Researchers find that most men will pay to
avoid unpleasant stimuli but will still chose that unpleasant experience over
sitting quietly alone with only their own thoughts.
by John
Tyburski
Copyright © Daily
Digest News, KPR Media, LLC. All rights reserved.
Is sitting
alone with nothing to do, nothing to fondle, and nothing to look at unpleasant
for many people? This is a question that was recently answered by
a group of University of Virginia researchers. The results of their
investigation are…shocking.
Published in Science
Magazine on July 4, the report documents
11 studies in which participants were required to sit from six to 15 minutes in
isolation with no devices or distractions. They only thing they had to think
about or do was entertain their own thoughts. This was more unpleasant to most
than doing mundane tasks and even receiving painful stimuli.
“I’m really
excited to see this paper,” said Matthew Killingsworth in a Science news article. Killingsworth is a psychologist at the University of
California (UC), San Francisco, who said his own work has turned up a similar
result. “When people are spending time inside their heads, they’re markedly
less happy.”
University
of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues recruited hundreds of
undergraduate students and community volunteers to participate in a series of
11 studies to determine whether people enjoyed quiet time. They found rather
that most people enjoyed doing some activity such as listening to music or
using a smartphone. When given the opportunity, some even chose self-administer
an electric shock over sitting quietly doing nothing.
“Those of us
who enjoy some down time to just think likely find the results of this study
surprising – I certainly do – but our study participants consistently
demonstrated that they would rather have something to do than to have nothing
other than their thoughts for even a fairly brief period of time,” Wilson said
in a statement.
An important
finding was a gender difference; about two-thirds of the men studied
administered shocks to themselves to avoid sitting quietly, compared with only
25 percent of the women studied.
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