How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion

Did I Really Do That? Most of us believe that our daily actions occur because we exert conscious effort to make them happen; nevertheless, we sometimes seem to end up doing the precise thing we had hoped to avoid. Wegner (p. 48) reviews the recent psychological research on ironic processes. The findings support the view that the unwanted outcomes are held in working memory and that the monitoring centers that usually ensure correct behavior can be distracted or exhausted, allowing the taboo idea to escape. In slapstick comedy, the worst thing that could happen usually does: The person with a sore toe manages to stub it, sometimes twice. Such errors also arise in daily life, and research traces the tendency to do precisely the worst thing to ironic processes of mental control. These monitoring processes keep us watchful for errors of thought, speech, and action and enable us to avoid the worst thing in most situations, but they also increase the likelihood of such errors when we attempt to exert control under mental load (stress, time pressure, or distraction). Ironic errors in attention and memory occur with identifiable brain activity and prompt recurrent unwanted thoughts; attraction to forbidden desires; expression of objectionable social prejudices; production of movement errors; and rebounds of negative experiences such as anxiety, pain, and depression. Such ironies can be overcome when effective control strategies are deployed and mental load is minimized.