Ellen Langer

• 
• 4 Comments
• Mindfulness
• Apr 8, 09:52 AM

Relationship illusions

Jane can’t understand how her spouse has changed. When she first met Charles, he was wonderfully generous and now he’s become a tightwad. Every time he lets their friend Richard pick up the check without a fight, she gets angry and starts telling herself how stingy he is.

When couples first come together, the implicit comparisons they make are about this person compared with the world of other possible mates. It’s unlikely that if I value a particular way of being, say generosity, that I’ll choose to be with someone who is stingy. If being smart matters to me, my choice is not likely to be someone I’d consider stupid.

Although they come together because of our similarities, couples argue about their differences. We all know how unkind we can be in the way we think about the person we fell in love with. How could I have gotten involved with someone so petty, stupid, sloppy, irresponsible, etc? No matter what the characteristic is that leads us to now think ill of someone we used to adore, there is a kinder, simpler explanation for the differences that lead to arguments.

Once Jane choose to be with Charles, she become the person to whom she now most often compares him. Being oblivious to how the range of her comparisons has narrowed—from everyone out there to just the two of them—leads her to forget how similar she once thought they were. With just a single point of comparison, one of them has to lose. Maybe she needs to take a closer look at how she’s magnified a very small difference.

Once we recognize that no two people are going to ever be exactly the same on any characteristic, we are able to realize that one of the two will always be more generous, wiser, neater, better with handling financial matters, and the like. It has to be so.

• 
• 0 Comments
• Mindfulness
• Mar 15, 06:13 PM

Bad Advice or a Mindless Decision?

I was once advised to take a calculus class in college that turned out to be the wrong one to pursue the chemistry major I had already embarked on. I became a psychologist instead.

There may really be no such thing as bad advice. What is good from one perspective may be bad from another. I’ve never been given bad advice although I have on occasion made a choice that seemed not to turn out to be to my advantage. When I’ve made it work out anyway, the so-called bad advice became good. Moreover, we never know what the alternatives not taken would have felt like.

Regret is mindless. If we make our decisions—to follow any particular path—mindfully, we’ll have no regrets, and thus will have not taken bad advice.

• 
• 0 Comments
• Mindful Health
• Feb 27, 04:21 PM

Blaming the Victim

When I give lectures around my book, Counterclockwise, not infrequently someone will ask whether the idea I’m espousing—that we have far more control over our illnesses than most of us realize—inevitably leads to blaming the victim. Their reasoning must be that if we can control either the severity of our symptoms or the entire disease process, than those who suffer are suffering by their own hands since they did nothing to help themselves. This understanding couldn’t be further from the truth.

We have been explicitly and implicitly taught by our culture to be mindless. We have been taught absolutes when none really exist independent of context. When we think we know something absolutely, we have learned that it is reasonable never to question it, nor to pay attention to how it may be otherwise. Beliefs and behavior always make some kind of sense from the actor’s perspective or else the actor would have done otherwise. Blame suggests mindlessness on the part of the blamer who does not recognize this. We are not at fault for what we do not know just because someone else can see a way we could have known it.

If we can avoid blaming the victim, we won’t waste time lost in the past, Instead we can learn to know now. Greater health and well being will follow if we do.

• 
• 0 Comments
• Mindfulness
• Feb 27, 04:17 PM

Mind Power

At the time, the dominant view in the field of psychology assumed that human decision-making was a thoroughly logical process, driven by a constant calculation of probabilities and costs and benefits. The reaction to that botched deal made Langer suspect something very different.

To test this, she ran a study in which she set up a lottery and varied the terms by which people got their tickets. She found that subjects valued their tickets much more when they were allowed to choose them, even though that did nothing to increase their chances of winning. She called this “the illusion of control.”

Langer followed this up by looking at the often meaningless factors that determine how people evaluate information. In one study, conducted with Benzion Chanowitz and Arthur Blank, she had experimenters approach people who were using a Xerox machine and ask to cut in to make copies. They found that people were more likely to let someone cut if offered a reason – but, intriguingly, it did not matter if the reason made sense. People were as receptive to a meaningless reason (“to make copies”) as a valid one (“I’m in a rush”).

“It is not that people don’t hear the request,” Langer wrote in “Mindfulness,” “they simply don’t think about it actively.”

The above is from a profile of me that ran in the Boston Globe a few days ago. You can read the rest of it here.

• 
• 1 Comments
• Mindfulness
• Feb 27, 04:12 PM

The Art of Living Mindfully

“Mindful attending, noticing, is enlivening,” says Langer. “People who say they’re bored—with their relationships, for example, or their jobs—that’s because they’re holding it still. They’re confusing the stability of their mind-set with the stability of the underlying phenomena. Things are always changing.”

From a profile that The Chronicle of Higher Education recently ran of me and my work. You can find the rest of the article here.