Strangers to Ourselves
Strangers to Ourselves
Timothy D. Wilson
Why it is that people often do not know themselves very well (e.g., their own characters, why they feel the way they do, or even the feelings themselves)? And how can they increase their self-knowledge?
Much of what we want to know about ourselves resides outside of conscious awareness.
Though not everyone is prepared to relegate conscious thought to the epiphenomenal refuse heap, there is more agreement than ever before about the importance of nonconscious thinking, feeling, and motivation.
The modern, adaptive unconscious is not the same as the psychoanalytic one.
The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious, just as a modern jumbo jetliner is able to fly on automatic pilot with little or no input from the human, "conscious" pilot.
It is a necessary and extensive part of a highly efficient mind and not just the demanding child of the mental family and the defenses that have developed to keep this child in check.
It is thus best to think of the adaptive unconscious as a collection of city-states of the these parts of the mind are inaccessible to conscious awareness-quite possibly because they evolved before consciousness did.
The modern view of the adaptive unconscious is that a lot of the interesting stuff about the human mind-judgments, feelings, motives-occur outside of awareness for reasons of efficiency, and not because of repression.
Emotional reactions can occur outside of awareness
It is difficult to know ourselves because there is no direct access to the adaptive unconscious, no matter how hard we try.
"Making the unconscious conscious" may be no easier than viewing and understanding the assembly language controlling our word-processing computer program.
It is often better to deduce the nature of our hidden minds by looking outward at our behavior and how others react to us, and coming up with a good narrative.
In essence, we must be like biographers of our own lives,
Humans have a "sixth sense" called proprioception, which is the sensory feedback they constantly receive from their muscles, joints, and skin, signaling the position of their bodies and limbs. Without knowing it, we constantly monitor this feedback and make adjustments to our bodies;
Proprioception is but one of many nonconscious perceptual systems. An important role of the nonconscious mind is to organize and interpret the information we take in through our senses, transforming light rays and sound waves into the images and noises of which we are aware.
An important part of personality is the ability to respond in quick, habitual ways to the social world. It also means having a healthy psychological defense system, warding off threats to the self in reasonable, adaptive ways. Much of this personality system operates outside of awareness.
A better working definition of the unconscious is mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior.
The term "adaptive unconscious" is meant to convey that nonconscious thinking is an evolutionary adaptation. The ability to size up our environments, disambiguate them, interpret them, and initiate behavior quickly and nonconsciously confers a survival advantage and thus was selected for.
At any given moment, our five senses are taking in more than ,, pieces of information. Scientists have determined this number by counting the receptor cells each sense organ has and the nerves that go from these cells to the brain.
we take in ,, pieces of information a second, but can process only of them consciously.
There are by now many other examples of people's ability to learn new information nonconsciously.
Explicit learning is the effortful, conscious kind of memorization we often dread.
Implicit learning is defined as learning without effort or awareness of exactly what has been learned. Perhaps the best example is a child's ability to master her native language. Children do not spend hours studying vocabulary lists and attending classes on grammar and syntax. They would be hard pressed to explain what participles are, despite their ability to use them fluently. Humans learn to speak with no effort or intention; it just happens.Implicit learning is one of the most important functions of the adaptive unconscious.
Those who had seen flashes of hostile words judged Donald to be more hostile and unfriendly than did people who had not seen flashes of hostile words-just as I judged Phil's behavior to be rude and belligerent, because my wife's impression of him was on my mind.
The adaptive unconscious is thus more than just a gatekeeper, deciding what information to admit to consciousness. It is also a spin doctor that interprets information outside of awareness.
The adaptive unconscious does a reasonably accurate job of interpreting other people's behavior.''
Our conscious mind is often too slow to figure out what the best course of action is, so our nonconscious mind does the job for us and sends us signals (e.g., gut feelings) that tell us what to do.
Accessibility is determined not only by the self-relevance of a category but also by how recently it has been encountered.
Another determinant of accessibility is how often a concept has been used in the past.
People's judgments and interpretations are often guided by a quite different concern, namely the desire to view the world in the way that gives them the most pleasure-what can be called the "feel-good" criterion.
People who grow up in Western cultures and who have an independent view of the self tend to promote their sense of well-being by exaggerating their superiority over others. People who grow up in East Asian cultures and have a more interdependent sense of self are more likely to exaggerate their commonalities with group members. That is, people who grow up in cultures with an interdependent view of the self may be less likely to engage in tactics that promote a positive self-view, because they have less investment in the self as an entity separate from their social group.
What makes us feel good depends on our culture and our personalities and our level of self-esteem, but the desire to feel good, and the ability to meet this desire with nonconscious thought, are probably universal.'-'
The adaptive unconscious is a better spin doctor than the conscious mind.
If people knew that they were changing their beliefs just to make themselves feel better, the change would not be as compelling.
The conflict between the need to be accurate and the desire to feel good about ourselves is one of the major battlegrounds of the self,
it is not always to people's advantage to see the world accurately; a dose of congratulatory self-deception can be useful as well.
The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher power of mind will be set free for their own proper work.-William James, Principles of Psychology ()
Once we acknowledge that people can think in quite sophisticated ways nonconsciously, however, questions arise about the relation between conscious and nonconscious processing.
If people could think efficiently without being conscious, why did consciousness evolve? It is tempting to conclude that it conferred a marked survival advantage, to explain why it has become a universal feature of the human mind.
Does gaining insight (becoming conscious of previously unknown things about ourselves) change anything?
The adaptive unconscious is subservient to consciousness (the president) and reports to
But Gazzaniga and LeDoux have made the startling suggestion that we all share the tendency to confabulate explanations, arguing that the conscious verbal self often does not know why we do what we do and thus creates an explanation that makes the most sense.
People's behavior is often determined by their implicit motives and nonconscious construals of the world.
The point is that personality is not the only cause of behavior and people might be better at knowing how factors in their immediate social environments influence their feelings, judgment, and behaviors.