A new video from Tech Insider shares some startling facts about modern human behavior and our need to be “connected,” aka entertained, at all times.
Here, they do a brief interview with Tim Wilson, a University of Virginia professor of psychology, on his study of what would happen if you took away people’s phones for 15 lousy minutes and “gave them the opportunity to give themselves an electric shock” instead.
The results are downright depressing. While the participants were encouraged to sit and enjoy their thoughts, Wilson’s team found that two-thirds of men opted for that electric shock at least once during those 15 minutes, while a quarter of women did the same.
Granted, it’s a light shock, like one from a 9-volt battery, but still. Come on.
Wilson’s initial study on this phenomenon was published in 2014 in the journal Science. The UVA release on the study states that “Wilson notes that broad surveys have shown that people generally prefer not to disengage from the world, and, when they do, they do not particularly enjoy it. Based on these surveys, Americans spent their time watching television, socializing or reading, and actually spent little or no time ‘relaxing or thinking.’ ”
As Wilson states in the Tech Insider video, “They seemed to find the shock preferable to boredom…Some other researchers have followed up on this and found even higher rates of shock, so maybe we’ve lost the ability to use our minds for short periods to enjoy ourselves.”
