Mon­ty Python icon John Cleese had this to say about Mar­jorie Tay­lor Greene yes­ter­day: “She is the per­fect exam­ple of some­one who is not intel­li­gent enough to realise that she’s not very intel­li­gent. Hence her enor­mous self-con­fi­dence. Sad­ly, her sup­port­ers are even less intel­li­gent than she is. Hence their con­fi­dence in her.” It turns out that, as Cleese fur­ther explains in the video above, there’s a sci­en­tif­ic term for MTG’s con­di­tion–the Dunning–Kruger effect, “a cog­ni­tive bias where­in unskilled indi­vid­u­als suf­fer from illu­so­ry supe­ri­or­i­ty, mis­tak­en­ly rat­ing their abil­i­ty much high­er than is accu­rate” owing to “a metacog­ni­tive inabil­i­ty of the unskilled to rec­og­nize their inep­ti­tude” (and, by the same token, of “high­ly skilled indi­vid­u­als to under­es­ti­mate their rel­a­tive com­pe­tence, erro­neous­ly assum­ing that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for oth­ers”). This con­di­tion gets its name from Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty researchers Justin Kruger and David Dun­ning, the lat­ter of whom Cleese–who has spent time at Cor­nell as a long-term vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor–counts as a friend. You can learn more about the Dunning–Kruger effect here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Why Incom­pe­tent Peo­ple Think They’re Amaz­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son from David Dun­ning (of the Famous “Dun­ning-Kruger Effect”)

24 Com­mon Cog­ni­tive Bias­es: A Visu­al List of the Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sys­tems Errors That Keep Us From Think­ing Ratio­nal­ly

John Cleese Revis­its His 20 Years as an Ivy League Pro­fes­sor in His New Book, Pro­fes­sor at Large: The Cor­nell Years

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

A cou­ple of weeks ago, the New York Times pub­lished an arti­cle head­lined “How to Stop Rumi­nat­ing.” If your social media feeds are any­thing like mine, you’ve seen it pop up with some fre­quen­cy since then. “Per­haps you spend hours replay­ing a tense con­ver­sa­tion you had with your boss over and over in your head,” writes its author Han­nah Seo. “Maybe you can’t stop think­ing about where things went wrong with an ex dur­ing the weeks and months after a breakup.” The piece’s pop­u­lar­i­ty speaks to the com­mon­ness of these ten­den­cies.

But if “your thoughts are so exces­sive and over­whelm­ing that you can’t seem to stop them,” lead­ing to dis­trac­tion and dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion at work and at home, “you’re prob­a­bly expe­ri­enc­ing rumi­na­tion.” For this broad­er phe­nom­e­non Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Ethan Kross has a more evoca­tive name: chat­ter.

“Your inner voice is your abil­i­ty to silent­ly use lan­guage to reflect on your life,” he explains in the Big Think video above. “Chat­ter refers to the dark side of the inner voice. When we turn our atten­tion inward to make sense of our prob­lems, we don’t end up find­ing solu­tions. We end up rumi­nat­ing, wor­ry­ing, cat­a­stro­phiz­ing.”

Despite being an invalu­able tool for plan­ning, mem­o­ry, and self-con­trol, our inner voice also has a way of turn­ing against us. “It makes it incred­i­bly hard for us to focus,” Kross says, and it can also have “severe neg­a­tive phys­i­cal health effects” when it keeps us per­pet­u­al­ly stress­ing out over long-passed events. “We expe­ri­ence a stres­sor in our life. It then ends, but in our minds, our chat­ter per­pet­u­ates it. We keep think­ing about that event over and over again.” When you’re inside them, such men­tal loops can feel infi­nite, and they could result in per­pet­u­al­ly dire con­se­quences in our per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives. To those in need of a way to break free, Kross empha­sizes the pow­er of rit­u­als.

“When you expe­ri­ence chat­ter, you often feel like your thoughts are in con­trol of you,” he says. But “we can com­pen­sate for this feel­ing out of con­trol by cre­at­ing order around us. Rit­u­als are one way to do that.” Per­form­ing cer­tain actions exact­ly the same way every sin­gle time gives you “a sense of order and con­trol that can feel real­ly good when you’re mired in chat­ter.” Kross goes into greater depth on the range of chat­ter-con­trol­ling tools avail­able to us (“dis­tanced-self talk,” for exam­ple, which involves per­ceiv­ing and address­ing the self as if it were some­one) in his book Chat­ter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Mat­ters, and How to Har­ness It. His inter­view with Chase Jarvis above offers a pre­view of its con­tent — and a reminder that, as means of silenc­ing chat­ter go, some­times a pod­cast works as well as any­thing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Secret to High Per­for­mance and Ful­fil­ment: Psy­chol­o­gist Daniel Gole­man Explains the Pow­er of Focus

How Lit­er­a­ture Can Improve Men­tal Health: Take a Free Course Fea­tur­ing Stephen Fry, Ian McK­ellen, Melvyn Bragg & More

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

The Ther­a­peu­tic Ben­e­fits of Ambi­ent Music: Sci­ence Shows How It Eas­es Chron­ic Anx­i­ety, Phys­i­cal Pain, and ICU-Relat­ed Trau­ma

Erich Fromm’s Six Rules of Lis­ten­ing: Learn the Keys to Under­stand­ing Oth­er Peo­ple from the Famed Psy­chol­o­gist

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Big Think uploaded the video on how to argue above at the end of last month, just in time for the Unit­ed States midterm elec­tion. Where pol­i­tics — or rather, polit­i­cal­ly inflect­ed con­flicts — have become more or less anoth­er nation­al sport, every­one is always look­ing for an edge. But the expert who stars in the video, Harvard’s Inter­na­tion­al Nego­ti­a­tion pro­gram head and Nego­ti­at­ing the Non­nego­tiable author Daniel Shapiro, has an unusu­al­ly capa­cious notion of what it means to win an argu­ment. Our goal, as he con­ceives of it, is to have “more effec­tive con­ver­sa­tions,” and this entails under­stand­ing three keys to hav­ing those con­ver­sa­tions: iden­ti­ty, appre­ci­a­tion, and affil­i­a­tion.

“The moment your iden­ti­ty gets hooked in these con­flicts,” Shapiro says, “all of a sud­den your emo­tions become a hun­dred times more pow­er­ful” — and the debate at hand becomes a hun­dred times less tractable. You there­fore must “know who you are and what you stand for,” the “val­ues and beliefs” dri­ving you to argue for your par­tic­u­lar posi­tion.

Ide­al­ly, you’ll also put some effort toward find­ing out the same things about your oppo­nent, or rather your inter­locu­tor. This is where appre­ci­a­tion comes in. Shapiro’s advice: “When you’re in the midst of the con­flict, don’t talk. Take the first ten min­utes to con­scious­ly lis­ten to the oth­er side. What’s the val­ue behind their per­spec­tive? What’s the log­ic, the ratio­nale?”

This allows you to assess the “emo­tion­al con­nec­tion” between your­self and the oth­er per­son. The trick is to “turn that oth­er per­son from an adver­sary into a part­ner” by fram­ing the con­ver­sa­tion as not a con­flict but as “fac­ing a shared prob­lem,” not least by ask­ing their advice on how to solve it. You can learn more about Shapiro’s con­cept of “inter­est-based nego­ti­a­tion” in this oth­er short Big Think video, and much more about his prin­ci­ples of argu­men­ta­tion in his talk at Google just above. In it, he breaks down the ele­ments of the “tribes effect” that keeps us butting heads, includ­ing our atti­tudes about taboos and our ten­den­cy toward iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics. And all of this is espe­cial­ly valu­able view­ing, of course, with the approach of that day of din­ner-table argu­men­ta­tive blood­sport known as Thanks­giv­ing.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How to Win an Argu­ment (at the U.S. Supreme Court, or Any­where Else): A Primer by Lit­i­ga­tor Neal Katyal

Lit­er­ary The­o­rist Stan­ley Fish Offers a Free Course on Rhetoric, or the Pow­er of Argu­ments

How to Argue With Kind­ness and Care: 4 Rules from Philoso­pher Daniel Den­nett

A Guide to Log­i­cal Fal­lac­i­es: The “Ad Hominem,” “Straw­man” & Oth­er Fal­lac­i­es Explained in 2‑Minute Videos

Read An Illus­trat­ed Book of Bad Argu­ments: A Fun Primer on How to Strength­en, Not Weak­en, Your Argu­ments

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.