Why the imp in your brain gets out

The visions seem to swirl up from the brains sewage system at the worst possible timesduring a job interview...

The visions seem to swirl up from the brains sewage system at the worst possible timesduring a job interview,a meeting with the boss,an apprehensive first date,an important dinner party. What if I started a food fight with these hors doeuvres? Mocked the hosts stammer? Cut loose with a racial slur?

But a vast majority of people rarely,if ever,act on such urges,and their susceptibility to rude fantasies in fact reflects the workings of a normally sensitive,social brain,argues a paper recently published in the journal Science.

There are all kinds of pitfalls in social life,everywhere we look; not just errors but worst possible errors come to mind,and they come to mind easily, said the papers author,Daniel M. Wegner,a psychologist at Harvard. And having the worst thing come to mind,in some circumstances,might increase the likelihood that it will happen.

The exploration of perverse urges has a rich history how could it not?,running through the stories of Edgar Allan Poe in The Imp of the Perverse to Freuds repressed desires and Darwins observation that many actions are performed in direct opposition to our conscious will. In the past decade,social psychologists have documented how common such contrary urges areand when they are most likely to alter peoples behavior.

At a fundamental level,functioning socially means mastering ones impulses. The adult brain expends at least as much energy on inhibition as on action,some studies suggest,and mental health relies on abiding strategies to ignore or suppress deeply disturbing thoughtsof ones own inevitable death,for example. These strategies are general,subconscious or semiconscious psychological programs that usually run on automatic pilot.

Perverse impulses seem to arise when people focus intensely on avoiding specific errors or taboos. The theory is straightforward: To avoid blurting out that a colleague is a raging hypocrite,the brain must first imagine just that; the very presence of that catastrophic insult,in turn,increases the odds that the brain will spit it out.

We know that whats accessible in our minds can exert an influence on judgment and behavior simply because its there,its floating on the surface of consciousness, said Jamie Arndt,a psychologist at the University of Missouri.

Story continues below this ad

The empirical evidence of this influence has been piling up in recent years,as Wegner documents in the new paper. In the lab,psychologists have people try to banish a thought from their mindsof a white bear,for exampleand find that the thought keeps returning,about once a minute. Likewise,people trying not to think of a specific word continually blurt it out during rapid-fire word-association tests.

The same ironic errors, as Wegner calls them,are just easy to evoke in the real world. Golfers instructed to avoid a specific mistake,like overshooting,do it more often when under pressure,studies find. Efforts to be politically correct can be particularly treacherous. The risk that people will slip or lose it depends in part on the level of stress they are undergoing,Wegner argues. Concentrating intensely on not staring at a prominent mole on a new acquaintances face,while also texting and trying to follow a conversation,heightens the risk of saying: We went to the moleI mean,mall. Mall!

A certain relief can come from just getting it over with,having that worst thing happen,so you dont have to worry about monitoring in anymore, Wegner said.

All of which might be hard to explain,of course,if youve just mooned the dinner party.