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Study: People Would Rather Be Shocked Than Be Alone With Their Thoughts
sciencehabit writes "How much do we hate being alone with our own thoughts? Enough to give ourselves an electric shock. In a new study, researchers recruited hundreds of people and made them sit in an empty room and just think for about 15 minutes. About half of the volunteers hated the experience. In a separate experiment, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to push a button and shock themselves rather than just sit there quietly and think. One of the study authors suggests that the results may be due to boredom and the trouble that we have controlling our thoughts. "I think [our] mind is built to engage in the world," he says. "So when we don't give it anything to focus on, it's kind of hard to know what to do."
Extroverts are 'people', introverts are abnormal. When studies discover behavior closely tied to extroverted personalty types it is considered something about 'people' in general, while studies discovering behaviors related to introverts tend to be labeled as being about introverts.
It is the classic normal/default/otherness problem, in the same basic category as when you draw a simple stick figure people think it is male unless you add something gender marking, male unless otherwise specified. In this case, extrovert unless otherwise specified.