Attention
Does mind-wandering help people solve social problems?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People whose minds wandered more generated more steps when solving everyday social problems, but their solutions were judged less effective.
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).
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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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