The researchers had about half the students try to suppress bad stereotypes of black males as they read and, later, judged Donald’s character on measures like honesty, hostility and laziness. The story purposely portrayed the protagonist in an ambiguous way. He snubbed a person collecting money for a heart fund, while his friend contributed some change. In the crowded parking lot, Donald would not park in a handicap space, even though he was driving his grandmother’s car, which had a pass, but he did butt in front of another driver to snag a nonhandicap space. The students saw a picture of him and read a narrative about his visit to a mall with a friend. In one study, researchers at Northwestern and Lehigh Universities had 73 students read a vignette about a fictional peer, Donald, a black male. Soccer players told to shoot a penalty kick anywhere but at a certain spot of the net, like the lower right corner, look at that spot more often than any other.Įfforts to be politically correct can be particularly treacherous. Golfers instructed to avoid a specific mistake, like overshooting, do it more often when under pressure, studies find. Wegner calls them, are just easy to evoke in the real world. Likewise, people trying not to think of a specific word continually blurt it out during rapid-fire word-association tests. In the lab, psychologists have people try to banish a thought from their minds of a white bear, for example and find that the thought keeps returning, about once a minute. The empirical evidence of this influence has been piling up in recent years, as Dr. The theory is straightforward: to avoid blurting out that a colleague is a raging hypocrite, the brain must first imagine just that the very presence of that catastrophic insult, in turn, increases the odds that the brain will spit it out. Perverse impulses seem to arise when people focus intensely on avoiding specific errors or taboos. These strategies are general, subconscious or semiconscious psychological programs that usually run on automatic pilot. The adult brain expends at least as much energy on inhibition as on action, some studies suggest, and mental health relies on abiding strategies to ignore or suppress deeply disturbing thoughts of one’s own inevitable death, for example. The exploration of perverse urges has a rich history (how could it not?), running through the stories of Poe and the Marquis de Sade to Freud’s repressed desires and Darwin’s observation that many actions are performed “in direct opposition to our conscious will.” In the past decade, social psychologists have documented how common such contrary urges are and when they are most likely to alter people’s behavior.Īt a fundamental level, functioning socially means mastering one’s impulses. “And having the worst thing come to mind, in some circumstances, might increase the likelihood that it will happen.” “There are all kinds of pitfalls in social life, everywhere we look not just errors but worst possible errors come to mind, and they come to mind easily,” said the paper’s author, Daniel M.
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