Why trying not to think about something makes you think about it more.
What the evidence says
- Attempts at thought suppression create two processes: operating process (seeks intended state) and monitoring process (checks for failure)[1]
- Under cognitive load, the monitoring process can supersede the operating process[1]
- Suppression is followed by a rebound: people who first tried not to think of a white bear, and were then asked to think of it, reported it more often than people asked to think of it from the start. Wegner’s 1994 theory offers a reason, that the monitoring process may ”enhance the person’s sensitivity to mental contents that are the ironic opposite of those that are intended”[2],[1]
- The “white bear” experiments: told not to think of a white bear, people could not keep it out of mind, mentioning it or ringing a bell for it more than once a minute. Suppression lowered the thought’s frequency while it lasted; the increase came afterwards, as the rebound above[2]
- The authors read this as suppression backfiring as a self-control strategy, ”perhaps even producing the very obsession or preoccupation that it is directed against”. The perhaps is theirs: two laboratory experiments with one neutral thought, and they call generalization beyond white bears ”an open question”[2]
- Trying not to think about food may lead to a later preoccupation with food: the authors propose this in their introduction from Polivy and Herman’s work on dieting, and do not test it. Their subjects suppressed a white bear, not food, so the application to eating rests on that conjecture, not on the experiments[2]
- Giving the mind one specific thing to turn to reduced the rebound: people told to think of a red Volkswagen whenever the white bear came to mind showed less rebound afterwards than people who simply suppressed, though suppression itself was no easier. *The general advice to redirect attention rather than suppress goes beyond the paper: the authors offer the single-distracter result as a possibility whose dimensions are ”only incompletely grasped”***[2]
- ACT’s cognitive defusion offers an alternative to suppression: rather than trying to eliminate unwanted thoughts, observe them as mental events without engagement or obedience. That defusion therefore sidesteps ironic processes — the thought being neither fought nor fed — is an inference joining Hayes’s account to Wegner’s, not a claim either source makes[3]