anyone. I  "aggressively marketed" T-shirts to hapless passersby outside the commons, played a ridiculous video game about racing Volkswagen beetles with friends instead of working on homework (I was able to rationalize it as working on this assignment), and acted like I was going to completely blow off an essay.

It was good fun. But there's no way I could keep that up.

Acting with less self-discipline seemed like it would be extremely self-destructive in the long term, such as by ignoring homework. Some people seem to be able to operate without any stress despite failing to uphold their responsibilities. I, for better or worse, am not one of them.

Responsibility is one of my schematic traits. That means I think it's incredibly important, and I pay attention to it and judge it in myself and others (Markus, 1977). Forcing myself to act in the opposite manner was draining and stressful. And because it's a schematic trait, I think it would be a terrible decision to attempt to embody making impulsive decisions and living in the moment. I feel bad enough that I let myself procrastinate on homework, even if it was for science.

Another feature of schematic traits is that we filter our memory such that we only see ourselves with the traits we want to have. I can clearly remember the times I have been proactive regarding assignments, but specific examples of procrastination are harder to bring up. I automatically ignored the events that might counter the notion that I'm not responsible.

The same applies here. I loved playing that stupid Beetle game. I spent an hour learning a new drum rudiment instead of writing my last blog post. I went to the store with my roommate to prepare for APO Senior Wills when I had 118 pages of African History to read that night. I formed flour into an imitation brick of cocaine as a gag gift to a hyperactive friend while another friend sat on my couch waiting to work on chemistry together. But I'm not irresponsible, no; I was just pretending to be for the sake of an assignment. That rationalization let me take it further than I intended, causing me to miss quite a few hours of sleep fixing those mistakes as my responsible old self came back from his little vacation and found the house a wreck.

A couple of my friends noticed, and even made a few sarcastic comments about it. "Shouldn't you be reading instead of going to the store?" "Why did you make me play Beetle Adventure?" (I didn't make him.) This was probably the most out-of-character behavior for me. It was fun while it lasted.

The last big change included in my mission of controlling myself less appeared most clearly when commiserating with a friend about an upcoming assignment in a different class. I hadn’t fully committed to this idea yet at the time, and I wasn’t sure if it would work. I had no other ideas. As a result of that plus the other assignment, I was feeling a little bit of stress. That’s when I decided to just go with it. It would be like a pilot test of my idea.

I probably played it up a bit, in reality. I got unreasonably frustrated with the assignment and ranted to my friend for around twenty minutes about how unreasonable it was and how little it amounted to and how I should just not do it. Eventually, he got frustrated and quit trying to talk me down, because I was clearly having none of it. I was a little tempted by my own rationalization, which was especially interesting to me.

I believe one of the reasons I was able to make these changes for a time is that I am a high self-monitor. Self-monitoring is the ability to change your behavior in order to adapt to whatever social situation you’re in (Snyder, 1974). For example, people who score high on tests of self-monitoring tend to be good actors. That’s exactly what this project required.

The effects of that acting, such as being happier, showed me just how easily you can change how you see yourself if you put effort into it. Even though I approached this assignment with a bit of skepticism regarding how it would benefit me, I had fun experimenting and am now glad I experienced it.

Although some of the changes didn’t suit me, such as the impulsivity, I liked how it felt to be more outgoing. I will continue to smile at random passersby, and I will continue to trick my brain into making me a happier person.

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Laird, J. D. (1974). Self-attribution of emotion: The effects of expressive behavior on the quality of emotional experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29, 475–486.

Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 63–78.

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231–259.

Snyder, M. (1974). The self-monitoring of expressive behavior. Journal

of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, 526–537.

(N = 1300 words)