Know Thy Selves: Learning to Understand Oneself Increases the Ability to Understand Others

authored by

Anne Boeckler, Lukas Herrmann, Fynn-Mathis Trautwein, Tom Holmes, Tania Singer

Abstract

Understanding others’ feelings, intentions, and beliefs is a crucial social skill both for our personal lives and for meeting the challenges of a globalized world. Recent evidence suggests that the ability to represent and infer others’ mental states (Theory of Mind, ToM) can be enhanced by mental training in healthy adults. The present study investigated the role of training-induced understanding of oneself for the enhanced understanding of others. In a large-scale longitudinal study, two independent participant samples (N = 80 and N = 81) received a 3-month contemplative training. This training focused on perspective taking and was inspired by the Internal Family Systems model that conceives the self as being composed of a complex system of inner personality aspects. Specifically, participants practiced perspective taking on their own inner states by learning to identify and classify different inner personality parts. Results revealed that the degree to which participants improved their understanding of themselves—reflected in the number of different inner parts they could identify—predicted their improvements in high-level ToM performance over training. Especially the number of identified parts that were negatively valenced showed a strong relation with enhanced ToM capacities. This finding suggests a close link between getting better in understanding oneself and improvement in social intelligence.

External Organisation(s)

Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science (MPI CBS)
Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg
Western Michigan University

Type

Article

Journal

JOURNAL OF COGNITIVE ENHANCEMENT

Volume

1

Pages

197-209

No. of pages

13

ISSN

2509-3290

Publication date

06.2017

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Behavioral Neuroscience

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1007/s41465-017-0023-6 (Access: Open)