Waiting Games

For so many people across the globe, 2020 has been a year of waiting and uncertainty. Waiting to see friends and family in far-flung locales. Waiting to hear about unemployment aid, or job opportunities. Waiting to hear about loved ones in the hospital. And even though the end of 2020 does not mean the end of these hardships, many of us are letting out a sigh of relief as we say goodbye to this difficult year. This week on Hidden Brain, we look at the psychology of relief and waiting, and how we can make periods of limbo less painful.

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[The silhouette of a man appears to sit on top of sand in an hourglass.]

Waiting Games

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ January 20, 2022

For so many people across the globe, these past two years have been full of waiting and uncertainty. Waiting to see friends and family in far-flung locales. Waiting to hear about unemployment aid, or job opportunities. Waiting to hear about loved ones in the hospital. This week on Hidden Brain, we look at the psychology of relief and waiting, and how we can make periods of limbo less painful.

Additional Resources

Sweeny, Kate, Rankin, Kyla, et. al., “Flow in the Time of COVID-19: Findings from China“, Psyarxiv.com, March 26, 2020.

Sweeny, Kate, et al. “The Psychological Experience of Awaiting Breast Diagnosis.” Annals of Behavioral Medicine, vol. 53, no. 7, pp. 630–641, 18 Sept. 2018.

Sweeny, Kate, and Kathleen D. Vohs. “On Near Misses and Completed Tasks.” Psychological Science, vol. 23, no. 5, 3, pp. 464–468, 10.1177/0956797611434590. Apr. 2012.‌

Nova Science Now. “Kate Sweeny: Waiting Is The Hardest Part” PBS.org, PBS.org, 25 Feb. 2014.

Sweeny, Kate, “Waiting Well: Tips for Navigating Painful Uncertainty“, Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6, pp. 258–269, 2012.

Rankin, Kyla, et al. “A Better Distraction: Exploring the Benefits of Flow During Uncertain Waiting Periods“, American Psychological Association, pp. 1528-3542/18, 2018.

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Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Hundreds of millions of people have spent the last year waiting. Waiting for it to be safe to enter workplaces, waiting to see if loved ones will survive their stay in a hospital, waiting to see if lost jobs will return. Perhaps you have caught yourself daydreaming about the moment everything returns to normal, when we can go about our lives without masks, sit in a crowded theater without worry, meet friends in our homes without fear. What will it feel like that day? Will there be a surge of joy, or will it be bittersweet? This week on Hidden Brain, the agony of waiting, and the strange things that happen in our minds when we experience relief.Shankar Vedantam: In books and movies, the experience of relief usually follows a period of waiting. We're going to mix up that order on today's show. We'll look at relief first, and later in the show, we'll explore the psychology of waiting and what new research reveals about how we can wait well.Shankar Vedantam: Our story about relief comes from Jamie Spurway. For five years, Jamie worked as a tour guide, mostly in the Middle East and Europe, but also in South Africa. One of the places he often brought tourists was called the Garden Route, where the safaris boast an incredible range of big game.Jamie Spurway: You're seeing an extraordinary array of animals. Zebra, giraffe, rhino, hippopotamus, impala.Shankar Vedantam: Jamie typically shepherded groups around in Land Rovers. They were completely open on the sides. No glass, no metal, no doors.Jamie Spurway: You just put your hand out, and there's air. You feel close to the animals in a way that is exciting, but can also be quite scary at moments as well, because there's no sense, really, of anything in particular protecting you from them.Shankar Vedantam: Jamie understood that this thrill was what paying customers were looking for. They wanted to get a feeling of being out in nature, among animals large enough to kill them, but without real risk. The chance an animal would attack was small, but there were occasional reminders that this was not just an excursion to the zoo.Jamie Spurway: One of the Land Rovers that we used had a slightly V-shaped dent in its front, where one of the rhinos in their park had, in the past, charged their vehicle. It just shows you the enormous weight and momentum behind an animal like a rhino, that it was able to leave this significant sized dent in the front of the car.Shankar Vedantam: As a fail safe, Jamie got used to having a rifle on hand for many trips, but not all of them. On one trip in 2005, his company contracted safari rangers to help with transportation and security. At the beginning of the trip, Jamie noticed something unusual about the rangers assigned to his group.Jamie Spurway: In the two parks that we visited in the Garden Route, safari rangers didn't have a weapon at all. It was always in the back of my mind, this sense of, "Okay, I've been trained in recognizing that there may be the need to use a rifle to defend your group of travelers, of tourists." And then, in these particular safari parks, that means of last resort wasn't there.Shankar Vedantam: It seemed unnecessary to bring this up, since the trip was going great. No charging rhinos, no rampaging hippos, no need for guns. One day, the group was in a safari park. There were too many people to fit into one vehicle, so Jamie split them between two Land Rovers. He rode in one with a driver and a set of parents and their young kids, while the rest went in a second Land Rover. They all had a great time for several hours. Finally, as the sun was beginning to slip over the horizon, it was time for one last animal encounter. It was time to see the lions.Jamie Spurway: We went into the lion area towards dusk, because they're very sleepy during the day, but they start to get more active as the sun goes down.Shankar Vedantam: The other Land Rover was just ahead of them when they got to the area with the lions.Jamie Spurway: We pulled up behind the other vehicle, switched off our engines straight away, because that's always the practice. As soon as you switch off the engine, the animals stop paying any attention to you. What we were observing at first was... I almost want to say it was flirtation between the alpha lion and a lioness who was on the other side of the fence, so actually in another safari park, and I've never seen a lion behave in the way that this lioness was behaving. If a lioness could blow kisses, this lioness would've been blowing kisses. She was very clearly flirting, and the alpha male on our side was pacing up and down. It was very clear that he wanted to get through that fence, but there was nothing he could do, so he was looking very frustrated. In addition to him, there's four sub-adult males, essentially a teenager, very close to fully grown, but not actually yet a full adult.Shankar Vedantam: For a while, the tourists in the two vehicles sat quietly and watched. The lions ignored them. They saw tourists come and go every day.Jamie Spurway: The alpha male had, by this point, wandered off. I think he just got sick of the scene, annoyed by the frustration of not being able to get to the other side. If he could go for a cold shower, that's what he would've been away to do. Now, all it is is us and these four sub-adult lions, all male, as I remember them. What we were observing was, really, that they were playing like kittens. The comparison to kittens, of course, is wrong in the sense of size. These are very, very much lion-sized kittens, but it looked very, very cute. Most of the reactions from my tourists, I remember, were, "Aw, isn't that adorable?" to watch what they were doing. I suspect that we, in that moment, didn't really even think of them any longer as lions.Shanka

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Original source

📄 sweeny_vohs_2012_psysci.pdf

📄 rankin_walsh___sweeny_2018__emotion_.pdf