Another revealing facet of self-control is what children do to regulate their behaviour. While waiting for the marshmallow, children who performed best on the task did not necessarily show more self-control but rather they seemed to find ways of taking their minds off the temptation. Many of them used distractions such as not looking at the marshmallow or singing to themselves. They were adopting a strategy known as self-binding – an action that one takes now in order to secure a better future. According to the Greek story, Ulysses wanted to hear the song of the Sirens but knew that their singing lured sailors to their deaths. To outwit them, he poured wax into the ears of his crew and had them bind him to the mast so that he would not leap from the ship and drown. Distraction turns out to be a better way of controlling urges because the act of resisting temptation by confronting it and trying to stop thoughts and behaviours can actually produce the opposite result in a psychological rebound effect.
Rebounding earworms and white bears
Rebound effects can happen when you least expect them and often can be very irritating.
Have you ever had that annoying experience where a tune gets stuck in your head – even one that you really hate? No matter how you try, it will simply not go away. The more you try to ignore it, the stronger the song becomes. Like some type of musical itch you cannot scratch.
This is because you are experiencing an earworm. Earworm is a direct translation of the German term ohrwurm, which means ‘earwig’. These are the tunes that we can’t forget, no matter how hard we try. It may be a catchy pop song or some advert jingle. Often we hate the tune but it simply will not go away. They intrude into our consciousness uninvited and, once there, overstay their welcome.
Around nine out of ten have experienced an earworm and diary studies indicate that most of us have an earworm episode at least once per week.39 Most people find them annoying, but no matter how hard they try, these earworms just will not go away on command. And it is not just tunes that get stuck in our head; mental images can lodge in your mind as well.
You can assess your own mental-image suppression with the following test. Say out loud each thought or image that comes into your head over the next five minutes. Time yourself. You can say anything, but the only rule is that you must not think about a white bear. Remember that – anything but a white bear. Now try it.
Did the image of a polar bear pop into your mind? When my Harvard colleague Dan Wegner conducted this simple experiment, he found that participants could not help but think of a white bear and the more they tried to suppress the thought of a white bear, the more it rebounded back.40 The reason for this obstinate effect is that in attempting not to think about the white bear, processes in our mind actively seek out white bears so as to monitor them and prevent them from entering awareness. However that monitoring in itself brings them into consciousness.
When people try to suppress unwanted thoughts, they come thundering back into consciousness with even greater strength. This failure of self-control can have implications for our domestication. Inappropriate sexual thoughts and racist stereotypes are both things that we would rather not think about, but in doing so, they become all the more vivid in our minds. In one study, adults were shown a picture of a skinhead and asked to write an essay about a day in the life of the individual portrayed in the photograph. Half of them were instructed not to use any stereotypes. After the essay, they were taken to a room with a row of eight empty chairs and told that the jacket on the end chair belonged to the skinhead they had just written about and were about to meet. Those who had suppressed the stereotype positioned themselves further away from where they thought the skinhead would be sitting than those who had not been given such instructions. This is the rebound effect in action. Even though these adults had not used stereotypes, actively suppressing the thoughts had altered their behaviour to make them even more susceptible to acting in a prejudiced way.41
Sometimes we cannot help ourselves, especially when our capacity for self-control has been compromised. After sustaining a concussion to his head, Basil Fawlty, the hapless hotel owner in the British classic comedy Fawlty Towers, was at pains not to mention the war when a group of German tourists came to stay. The more he tried to avoid mentioning the war, the more he let it slip during conversation. For children it may be marshmallows, but for adults it is all the thoughts and actions that we would rather not express in public because of the consequences they would have in terms of what others might think about us. Domestication means behaving in ways that are socially acceptable, something that requires sufficient self-control. Such self-control is difficult for young children, but for some adults, particularly those whose EFs are compromised by damage, disease or drugs, it continues to represent a considerable challenge.
Filth, harm, lust and Jesus
For some individuals, intrusive thoughts and behaviours completely undermine their ability to behave appropriately in social situations. Impulse control disorder (ICD) covers a variety of conditions acquired through disease and injury as well as those that arise during development. Phineas Gage and Alexander Laing had acquired ICD from frontal damage and there are various forms of dementia resulting from brain disease of the frontal lobes that produce syndromes where behaviour becomes inappropriate. However, for some individuals, they are born with ICD that impairs their social functioning.
One developmental disorder, named after French neurologist Georges Gilles de la Tourette, that has become synonymous with ICD is Tourette Syndrome (TS). TS is a condition characterized by involuntary thoughts and behaviours. These can be body jerks but they include vocal tics, from simple grunts to shouting obscenities in public or corporallia. This is often how they come to the attention of others, because strangers fail to understand that these individuals are unable to control their impulses. To someone who is not aware that an individual has TS, this can seem like the height of rudeness, which is why TS sufferers often end up in difficulty in social settings.
TS is a spectrum disorder that first appears around school age, increases during pre-adolescence but, for most, declines by the beginning of adulthood. The incidence may be as many as one in a hundred children, is more common in males than females and runs in families, indicating that it is a developmental brain disorder with a genetic basis. The typical symptoms relate to impulse control, which supports the idea that ICD must be related in some way to the PFC. This link has been confirmed by imaging studies that reveal that the connectivity of the PFC to an area of the brain that regulates behaviours known as the basal ganglia is altered in persons with TS.42
Those with TS fight a constant battle to inhibit their tics, especially in public, which usually makes the condition much worse, just like Basil Fawlty trying not to mention the war. As the pressure to behave normally in a social situation increases, the urge to tic increases, which makes it build up like a sneeze. And just like a sneeze, it becomes involuntary so that they must tic in order to get some relief. As one boy, Jasper, with TS explained on a HBO television special, ‘When I try to hold back too much, you can’t think of anything except holding them back and you can’t think of anything except doing them.’43
Similar intrusive thoughts are also reported in individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), another ICD that affects around two out of every hundred adults in the West.44 Obsessions are the tormenting thoughts whereas compulsions are the activities that the sufferer must engage in to counteract the obsession. If I am obsessed by thoughts of filth then I may feel the compulsion to wash my hands repeatedly.