In the Guardian, Oliver Burkeman talks about how we sometimes sabotage our own best intentions:
The great Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner, who died earlier this year, wrote a famous article entitled How To Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion (pdf). It concerned a very specific kind of mistake, which he labelled the “precisely counterintuitive error” — the kind of screw-up so obviously calamitous that you think about it in advance and decide you definitely won’t let it happen:
We see a rut coming up in the road ahead and proceed to steer our bike right into it. We make a mental note not to mention a sore point in conversation and then cringe in horror as we blurt out exactly that thing. We carefully cradle the glass of red wine as we cross the room, all the while thinking ‘don’t spill,’ and then juggle it onto the carpet under the gaze of our host.”
This is an example of what psychologists call an “ironic effect”: it’s not just that we fail in our best efforts, but that we fail because of our best efforts. If you hadn’t given much thought to the wine, you’d probably not have disgraced yourself.
The depressingly popular field of “positive thinking” is basically one long litany of ironic effects, because trying too hard to be happy makes people miserable. (I explore this in my book The Antidote — and now I just have to hope that this self-promotional reference doesn’t have the ironic effect of making you less likely to buy it.) But ironic effects have been cropping up in a whole range of other contexts, too
Three recent reports of ironic effects he mentions:
- Stigmatising obesity makes overweight people eat more, not less
- Supporting a good cause on Facebook makes people less likely to give money or time
- Awareness campaigns get forgotten by the people who need them most
