Satire can predict the future, sometimes. Over two years ago, in May of 2012, for example, the satirical website, The Onion, published a fictional interview with a man in New Mexico who was still visibly shaken after spending a few minutes alone with his thoughts. Still sweating profusely, the man described the experience: “My God, it was just awful — that’s the last time I ever take a moment to myself to reflect.”
The interview concluded with the man revealing that, “if he ever again found himself alone and without the distractions of music, the Internet, television or video games, he would repeatedly hit himself in the head with the handiest large blunt object.”
Now we have scientific evidence that a lot of people would do much the same thing.
In the July 4 edition of Science magazine, University of Virginia psychology professor Timothy D. Wilson, along with seven colleagues (six from the University of Virginia; one from Harvard) published the results of their behavioral experiments, which involved leaving people by themselves, alone.
The results were eerily similar to those imagined by The Onion.
The participants in the experiments — university students — were left alone in a bare-walled room for periods of time that ranged from 6 to 15 minutes. They had left their cell phones, pens, pencils, paper, computers and reading material behind and were required only to remain seated and to stay awake. They were very much alone with their thoughts. Although there were no distractions, most found it difficult to concentrate. And, as the report states “on average, most participants did not enjoy the experience very much.” A further experiment explored the behavior and found that most participants preferred at least one electric shock over thinking. Not included in the total was one student who self-administered 190 electric shocks and might be worthy of further, separate inquiry.
The psychologists’ findings have some important implications for today’s economy and for future economic growth.
Clearly, while most people want to be “left alone” — meaning not bothered or hassled in some way — they don’t actually want to be alone, at least not without outside stimulus.
The growth of the huge and hugely profitable outside stimulus industry should have given us a clue. Modern technology has allowed it to fill almost every second of our waking moments. It serves to fill the gaps in the day and evening that occur in the lives of socially active people, and provides other people with a substitute for real social contact when they find that too demanding or it is unwanted for other reasons.
The diversity of the outside stimulus industry is impressive, and despite mergers and pockets of monopoly control it is still highly competitive. It includes things as varied as symphony orchestras and social media, professional sports, movies, books, magazines, newspapers, radio, recorded music, television, telephones (both smart and not so), video games, and the now ever-present Internet.
All of the businesses in this industry have one thing in common: competition to provide the minutes and even seconds of time demanded by individuals to fill in the stimulation gaps in their waking days and to avoid the kind of unstructured thinking that occurs when we are genuinely alone.
The economic implications are significant, and not solely because the outside stimulus industry is a large economic sector and employs so many people. Constant stimulation of this sort cannot help but affect the course of our economic growth.
From an economics standpoint, this research provides something we never had before: a baseline of measurements that may tell us whether our need for constant stimulus is new, peculiar to our economic system or part of our evolutionary heritage.
There are still some key questions about the behavior the researchers found. Is everybody like that, or are some people — entrepreneurs, inventors, leaders, etc. — more welcoming to their own thoughts? Can individuals be motivated to move away from outside stimulation to use their time more productively?
This last question is important for our educational system as well as our businesses. Teachers today face a daunting competition for their students’ attention, inside and outside the classroom, and we could sure use some more knowledge about how motivation, attention spans, and constant outside stimulation really work.
A prominent psychologist and economics Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, once wrote that thinking is hard work, and humans have a long history of minimizing or avoiding effort. Still, effort-avoidance is a behavioral gift that is responsible in no small part for the remarkable abundance we enjoy in the world today. We need to know a lot more about the effect of constant outside stimulation on thinking if we hope to put it to good use in our workplaces, our classrooms and our lives.
James McCusker is a Bothell economist, educator and consultant. He also writes a column for The Herald Business Journal.
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