Chatter

Ethan Kross
2021

He unlinked. Ankiel’s verbal stream turned into a spotlight that shined his attention too brightly on the individual physical components of his pitching motion, thereby seeming to inadvertently dismantle it.
—Chatter by Ethan Kross

This is exactly what our inner voice’s tendency to immerse us in a problem does. It overfocuses our attention on the parts of a behavior that only functions as the sum of its parts. The result: paralysis by analysis.
—Chatter by Ethan Kross

All of us are familiar with the distractions of a negative verbal stream. Have you ever tried to read a book or complete a task requiring focus after a bad fight with someone you love? It’s next to impossible. All the resulting negative thoughts consume your executive functions because your inner critic and its ranting have taken over corporate headquarters, raiding your neuronal resources.
—Chatter by Ethan Kross

Indeed, not having a strong social-support network is a risk factor for death as large as smoking more than fifteen cigarettes a day,
—Chatter by Ethan Kross

The asymmetry in King Solomon’s thinking is a chatter parable that embodies a fundamental feature of the human mind: We don’t see ourselves with the same distance and insight with which we see others. Data shows that this goes beyond biblical allegory: We are all vulnerable to it. My colleagues and I refer to this bias as “Solomon’s Paradox,” though King Solomon is by no means the only sage who could lend his name to the phenomenon.
—Chatter by Ethan Kross

While some people may understandably think that outrage is the wisest response to discovering that your partner cheated on you, our interest was in whether distance would decrease rather than increase conflict by cultivating a wise response. As we expected, people were much wiser when they imagined the problem was happening to someone else. They felt it was more important to find compromise with the person who had cheated, and they were also more open to hearing that person’s perspective.
—Chatter by Ethan Kross

have a 10 percent chance of dying from cancer, or undergo a novel treatment that has a 5 percent chance of killing you. Obviously, the second option is better, because the risk of death is 5 percent less. And yet, consistent with prior research indicating that people often choose to do nothing rather than something when it comes to their health, 40 percent of participants chose the more life-threatening option. But—and this is a big but—when the same people were asked to make this decision for someone else, only 31 percent made the bad choice.
—Chatter by Ethan Kross

There’s a classic finding in psychology called the frequency illusion. It describes the common experience of, say, learning a new word and then suddenly seeing it seemingly everywhere you look.
—Chatter by Ethan Kross