Paradox - Nov 2011

You must have an experience on suppressing yourself to think about a thing or an event; however, you cannot stop yourself thinking about it at the end. Ironically, you can easily forget a thing or an event if you never remind yourself to stop thinking about it. Why do these situations happen?

Do not think of a white bear 別去想白熊

‘Don’t think of a white bear’. Do you feel this sentence so familiar? Maybe you have heard this sentence in the film ‘Inception’ and the respondent said that he could not stop thinking about a white bear. Wegner D. M. gave the name ‘thought suppression’ to this situation. It is defined as the process of deliberately trying to stop thinking about certain thoughts. But is that suppression work?

A famous experiment, aiming to study about the effectiveness of thought suppression, was carried out by Wegner, Schneider, Carter & White. In this experiment, one group of participants was asked not to think of a white bear, while another group did not get such a command. And they had to ring a bell if they did think of a white bear. The result showed that the group with suppression had a higher record of respondents who thought of a white bear. Furthermore, both groups were asked to think of a white bear five more minutes after the first practice and the experiment revealed that the suppression group had a higher frequency of targets who have thought about a white bear too. As a result, thought suppression can cause an increase in target thoughts.

Next time when you are going to memorize something, try to ask your friend to tell you not to think of that thing; maybe you can have a surprising result!

Anthony Chan

References

Wegner, D.M., Schneider, D.J., Carter, S.R., & White, T.L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thoughts suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 5–13.

Wegner, D.M. (1989). White bears and other unwanted thoughts: Suppression, obsession, and the psychology of mentalcontrol. London: The Guilford Press.