Life Lessons from Psychological Research

I have a confession to make. I am terrified of being overconfident. Yet, it happens to me. All the time. Over and over again, I overestimate how well I know things or how well I can do things. It is excruciating! I still remember the first time I became aware of this. It was in primary school, I drastically overestimated my ability to roller skate as "pro-level" (I could skate backwards!!! And I could do circles that were almost pirouettes!! - I was not a pro-level roller skater, for the record) and faced my friends' ridicule as a consequence. Decades later, I felt a bit better when I learned that this is actually quite normal. People think they understand complicated things better than they do and they think they do better than they do. This is of course a gross oversimplification. Let's have a look!

Kruger and Dunning explain my roller skating humiliation as follows: Because I was not in fact a great roller skater, I also didn't have the ability to judge what it means to be a great roller skater, and therefore I was unable to recognize the ways in which my roller skating was actually sub par. In their words: "overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." 

The "Dunning-Kruger effect" is quite famous. What people often don't know is that the opposite tends to happen, too. People who are highly skilled will underestimate how well they do. Some of this can be explained by the way people judge their performance. Jansen and colleagues tested whether a simple explanation for the finding could be that people bias their judgments to the mean when they are not so sure. If you don't know how well you are doing what you should do is guess that you are average, because that is the best guess if all judgments are equally likely. So when in doubt, one should assume they are average. When one experiences one's own performance and maybe it doesn't feel so great, then one can update a little bit downwards. If people who do poorly do that and people who do really well only update a little bit upwards, one would find exactly what Kruger and Dunning found. People wouldn't even need to be robbed of the metacognitive ability to realize they are unskilled. This possibility was contrasted with the alternative that people who are unskilled are indeed also very bad at noticing when they are doing poorly. What Jansen and colleagues found was that indeed, there was not just the completely rational bias to the mean, but on the lower end, people indeed had trouble noticing their errors, too. 

Another important misinterpretation that people often have is that they think it's only certain people who are unskilled and overconfident all the time. That's not the case. We all are like this sometimes, specifically when we are doing new things that we are not good at - yet! And perhaps that's not so bad. It is a lot less demotivating when learning a new thing, to feel like it's not that hard and you're nailing it, blissfully unaware of all the flaws. 

So what do we do with this? These posts are supposed to be helpful, aren't they?! Well, I'll tell you what I did with this. First, I remind myself that I could use some humility when I feel like something I'm just getting into feels easy to me. I maybe get some external evaluation from someone with more experience. That will help me avoid the shame of realizing later that I had been overconfident. Second, and the more important lesson for me was that everybody is overconfident sometimes and that most likely, when I find someone being overconfident, all that tells me is that they haven't learned much about this particular thing yet, that they are overconfident about. It does not mean they are an overconfident person. That is important. I don't know about you, but I will interact very differently with someone who hasn't learned much about a specific thing yet, than with someone who is generally overconfident. Someone who is overconfident in that one thing they haven't learned yet, can be a very reliable narrator in other domains, and therefore be trusted. Somebody who is always overconfident is someone whose opinion I would rather not know. On the flipside, especially when teaching people something new, I remind myself, that they almost have to be overconfident because they don't have the knowledge yet to identify their mistakes and correct themselves. Knowing this, I am prepared to step in and provide corrections fore them. How about you? How can you use this knowledge to work better with yourself and others?

If you want to learn more, you can read the articles here and here. 

Jansen, R. A., Rafferty, A. N., & Griffiths, T. L. (2021). A rational model of the Dunning-Kruger effect supports insensitivity to evidence in low performers. Nat Hum Behav. doi:10.1038/s41562-021-01057-0

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. J Pers Soc Psychol, 77(6), 1121-1134. 

March 2026, Romy

This lesson I really learned from Lisa Feldman Barrett's excellent book "Seven and a half lessons about the brain". I had never previously heard about emotion contagion, the concept that we pick up on and align with the emotions of the people around us and they with ours. This really made me re-evaluate my perspective on some of my behaviors and it helped me understand some patterns and regulate my emotions better, but let's take a step back!

According to very influential work by Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson, in the 90s, people can "catch" other people's emotions. Lots of work has been done on this since, outlining how this occurs and expanding the concept to our digital world. Amit Goldenberg and James Gross for instance summarised research on emotion contagion through social media. The take-away is that other people's emotions shape ours, whether in person or online, and conversely ours shape theirs.

This insight really changed my mind. When I was younger, I was of the opinion that me being grumpy around my family (all the time, I was such a terrible teenager!) didn't really hurt anyone. I wasn't saying or doing anything, so that was fine, right? I could just exist and be left alone in my dark cloud of doom and gloom and it was nobody's business, right? That was my explicit stance at least and I would communicate that stance in strong words if necessary, which was frequently the case as my poor mother tried to stop me from poisoning the air. It was only when I learned about emotion contagion many, many years (decades... it was decades) later, that I understood that actually, I was doing harm. 

Now that I knew that my emotional responses really affected the people around me, I had a choice. I could let myself slip and be negative and let anxiety and anger spiral for myself and others, or I could try to be aware of my emotional responses and take care of myself, to my own benefit and that of the people around me. I'm not going to pretend that I am always successful, but I now much more often choose the latter. 

This concept has also helped me understand the influence that other people, media and, yes, even movies and tv shows have on me. I am now much more selective in the types of interactions and content I engage with and I understand why some people draw me in whereas others chase me off, they literally make me feel good versus bad! Now, what were your thoughts when learning about emotion contagion? How can you use this information to make your life and/or that of others a little better? 

If you want to learn more, you can read the articles here and here. And you can of course also read "Seven and a half lessons about the brain", available everywhere where you can buy or rent books.

Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional Contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96-99. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20182211

Goldenberg, A., & Gross, J. J. (2020). Digital Emotion Contagion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(4), 316-328. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2020.01.009

March 2026, Romy

When I was doing my PhD,  a conference talk introduced me to a concept that changed my life. This concept is the growth vs fixed mindset. I learned that people with a fixed mindset believed that things like talent and intelligence were innate and couldn't be changed, whereas people with a growth mindset were people who believed that you could always improve these things. I'm not going to lie, I was pretty firmly in the fixed mindset camp and I still think that there are genuine differences between people in how quickly they are able to pick things up, but my perspective has shifted nonetheless, and I will tell you why. 

What Carol Dweck's theory proposed was that that these beliefs fundamentally changed how we learn from feedback, how much effort we are willing to invest in our skill development and performance, and therefore, ultimately, how successful we are in life. Pretty big deal, huh? That's what I thought, too! I will add another thing that maybe is less emphasised in much of that work: This will also very much change how you feel when you get feedback. Let's take a step back and unpack. 

The key idea is that if you think that you just have certain abilities that cannot change (fixed mindset), then when you get feedback, what you will learn about is your ability for the thing you are currently trying to do. When I was a kid, I learned to play the piano. I thought I had some talent and indeed in the beginning I was just breezing through the classes and needed little rehearsal at home to do pretty well (none, actually). That confirmed my belief that I had musical talent. All was well. Eventually however, I hit a level where just showing up wouldn't do. I had to actually put in work. I did not do that (except when my mom bribed me with little smurf figurines - we'll talk about intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation another time - and even then I would do the bare minimum to clear the smurf bar). Instead, I did what a good fixed mindset person would do and I declared defeat. Clearly, if this was hard for me then I just wasn't talented enough. I quit the piano soon. I showed a similar pattern in many other domains. If I didn't excel naturally, I concluded it wasn't for me and I should just do something else. I left a lot of potential on the table.  

I experienced the power of a growth mindset years later when I started implementing what I had learned in that talk. Unlike a fixed mindset person, a growth mindset person believes that change is possible. That turns out to be essential for... well, change. With a growth mindset, feedback is primarily information that you can use to get better, not a judgment on your ability. Effort is a means to achieving improvement, not a signal that you just don't have it. See where I'm going with this? Once I understood these crucial differences, I changed my approach. I started working on the things that were hard and I focused on how I could use the feedback rather than avoiding it because it would just make me feel bad. I have learned so many things since I changed my perspective this way. I have learned programming, I have improved my figures and my writing. I have worked on improving my personal life (I ran my first marathon last year!). I just cannot get enough learning now! I'm even back to practicing piano (working on a daily practice)!

The science is a bit mixed still as to whether we can teach growth mindsets and whether (or whom) it helps. It seems that trainings are most effective for people who face lots of challenges and in environments that support growth mindsets. It's also not as black and white as I described above - I still fall back into fixed mindset thinking sometimes and then need to remind myself that it would be much more helpful if I didn't use feedback to judge myself, but to learn, and if I didn't take effort as evidence of poor ability, but as the means to improving it. It does get easier, though, and it turns out, if you interpret negative feedback not as revealing constraints, but as opening up possibilities, then instead of feeling down, you feel excited and motivated. Sounds great, right? How about you give it a try? 

If you want to learn more, you can read the article here. 

Dweck, C. S., & Yeager, D. S. (2019). Mindsets: A View From Two Eras. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(3), 481-496. doi:10.1177/1745691618804166

January 2026, Romy

One of the most profound life lessons I have learned is that many of the things we seek to cheer us up when we're down don't actually do that. That piece of chocolate is more likely to make me feel like a piece of shit in the end than to brighten my day (though, a well-timed piece of chocolate is nothing to frown at when it's eaten for its own sake and not for emotion regulation). The question then is what does help? Here, psychological research has given me a valuable pointer and at least this N of one has found this to work like a charm when applied in daily life. 

According to a study by Bastien Blain and Robb Rutledge, our momentary wellbeing is influenced by learning: 

In their study, they had participants play psychologists' version of a computer game online and answer questions about how they were feeling throughout. Then they used mathematical models of the mind to try and understand what determined how people were feeling moment to moment. Was it how much they were rewarded in the game (like we reward ourselves with chocolate)? Or was it something else these rewards provided, like information about the game and consequently how to do well at it, i.e., the stuff we need for learning? They could disentangle these possibilities by manipulating reward magnitude independently from the probability of getting a reward for a correct choice. What they found was that people's momentary happiness did not actually depend on the rewards they were given, but instead on the information about probabilities that they could leverage on subsequent trials to do better in the game. So what the rewards were teaching people was a better predictor of people's happiness than how big those rewards were!

My personal conclusion was that if this is true, then learning something every day should make me happier. This was during the pandemic when being happier was what most of us needed. So, following a global trend, I went and learned something. Specifically, I returned to practicing the piano. Lo and behold - it made me feel better. My piano practice has tanked a little bit since then, but I still try to learn something every day and throughout, I keep asking myself "What can I learn from this?".  What do you do to cheer yourself up? 

If you want to learn more, you can read the article here. 

Blain, B., & Rutledge, R. B. (2020). Momentary subjective well-being depends on learning and not reward. Elife, 9, e57977. doi:10.7554/eLife.57977

May 2025, Romy

In 2019 I heard a talk by Ida Momennejad. She was showing an algorithm that learned to navigate a grid world that had a cliff. With a regular setting, the algorithm would figure out where the cliff is, and navigate around it while pursuing a reward nearby. When the researchers cranked up the algorithms pessimism, it started to think that not only the cliff was dangerous, but that increasingly extensive areas around the cliff were also dangerous. At first, the pessimistic algorithm would just take ridiculous detours to avoid the cliff, but increasingly it would go more and more out of its way to prioritize avoiding the cliff over doing anything else. I gasped when Ida showed that ultimately the algorithm could learn to perceive the world as so terrible - an ever looming cliff - that the only way to escape the pain was to throw itself off the cliff.

I had two critical insights that day: 1) I had been operating like that algorithm and made my world smaller and smaller to avoid threats, and 2) I could change the world I inhabited.

These insights allowed me to change my life for the better. Awareness is the first requirement for change. By being mindful and recognizing when I was not doing things that would be good for me or doing things that incurred unnecessary effort to avoid potential, unlikely threats, and then choosing otherwise, I increased my world again. I restarted doing things that were fun, I began enjoying things again because I stopped focussing on the terrible things that could happen and aligning everything with avoiding them. I changed the world I inhabited by changing which aspects I looked at. Suddenly there were opportunities and blessings where before all there was was threats and fear. 

What world do you choose to live in? Do you regularly not go places because something bad might happen? Do you regularly work around people because you don't trust that they will respond well to things you bring up? Do you regularly overprepare and overthink or abandon plans altogether because they seem too daunting? 

You can read the published article here. Maybe it changes your life, too. 

Zorowitz, S., Momennejad, I., & Daw, N. D. (2020). Anxiety, Avoidance, and Sequential Evaluation. Computational Psychiatry. doi:10.1162/CPSY_a_00026

April 2025, Romy