a 2014 study found people would rather be electrically shocked than be left alone with their own thoughts for 15 mins

by Daniel LaPonsie at Psychology Punk (psychologypunk.com)

You wouldn’t be shocked to learn that most people hate to be left with idle time. But just how much do you really hate to be bored? Is idle time bad, something to be feared …or even painful? One study found that some people would rather beelectrically shocked than be left alone with nothing more than their own thoughts.

“Many people find it difficult to use their own minds to entertain themselves, at least when asked to do it on the spot,” said University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy Wilson, who led a shocking (sorry) study that appeared in the journalScience in 2014. “In this modern age, with all the gadgets we have, people seem to fill up every moment with some external activity.”

In the article, Wilson echoed a popular concern that we are becoming so accustomed to filling every corner of our day with business and noise and distraction that we have forgotten how to be alone with our own thoughts.

His three central claims, laid out in the article’s abstract, are that the study’s “participants typically did not enjoy spending 6–15 min in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think,” participants “enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more” than “just thinking,” and “many [participants] preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts.”

Some 800 people took part in the study. Volunteers of various ages and professions were recruited from college campuses, farmer’s markets, and even a church. Different environments were used, including an empty room and some participant’s own homes. Participants were asked to do nothing but sit and think or daydream for up to fifteen minutes.

A full third of the volunteers couldn’t resist the urge to pick up their cell phone and start fiddling with it, texting or listening to music.

One of the experiments had participants brought to an empty room. They were administered a mild electric shock and asked if they would pay $5 to not receive that shock again. The participants who said that the shock was so painful that, yes, they’d pay money to not be shocked again were left alone in the empty room… with the device. They were asked to sit in the room and think for fifteen minutes. They were offered the option to press a button and shock themselves if they wanted.

Many participants did press that button! Recall that these are all people who had previously said that they would pay money not to be shocked again, and here they are shocking themselves in an effort to fill idle time.

A quarter of the women shocked themselves at least one time, and two-thirds of the men did so as well. One man zapped himself repeatedly–pressing that button 190 times!

Wilson himself said that he was surprised by the results of the study. “We went into this thinking that mind wandering wouldn’t be that hard. People usually think of mind wandering as being a bad thing, because it interrupts when you’re trying to pay attention. But we wanted to see what happens when mind wandering is the goal.”

Is it really less painful to be electrocuted than to be alone with one’s thoughts? Wilson suspected that “they just wanted to shock themselves out of the boredom. Sometimes negative stimulation is preferable to no stimulation.”

The 2014 Wilson et al. paper can be found here: Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind

Also, if you are interested in reading a counter-point to Wilson’s article, there was a detailed rebuttal that was published in December of 2014. It was written by Kieran C. R. Fox, Evan Thompson, Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, and Kalina Christoff, and appeared in Frontiers in Psychology. You can read it here: Is thinking really aversive? A commentary on Wilson et al.’s “Just think: the challenges of the disengaged mind”

Image credits:
“Shocking,” by Ben Alexander. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
“Texting,” by Seika. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
“Texting,” by Nick Bramhall. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
“Boring,” by Thomas Fading. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.