Problems never seem to end. This is what every individual has to say about his life. Have you ever wondered why this happens? Why do problems never come to an end? Well, a group of researchers from Harvard University conducted various experiments to study the cognitive aspect of the human mind and find out the reason behind people being worried all the time.
The study concluded that people dealing with serious problems for a long period of time tend to focus on problems and get panicked over smallest of things.
Harvard University researcher David Levari, in his publication for The Conversation, compared people's thinking with a "neighbourhood watch" comprising multiple volunteers who inform the police about anything serious or suspicious they see around.
When their efforts yield positive results, leading to the reduction in the number of crimes in the area, it is expected that they would relax after the success. However, this is rarely the case. After a series of severe criminal incidents, volunteers start suspecting even the minute issues as severe crimes, which keeps them worried all the time.
The group of researchers conducted three different experiments with three different groups of people to figure out what leads people to consistently think about the problems as serious even when they are not.
In the first experiment, a group of people was asked to identify the most threatening faces from the carefully designed ones that ranged from very threatening to most harmless expressions. As the threatening faces became rare over and over again, the researchers observed that the people started identifying even the harmless faces as threatening ones.
In the second set of experiments, the examination was a bit easier as a group of people was asked to distinguish between blue-coloured dots and purple-coloured dots on a screen. The study found that as the blue dots became rarer, even the slightly purple dots appeared to be blue to the samples. They continued to identify them wrong even after the indications that were given to them during the session.
The most surprising result came when the third experiment was conducted. Unlike the previous ones that were visually-driven experiments, the third one consisted of non-visual judgments. In the final decision-making ability test, participants had to read and sort ethical research papers from the unethical ones
The Harvard researchers observed that the results were the same. As they went through fewer unethical studies, they started considering ethical ones as also unethical.
The study concluded that the more stressful situations you go through in life, the more your mind tends to get stuck in the worrier mode.
