Stanford University, Graduate School of Business, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2011 Apr;22(4):523-31. doi: 10.1177/0956797611400095. Epub 2011 Mar 3.
Under pressure, people often prefer what is familiar, which can seem safer than the unfamiliar. We show that such favoring of familiarity can lead to choices precisely contrary to the source of felt pressure, thus exacerbating, rather than mitigating, its negative consequences. In Experiment 1, time pressure increased participants' frequency of choosing to complete a longer but incidentally familiar task option (as opposed to a shorter but unfamiliar alternative), resulting in increased felt stress during task completion. In Experiment 2, pressure to reach a performance benchmark in a chosen puzzle increased participants' frequency of choosing an incidentally familiar puzzle that both augured and delivered objectively worse performance (i.e., fewer points obtained). Participants favored this familiar puzzle even though familiarity was established through unpleasant prior experience. This "devil you know" preference under pressure contrasted with disfavoring of the negatively familiar option in a pressure-free situation. These results demonstrate that pressure-induced flights to familiarity can sometimes aggravate rather than ameliorate pressure, and can occur even when available evidence points to the suboptimality of familiar options.
在压力下，人们往往更喜欢熟悉的东西，因为它们似乎比不熟悉的东西更安全。我们表明，这种对熟悉的偏好可能会导致与所感受到的压力源完全相反的选择，从而加剧而不是减轻其负面影响。在实验 1 中，时间压力增加了参与者选择完成更长但偶然熟悉的任务选项（而不是更短但不熟悉的替代选项）的频率，导致在任务完成过程中感到更大的压力。在实验 2 中，在选择的谜题中达到表现基准的压力增加了参与者选择偶然熟悉的谜题的频率，而这些谜题在客观上表现更差（即获得的分数更少）。参与者更喜欢这种熟悉的谜题，尽管熟悉是通过不愉快的先前经验建立的。这种在压力下“明知山有虎，偏向虎山行”的偏好与在无压力情况下不喜欢负面熟悉选项形成鲜明对比。这些结果表明，压力引起的对熟悉的追求有时会加剧压力，而不是减轻压力，即使有证据表明熟悉的选项并不理想。
