Why Does the Fortress Besieged Effect Happen?
As I understand it, the Fortress Besieged effect means that when people are living one kind of life, they always feel that another kind of life would be infinitely better. But once they actually start living that other life, they find it is nothing special—and might even be worse than the life they had.
The key to explaining the Fortress Besieged effect is understanding why we initially develop such an overly rosy fantasy about another kind of life.
I think what lies behind this is the Construal Level effect.
Construal Level means that we perceive objects at different psychological distances from us in time and space at different levels of abstraction.
For things that feel close to us in space—such as the people around us and the life we are living—and close in time—things happening now, immediately, or very soon—we understand them more concretely. We use lots of specific adjectives to describe them, and imagine all kinds of details within them;
but for things that feel distant from us in space or time, we understand them more abstractly. We describe them with general adjectives, think about their overall outline and purpose, and consider their broad significance, while finding it much harder to imagine all the details.
The two kinds of life in the Fortress Besieged effect—the one around us and the one we fantasize about—happen to be one close and one distant. We naturally think about the close one in concrete detail, and the distant one in abstract terms. And once we think abstractly, it is of course easy to become extreme: your mind contains only a few big concepts, grand words, and sweeping meanings. So if you start out with a rosy fantasy about it, that fantasy gets magnified, becoming infinitely wonderful in abstract thought stripped of detail.
But once you really find yourself living inside that fantasy life, the distant becomes close, and the details rushing toward you are bound to send you tumbling down from the clouds.
This reminds me of a type of research on how imagination affects success. Those studies found that the more people mentally anticipate and rehearse all the details of a task before doing it, the more likely they are to succeed when they actually do it. People who only imagine, in the abstract, that they will succeed are actually less likely to succeed.
Before taking action, force yourself to imagine all the details in advance. The devil is in the details. With that devil in your heart, the urge to climb over the “wall” and get out probably will not be quite so strong.
p.s.:
Chinese academic papers may more commonly call the theory Construal Level Theory (CLT), and may more commonly translate it as “Interpretive Level Theory.”
Note
- This series of articles, the “Psychology New Knowledge Mini-Course,” consisted of short popular-science essays and informal reflections written at the time to accompany content related to Zhichao Wei: Psychology New Knowledge Course. They were published on the now-shuttered platform Fantuan, and the original article link no longer exists.
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