'The circumstances of our lives may matter less than how we see them, says Rory Sutherland. At TEDxAthens, he makes a compelling case for how reframing is the key to happiness.' -- "Our perception is leaky."

'The theory of self-affirmation is a psychological theory that was first proposed by Claude Steele (1988) with the premise that people are motivated to maintain the integrity of the self. The ultimate goal of the self is to protect an image of its self-integrity, morality and adequacy. People tend to interpret relatively uncomfortable information in a way consistent with their existing beliefs (see confirmation bias), a phenomenon which is associated with valued aspects of self-identity. The need to protect a valued identity is a major source of biased processing. Fortunately, people identify with multiple values. Researchers discovered that providing people with affirmation opportunities on alternative sources of self-integrity lead to a less biased evaluation to threatening information. Self-affirmation increases the openness of people to ideas that are difficult to accept. Specifically, affirmation leads to attitude change by means of a more careful consideration of the information rather than through heuristic processing. Moreover, self-affirmation studies suggested that discomfort resulting from cognitive dissonance could be overcome if their self-integrity is enhanced through the affirmations of an alternative domain of identity. People who affirm themselves in one aspect when they are facing threats to another aspect are believed to have more psychological support with which to self-affirm. Generally, self-affirmation increases people's open-mindedness and flexibility. However, the domain from which the threat and affirmation emerge is important. In the case that the threat and affirmation come from the same domain, self-affirmation would lead to a decrease in open-mindedness and flexibility.'

'Research has also shown that individuals strategically seek out opportunities to act morally if they know they might need a moral license for an upcoming dubious action. Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral. How do individuals face the ethical uncertainties of social life? When under the threat that their next action might be (or appear to be) morally dubious, individuals can derive confidence from their past moral behavior, such that an impeccable track record increases their propensity to engage in otherwise suspect actions. Such moral self-licensing (Monin & Miller, 2001) occurs when past moral behavior makes people more likely to do potentially immoral things without worrying about feeling or appearing immoral. We argue that moral self-licensing occurs because good deeds make people feel secure in their moral self-regard. For example, when people are confident that their past behavior demonstrates compassion, generosity, or a lack of prejudice, they are more likely to act in morally dubious ways without fear of feeling heartless, selfish, or bigoted. Do good deeds reframe bad deeds (moral credentials) or merely balance them out (moral credits)? When does past behavior liberate and when does it constrain? Is self-licensing primarily for others’ benefit (self-presentational) or is it also a way for people to reassure themselves that they are moral people?' -- Action Identification: "I am *doing* good" = I am doing the thought: "I am *being* good"

'Names are nothing; naming is everything. To name a thing is to truly know it. As Ursula Le Guin said, “for magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.” It is in fact useful to think of naming an interrogative act that creates what it questions. Demand insistently enough to know the name, rank and number of a thing, and you will eventually find out. Even if your mind has to manufacture an answer. We name to liberate, and we name to imprison. We name to flatter, and we name to insult. We name to own, and we name to be owned. We name to subsume, and have subsumed. We name to frame, and we name to reframe. You name to create, destroy, fragment and churn. You name a product and launch it. You give a dog a bad name and hang it. To name is also to hide and cloak. To switch stories and manufacture realities. This is the world of Don Draper. He dons a mask, and drapes new realities over old ones. Starting with his own life.'

'Meaningful actions exist because we find or impose patterns on the specific behaviours we observe or otherwise learn about. The patterns are constructions, but once generated, they are maintained because they disambiguate reality and thereby provide coherent understanding and a stable platform for subsequent thought and behaviour. Because they are constructions, however, they can admit to tremendous variability across people and contexts. Hence, the certainty of action that exists for each individual embedded in a particular context coexists with the uncertainty of action across individuals and contexts. That said, there is one metric for disambiguating action that seems solid and reflects a shared reality. The multiple act identities for an action tend to be organized in a hierarchical manner. A simple criterion is useful for sorting an action's multiple identities into a hierarchy: One act identity is higher-level than another identity if it makes sense to say that one does the former by doing the latter. -- ...when two or more plausible identities are available, people are inclined to choose the identity that provides the most comprehensive understanding of what they are doing, plan to do, or have done. -- #Social Influence: The influence agent first induces the target to consider the relevant action in concrete, low-level terms. Simply describing the action in terms of its details can induce low-level identification, as can presenting the target with a surplus of concrete information regarding the action. From this low-level state, the target experiences a heightened press for coherence. On his or her own, the target might emerge with a higher-level identity that reflects past perspectives or perhaps one that reflects a new integration. But if the influence agent offers a message that provides the missing integration before the target has demonstrated emergence on his or her own, the target may embrace this message as an avenue of emergent understanding, even if it conflicts with his or her prior conception.'

'Compared with low-level agents, high-level agents express a more internal locus of control, report more stability and consistency in their actions across contexts, and have clearer and more stable self-concepts. By contrast, low-level agents report acting more impulsively and describe their actions with less reference to mental states. The tendency to identify one’s actions at higher levels then may be indicative of an awareness of one’s own mind as a cause of behavior. -- Mentalizing incorporates subprocesses whereby the perceiver infers the existence of mental states, internal events, and other features of agents from external cues or from a personal simulation of the other’s experience... The tendency to mentalize in adults has been examined in studies of empathy, perspective-taking, emotion recognition and attribution, and knowledge estimation....mentalization is a continuum. At the lowest end of the continuum is the failure to attribute mental states to an agent, which might be called dementalizing. Thought, emotion, and intention are not inferred or are ignored. A perceiver can dementalize a person by explaining the person’s actions in terms of physical events, preexisting dispositions, or causal chains that do not require a mind.'

'Mentalization is the process by which an observer views a target as possessing higher cognitive faculties such as goals, intentions and desires. Mentalization can be assessed using action identification paradigms, in which observers choose mentalistic (goals-focused) or mechanistic (action-focused) descriptions of targets’ actions. Typically, healthy adults mentalize liked others more than disliked others... This discrepancy is reflected in discrepancies in action identification across targets. Liked
targets’ actions are consistently identified at higher levels than disliked targets’... This suggests that mentalization as assessed by action identification tasks varies as a function of the observer’s impression of the actor. Activation in several regions increased when participants considered the actions of disliked targets. These regions included the bilateral dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral anterior insula and right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. These are regions consistently associated with negative emotions such as disgust, anger and pain...'

'People change their conceptions of what they are doing either by moving from a higher level to a lower one, or by moving from a lower level to a higher one. This means that in moving from one high-level conception of an action to another, the person must necessarily pass through a transitional state in which the specifics of the action come to mind. This formulation indicates that when people hold a fairly comprehensive and general conception of what they are doing, that conception will serve as an intention to act and will remain unperturbed by suggestions that the act has some alternative general identity. Thus, the theory explains why people are not always willing to believe it when someone suggests to them a new high-level conception of their action. It is only when people come to identify an action in terms of its details that they lose sight of their initial high-level understanding of the act and become susceptible to information indicating that the act can be identified in another high-level way.'

'If successfully enacted, an action tends to be identified at a relatively high level; if unsuccessfully enacted, it tends to be identified in lower-level terms. ...in the face of failure, the actor is likely to think about the action in more mechanistic terms. -- ...the extension of action identification principles to the communication of action allows for a certain "coyness" in self-presentation. Rather than boasting of one's personal competence, a person might nonetheless communicate this image of himself or herself through high-level identities. And rather than admitting failure or explaining it away, one can simply (and honestly) describe what one has done in mechanistic terms, thereby circumventing the presentation of oneself as incompetent. Finally, one can cultivate an image of modesty in the eyes of others by describing action-even successful action-in relatively low-level terms.'

'...people identify the actions they perform at the highest level they can.' -- Links to PDF papers

Action Identification: High/Why vs Low/How: "We have meaning and significance at the high levels of identification... When you focus at low levels there's less self-relevance to what you're doing." -- Being vs Doing