Abstract

A brief review of recent experimental work by T.D. Wilson et al. on the disruptive effects of deliberation provides an opportunity for extending an alternative interpretation of those effects first offered in this journal [D.L. Holt (1993) Rationality is hard work: an alternative interpretation of the disruptive effects of thinking about reasons, Philosophical Psychology, 6, 251-266]. I therefore propose a thought experiment in which the favored parameters of much social psychological experimentation, including the specific parameters of Wilson et al., are reversed