My exercise already calls for people to think of specific things they did recently in their lives. I doubt many exercises can do better than that.
In getting them to be specific in the present, it’s hard to ask for better. In getting them to be specific in the future, I’m not sure, and the point is their future behavior, right?
Of course, my own exercise might be considered a cop-out in this regard; it doesn’t get them to be specific in the present, even, and its main goal is to get them to simply be frustrated with a lack of specifics in the present and future.
In terms of application, I think people are already massively curious about who they are and how they fit in (and this might apply especially strongly to people who aren’t the sort to read LW). Just improving folks’ self-evaluations could be seen as a pretty big benefit.
Yeah, I can see that. But that’s helpful in improving their self-evaluations, not in being specific as an ongoing habit. Still useful, but I’m not sure it helps with this goal.
Beating compartmentalization is almost an impossible mandate.
True, but we could probably bruise it a bit. It could help even to do something as simple as telling the students three other situations they could apply the same approach to. They’d have to be fairly similar to the exercise, or else it wouldn’t establish a strong enough connection in the students’ heads, but I do think that talking about closely-related applications could help. With the mission statement exercise, for instance, you could point out that the same approach could help them recognize the need for specifics and the range of possible specifics in 1) descriptions of courses in college catalogs, 2) the kinds of goals that institutions set for projects, and 3) political speeches.
(Any help making these three examples more specific would be gratefully appreciated.)
Maybe what we need is a series of related exercises that lend themselves to being applied in related but different situations, to push at the boundaries of compartmentalization.
In getting them to be specific in the present, it’s hard to ask for better. In getting them to be specific in the future, I’m not sure, and the point is their future behavior, right?
Of course, my own exercise might be considered a cop-out in this regard; it doesn’t get them to be specific in the present, even, and its main goal is to get them to simply be frustrated with a lack of specifics in the present and future.
Yeah, I can see that. But that’s helpful in improving their self-evaluations, not in being specific as an ongoing habit. Still useful, but I’m not sure it helps with this goal.
True, but we could probably bruise it a bit. It could help even to do something as simple as telling the students three other situations they could apply the same approach to. They’d have to be fairly similar to the exercise, or else it wouldn’t establish a strong enough connection in the students’ heads, but I do think that talking about closely-related applications could help. With the mission statement exercise, for instance, you could point out that the same approach could help them recognize the need for specifics and the range of possible specifics in 1) descriptions of courses in college catalogs, 2) the kinds of goals that institutions set for projects, and 3) political speeches.
(Any help making these three examples more specific would be gratefully appreciated.)
Maybe what we need is a series of related exercises that lend themselves to being applied in related but different situations, to push at the boundaries of compartmentalization.