Don’t Think of a White Bear

Tell people not to think of a white bear for five minutes, and chances are they won’t be able to get polar bears out of their heads.

David Schneider, Rice professor of psychology, demonstrated this paradoxical effect of thought suppression in a research study he collaborated on in the 1980s at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research paper, published in 1987 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was recently selected as a “modern classic” by four prominent social psychologists.

The Journal of Psychological Inquiry asked the four experts to select papers from the past 20 years that they think social psychologists will still be talking about in the future, and Schneider’s paper on thought suppression rated the highest.

The journal asked Schneider and co-author Daniel Wegner, now a professor of psychology at Harvard University, to write about their original paper, and then published their recollections in volume 14 (2003).

“The original white bear paper documented the fact that people can, but only for brief periods of time, suppress thoughts of white bears,” Schneider said. “But on removal of suppression instructions, people are typically flooded with the thoughts they were supposed to suppress.”
For the experiment that Schneider and Wegner collaborated on with two students at Trinity University (Samuel Carter III and Teri White), study participants were given five minutes to state the thoughts that were going through their heads, but they were instructed not to think of a white bear.

The bear was chosen because one of the researchers remembered reading that when Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky challenged his brother not to think of a white bear, the brother remained perplexed for quite a while.

Study participants had to ring a bell each time they thought of a white bear, and the frequent rings tallied in the study results indicated their inability to suppress the thought. In the next phase of the study, participants were asked to think about the white bear for five minutes, and they performed better on this task than did participants who were never asked to suppress the thought earlier.

“These observations suggest that attempted thought suppression has paradoxical effects as a self-control strategy, perhaps even producing the very obsession or preoccupation that it is directed against,” the authors wrote in an abstract for the original paper. They noted that contemporary psychology had not paid much attention to “such puzzling yet important phenomena,” which is why they designed a research study that would begin the investigation.

In their retrospective article in the Journal of Psychological Inquiry, Schneider and Wegner wrote, “The white bear was part of a movement in social psychology to understand the unconscious underpinnings of social behavior and consciousness.”

They cited a number of papers that subsequently studied some aspect of the white bear phenomenon. These included research on the phenomenon’s relevance to clinical concerns, such as the “remarkable health effects” of disclosing a thought rather than suppressing it, and the negative effects of depressed people trying to suppress self-critical thoughts. Other research, Schneider noted, has suggested that attempting to suppress stereotypes might actually lead to their becoming more salient—perhaps more available to consciousness—and more likely to affect behavior toward members of stereotyped groups.

—B. J. Almond