Time alone? Many would rather hurt themselves
Time alone? Many would rather hurt themselves
AFP By Kerry Sheridan
21 hours ago
Washington (AFP) - Many people would rather inflict pain
on themselves than spend 15 minutes in a room with nothing to do but think,
according to a US study out Thursday.
Researchers at the University of Virginia and Harvard
University conducted 11 different experiments to see how people reacted to
being asked to spend some time alone.
Just over 200 people participated in the experiments.
Some were college students, others were volunteers who ranged in age from 18-77
and were recruited from a church and farmers' market.
Researchers asked them to sit alone in an unadorned room,
with no mobile phone, reading or writing materials, and then report back on
what it was like to entertain themselves with their thoughts for between six
and 15 minutes.
Turns out, more than 57 percent found it hard to
concentrate and 89 percent said their minds wandered.
About half found the experience was unpleasant.
"Most people do not enjoy 'just thinking' and
clearly prefer having something else to do," said the study in the journal
Science.
- Cheating, self-shocking -
Then, researchers turned their attention to what people
were doing to avoid being alone with their thoughts.
In one experiment, students were asked to do the
"thinking time" exercise at home.
Afterward, 32 percent reported they had cheated by
getting out of their chair, listening to music or consulting their mobile
phone.
Even more of the adults recruited from outside the
university -- 54 percent -- broke the rules, said co-author Erin Westgate, a PhD
student at the University of Virginia.
"And that's probably an underestimate, because those
are just the ones who were honest and told us afterward that they had
cheated," she told AFP.
Then researchers wondered how far students would go to
seek some stimulation while sitting alone with their thoughts.
An initial pilot study found, surprisingly, that students
preferred to hear the sound of a scraping knife to hearing no noise at all.
"We thought, surely, people wouldn't shock
themselves," said Westgate.
They offered students in one of the studies a chance to
rate various stimuli, from seeing attractive photographs to the feeling of
being given an electric shock about as strong as one that might come from
dragging one's feet on a carpet.
After the participants felt the shock, which Westgate
described as mild, some even said they would prefer to pay $5 rather than feel
it again.
Then each subject went into a room for 15 minutes of
thinking time alone. They were told they had the opportunity to shock
themselves, if desired.
Two-thirds of the male subjects -- 12 out of 18 -- gave
themselves at least one shock while they were alone.
Most of the men shocked themselves between one and four
times. However, one "outlier" shocked himself 190 times.
A quarter of the women, six out of 24, decided to shock
themselves, each between one and nine times.
All of those who shocked themselves had previously said
they would have paid to avoid it.
Westgate said she is still astounded by those findings.
"I think we just vastly underestimated both how hard
it is to purposely engage in pleasant thought and how strongly we desire
external stimulation from the world around us, even when that stimulation is
actively unpleasant."
She added that the research showed that by and large,
people prefer some positive stimulation, like reading a book or playing a video
game.
Whether the effects seen in the experiment are a product
of today's digital culture or not is a matter of debate.
Sherrie Bourg Carter, a psychologist and CEO of the
Institute for Behavioral Sciences and the Law, a forensic psychology practice
in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said modern technology may contribute to the
inability to slow down.
"We are socially trained to be impulse
sensation-seekers in our work and play," said Carter, who was not involved
in the study.
"Therefore, sitting down for a single, non-connected
activity, like thinking, has become quite foreign to most people, even the
elderly who were not raised in an electronically-driven world."
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