Cross-Cultural Consistency and Relativity in the Enjoyment of Thinking Versus Doing

Which is more enjoyable: trying to think enjoyable thoughts or doing everyday solitary activities? Wilson et al. (2014) found that American participants much preferred solitary everyday activities, such as reading or watching TV, to thinking for pleasure. To see whether this preference generalized o...

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Published in:	Journal of personality and social psychology Vol. 117; no. 5; pp. e71 - e83
Main Authors:	Buttrick, Nicholas, Choi, Hyewon, Wilson, Timothy D, Oishi, Shigehiro, Boker, Steven M, Gilbert, Daniel T, Alper, Sinan, Aveyard, Mark, Cheong, Winnee, Čolić, Marija V, Dalgar, Ilker, Doğulu, Canay, Karabati, Serdar, Kim, Eunbee, Knežević, Goran, Komiya, Asuka, Laclé, Camila Ordóñez, Ambrosio Lage, Caio, Lazarević, Ljiljana B, Lazarević, Dušanka, Lins, Samuel, Blanco Molina, Mauricio, Neto, Félix, Orlić, Ana, Petrović, Boban, Arroyo Sibaja, Massiel, Torres Fernández, David, Vanpaemel, Wolf, Voorspoels, Wouter, Wilks, Daniela C
Format:	Journal Article
Language:	English
Published:	United States American Psychological Association 01-11-2019
Subjects:	Cognition Cross Cultural Differences Cross-Cultural Comparison Cultural differences Emotions Enjoyment Female Human Humans Individual Differences Male Meditation Need for Cognition Openness Pleasure Positive emotions Structural equation modeling Structural models Television viewing Thinking replication thinking cultural differences individual differences
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Summary:	Which is more enjoyable: trying to think enjoyable thoughts or doing everyday solitary activities? Wilson et al. (2014) found that American participants much preferred solitary everyday activities, such as reading or watching TV, to thinking for pleasure. To see whether this preference generalized outside of the United States, we replicated the study with 2,557 participants from 12 sites in 11 countries. The results were consistent in every country: Participants randomly assigned to do something reported significantly greater enjoyment than did participants randomly assigned to think for pleasure. Although we found systematic differences by country in how much participants enjoyed thinking for pleasure, we used a series of nested structural equation models to show that these differences were fully accounted for by country-level variation in 5 individual differences, 4 of which were positively correlated with thinking for pleasure (need for cognition, openness to experience, meditation experience, and initial positive affect) and 1 of which was negatively correlated (reported phone usage).
Bibliography:	ObjectType-Article-1 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 content type line 23
ISSN:	0022-3514 1939-1315
DOI:	10.1037/pspp0000198