The rationale was to study the basic phenomena of whether people’s untutored, uncontrolled minds like solitude and fancy “freedom of thought” or whether they find it distressing compared to always having some external activity to engage in.
Clarifying people’s basic preference has implications for things like the effects of meditation training, the desire for constant entertainment, etc.
Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D. A., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert, D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., ... & Shaked, A. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345(6192), 75-77.
Procedure
Across 11 studies with over 700 participants, the researchers used a similar basic procedure:
- Participants were brought into a room, asked to store their belongings, including phones and writing materials, and sat alone for 6-15 minutes while entertaining themselves with their thoughts.
- They were then left alone in the room for 6-15 minutes and asked to entertain themselves with their thoughts during this “thinking period.”
- In some studies, participants completed this thinking period alone in a psychology laboratory room. In other studies, participants followed online instructions to complete the thinking period alone at home without any distractions or external activities.
- After the thinking period, all participants completed various quantitative surveys about their experiences. This included rating how enjoyable and entertaining the thinking period was, how difficult it was to concentrate, how much their mind wandered, and how bored they were during the period.
- Some studies also had participants qualitatively describe their thoughts during the thinking period. These responses were analyzed using linguistic analysis software to determine the amount of self-focus, positive emotion, negative emotion, and other characteristics of the thought content.
Results
- The majority of participants did not enjoy the experience of being alone with their thoughts – on average, across studies, only around 50% reported enjoyment higher than the midpoint of the rating scale.
- 89% of participants responded that their mind wandered at least somewhat during the period. 58% reported that they found it difficult to concentrate on their thoughts.
- In multiple studies, analyses clearly indicated that people enjoyed doing mundane external activities such as reading or listening to music significantly more than being alone entertaining themselves with their thoughts.
- One study allowed participants to voluntarily self-administer mild electric shocks during the thinking period. 67% of men and 25% of women chose to shock themselves to have something to do, despite having said earlier they would pay money to avoid being shocked again.
- There was little evidence that individual differences in age, education level, income, or smart phone/social media use affected enjoyment of the experience. There were also no significant correlations between the amount of self-focus in thought content and the enjoyment, difficulty concentrating, or mind wandering during the period.
Implications
- Overall, the results suggest that most people find it unpleasant and difficult to be alone with nothing other than their own thoughts. They would prefer to have some form of external activity to engage in, even if it is a relatively unpleasant activity.
- Possible reasons discussed for the difficult nature of solely thinking include the demands of simultaneously generating thought content and then mentally experiencing it, the tendency of untrained minds to naturally wander, and the development of negative rumination cycles while self-focused without external input.
- The studies conclude that “the untutored mind does not like to be alone with itself.” Without training in techniques like meditation to calm and control one’s thoughts, most people appear to prefer doing almost anything over no activity other than thinking, even if the alternative is an unpleasant task.
