How many times have we watched a football game and were so frustrated with the ballers because of how you can see the “fatal” mistakes they are making? Nigerians can relate to the just concluded AFCON finals between Nigeria and Cote D’Ivoire.
Mind you, almost 100% of us shouting at our screens about how the players should be playing are neither professional footballs nor do they even play recreational.
This our ability to give other people’s advice but not able to apply the same wise counsel if we were in the situation we were doling out advice on that is called Solomon’s Paradox. A form of cognitive bias.
It was named for King Solomon by psychologists Igor Grossman and Ethan Kross. King Solomon is well known for his wisdom and insights which were given to him by God after God asked him what he wanted. He didn’t ask for wealth or health but for wisdom. People came from far and wide to seek his counsel.
One of his more prominent shows of wisdom in the bible was the settlement of the dispute between 2 women dragging the ownership of a baby(no DNA testing then). One of the women wanted the child to be divided into 2 (essentially killing the baby), and the other wanted the other woman to keep the child believing that the child will find its rightful owner when he grows. He said the woman willing to give up the baby was the rightful mother because no real mother would want their child killed. She was willing to give up the child in the moment as long as he wasn't killed.
Despite all his wisdom, he didn’t seem to be able to internalise them, he fell into the trappings of wealth, power, and idolatry. He accumulated vast riches, amassing gold, silver, and other valuable treasures despite saying “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit”. He engaged in political alliances through marriages to foreign women( he notoriously had 700 wives of royal birth and 300 concubines), which ultimately led him astray from worshipping the one true God and caused divisions within his kingdom.
It was based on this dichotomy between his “external” wisdom and internal application that Grossman and Kross based their 2014 research. They found that people are less likely to adopt multiple wisdom-related strategies when reasoning about their issues than when considering others’ conflicts.
Grossmann et al. (2010, 2013) regarded wisdom (reasoning) as practical reasoning related to wisdom used by individuals to cope with many challenges in social life, while wise reasoning consists of the common features of dialectical thinking, intellectual humility, compromise-seeking, and prosocial tendencies to promote the common good, all of which require one to go beyond egotism and consider and reason about an overall situation holistically (Staudinger and Glück, 2011).
Studies have shown that, when people are thinking about important life problems, they tend to focus on the specific details of themselves in their own life experiences, which makes it difficult for them to broaden their perspectives and is not conducive to reasoning (Ayduk and Kross, 2010; Grossmann and Kross, 2010).
Reflecting on personal experiences from the perspective of a bystander or through self-abstraction, however, individuals can adopt more abstract high-level explanations to represent and avoid egocentric perspectives (Trope and Liberman, 2010; Kross and Ayduk, 2011). This method of self-distance has also been observed in an intervention study in which participants were trained to reflect on daily conflicts in the third person, and results showed that the participants were able to effectively improve their wise reasoning in this manner, as compared to when they thought about their problems in the first person (Grossmann et al., 2021).
Reflecting from a bystander perspective reinforces my Heroes post of last week. Seeing things from the perspective of another removes the subjectiveness that clouds our judgment when making decisions that affect us.
Another way to avoid Solomon’s Paradox is (as crazy as it might sound) to talk to yourself. This again draws from adopting an outsider perspective, imagining you are say your therapist or a “smarter” person. Ask yourself questions like “Why are you doing that?”, “What can you do to help?”
If you are such a rockstar for others, a shame not to use such homegrown ingenuity on ourselves too right?
Keep going,
Ije.
Good piece...reminds me of a meme I saw one time that said " My toxic trait as a doctor is giving my patients advice that I don't apply to myself " 😀
Interesting read…
In a nutshell "practice what you preach"
How many of us can actually say our words match our actions?! In a society full of people having different opinions and sharing différents ideas and perpective to life and things without considering others? I guess that’s why the other woman didn’t mind the child shared into two, while the other didn’t want any harm to come close to the child. We all need to be intentional about the things we do or say.
"Seeing things from the perspective of another removes the subjectiveness that clouds our judgment when making decisions that affect us/others. "
It’s safe to say it is important while we are all biased with the things we do that we see how that can affect others even while dishing out advice let’s make sure we also live a life we can be proud of.