Lack of control. One of the active ingredients of noise and traffic, the aspect that helps them get under your skin, is that you can’t control them. In one classic study, David Glass and Jerome Singer exposed people to loud bursts of random noise. Subjects in one group were told they could terminate the noise by pressing a button, but they were asked not to press the button unless it was absolutely necessary. None of these subjects pressed the button, yet the belief that they had some form of control made the noise less distressing to them. In the second part of the experiment, the subjects
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