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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 13, 2014

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REAL LIFE NEWS: MEN GIVE THEMSELVES SHOCKS TO AVOID THINKING

by Hazed

Do you enjoy just sitting and thinking? Most people don’t. They’d rather be doing something – anything – than be left alone with their own thoughts. In fact, the majority of men will even give themselves electric shocks rather than do nothing but think.

This quite literally shocking conclusion comes from a study run by psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities, who wanted to find out just why people find it so hard to do nothing.

They started off by just leaving people alone and then asking them how they felt about it. The first experiments involved students who were ushered into an empty room and left on their own, with no phones, books or writing materials. They were instructed to stay seated and not fall asleep, and informed they would be left for six or 15 minutes; sometimes they were told the time specifically, other times vaguely.

After their time was up, the students were questioned about the experience. They reported that they struggled to concentrate, their minds wandered and they did not enjoy the experience.

The experiments were then tried with people in their own homes, in case the unfamiliar setting had affected their ability to be left alone to think, but not only were the results the same but the participants found the experience even more miserable. They were prone to cheat by getting up from their chairs or checking their phones.

The scientists wanted to see whether this effect was only found in students, so they recruited more than 100 people from a church and a farmers market, aged between 18 and 77. Guess what? They hated being left alone to think, too.

Now comes the really gobsmacking result. The researchers decided whether to check if people would prefer to have something unpleasant happen as an alternative to nothing happening at all. They set this experiment up by first asking students to rate how unpleasant they found it when they were given mild electric shocks, and to rate the experience by comparing it to other unpleasant things such as looking at pictures of cockroaches or hearing jarring noises.

After this stage of the test, all of the students said that they would pay money to avoid mild electric shocks.

Then the students were left alone, still strapped to the electric shock machine, with a button to administer the shocks. Two-thirds of the men actually gave themselves electric shocks to relieve the unpleasantness of being left alone with their thoughts; a quarter of the women did so as well. One man found the aloneness so unbearable he gave himself 190 shocks.

Wow! No wonder being put into solitary confinement is so unbearable.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jul/03/electric-shock-preferable-to-thinking-says-study

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