The Discomfort Index: How to Spot a Really Good Idea Whose Time Has Come

Really good ideas are inconvenient. A sure sign that an article has the potential for impact is that it makes readers uncomfortable right away. Not just any objectionable idea makes one uncomfortable, of course-the idea has to be new, convincing, and well-supported to be truly obnoxious. Having to rearrange how one understands a corner of human nature is very annoying-and a significant sign of a classic in the making. The old classics all had that property of being obnoxious. Who wanted to know that human beings would shock each other to death, simply because a nondescript experimenter told them to do so (Milgram, 1965)'? Too disturbing. Who wanted to know that people would believe their own falsehoods, simply because they had been underpaid to lie (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)? Very disruptive. Who wanted to know that people would fail to help someone dying, simply because they were ready to let someone else do it (Darley & Latane, 1968). Quite disillusioning. Yet these are the counterintuitive studies that attracted many of us to social psychology. The modem classics resemble the earlier classics by irritating people on first encounter yet having convincing data and revealing new insights about people. And oh yes, good theory helps, too. These criteria overcome people's reluctance to give up comfortable old paradigms and habits of thinking. After the initial reluctance comes enthusiastic, wholesale adoption. Characteristics of the research with the most impact include (a) phenomena of important everyday interest but old problems for social psychology, (b) well-grounded theory, (c) subtle and seemingly small independent variables, (d) large effects on important dependent variables, and (e) work that captures the spirit of the times but before other studies have done so (hence, the discomfort index). Clever, realistic, and innovative procedures help also, but they are not sufficient without Characteristics (a)-(e). I As a preliminary to illustrating some modern classics, I polled a course in advanced social psychology at the end of the semester and then took their nominations to a haphazard sounding of the Social Science Citation Index, out of curiosity. Following the editors' ground rules (post-1980, empirical articles, self excluded) eliminated some potential front-runners. For example, Nisbett and Wilson's (1977) Psychological Review article, "Telling More Than We Can Know," garners many citations per year, and Nisbett and Ross's (1979) book, Human Inference, does astoundingly well too. Both provided admirably irritating insights into people's oblivious irrationality. As another example, Markus's (1977) study of self-schemas, along with Cantor and Mischel's (1977) study of prototypes in person perception, both annoyed and excited readers by showing that basic human processes could reduce to cognitive structure and process. Together, all these contributions helped create the revolution in social cognition. But back to our charge here, post1980 studies. I've picked a pair of social cognition studies, a pair of stereotyping studies, and a pair of studies told from neglected perspectives. Many of these studies deal with the extent of automaticity and the limits of control in social thinking and feeling. We do not like to be reminded of our shortcomings. Big discomfort.