Where do you think your ‘self’ is? It may signal how you decide

self location – New studies suggest people who can flex their “self” between head and heart perform better on tests of reasoning and emotional insight.

Ask people where their “self” is, and the answers often split in two: the head or the heart.. It sounds like a metaphor, the kind we use without thinking too hard about what it means.. But researchers have been testing whether the way people picture the location of their essence maps onto how they actually think. especially when choices get complicated.

The question is deceptively simple.. In experiments. participants place their “self” somewhere on their body—most commonly either behind the eyes or in the chest—then report how much of themselves they believe is involved in different tasks.. The researchers behind this line of work argue that these perceptions track with whether people default to slow. deliberative processing or to faster instinctive judgment. according to dual process theory.

Work began in 2013 with Adam Fetterman. now at the University of Houston. and Michael D Robinson at North Dakota State University.. Using self-report questionnaires. they found that “head-locators” were more likely to describe themselves as rational and logical. while “heart-locators” saw themselves as more emotionally driven.. The pattern wasn’t only subjective.. Fetterman and Robinson linked it to behavioural measures: students who said their self lived in their head scored better on tests of general knowledge. while those who placed their self in the heart tended to report feeling worse in stressful situations—suggesting greater emotional sensitivity.

Perhaps the most striking finding was that how people answered about where the self was located could predict certain outcomes a year later. The authors interpreted this as evidence that the notion of where the self “resides” can be relatively stable.

Still, psychology rarely gives us a single answer that lasts forever. Extraversion, for example, can shift with who you are around. That raises a more immediate question: could ideas about the self be flexible too, changing with the task?

Robinson’s team explored that idea in the latest research, using two studies that together involved 455 participants.. People were asked to imagine themselves carrying out a range of activities.. For each one. they estimated how much of their self was in the brain versus the heart. using a scale from 1—“none of myself”—to 7—“a lot of myself.”

The results were consistent with everyday intuition. When participants were thinking about their studies, many put more of their self in the head. When the focus shifted to analysing feelings, their self-location moved toward the heart. Crucially, this flexibility mattered for performance.

Those who showed a more mobile sense of self scored higher on the ACT assessment. an exam used in the United States for college admissions.. They also did better on the North Dakota Emotional Abilities Test. which measures how well people can predict others’ feelings in various scenarios and find suitable solutions to social problems.

To interpret why that might be, the researchers point back to dual process theory.. If the “location” of the self reflects which mental system someone is using. then switching more effectively between systems could translate into stronger decision-making across different settings.. In their framing. higher performers had learned to recruit the processing strategy that fit the moment—knowing when to think with the head and when to rely on the heart.

The idea that you could deliberately train that switching is tantalising, but so far it remains early.. Robinson suggested one possible route for learning: meditation or other body-focused attention exercises to build the ability to notice the self moving strategically.. He also described how. as an intellectual. he tends to feel his self above the neck but is working on shifting it more deliberately.

There is already at least a small experiment pointing in a similar direction.. In the original 2013 work by Robinson and Fetterman. participants took part in a task related to moral dilemmas resembling the famous trolley problem.. When they touched different parts of the body, their thinking mode shifted.. Touching the temple made them more likely to use rational appraisal; touching the chest made them more likely to rely on instincts about what is right or wrong.. That same study also reported effects on logical reasoning: shifting from heart to head seemed to enhance performance on true-or-false general knowledge tests that require logical deduction by around 9 percentage points.

Even with those results, the takeaway for everyday life is cautious.. The evidence so far includes experiments that are promising but not yet strong enough to treat as a ready-made tool without replication in larger trials.. Still, the work has a different kind of relevance beyond its practical potential.. It offers a way to notice how decisions may change when people feel their self move from one place to another—behind the eyes. or down in the rib cage.

That, for many readers, is the point where the science starts to feel personal. The research suggests that what we take for granted—our sense of where “we” are—may be more than symbolism. It could be a window into the mental mode we’re running, and the lever we can learn to control.

self location head heart dual process theory decision-making psychology meditation body awareness emotional abilities test