Your reaction to this confusing headline reveals more about you than you know

The Washington Post:

In the wake of San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake, as survivors sifted through rubble and fires raged, the city’s men and women responded to the chaos in an unusual way: by getting married.

The magnitude 7.9 quake demolished the city, killed 3,000 people, and left hundreds of thousands homeless. But in the 10 days after the disaster, marriages in San Francisco and Alameda County surged to four times the normal rate. The Oakland Tribune observed “young couples scrambling about among the ruins trying to find where marriage licenses were issued,” and The Louisville Courier-Journal remarked that couples were being “earthquaked into marriage.”

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While many people think of confusion as a negative thing, Holmes says the reality is more nuanced. He calls uncertainty an “emotional amplifier,” echoing the work of psychologists Tim Wilson and Daniel Gilbert.

Wilson and Gilbert carried out experiments in which they had subjects watch pleasant or unpleasant films, and then had them repeat phrases connoting certainty or uncertainty to induce certain emotions. It turned out that when subjects felt uncertainty, they took more pleasure in the enjoyable film, but also found the unpleasant film more unpleasant.

Read the whole story: The Washington Post