The Putt and the Pendulum: Ironic Effects of the Mental Control of Action

People sometimes find themselves making movement errors that represent the ironic opposite of what they intended to do. These studies examined this tendency in the case of putting a golf ball and swinging a handheld pendulum, and found that ironic errors were particularly likely when participants who were instructed to avoid them tried to do so under mental load or physical load. The idea that such errors may be prompted by a monitoring process that increases sensitivity to the most undesirable outcome of an intention was supported by the finding of a tendency for ironic errors to be more evident when participants were allowed to monitor their action visually than when they could not.