Brown, Casey L.

Gilbert, Daniel T.

Reinhard, David A.

Westgate, Erin C.

Wilson, Timothy D.

Frontiers in Psychology

PubMed

Harvard University - DASH 

 Would you fund this movie? A reply to Fox et al. (2014)  (Article begins on next page)The Harvard community has made this article openly available.Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters.Citation Wilson, Timothy D., Daniel T. Gilbert, David A. Reinhard, ErinC. Westgate, and Casey L. Brown. 2014. “Would you fund thismovie? A reply to Fox et al. (2014).” Frontiers in Psychology 5(1): 1428. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01428.http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01428.Published Version doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01428Accessed February 17, 2015 8:01:35 AM ESTCitable Link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:13581112Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University's DASHrepository, and is made available under the terms and conditionsapplicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth athttp://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAAGENERAL COMMENTARYpublished: 09 December 2014doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01428Would you fund this movie? A reply to Fox et al. (2014)Timothy D. Wilson1*, Daniel T. Gilbert2, David A. Reinhard1,E r i nC .W e s t g a t e1 and Casey L. Brown31 Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA2 Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA3 Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA*Correspondence: tdw@virginia.eduEdited by:Daniel Lakens, Eindhoven University of Technology, NetherlandsReviewed by:Bernhard Hommel, Leiden University, NetherlandsKeywords: thinking, directed thought, consciousness, affect, enjoyment, boredomA commentary onIs thinking really aversive? Commentaryon Wilson et al.’s “Just think: Thechallenges of the disengaged mind”by Fox, K. C., Thompson, E., Andrews-Hanna, J. R., and Christoff, K.(2014). Front. Psychol. 5:1427. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01427WethankFoxetal.(2014)fortheirinterestin our research and welcome this oppor-tunity to respond to their commentary.They argue that participants in our stud-ies enjoyed “just thinking” more than weclaimed (Wilson et al., 2014). We foundsome irony in their position, because webegan this line of research with a simi-lar hypothesis. As the data came in wewere surprised that participants did notenjoy deliberative thought very much,even when we went to some lengths to givethemtimetoprepareandchoosetheirtop-ics (i.e., in our “prompted fantasy” condi-tions). We are thus in the rather amusingposition of explaining why both Fox et al.’sinterpretation and our initial hypothesesare wrong.Our view can be summarized with asimple thought experiment. Imagine youare a venture capitalist, and a ﬁlmmakercomes to you asking for money to makea full-length feature ﬁlm. You decide itwouldbewisetoshowtheﬁlmmaker’s15-min trailer to some focus groups. You ﬁndthat (a) on average, the focus groups ratethe trailer as much less enjoyable than avariety of everyday activities, such as lis-tening to music and surﬁng the web; (b)between a third and a half of the people inthe focus groups disobey the instructionsto watch the trailer and instead prefer todo something else, such as playing withtheir cell phones; and (c) the majority ofthe men (and a quarter of the women) inthe focus groups choose to give themselvesan unpleasant electric shock while watch-ing the trailer, even though they had saidearlier that they would pay to avoid get-tingtheshock.Wouldyouinvest?Probablynot. These are, of course, precisely theresults we found in our studies when weleft people alone with their thoughts. Assuch, we do not think it is unreasonable toconcludethattheparticipantsfounddelib-erative thought to be neither engaging norenjoyable.Although our space is limited, we willr e s p o n dt oaf e wo fF o xe ta l . ’ ss p e c i ﬁ carguments. First, the results they reportin Figures 1A–C are entirely consistentwith the data we reported in our Table 1.Instead of quibbling over what it meansforparticipantstoratesomethingassome-what enjoyable and somewhat boring, webelieve it is more informative to comparethe ratings of participants under differentexperimental conditions and to observetheir actual behavior. In Study 8, partic-ipants rated everyday external activitiesas much more enjoyable than deliber-ate thinking (the distribution of responsesin the two conditions was almost non-overlapping). Fox et al. suggest that westacked the deck in favor of the externalactivities by letting people choose amongactivities that “were not banal or bor-ing.” But note that participants in the“thinking” condition were completely freeto think about anything they wished, tochoose topics that were “tailored to theirpersonal interests,” and to switch betweentopics. They could choose to think aboutpast accomplishments, current interests,or future plans, or even, to build on Foxe ta l . ’ sa n a l o g y ,c h o c o l a t ea n ds e x .T h efact that participants much preferred theeveryday external activities is quite telling,we think, and does not speak well for theappeal of “just thinking.”We also ﬁnd it revealing that 32–54%of participants (depending on the study)disobeyed instructions to “just think” andperformed external activities they werespeciﬁcally asked to avoid, such as usingt h e i rc e l lp h o n e so rd o i n gs c h o o lw o r k .(Note that these ﬁgures include only thosewho admitted to doing the banned activi-ties.)Ifdeliberativethinkingisasenjoyableas Fox et al. suggest, why did so manyparticipants disobey explicit instructionsto do it for relatively short periods oftime?Fox et al. are unimpressed by the resultsof our study in which 67% of men and25% of women administered at least oneshock to themselves. Their argument thatparticipants were simply curious is at oddswith the fact that all participants hadalready experienced the shock and thatwe speciﬁcally selected only those partic-ipants who reported that they would payto avoid another shock. Fox et al. arguethat 14 of the 18 participants who shockedthemselves reported that they did so out of“curiosity about (or interest in) the qualityof the shock or its effects as their motiva-tion.” But note that what many of theseparticipants were interested in was howunpleasant the shock would be, such asthe participant who wrote, “I wanted tosee if the shock felt as painful the secondtime as it did the ﬁrst time.” If thinkingwww.frontiersin.org December 2014 | Volume 5 | Article 1428 | 1Wilson et al. Would you fund this movie?is so enjoyable, why would participantsbe willing to re-experience an unpleasantstimulus just to see if it is still unpleas-ant? (Not to mention the fact that par-ticipants’ reports about the reasons fortheir behavior are, in large part, post-hocrationalizations that may not reﬂect theiractual reasons; Nisbett and Wilson, 1977;Johansson et al., 2005). Lastly, we notean error in one of Fox et al.’s statements.Participants did not rate their “enjoymentof ‘just thinking,”’ but rather their enjoy-ment of the thinking period, includingany shocks they administered. Thus, ifpeople shocked themselves because theywere bored, and the shocks helped allevi-ate that boredom, it is not surprising thatthe shockers rated the overall experiencesimilarly to the non-shockers.More fundamentally, Fox et al. seemto have misunderstood what our stud-ies were about. They described ourresearch as having investigated “sponta-neous thought,” which one of the authorsdeﬁned as “the unintended, non-working,non-instrumental mental content thatcomes to mind unbidden and effort-lessly” (Christoff, 2012, p. 52). But infact we examined directed consciousthought, because in virtually all of ourstudies we speciﬁcally instructed par-ticipants to think in enjoyable ways. AsChristoff (2012) noted, “It is impossible,after all, to instruct participants to have aspontaneous thought” (p. 57). No otherstudies, to our knowledge, have exam-ined how successfully people can engagein deliberative thinking when the goal isenjoyment or positive affect. Fox et al.’scomparison of our research to previousstudies of spontaneous thought is thusmoot.Clearly some kinds of thinking areenjoyable. As we said at the end of ourarticle, “There is no doubt that peopleare sometimes absorbed by interestingideas, exciting fantasies, and pleasant day-dreams.” But we also noted that “it may beparticularly hard to steer our thoughts inpleasant directions and keep them there”(p.77).Thepreponderanceoftheevidencesupportsthisconclusion,webelieve,andiscontrary to both Fox et al.’s and our owninitial hypotheses.ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe writing of this article was aidedby National Science Foundation GrantBCS-1423747.REFERENCESChristoff, K. (2012). Undirected thought: neu-ral determinants and correlates. Brain Res.1428, 51–59. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2011.09.060Fox, K. C. R., Thompson, E., Andrews-Hanna, J. R.,andChristoff,K.(2014).Isthinkingreallyaversive?Commentary on Wilson et al.’s “Just think: thechallenges of the disengaged mind.” Front. Psychol.5:1427. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01427Johansson, P., Hall, L., Sikström, S., and Olsson,A. (2005). Failure to detect mismatches betweenintention and outcome in a simple decisiontask. Science 310, 116–119. doi: 10.1126/sci-ence.1111709Nisbett, R. E., and Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling morethan we can know: verbal reports on mental pro-cesses. Psychol. Rev. 84, 231–259.Wilson, T. D., Reinhard, D., Westgate, E. C., Gilbert,D. T., Ellerbeck, N., Hahn, C., et al. (2014).Just think: the challenges of the disengagedmind. Science 345, 75–77. doi: 10.1126/science.1250830Conﬂict of Interest Statement: The authors declarethat the research was conducted in the absence of anycommercial or ﬁnancial relationships that could beconstrued as a potential conﬂict of interest.Received: 14 November 2014; accepted: 22 November2014; published online: 09 December 2014.Citation: Wilson TD, Gilbert DT, Reinhard DA,Westgate EC and Brown CL (2014) Would you fundthis movie? A reply to Fox et al. (2014). Front. Psychol.5:1428. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01428This article was submitted to Cognition, a section of thejournal Frontiers in Psychology.Copyright © 2014 Wilson, Gilbert, Reinhard, Westgateand Brown. This is an open-access article distributedunder the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionLicense (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduc-tion in other forums is permitted, provided the originalauthor(s) or licensor are credited and that the origi-nal publication in this journal is cited, in accordancewith accepted academic practice. No use, distribution orreproduction is permitted which does not comply withthese terms.Frontiers in Psychology | Cognition December 2014 | Volume 5 | Article 1428 | 2

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