Exploring Solomon's Paradox: Self-Distancing Eliminates the Self-Other Asymmetry in Wise Reasoning About Close Relationships in Younger and Older Adults
Grossmann and Kross tested a pattern named after Solomon, the king celebrated for his judgment whose own household was a disaster: people reason more wisely about other people's problems than about their own. Across three experiments with nearly seven hundred participants, they found exactly that. Reasoning about someone else's conflict, people were better at recognising the limits of their own knowledge, the value of compromise, the likelihood that circumstances would change and the existence of other perspectives. The second finding is the practical one. Instructing people to think about their own problem from a distance, as an observer rather than from inside it, removed the gap entirely. The third finding is a rebuke to a common assumption: this held equally for adults in their twenties and thirties and adults in their sixties and seventies, so age brought no advantage in reasoning about one's own conflicts. This vault cites it for the self-distancing technique.
Grossmann and Kross tested a pattern named after Solomon, the king celebrated for his judgment whose own household was a disaster: people reason more wisely about other people's problems than about their own. Across three experiments with nearly seven hundred participants, they found exactly that. Reasoning about someone else's conflict, people were better at recognising the limits of their own knowledge, the value of compromise, the likelihood that circumstances would change and the existence of other perspectives. The second finding is the practical one. Instructing people to think about their own problem from a distance, as an observer rather than from inside it, removed the gap entirely. The third finding is a rebuke to a common assumption: this held equally for adults in their twenties and thirties and adults in their sixties and seventies, so age brought no advantage in reasoning about one's own conflicts. This vault cites it for the self-distancing technique.
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What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
Grossmann, I. & Kross, E. (2014). "Exploring Solomon's Paradox: Self-Distancing Eliminates the Self-Other Asymmetry in Wise Reasoning About Close Relationships in Younger and Older Adults." Psychological Science, 25(8), 1571-1580. Three experiments, N = 693.
Where we use it
- Why You Are Kinder to Your Friends Than to Yourself, Why We Care
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535400
DOI: 10.1177/0956797614535400