Langer, E. J., & Piper, A. I. (1987). The prevention of mindlessness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(2), 280-287.
We conducted three experiments to assess the hypothesis that mindlessness could be prevented with a simple linguistic variation. Subjects in the first two experiments were either introduced to new objects conditionally (e.g., this could be an X) or unconditionally (e.g., this is an X), and the objects used were either unfamiliar or familiar. In each study a different need was then generated for which the ...