“Limiting conditions” is my own little trick for reading psychology books.
In this episode, we continue talking about popular psychology books. Last time, we talked about how to choose; this time, we’re talking about how to read. More precisely, once you’ve finished a popular psychology book and learned some psychological knowledge from it, what are you supposed to do with that knowledge?
Psychology That’s No F***ing Use
If you can’t wait to treat this knowledge as an action manual and use it to guide your life, I’m guessing you’ll probably be disappointed. You may soon discover:
You seem to know so many psychological truths, yet you still can’t live this life well.
Psychological knowledge that looks so convincing on paper often turns out to be no f***ing use once you put it into practice.
Example: Happier When Distracted, or Happier When Focused?
Let’s take an example. Here’s a question for everyone:
Are you happier when you’re distracted and doing two things at once, or when you’re focused on one thing?
A study published a few years ago in Science, one of the most prestigious journals around, examined this very question.
The researchers developed an app. Through it, they connected with 5,000 participants from 83 countries. For a period of time, the researchers sent the participants notifications at random intervals. Whenever they received one, the participants had to answer immediately: Were the thing they were doing and the thing they were thinking about the same? They also had to quickly rate how happy they felt.
The results showed that for 46.9% of the people in the study, what they were thinking about had nothing to do with what they were doing. In other words, when the notification arrived, they were distracted, daydreaming, or letting their minds wander.
More importantly, even when their daydreams were about things that made them happy, these participants felt less pleasure than when they were concentrating on what they were doing.
So the researchers concluded: Although people often let their minds wander, they are happier when concentrating on a task than when doing it while distracted.
Okay, if a paper published in a top international journal tells us that concentrating on a task makes us happiest, can we treat that conclusion as a universal law and use it to guide our lives?
Does a happy life equal “staying utterly focused and never getting distracted”?
Probably not! Human nature isn’t that simple.
Limiting conditions!
Human nature is the most complicated thing in the world. As long as even one seemingly insignificant factor changes in a person’s internal or external environment, their psychology and behavior may change dramatically.
There are simply too many factors that influence the human mind. In each study, psychologists can only target a few of them—which means deliberately simplifying the complexity of the model.
As a result, their conclusions actually come with very strong “limiting conditions.”
For example, what limiting conditions might apply to the study we just discussed? I can think of one:
The point in time when the participants evaluated their emotions might be a limiting condition.
In the published experiment, the researchers asked participants to evaluate their emotions immediately upon receiving the notification. They were evaluating how they felt in that moment.
What if, instead, they were asked to recall their feelings that evening, before going to bed? The results might have been very different.
Once you stretch out the time frame, things get much more complicated.
For instance, what if I don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do?
When time is tight, concentrating on a task might raise my momentary happiness, but then I won’t finish everything. As a result, I’ll be especially anxious afterward.
If I work while distracted, my happiness in the moment may not be as high, but at least I’ll have done more with the limited time I had. Looking back afterward, I might feel more satisfied—or at least less anxious.
So can you still simply say that concentrating on a task makes you happier?
I can think of another possible situation:
What if the distracting activity is especially enjoyable?
I like cooking while listening to music. If an insanely rousing song comes on while I’m stir-frying, I suddenly feel as if I could cook that dish with an epic sense of grandeur.
In that case, the daydream serving as a distraction has actually elevated the main task. How could that not be pleasurable?
So you see, even if what you’ve learned isn’t pseudo-psychology but the most rigorous, authoritative findings from psychological research, you still can’t use them to guide your life without thinking.
That’s the nature of psychological experiments. Their results often hold only under certain conditions, at a certain time and place; they are not necessarily laws that apply everywhere.
So I’m not saying that the psychological knowledge in books is useless. I’m saying we should always remind ourselves that it comes with “limiting conditions.”
The Mindset
“Limiting conditions” is the key idea of today’s episode, and a little mindset I use when reading psychology books.
Whenever I come across a psychological conclusion, I ask myself: What are the limiting conditions under which this conclusion holds?
If an experiment was conducted with Americans, would it still hold in the Chinese cultural context? Could cultural background be a limiting condition?
If an experiment was conducted with adults, and you want to use the psychological rule it reveals to correct the behavior of your three- or four-year-old daughter, shouldn’t you be especially careful? Could age be a limiting condition?
This kind of thinking may not always produce an answer, but I think it’s essential to keep it in mind.
Example: The Power of Habit v.s. The Talent Code
Not only is it essential, I also think it’s one of the great pleasures of reading psychology books—you get to play an intellectual game with the author.
Here’s an example. There are two popular psychology books on the market: one is called The Power of Habit, and the other The Talent Code.
Here’s my blunt, rough summary of their themes:
- The Power of Habit argues that excellence comes from your habits, and that building habits is the most important thing;
- while The Talent Code says that excellence comes from deliberate practice that breaks through habit, and that breaking habits at every moment is the most important thing.
Both books use sports competitions as examples:
- The Power of Habit says that an American football team performed so well because its players responded on the field with the habitual movements they had developed in training;
- while The Talent Code says Tiger Woods was so good because every time he swung at the ball, he broke through his habits and never let himself get too comfortable simply following habitual movements.
Are you frozen in your tracks by now? From their arguments to their examples, the two books seem to contradict each other exactly—and each has theories and cases to support it.
So what do we do? Whom should we listen to? Which one is right, and which one is wrong?
It’s quite possible that neither is wrong. They simply failed to spell out the limiting conditions of their own arguments.
Acting according to habit and breaking through habit may each have their own boundaries and fields of application.
At this point, we readers can put our intelligence to work and help both authors identify those fields of application and limiting conditions.
We can ask ourselves:
- Could American football and golf actually represent two different types of problems, requiring different methods to solve them?
- Could an ordinary football player score 95 by acting habitually, while a truly top-level player still has to break through habit constantly, like Tiger Woods, to score 100?
We can think through lots of questions like these.
You probably don’t find this kind of reading pleasure in popular physics or mathematics books, do you?
I love reading popular physics books. When I read them, how would I dare play intellectual games with the authors? I’m basically there only to worship the gods. If I don’t come away feeling like an idiot, that’s already a win.
Conclusion
Let’s sum up today’s point:
When we encounter a piece of psychological knowledge in a book, it’s extremely important to think about its “limiting conditions.”
If you read popular psychology books with this mindset, the knowledge in them may still not become a guide for your life. But during the reading process, you may well discover that you’ve gone beyond the author’s field of vision:
“What you’ve written makes sense, but I know when it makes sense.”
If we can read our way to that realization, isn’t that already enough to make us happy?
Text｜Zhichao Wei
Illustrations｜Wang Xiaowei
References mentioned in the article:
1. The paper on whether distraction or concentration makes us happier
Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932-932.
2. A hilarious rebuttal
Regarding the conclusion of the paper above—that “concentration makes us happier than mind-wandering”—there’s a very interesting rebuttal in the book The Art and Science of Mind-Wandering.
The author says that the experimental results actually prove that mind-wandering is happier than concentration.
It’s precisely because mind-wandering feels so good that being rudely interrupted by the researchers made the participants so unhappy!
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