Emily Falk

So we know from other research that social relevance brain systems that help us understand what other people think and feel are engaged when we hear stories and when we tell stories.

And that that kind of thinking might be fundamentally different from the other kinds of reasoning that we're talking about.

Exactly.

And research by folks like Ethan Cross, some of the research that's been done here at Penn in the Behavior Change for Good initiative,

shows exactly that, that when people are put in the position of either, you know, taking the perspective of a distanced other person, like the perspective of a fly on the wall or the perspective of somebody else or their perspective of someone giving advice to another person, that that makes it easier for us to actually think about the situation in a more wise way ourself.

And so we can come up with better solutions.

We can come up with wiser solutions.

And, um,

I'll say personally, the number of studies that I've run where I have tried to convince somebody else to do something, to get more physically active or use sunscreen or floss or whatever it is, and then I just end up convincing myself.

I'm just this constellation of all the studies that I've ever run because for so many years I've been doing these studies trying to convince other people to do stuff.

Yeah, we ran a study where we had college students get messages on a day-to-day basis.

We sent them text messages and some of the students got messages where they were just told to respond to alcohol however they normally would.

And others were told to take the perspective of somebody who we knew from prior surveys that we had done with them was somebody that they were friends with and drank less than they did.

So it's somebody where they're familiar with that behavior and taking the perspective of a friend who drank less than they did also reduced their own drinking.

Well, in the hour or so after my kids go to bed, it's a really nice time where Brett and I usually hang out with each other.

And usually we hang out in the kitchen and we clean up from the day.

And by we clean up from the day, I mean Brett cleans up from the day and I hang out with him while that happens, which is really a lovely characteristic to have in a partner, somebody who's just as happy doing dishes as sitting around.

Yeah.

And so in this particular evening, Brett was doing his wonderful typical thing of doing the dishes.

And I was sitting in a very comfortable chair checking my email.