White Bears And Other Forbidden Thoughts: The Psychology of Mental Control - Softcover

Wegner, Daniel M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140115994 ISBN 13: 9780140115994

Publisher: Penguin, 1990

Synopsis

For several years, social psychologist Daniel M. Wegner has been investigating the inability to control thoughts. Drawing on the most recent breakthroughs in this area of research, this is an illuminating explanation of just how human minds work and of the glimmerings of madness in all people.

About this title

Review

"Insightful, provocative, and firmly grounded in research....I will be using it in my seminar on personality." --Elissa Wurf, Lehigh University

"Pioneering explorations of mental control. A major contribution to the field and a stimulating read." --David M. Clarke, University of Oxford

"Over 1000 Introduction to Psychology students have read the book and raved about it. It shows them how psychologists come up with ideas and how they go about testing these ideas through rigorous scientific research. Students also loved the writing style and found it highly engaging and accessible. However, the book should not be considered light reading. I have also used it in two graduate seminars and the students have consistently had high praise for how Wegner weaves together diverse psychological theories to arrive at an important understanding of mental control and the self-regulation of emotion." --Todd Heatherton, Ph.D., Harvard University

"For Dan Wegner, asking people to avoid thoughts of a white bear is more than a clever demonstration. It is one of the tasks he has used for some years now in a creative set of laboratory experiments on the consequences on the deliberate thought suppression. These consequences are something of a paradox: the more one tries not to think a particular thought, the more that thought invades conscious awareness...White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts is a clever, engaging, and highly readable book that explores how individuals try to influence the contents of their own consciousness and the reasons for the success and failure of these attempts." --Peter Salovey and Paula M. Niedenthal in Imagination, Cognition and Personality

"Wegner's White Bears is a masterful introduction to the thorny issues of consciousness and self-control. No student can read this book without several times thinking: 'Aha, that's why I do that.'...Students need more academic thrillers like White Bears."--Matthew D. Lieberman, PhD, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles

"Everyone has at one time or another had a thought that she or he just didn't want in mind--and knows the difficulty of suppressing that thought....[Wegner's] advice, however unsettling, is to let your personal white bears out, since that appears to be the only way to finally set them free."--American Health

From the Author

Trying to control our minds can backfire.
There are many things we might prefer not to think about. We may wish to keep our thoughts away from some unpleasant incident in our past, for example, or we might hope not to think of food when we're on a diet. This book is about psychological studies in which people were in fact asked not to think about various things, including in some cases a white bear. As it turns out, the participants in these experiments quickly became obsessed with the very thoughts they were trying to suppress. The outcome of this odd laboratory exercise mirrors the greater problems we all have when we try to suppress thoughts in everyday life. The thought comes back again and again--suppression leads to obsession. The book examines explanations of why our minds are unable to empty themselves. It concludes by exploring some of the strategies that may be more useful than simple suppression when we attempt to overcome unwanted thoughts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0140115994
• ISBN 13: 9780140115994
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224