People Prefer Electric Shocks to Being Alone With Their Thoughts

People Prefer Electric Shocks to Being Alone With Their Thoughts
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7/4/2014
Updated:
7/4/2014

Considering the many challenges life has to offer, entertaining yourself with your own thoughts for a few minutes seems like one of the easier hurdles to overcome. You could recall your favorite childhood memory, plan your weekend, or try to solve a problem from work. But it turns out that people find this assignment incredibly hard. And, according to new research, they'll even resort to giving themselves electric shocks to keep themselves entertained.

“We, like everyone else, noticed how wedded people seem to be to modern technology, and seem to shy away from just using their own thoughts to occupy themselves,” the lead researcher, Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia, told me. “That got us to wondering whether this said something fundamental about people’s ability to do this.”

Wilson reported some of his team’s results at a recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and also published them in today’s issue of Science.

In the most, ahem, shocking study, subjects were wired up and given the chance to shock themselves during the thinking period if they desired. They'd all had a chance to try out the device to see how painful it was. And yet, even among those who said they would pay money not to feel the shock again, a quarter of the women and two thirds of the men gave themselves a zap when left with their own thoughts.

This article was originally published on www.theatlantic.com. Read the complete here.

*Image of “sign“ via Shutterstock

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