HERE’S a task for you. While reading this article, on no account think of your mother-in-law. If you don’t have a mother-in-law, or actually enjoy thinking of your mother-in-law, substitute an object of disaffection: your boss, perhaps. The main thing is, whoever you choose, exclude them from your mind. Totally. Just don’t think about them. Pretend they don’t exist.
Chances are you’ll fail, and that persona non grata will pop up on your mental doorstep. Suppressing unwanted thoughts is a strangely difficult thing to do, as Fyodor Dostoevsky trenchantly observed in his Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. “Try not to think of a polar bear,” he challenged his readers, “and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”
More alarmingly, the same goes for actions. Remind yourself not to tell the widow at the wake that you’re dying for a drink, and as like as not, you will. Try not to spill the longed-for glass of wine on that nice carpet: oops, there it goes. The harder you try to stop yourself making a fool of yourself, the more likely it is that you will. It’s as if a mischievous inner demon were constantly whispering to us to fulfil our worst desires – an imp dubbed “the counter will” by Sigmund Freud.
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“It’s as if a mischievous inner demon were whispering to us to make a fool of ourselves”
Spurred on by the observations of Dostoevsky and others, Harvard psychologist has spent considerable time investigating such . “It was the kind of literary observation that turns into very good psychology,” he says. He has a theory as to how ironic slips arise: they are the result of occasional errors in our sophisticated systems of mental control.
It works something like this. Say we’ve given up chocolate or cigarettes, and want to block all thoughts of them. We do this by filling our conscious mind with distracting thoughts – anything but chocolate or cigarettes. At the same time, though, our unconscious mind remains alert for any signs of the unwanted thought, the better to help us chase it away. “Some part of the mind has to know what it is we don’t want to think about and to monitor for that,” says Wegner.
Such dual mental processes, in which the unconscious assists in achieving goals set by the conscious, are crucial to many cognitive tasks, such as memory retrieval and learning. The accompanying unconscious processes usually stand us in good stead. In the case of ironic monitoring, they allow us to control our impulses and contain unwanted thoughts. But the monitoring process also stores those unwanted thoughts as references in our unconscious, and that can come back to haunt us when our mind is under strain.
Don’t mention the war
That’s because the conscious search for distractions involves a lot more mental effort than the unconscious monitoring process, making it much more prone to disruption by an extra mental load – when we are asked to multitask, for example, or when we simply try too hard to suppress an irksome thought (incidentally, you are really trying not to think of your mother-in-law, aren’t you?). That gives the unconscious thought the space to pop into our awareness with a vengeance (). It’s almost as if we’ve set a trigger for them, says Wegner. “They become hyper-accessible.”
It’s a neat idea, but is there any evidence for it? In experiments in the 1990s, with , Wegner tested the interplay of mental load and thought suppression. They found that undergraduates asked not to blurt out the word “house” while playing a word-association game involving related words, such as “home”, performed significantly worse under time pressure (). Think of the word “aunt” for a moment. You now have 10 seconds to name me 10 other sorts of familial relationship. Go!
The idea ties in, too, with the results of extensive research by , Colorado Springs, and others into how we block out the most unwanted thought of all: death. Various suppression strategies – for example, clinging more strongly to things that seem to give life meaning, such as children or religious beliefs – seem to work well as long as our minds are not under stress. Add an extra mental load, however, and the naked fact of our own mortality starts to creep back in ().
So what lessons can we take into the holiday season from this research? First, that it is a mental war zone. As the density of fraught social interactions increases, so does our mental load and our propensity for the social faux pas. Try thinking of one embarrassing thing you really ought not to say when visiting family and see how long it takes before it just slips out. Or make up your mind that at the office lunch you will not, repeat not, dribble gravy onto your chin while talking to your boss. Then feel it trickle.
Now a word to the wise: when it comes to such ironic slips, alcohol is most definitely not your friend. Any diminution of mental control makes us all the more prone to embarrass ourselves by saying or doing the very thing we were trying to avoid. “We call it getting loaded,” says Wegner, “but it’s a mental load as well.”
The worst of it is that the more taboo a thought is, the more store we set by suppressing it and the more difficult it consequently becomes to contain. No surprise, then, that things get really messy when we’re batting down our carnal desires. Wegner and others have found that when you tell people not to think about sex, they become significantly more aroused than when you tell them not to think about, say, dancing. Indeed, you may as well tell them to actively think about sex: the arousal effect is about the same (). You might want to experiment with this on a friend – wait for an inappropriate moment, instruct them to keep their thoughts virtuous, then sit back and wait for their blushes, or a slap.
So what can we do to avoid getting egg on our faces? Aside from staying off the booze, techniques such as meditation that improve our powers of concentration might help. But the most useful ploy, says Wegner, is to rehearse those situations in which you are most likely to slip up. If you have a propensity to say the wrong thing while conversing in a small group, practise conversing in a small group until you’ve overcome your fear of making a faux pas: then you’ll be less likely to make one.
Another of Wegner’s insights might come in useful for another seasonal ritual – making New Year’s resolutions. The secret, he says, is to keep them affirmative. Positive resolutions (“be happy”) are altogether easier to control than negative ones (“don’t smoke”). Positive resolutions invoke a conscious search process looking for something specific (happiness), rather than the effortful task of filling your consciousness with distractions. A negative resolution gives that specificity (don’t smoke!) to the ironic monitoring process instead, making it more likely to act as a trigger for the very behaviour you’re trying to avoid.
So rather than resolving not to do something this New Year, try taking something up. Being nicer to your mother-in-law, for example.
Be honest, you did think of her, didn’t you?
