What I Tell You Three Times Is True

I think the most important argument is missing. If you repeat an affirmation every night or just think about it, what happens in your brain is that corresponding brain areas get activated(see also http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/priming-and-con.html). Once you do this your brain will automatically keep thinking about it and generate ideas to advance towards your goal. You will keep an open eye for good opportunities and will take advantage of them.

You have to contrast this with people who are just going with the flow and don't have a fixed target on mind.

We can think of this as self-signaling. Earnestly repeating an aspiration many times sends a credible signal to your subconscious that this goal is very important to you, and so worth devoting more resources.

Elsewhere I write

If you practise Buddhism, doing traditional meditations and, separately, thinking about what you learn from them, the thing that stands out is the craptastic way that thoughts swirl round and round inside your head. Before you become a Buddhist you think it is easy to dodge developing bad habits, because you need only avoid doing things too often. Afterwards you realise that your life is shaped by your mind and you can screw yourself over by developing a bad habit with very few physical repetitions by repeatedly thinking thoughts

If you find this hypothesis worthy of consideration it greatly complicates the question of the effectiveness of affirmations. You have repeated thoughts that you haven't chosen and aren't much aware of. Your affirmation replaces some of these but not others. If you try to analyse the effect of an affirmation purely in terms of it own positive content, without considering the negative thought it displace, things could get very confusing.

When Scott Adams says to himself "I will become a syndicated cartoonist" is that instead of saying "I will become a doctor and cure cancer" or instead of saying "Only fine artists can become cartoonists."

A few additions: Adams points out that it's possible that affirmations work via selection bias: if you're capable of actually having the self-discipline to use them consistently, it may simply mean you also have the self-discipline to achieve the goal involved.

Other factors that play into affirmations have to do with whether you consciously reject the belief in the affirmations; many books mention the importance of noting your automatic responses (like "yeah, right!") to an affirmation and addressing whatever conflicting belief is involved. If not, the process can actually reinforce one's conflicting beliefs, due to retrieval practice! (This would explain, btw, a lot of individual variation in success at affirmation usage.)

Finally:

He suggests using imagination and self-deception to trick the subconscious mind into adopting the necessary role.

Actors are not practicing self-deception, any more than a child is practicing self-deception when he or she says, "I'm a fireman!" Congruent role play in both cases consists merely of adopting the role without signaling pretense!

Notice that children have to be taught to say, "I'm pretending to be a fireman", and that only "ham" actors attempt to draw attention to their acting. Unskilled actors are likewise too conscious of the fact they are "acting", and thus "act", instead of simply assuming the role.

Another way of putting it might be that "acting as if" (of which affirmations are actually just one manifestation) is like crossing a girder between skyscrapers -- you can do it confidently as long as you can avoid thinking too much about what you're doing. Children do this easily, because they haven't learned to second-guess themselves yet. Adults have it a little bit harder, but they can still learn to ignore their second guesses or find something that draws their focus in so they can't pay attention to the second-guessing.

Notice, too, that placebos, affirmations, and priming are all able to work as long as there is no conflicting information present to cause active disbelief or rejection of the suggestion. This strongly suggests that they are all operating via the exact same mechanism, despite our differing names for the phenomena.

I feel obligated to point out that Boltzman brains aren't a hypothesis themselves, but a counterargument to the hypothesis that the current low-entropy state of the universe is a random low-entropy fluctuation in a steady state high-entropy universe.

The idea is that a brain randomly forming out a maxentropy soup is a lot more likely than enough negentropy to comprise our entire universe, so if you believe in the steady state hypothesis, then you have to conclude that you are far more likely to be a bloltzman brain, than not.

"So I was very surprised to find Adams was a believer in and evangelist of something that sounded a lot like pseudoscience."

Yep. The Dilbert Future isn't online so you can't see the nonsense directly, but to get a feeling for what Adams was like before he started backpedaling recently:

(http://www.reall.org/newsletter/v05/n12/scott-adams-responds.html)

Unflattering, but (to memory) accurate, description of The Dilbert Future here:

(http://www.insolitology.com/rloddities/dilbert.htm)

A recent study on affirmations:

"Self-Affirmation Can Break Cycle of Negative Thoughts"

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/0416sp_affirmation.shtml

I'm not sure why anyone would call affirmations "pseudoscientific" - that sounds insulting - and affirmations deserve better treatment.

The difficulty for me is that this technique is at war with having an accurate self-concept, and may conflict with good epistemic hygiene generally. For the program to work, one must seemingly learn to suppress one's critical faculties for selected cases of wishful thinking. This runs against trying to be just the right amount critical when faced with propositions in general. How can someone who is just the right amount critical affirm things that are probably not true?

On an off-note, Adams has also suggested exercise and diet as simple and yet important components of beating Akrasia. For this specific goal, I think they are more important than affirmations.

For overall performance though, I'm not so sure.

I would ask whether affirmations result in any change to the details of the person's behavior with regard to the goal. (E.g. does it result in just one more resume submission?) It seems likely to me.

Then, remember that this question is usually posed in the context of some economic game like real estate investing, dating, job searches, career advancement, etc. The principle of each person acting in their own best interest makes such games tend towards a certain (imperfect) balance (e.g. your rent is probably on the same order of magnitude as what you can afford for rent).

Balances are sensitive to tipping. Any behavior (trying harder, not giving up as easily, making one more call, walking a little faster, putting in an extra hour) that tips the balance in your favor, is probably doing yourself a favor. Affirmations seem to me just a way to prime yourself for such behavior.

This study is relevant: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8132857.stm

But AFAIK no one's ever done a study on Adams-variety simple personal affirmations in all of their counter-intuitive weirdness, probably because it sounds so silly, and I think that's a shame.

I totally agree with this. Do you have any ideas on how to turn this into a controlled experiment?

While I'm sympathetic to the idea that "you are likely to begin believing things you say to yourself frequently, and furthermore you are likely to act in ways to make these beliefs come true," I'm not sure I'd use Scott Adams as the prototypical purveyor of this idea. He is known to have beliefs difficult to characterize as "rational," notably a belief in intelligent design creationism. The Wikipedia also cites him as being a hypnotist and a vegan; these are not inherently irrational, but I don't have further sources to analyze Adam's specific perspective on these issues.

I think the title is misleading because this is not about convincing others but changing yourself. A better idea would be "What I tell myself every night becomes true" or something entirely different.

[comment deleted]

I'm familiar with his ideas about affirmations. I actually read about it in a book of his a long time ago and tried it out. I was struggling in math class in high school and used the affirmations to improve my grades. I actually got higher grades soon thereafter. Adams believes that the affirmations work because of "Chaos Theory" which is of course nonsense. I think a lot of gimmicks like affirmations actually work but that it's mostly due to the placebo effect.