School of Information.
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2022 Dec;151(12):3213-3229. doi: 10.1037/xge0001255. Epub 2022 Jul 28.
The ability to engage in internal thoughts without external stimulation is a unique characteristic in humans. The current research tested the hypothesis that people metacognitively underestimate their capability to enjoy this process of "just thinking." Participants (university students; total N = 259) were asked to sit and wait in a quiet room without doing anything. Across six experiments, we consistently found that participants' predicted enjoyment and engagement for the waiting task were significantly less than what they actually experienced. This underappreciation of just thinking also led participants to proactively avoid the waiting task in favor of an alternative task (i.e., Internet news checking), despite their experiences not being statistically different. These results suggest an inherent difficulty in accurately appreciating how engaging just thinking can be, and could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in our daily life. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
无需外部刺激就能进行内部思考的能力是人类所特有的。目前的研究检验了这样一个假设，即人们元认知上低估了自己享受这一“只是思考”过程的能力。参与者（大学生；总 N=259）被要求坐在安静的房间里什么也不做等待。在六个实验中，我们一致发现，参与者对等待任务的预期享受和参与度明显低于他们实际体验到的程度。这种对只是思考的低估也导致参与者主动避免等待任务，而选择替代任务（即上网查看新闻），尽管他们的体验在统计学上没有差异。这些结果表明，准确评估只是思考的吸引力具有内在的困难，这可以解释为什么人们更喜欢让自己忙碌，而不是在日常生活中花点时间进行反思和想象。（PsycInfo 数据库记录（c）2022 APA，保留所有权利）。
