Stimulus Error: 19th Century Psychology Can Unlock Endless Opportunity In Your Life

Sit back. Relax. Close your eyes. Now, tell me all the things you see in your mind.

In the late 1800s, Wilhelm Wundt, a German doctor, was pioneering a new tool in the field of psychology. He was trying to learn how to take people’s conscious thoughts and break them down into smaller pieces that could be studied. It was called… wait for it… introspection, and it quickly became one of the leading research tools in the field.

But there was a small problem with introspection. Many patients being studied simply didn’t have the wherewithal to perform deep introspection on themselves, and most psychologists didn’t know how to coax it from them.

A researcher would ask a subject, “What are you thinking about now?” The subject would respond, “Well, I guess I see a table.” And that was the end of it.

“Subject thought of a table. Conclusion: undetermined.” Not very helpful!

This problem wasn’t fixed until a few years later when Edward Titchener, a British psychologist, coined this phenomenon as the “stimulus error” and started creating a procedure to fix it.

You can use his findings to improve your own life…

Stimulus Error: You Have To Think Harder

His hypothesis? That the thoughts of the conscious mind were simply gateways to deeper thoughts, pathways to the hidden parts of the mind that held critical information about someone. Stimulus error occurred when a subject or a researcher got too caught up in the object of the conscious thought—the table, for instance—and neglected the real meaning behind it.

Titchener taught his students to delve deeper. To follow a strict set of guidelines for getting the subject of a psychological test to explain their hidden thoughts.

If a subject reported a table in their mind, it was important to learn what it was made of, where it was located, the intricate details of its style. Through this probing, you could learn how the table relates to a deeper, more basic need in the subject’s life for something sturdy. Or they might uncover that the table equals dinner equals family time. For this particular person, the conscious thought of a table related to some strong feeling about family.

Beating stimulus error allowed psychologists of the day to go beyond the surface layer of people’s thoughts, and get down into the deeper meanings that controlled them.

This process greatly advanced the theory of introspection—something still used widely today—as a valuable tool of psychology.

Introspection can help you gain some insight into your own thoughts and the meanings behind them, but I find it to be an even more useful tool for changing my mindset to see and create more opportunity in my life.

If that sounds like a departure from how I’ve just described it, it isn’t.

Reverse Engineering Introspection To Make Yourself Happier

What Wundt and Titchener pioneered was a way to find the associations between the conscious and subconscious mind. You can use the same process to create positive associations in your mind, a kind of reverse engineering of Wundt’s introspection.

Rather than think of something and try to figure out what it means, force yourself to think something positive about it. Even if you don’t necessarily believe it.

Let’s go back to the table. I’m sitting at one now, so it’s a convenient example. As I look at the table in my mind, I’ll try to see all the great benefits of it—even if they’re not immediately accessible to me.

• It’s a big thing for me to do my work on.
• It’s the best spot in the house to have dinner and conversation with my fiancé.
• It’s a sturdy asset that could be sold to get other things I might need later in life.

This is particularly useful for the things in your life that you may see as problems.

Sometimes, the table is a big pain the ass. It takes a lot of work to clean and, if I drop something under it, I usually bump my head retrieving it. But, by changing the way I think about the table—especially during times my head is throbbing from a good thwack—it encourages me to remember its useful features, and I’m quickly happy again.

Maybe you work a job you hate, and it keeps you from having the time to pursue something else. If you allow that to be the association you make, you’ll see your job as a problem. It might make you feel helpless—like you’ll never do what you really want.

But what if you looked at that job as an opportunity to stockpile savings that will allow you to pursue something different in time. Maybe it’s a great place to network and make connections that will serve you in the future. Maybe it’s teaching you a skill that you can put to use on other projects in your life.

You can do this for anything in your life. When you look at something and force yourself to see opportunities instead of problems—even when the problems are staring you in the face—your life improves tremendously.

Doors that used to be closed are now wide open. And these kinds of thoughts multiply. The more opportunity you force yourself to see the more you’ll begin to see in other parts of your life without trying.

Positive thinking becomes a habit just like any other behavior you might force yourself to adopt. But this is a super-habit, one that helps and improves all the others you build for yourself.

You can thank Wundt and Titchener for making introspection useful. But you can thank yourself for using it to make yourself happier.

What opportunity will you create for yourself today?