14 DAY TRIAL // Generally speaking, citizens in the United States are more fond of doing something than others around the world. Regardless of whether they have a fixed, important goal, or they are engaged in trivial activities, they are more likely to keep themselves busy than other people.
In an recent study, experts demonstrated that Americans are not necessarily engaged in doing something in particular – they simply want to be engaged in some activity, rather than standing idly by.
This conclusion is very important for psychologists, because studies conducted thus far tended to assess people's levels of activity based on the existence of specific goals, attitudes, and motivations. None of the studies took into account the performance of meager, trivial tasks.
What the new work showed is that Americans generally tend to prefer being active. This is the way in which the society is set up at a macro level, and the reasons for why this is may be more complex and intricate than experts ever believed.
The research also proposes a new series of aspects that psychologists should consider when conducting studies of activity as a concept. Details of the work appear in the latest issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.
The investigation was led by University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) expert Dolores Albarracin, PhD, who was also the author of the journal entry. The scientist says she became interested in this type of studies after noticing that other people are generally less active than Americans.
“People [in the US] have this inclination to do more, even if what they do is trivial,” she explains. But this may also have some negative side-effects on the health of the population, the scientist explains.
People who are more active have a higher tendency to engage in impulsive behaviors such as eating high-calorie, highly-processed food that is unhealthy to the body. According to the study, experts do so because they want to remain able to maintain the level of activity they are accustomed to.
The scientific community tends to harbor “the idea that people have these highly specific goals,” Albarracin explains. However, that is not always the case, PsychCentral reports.
“Quite often some significant proportion of our time is engaged in this global level – we want to do something, but what we do ends up not mattering much,” the investigator adds.
“You could end up with productive behavior, like work, or impulsive behavior, like drug use,” she concludes.