ATTITUDES AND SOCIAL COGNITION Paradoxical Effects of ThoughtSuppression Daniel M. Wegner Trinity University David J. Schneider University of Texas at San Antonio Samuel R. Carter III and Teri L. White Trinity University In a first experiment, subjects verbalizing the stream of consciousness for a 5-min period were asked to try not to think of a white bear, but to ring a bell in case they did. Asindicated both by mentions and by bell rings, they were unable to suppress the thought as instructed. On being asked after this suppression task to think about the whitebear for a 5-min period, these subjects showed significantly more tokens of thought about the bear than did subjects who wereasked to think about a white bear from the outset. 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. A second experiment replicated these findings and showed that subjects given a specific thought to use as a distracter during suppression were less likely to exhibit later preoccupa- tion with the thought to be suppressed. Consciousness cannot produce a negation except in the form of consciousness of negation. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1956, p. 43) It is sometimes tempting to wish one's thoughts away. Un- pleasant thoughts, ideas that are inappropriate to the moment, or images that may instigate unwanted behaviors each can be- come the focus of a desire for avoidance. Whether one is trying not to think of a traumatic event, however,or ismerely attempt- ing to avoid the thought of food while on a diet, it seems that thought suppression is not easy. It is said, for instance, that when the young Dostoyevski challenged hisbrother not tothink of a white bear, the child was perplexed for a long while. Con- temporary psychology has not focused much inquiry on such puzzling yet important phenomena, and our research was de- signed to initiatesuchinvestigation. The Problem of Thought Suppression The idea that people may have unwantedthoughts wasone of Freud's fundamental insights, and his notion that people re- press such thoughts has long served as a theoretical rallying point in the study of psychopathology (Erdelyi & Goldberg, 1979 Hart, 1934). Still, classical psychoanalytic theory skirts We thank Claudia Serrano, Susan Shackelford, Debbie Shearer, and Sharon Thorns for help in conducting this research, and Toni Giuliano, Paul Paulus, James W. Pennebaker, Thomas Pyszczynski, and William B. Swann,Jr., for their suggestions. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dan- iel M. Wegner, Department of Psychology, Trinity University,San Anto- nio, Texas78284. the most vexing problem of thought suppression: the self-refer- ent quality of the plan to suppress. To suppress a thought re- quires that one (a) plan to suppress a thought and (b) carry out that plan by suppressing all manifestations of the thought, in- cluding the original plan. Thought suppression thus seems to entail a state ofknowingand not knowingat once. Freud (1915/ 1957) made this strange dissociated state theoretically possible by postulating the unconscious and by further specifying that the unconscious was capable of performing the thought sup- pression for consciousness. So, although the unconscious could not remove the thought from itself, and consciousness also could not removethe thought from itself, the unconsciouscould perform this housecleaning for the separate, conscious part of the mind. The psychoanalytic emphasis on such unconscious repres- sion has resulted in a longstanding bias against the examination of consciousness during processes of thought suppression. Rather, the process of suppression has been expected to be ob- servable only after the fact, leavingits mark on memory. Thus, even contemporary research investigates directed forgetting (e.g., Geiselman, Bjork, & Fishman, 1983) and posthypnotic amnesia (e.g., Kihlstrom, 1983) rather than directed inatten- tion or directed conscious avoidance. These lines of investiga- tion do not attempt to explain how or with what effect people go about the conscious task of suppressing a thought. Yet there are multiple instances in everyday life when this is precisely what people try to do. Trying not to think about an upcoming stressful event, avoiding thoughts of smoking while trying to quit, or putting persistent thoughts of a lost love out of mind are common experiences for many. Worries of every kind are similarly conscious thoughts that people express the desire not 1o have. What happens when people make a conscious effort to avoid a particularthought? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987, Vol. 53, No. 1,5-13 Copyright 1987 by the American Psychological Association.Inc. 0022-3514/87/J00.75

WEGNER, SCHNEIDER, CARTER, AND WHITE Although the evidence is sketchy, there is some indication that the task of conscious thought suppression can be difficult. Early studies by McGranahan (1940) and Sears and Virshup (cited in Sears, 1943) showed that people instructed to avoid making color associations to stimulus words often reported such associations nonetheless, even when threatened with shock for doing so. In these cases, of course, people did not know in advance the specific thought they wereto suppress, only thegen- eral category of colors. More recently, Logan (1983) examined patterns of reaction time to stop signals given as subjects per- formed brief tasks, and found that although actions can be stopped in midcourse, thoughts seem to run to their conclusion as long as the stimuli activating them are present. Consistent with this, but only broadly relevant, are the outcome studies of the thought-stopping therapy technique. This therapy, suggested by Wolpe and Lazarus (1966) for obsessional disorders, appears generally no more successful than no intervention at all (Reed, 1985). Another line of evidence arises in research that calls for peo- ple to ignore information that is relevant to a judgment they must make. Whether people are instructed to ignore the infor- mation before they encounter it (e.g., Wegner, Coulton, & Wenzlaff, 1985) or are told to disregard it afterwards (e.g., Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975), they tend to incorporate it into sub- sequent judgments nonetheless. Jurors are influenced by infor- mation they have been instructed to disregard (Thompson, Fong, & Rosenhan, 1981), media audiences are influenced by news they are told is untrue (Wegner, Wenzlaff, Kerker, & Beat- tie, 1981), and people judging odds are influenced by informa- tion even when they have been offered moneyto ignore it (Tver- sky & Kahneman, 1974). These effects would seem unlikely if people could will away their conscious experience of the thoughts they were instructed to ignore (cf. Sherman & Corty, 1984). The hypothesis suggested by a diverse array of findings to date, then, is that conscious thought suppression is not a cog- nitive transformation that people perform with great facility. Consequences of Thought Suppression The mental state produced by an attempt at thought suppres- sion seems to differ in several ways from that accompanying simple inattention or unintended distraction. The hypothesis suggested by several theorists is that attempts to suppress thoughts (or emotions) can result in a subsequent rebound of absorption with those topics. The prototypic study in this area (Janis, 1958) showed that individuals who are personally in- clined to avoid thinking about an upcoming surgery subse- quently exhibit more anxious reactions to it. Although the meaning of this finding still is in debate (e.g., Janis, 1983 Laza- rus, 1983), there is a degree of theoretical unanimityin the con- clusion that avoidinga stressful thought can lead to subsequent intrusions of that thought (e.g., Horowitz, 1975). Even recent research in this domain continues to depend on the preselection of subjects who are prone to suppress (e.g., Burstein & Mei- chenbaum, 1979), however, and for this reason the processes underlying any transition from suppression to absorption re- main unexamined. The possibility that thought suppression leads to absorption can also be found in the reactions people have to abstinence from food or addictive substances. Given the assumption that the attempt to avoid a habitual behavior is commonly preceded by attempts to suppress or avoid habit-related thoughts, the pat- tern of behavior following self-control attempts is informative about the pattern of thinking that may take place. In the case of abstinence from food, for instance, Polivy and Herman (1985) indicated that dieting generally causes subsequent overeating. They cite several converging sources of evidence suggestingthat the restraint of eating is a reliable precursor of binge eating and overweight. It seems, then, that the attempt to avoid thoughts of food may lead to a later preoccupation with such thoughts. The more general abstinence-violation effect observed by Mar- latt and Parks (1982) suggests that the state of abstinence is a precarious one, in that relapse to an addictive behavior can be triggered by a single, seemingly minor violation of the prohibi- tion. This, too, is consistent with the idea that an initial attempt to suppress thoughts can be followed by an unusual preoccupa- tion with the suppressed thought domain. Their observation suggests further that the event that serves to halt suppression and trigger relapse may be only a single occurrence that draws the person's attention to the originally suppressed thought. The tentative conclusions suggested by past findings are two- fold. First, it seems that thought suppression is difficult for peo- ple to do the conscious avoidance of a thought may be perplex- ing and even time consuming. Second, there is some evidence to suggest that even when thoughts can be suppressed, they may return to consciousness with minimal prompting, perhaps to become obsessive preoccupations. These general expectations were explored here in two experiments through the expedient of asking people to suppress a thought while they delivered stream-of-consciousness reports in a laboratory setting. Experiment 1 Method Subjects and design. Trinity University undergraduates (14 men and 20 women) in introductory psychology classes volunteered to partici- pate in return for extra class credit. Each was randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions, an initial suppression condition or an initial expression condition. These conditions differed only in the order of two experimental tasks. For initial suppression, the subject was first instructed to suppress a thought, and then to express if, for initial ex- pression, these instructions were given in reverse order. Procedure. Each subject participated individually, starting by reading a set of instructions on how to report one's stream of consciousness. The instructions were adapted from those used by Pope (1978) and were fashioned to encourage continuous verbalization. The instructions asked only for subjects to describe what they were thinking there was no special appeal for the subject to explain or justify the thought (cf. Ericcson & Simon, 1984). The participant then was asked and gave informed consent to spend several S-min periods alone reporting to a tape recorder "everything that comes to mind." For each period, it wasexplained that the experi- menter would say "begin" and then leave the room for the duration of the period. After one such practice period, the experimenter returned to issue additional instructions. Participants assigned to the initial sup- pression group were told the following: In the next five minutes, please verbalize your thoughts as you did before, with one exception. This time, try not to think of a white