Revisiting “White Bears and Pink Elephants” - Monday, September 28th, 2009

White Bears and Pink Elephants

“In Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), Dostoyevsky asked the question: “How do you stop thinking about a white bear?” Researcher Dan Wegner and his colleagues set out to investigate this issue in 1987. They asked college students to not think about a white bear. What do you think happened? The students couldn’t stop thinking of a white bear. The researchers concluded that trying to suppress a thought actually produces more of that thought. Wegner went on to repeat the experiment, asking students to purposefully think of a pink elephant. What happened? The opposite—the more you try to think of something, the less you actually do think of it.”

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