At any given moment, you can be
focused on thinking about what is going on in the world around you, or you can
be motivated to act in the world. For
example, you might contemplate taking an art class. In the thinking mindset, you would consider
the various pros and cons of taking this class.
In the doing mindset, you would generate and then execute a plan for
registering and attending the class.
Psychologists have used different terms to describe these orientations,
but I will call them the thinking mindset
and the doing mindset.
Most of the research on these
mindsets has focused on the behaviors that are associated with them. An interesting question, though, surrounds
whether these motivational states affect what you see. This issue was explored by Oliver Buttner,
Frank Wieber, Anna Maria Schultz, Ute Bayer, Arnd Florack, and Peter Gollwitzer
in a paper in the October, 2014 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The idea is that when you are
focused on thinking, you are open to lots of possibilities, and so you are
willing to be expansive in the information you take in. When you are focused on doing, then you
narrow your attention to the information you think is most important.
To test this possibility, the
researchers first manipulated people’s mindset.
To put people in a thinking mindset, they asked people to spend some
time reflecting on an unsolved personal problem. To put people in a mindset, they asked people
to create a plan to complete a personal project. These tasks have been used in previous
studies as well.
Then, participants were asked to
look at a series of pictures on a computer monitor. The pictures showed an object or animal
against a background (such as a cow against a farm field). Participants were told to look at the
pictures and then rate how much they liked them.
While participants looked at the
pictures, their eyes were being tracked.
Though you may not realize it, your eyes are constantly in motion. You have only a small amount of very clear
vision in each eye. If you hold your arm
out and stick up your thumb, the area of clear vision (which reflects the
location of a densely packed group of cells in the back of your eye) is about
the size of your thumbnail. In order to
build up a view of what you are looking at, you have to move your eyes
around. The information you point your
eyes toward is a good indicator of what you are paying attention to.
Participants who were put in a
thinking mindset looked about equally at the central object in the picture and
the background. Those who were put in a
doing mindset looked much more at the central object than at the background. This result is consistent with the idea that
the doing mindset narrows attention to what seems important, while the thinking
mindset enables people to take in a lot of information.
One reason why this finding is
important, is that our modern world promotes getting things done. We feel as though we should always be doing
something. However, if we want to take a
broad view of a situation, then we need to be willing to take a step back and
to put ourselves in a mindset of thinking rather than doing. These mindsets actually influence what we see
in the world around us.
