Does mind-wandering help people solve social problems?
People whose minds wandered more generated more steps when solving everyday social problems, but their solutions were judged less effective.
Source
Is self-generated thought a means of social problem solving?
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Individual-differences lab study: thought probes during a low-demand choice reaction time task and a working memory task (within-subject), related to scores on the Means-End Problem Solving task.
- N
- N=84 · 94 right-handed adults were recruited; ten were excluded for extreme scores on the tasks, and the remainder were analysed.
- Population
- Healthy right-handed native German-speaking adults recruited from a Leipzig research institute database.
- Outcome
- Self-generated thought ratings from thought probes (off-task, past, future, self, other) and social problem-solving (number of relevant steps and rated efficiency on the MEPS).
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
94 adults were recruited to perform a low-demand choice reaction time task and a more demanding working memory task while being interrupted by thought probes asking how off-task, past- or future-focused, and self- or other-focused their thoughts were. They also completed a social problem-solving task in which they wrote stories describing how they would get from a problem (such as knowing nobody in a new neighbourhood) to a stated solution. Two raters scored each story for the number of relevant steps and for overall efficiency. The researchers used principal component analysis to group the thought ratings into types and related these to problem-solving scores.
What they found
Mind-wandering was higher in the easy task than in the working memory task, especially future-focused thought, replicating a known prospective bias. Two components summarised thought content, both mixing off-task thinking with thoughts about other people, one future- and self-focused and one past-focused. People who mind-wandered more produced more relevant steps in their stories but lower-rated efficiency, and this held regardless of the content of their thoughts. Poor problem solvers also tended to perform worse on the working memory task, and future-focused social thought was linked to slightly better performance on the easy task.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study is correlational, so it cannot show whether mind-wandering improves or impairs problem-solving, or whether good problem-solvers simply mind-wander more. Problem-solving was measured with hypothetical written scenarios, which the authors note may not reflect how people actually handle real-life problems. Only social problems were tested, so it is unknown whether the pattern extends to other kinds of problem-solving. Several effects, such as the link between problem-solving and working memory performance, were only at trend level, and the sample was young healthy adults from one German institute.
Key terms
- Self-generated thought (SGT)
- Thoughts produced internally that are unrelated to the task in front of you, commonly called mind-wandering or daydreaming.
- Thought sampling (experience sampling)
- A method that interrupts people at random moments during a task to ask them to rate what they were just thinking about.
- Means-End Problem Solving task (MEPS)
- A task in which people write a story connecting a social problem to its solution; scored for number of relevant steps and overall efficiency.
- Principal component analysis (PCA)
- A statistical technique that groups correlated measures into a smaller number of underlying components.
- Current Concerns Hypothesis
- The idea that the mind wanders toward unresolved personal goals and concerns when the environment is not demanding enough.
Flashcards
0 of 11 answers reviewed
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
People who reported more mind-wandering tended to produce problem-solving stories that were:
Common questions
So is mind-wandering good or bad for problem-solving?
Both, according to this study: more mind-wandering went with generating more solution steps but with less efficient solutions, which the authors suggest may reflect an optimal middle level, like an inverted-U relationship.
Why use two tasks of different difficulty?
Mind-wandering is reduced in demanding tasks, so using an easy and a harder task created variation within each person and let the researchers check that their thought measures responded to task demands as expected.
Did the type of mind-wandering matter?
Not for problem-solving: both future-focused and past-focused thought components had similar relationships with problem-solving scores, contrary to the idea that only certain content would matter.
More on Attention