and women indicated that they would be more likely to discuss
sexual fantasies, attitudes, and anxieties with both close and casual
friends than low sensation-seekers. What’s more, high sensation-
seekers had a higher tendency to encourage disclosure from
others.^4
High sensation-seekers sometimes have trouble defusing
situations that might lead to altercations. By doing so they may be
more likely to be pulled into high intensity situations (which they
find stimulating). This can apply to their day-to-day interactions
with others too. Getting people to disclose private details of their
lives, and even telling risque ́jokes are techniques that sensation-
seekers employ to make their interactions more stimulating.
Sensation-seekers generally react to threatening situations
with minimal amounts of negative feelings and dread. In fact they
often see these threatening situations as a challenge or an
adventure.^5 High sensation-seekers see people who are different
from them as potential sources of excitement.
Low sensation-seekers prefer to be around people with
whom they may be more similar, and when they are around people
who are different, they may feel awkward and anxious. But there
may be a way that some high sensation-seekers stack the deck in
terms of finding these exciting differences. They poke the bear.
When given the opportunity to pick topics for discussion,
HSSs are more likely to pick a topic of disagreement than average or
low sensation-seekers.^6 Billy Thornton and his team at the
University of Maine in Orono asked 135 undergraduates to com-
plete a questionnaire.^7 They asked them to share their personal
views and attitudes about subjects including God, war, drug laws,
and premarital sex. They also used Zuckerman’s sensation-seeking
scale to measure their level of sensation-seeking.
After the attitude assessment, the students were told that
later in the day they would meet with another person to have
a discussion and they were presented with the attitude survey of
that person. In actuality this was a bogus attitude survey that was
selected to either be very similar to the person (60 percent agree-
ment in attitudes) or very dissimilar (only 30 percent agreement in
attitudes). The undergraduates were asked to look over the attitude
survey and then rate how much they were looking forward to
meeting the person, how much they expected to like the person,
and here’s the fun part, to pick a topic of discussion from the survey
of attitude items. Low sensation-seekers were more attracted to the96 / Buzz!Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 11 Nov 2019 at 14:21:35, subject to the Cambridge