Subliminal: How your unconscious mind rules your behavior
By: Leonard Mlodinow
Prologue
The work done by the unconscious is a critical part of our evolutionary survival mechanism.
For over a century now, research and clinical psychologists have been cognizant of the fact that we all possess a rich and active unconscious life[…].
The Latin root of the word “subliminal” translates to “below threshold.” Psychologists employ the term to mean below the threshold of consciousness.
Scientists form theories of the physical world; we all, as social beings, form personal “theories” of our social world.
History is the story of events that played out in civilization, but dreams and myths are expressions of the human heart. The themes and archetypes of our dreams and myths, Jung pointed out, transcend, time and culture. They arise from unconscious instincts that governed our behavior long before civilization papered over and obscured them […].
Part 1: The Two-Tiered Brain
Chapter 1: The New Unconscious
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” - Blaise Pascal
It can be difficult to distinguish willed, conscious behavior from that which is habitual or automatic. Indeed, as humans, our tendency to believe in consciously motivated behavior is so powerful that we read consciousness into not only our own behaviors, but those of the animal kingdom as well.
Animals like the fruit flies and tortoises are at the lower end on the brain-power scale, but the role of automatic processing is not limited to such primitive creatures. We humans also perform many automatic, unconscious behaviors. We tend to be unaware of them, however, because the interplay between our conscious and our unconscious minds is so complex.
If it is difficult to recognize automatic behaviors in animals, it is even more difficult to recognize habitual behavior in ourselves.
The current revolution in thinking about the unconscious came about because, with modern instruments, we can watch as different structures and sub-structures in the brain generate feelings and emotions.
Sigmund Freud came to the correct conclusion that much of (his patients’) behavior was governed by mental processes of which they were unaware.
Many unconscious processes can never be directly revealed through the kind of self reflection encouraged by therapy, because they transpire in areas of the brain not open to the conscious mind. As a result, Freud was mainly off the mark.
Among research psychologists, the idea that the unconscious is important to our behavior was, until recent years, shunned as pop psychology. As one researcher wrote, “Many psychologists were reluctant to use the word ‘unconscious’ out of fear that their colleagues would think they had gone soft in the head.” - John Bargh, Yale psychologist
In the late 1970s, it was almost universally assumed that not only our social perceptions and our judgments but also our behaviors were conscious and deliberate.
The unconscious, envisioned by Freud was, in the words of a group of neuroscientists, “hot and wet; it seethed with lust and anger; it was hallucinatory, primitive, and irrational,” while the new unconscious is “kinder and gentler than that, and more reality bound.”
The inaccessibility of the new unconscious is not considered to be a defense mechanism, or unhealthy. It is considered normal.
To ensure our smooth functioning in both the physical and social world, nature has dictated that many processes of perception, memory, attention, learning, and judgment are delegated to brain structures outside, conscious awareness.
Each day we ask and answer many questions about our feelings and our choices. Our answers usually seem to make sense, but nonetheless, they are often dead wrong.
People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and we therefore have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits, similar to our own, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names. Scientists have even identified a discrete area of the brain, called the dorsal stratum, as the structure that mediates much of this bias.
“Environmental factors” such as package design, package or portion size, and menu descriptions unconsciously influence us. What is the most surprising is the magnitude of the effect - and of people’s resistance to the idea that they could have been manipulated.
Studies show that flowery modifiers not only tempt people to order the lyrically described foods, but also lead them to rate those foods as tasting better than the identical foods given only a generic listing.
Psychologists call this the “fluency effect.” If the form of information is difficult to assimilate, that affects our judgment about the substance of that information.
“People think that their enjoyment of a product is based on the qualities of the product, but their experience of it is also very much based on the product’s marketing,” says Rangel.“For example, the same beer, described in different ways, or labeled as different brands, or with a different price, can taste very different. The same is true for wine, even though people like to believe it’s all in the grapes and the winemaker’s expertise.”
(This quote is in relationship to the Pepsi paradox, and the preferred flavor between Pepsi and Coke) Our brains are not simply recording a taste or other experience, they are creating it.
Chapter 2: Senses Plus Mind Equals Reality
The eye that sees is not a mere physical organ but a means of perception conditioned by the tradition in which its possessor has been reared. - Ruth Benedict
The distinction between the conscious and the unconscious has been made in one form or another since the time of the Greeks. Among the most influential of the thinkers delving into the psychology of consciousness was the 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant.
Kant’s theory was that we actively construct a picture of the world, rather than merely documenting objective events, that our perceptions are not based just on what exists but, rather, are somehow created - and constrained - by the general features of the mind.
William Carpenter, in his 1874 book Principles of Mental Physiology wrote that “two distinct trains of mental action are carried on simultaneously, one consciously, the other, unconsciously,“ and that the more thoroughly we examine the mechanisms of the mind, the clearer it becomes “that not only an automatic, but an unconscious action enters largely into all its processes.“
What has become abundantly clear is that within this two-tier system, it is the unconscious tear that is the more fundamental.
While most non-human species of animals can and do survive with little or no capacity for conscious, symbolic thought, no animal can exist without an unconscious.
According to a textbook on human physiology, the human sensory system sends the brain about 11 million bits of information each second… The actual amount of information we can handle has been estimated to be somewhere between 16 and 50 bits per second.
Our sensory perception, our memory, recall, our every day decisions, judgments, and activities, all seem effortless – but that is only because the effort they demand is expended, mainly in parts of the brain that function outside awareness.
Deep concentration causes the energy consumption in your brain to go up by only about 1%. No matter what you are doing with your conscious mind, it is your unconscious that dominates your mental activity - and therefore uses up most of the energy consumed by the brain. Regardless of whether your conscious mind is idle or engaged, your unconscious mind is hard at work, doing the mental equivalent of push-ups, squats, and wind sprints.
One of the most important functions of your unconscious is the processing of data delivered by your eyes. That’s because, whether hunting or gathering, an animal that sees better eats better and avoids danger, more effectively, and hence lives longer. As a result, evolution has arranged it, so that about a third of your brain is devoted to processing vision: to interpreting color, detecting edges and motion, perceiving depth and distance, deciding the identity of objects, recognizing faces, and many other tasks.
Though thin, the neocortex is folded in a manner that allows almost 3 ft.² of neural tissue - about the size of a large pizza - to be packed into your skull…The occipital lobe is located at the very back of your head, and it’s cortex - the visual cortex - contains the main visual processing center of the brain.
But of all possible questions, one that would probably not make your list would be whether a blind man can sense your mood by staring at your face.
Your brain devotes a lot more attention (and neural real estate) to faces than to many other kinds of visual phenomena, because faces are more important.
The researchers, studying TN (blind patient) chose faces as their second series of images in the belief that the brains special and largely unconscious focus on faces might allow TN to improve his performance, even though he’d have no conscious awareness of seeing anything… Though the part of his brain responsible for the conscious sensation of vision had obviously been destroyed, his fusiform face area was receiving the images. It was influencing the conscious choices he made in the face choice experiment, but TN didn’t know it.
The phenomenon exhibited by TN - in which individuals with intact eyes have no conscious sensation of seeing, but can never the less respond in someway to what their eyes register - is called “Blindsight.”
Binocular rivalry: under the right circumstances, if one image is presented to your left eye, while a different image is presented to your right eye, you won’t see both of them , somehow, super imposed. Instead, you’ll perceive just one of the two images. Then, after a while, you’ll see the other image, and the first again. The two images will alternate in that manner indefinitely. What Koch’s group found, however, was that if they present a changing image to one eye, and a static, one to the other, people will see only the changing image, and never the static one.
As I said, in a way, every mind is a scientist, creating a model of the world around us, the every day world that our brains detect through our senses. Like our theories of gravity, our model of the sensory world is only approximate and is based on concepts invented by our minds. And, like our theories of gravity, though our mental models of our surroundings are not perfect, they usually work quite well.
We accept the visions concocted by our unconscious mind without question, and without realizing that they are only an interpretation, one constructed to maximize our overall chances of survival, but not one that is in all cases the most accurate picture possible
If a central function of the unconscious is to fill in the blanks when there is incomplete information in order to construct a useful picture of reality, how much of that picture is accurate?
Chapter 3: Remembering and Forgetting
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face. - Jorge Luis Borges
About 75,000 police lineups take place each year, statistics on those show that 20 to 25% of the time witnesses make a choice that the police know is incorrect. They can be sure of this because the witnesses have chosen one of the “known innocents” or “fillers” that the police inserted into the lineup simply to fill it out.
Experimental studies in which people are exposed to mock crimes suggest that when the true culprit is not in the lineup, more than half the time eye witnesses will do exactly what Jennifer Thompson did: they will choose someone anyway, selecting the person who best matches their memory of the criminal.
Of the hundreds of people exonerated on the basis of post conviction DNA testing, 75% had been imprisoned because of an accurate eyewitness identification.
In constructing your memory, however, there is what you said, but there is also what you communicated, what the other participants in the process, interpreted as your message, and, finally, what they recalled about those interpretations. It’s quite a chain, and so people often strongly disagree in their recollections of events.
As late as 1991, in a survey conducted by the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, most people, including the great majority of psychologists, still held this traditional view of memory: that whether accessible or repressed, clear or faded, our memory is a literal recorder of events.
From the nature of these memory errors, and those documented in many other incidents he studied, Münstergerg fashioned a theory of memory. He believed that none of us can retain in memory the vast quantity of details we are confronted with at any moment in our lives, and that our memory mistakes have a common origin: they are all artifacts of the techniques our minds employ to fill in the inevitable gaps. Those techniques include relying on our expectations, and, more generally, on our belief systems, and our prior knowledge. As a result, when our expectations, beliefs, and prior knowledge are at odds with the actual events, our brains can be fooled.
First, people have a good memory for the general gist of events but a bad one for the details; second, when pressed for the unremembered details, even well intentioned people making a sincere effort to be accurate will inadvertently fill in the gaps by making things up; and third, people will believe the memories they make up.
Münsterberg, on the other hand, was blunt about his view of the unconscious, writing, “the story of the subconscious can be told in three words: there is none.”
Freud understood much better than Münsterberg did the immense power of the unconscious, but he thought that repression, rather than a dynamic act of creation on the part of the unconscious, was the reason for the gaps and inaccuracies in our memory; while Münsterberg understood much better than Freud did the mechanics and the reasons for memory distortion and loss – but had no sense at all of the unconscious processes that created them.
The human memory is subject to the distortion of memory reconstruction, if those those subliminal distortions have proved seriously detrimental to our ancestors survival, our memory system, or, perhaps our species, would not have survived. Though our memory system is far from perfect, it is, in most situations, exactly what evolution requires: it is good enough.
The starting point in understanding how memory works is Münsterberg’s realization that the mind is continuously bombarded by a quantity of data so fast that it cannot possibly handle all of it…
The challenge that the mind faces, and that the unconscious meets, is to be able to sift through this inventory of data in order to retain the parts that actually do matter to you.
The man who couldn’t forget was a famed mnemonist named Solomon Shereshevsky. Shereshevsky apparently remembered in great detail everything that happened to him… The downside of Shereshevsky’s flawless memory was that the details often got in the way of understanding. For instance, Shereshevsky had a great trouble, recognizing faces…To Shereshevsky, each time a face changed its expression, or was seen in different lighting, it was a new face, and he remembered them all.
Most of us avoid the problems of clutter by retaining the gist, but freely discarding details. As a result, although we can retain deep structure – the meaning of what was said – for long periods of time, we can accurately remember surface structure – the words in which it was said – four just 8 to 10 seconds.
Our process of remembering can be said to be analogous to the way computers, store, images, except that our memories have the added complexity that the memory data we store changes over time… In computers, to save storage space, images are often highly “compressed,” meaning, that only certain key attributes of the original image are kept.
Remember the gist, fill in the details, believe the result.
For when we are repeatedly asked to re-create a memory, we reinforce it each time, so that in a way, we are remembering the memory, not the event.
Those who have made it there business to investigate memory in a serious fashion can provide you with plenty of reasons for doubting.
Frederic Bartlett imagined that the evolution of both cultural and personal memories resembles the whisper game (also called the telephone game).
In his most famous work, Bartlett read his subjects, the native American folktale “the war of the ghosts.“ The story is about two boys, who leave their village to hunt seals at the river. Five men in a canoe come along and ask the boys to accompany them in attacking some people in a town up river. One of the boys goes along, and, during the attack, he hears one of the warriors remark that he - the boy - had been shot. But the boy doesn’t feel anything, and he concludes that the warriors are ghosts. The boy returns to his village and tells his people about his adventure. The next day, when the sun rises, he falls over, dead. After reading the story to his subjects, Bartlett asked them to remind them selves of the tale after 15 minutes, and then at irregular intervals after that, sometimes over a period of weeks or months… He noted an important trend in the evolution of memory: there wasn’t just memory loss; there were also memory additions.
The subjects maintained the stories general form, but dropped some details and changed others. The story became shorter and simpler. With time, super natural elements were eliminated. Other elements were added or reinterpreted, so that “whenever anything appeared incomprehensible, it was either omitted or explained“ by adding content. Without realizing it, people seemed to be trying to alter the strange story into a more understandable and familiar form. They provided the story with their own organization, making it seem to them more coherent. Inaccuracy was the rule, and not the exception. The story, Bartlett wrote, “was robbed of all its surprising, jerky, and inconsequential form.” This figurative “ smoothing out“ of memories is strikingly similar to a literal smoothing out that Gestalt psychologists in the 1920s had noted in studies of people’s memory for geometric shapes: if you show someone a shape that is irregular and jagged, and quiz them about it later, they’ll recall the shape as being far more regular and symmetrical than it actually was.
Even more striking than the distortions, were the students reactions to their original accounts. They were reluctant to accept there earlier description of the scene, even though it was in their own handwriting. Said one, “yes, that’s my hand writing – but I still remember it the other way!”
We might all benefit from being less certain, even when a memory seems clear and vivid.
To not store in memory the details of a penny is for most of us an advantage; unless we have to answer a question on a game show with a lot of money at stake, we have no need to remember what’s on a penny, and to do so could get in the way of our remembering more important things.
A “false memory,” a memory that seemed real but wasn’t. False memories feel no different than memories that are based in reality.
Even when the subjects were remembering a word that had not actually been uttered their memory of its utterance was a vivid and specific. In fact, when told in a post experiment, debriefing that they hadn’t really heard a word, they thought they had heard, the subjects frequently refused to believe it.
As humans, we are so prone to false memories that you can sometimes induce one simply by casually telling a person about an incident that didn’t really happen. Overtime, that person may “remember” the incident, but forget the source of that memory. As a result, he or she will confuse the imagined event with his or her actual past.
For example, in a recent study, subjects who had actually been to Disneyland, were asked to repeatedly read and think about a fake print advertisement for the amusement park. The copy in the fake ad invited the reader to “imagine how you felt when you first saw Bugs Bunny with your own eyes up close… Your mother pushing you in his direction so you would shake his hand, waiting to capture the moment with a picture…” Later, when asked in a questionnaire about their personal memories of Disneyland, more than a quarter of the subjects reported having met Bugs Bunny there. Of those, 62% remember shaking his hand, 46% recall hugging him, and one recalled that he was holding a carrot. It was not possible that such encounters really occurred because Bugs Bunny is a Warner Brothers property and Disney inviting bugs to roam Disneyland is something like the king of Saudi Arabia, hosting a Passover Seder.
Even when memories are entirely fabricated, they are usually based on something true.
Think back on your life. What do you remember? When I do that, I find that it is not enough. Of my father, for example, who died more than 20 years ago, my memory holds but meager scraps.
I know, when I shower my children with my usual excess of hugs and kisses that most of those scenes will not stay with them. They will forget, and for good reason.
My hugs and kisses do not vanish without a trace. They remain, at least in aggregate, as fond feelings and emotional bonds.
Moments in time may be forever forgotten, or viewed through a hazy or distorting lens, yet something of them nonetheless survives within us, permeating our unconscious.
Though imperfectly, our brains still manage to communicate a coherent picture of our life experience.
Through evolution, perfection may be abandoned, but sufficiency must be achieved. The lesson that teaches me is to be both humble and grateful. Humble, because any great confidence I feel in any particular, memory could well be miss placed; but grateful, both for the memories I retain, and the ability to not retain all of them.
Chapter 4: The Importance of Being Social
“Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to a divine purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of others.“– Albert Einstein
Language is handy, but we humans have social and emotional connections that transcend words, and are communicated – and understood – without conscious thought.
Studies on infants show that even six-month-olds make judgments about what they observe of social behavior.
Scientists have found that parts of our brain linked to reward processing are engaged when we participate in acts of mutual cooperation, so being nice can be its own reward. Long before we can verbalize attraction or repulsion, we are attracted to the kind and repelled by the unkind.
The point of the ruse was to see if, because of their anxiety, the group expecting a painful shock would be more likely to seek the company of others than the group not expecting one. The result: about 63% of the students who were made anxious about the shocks wanted to wait with others, while only 33% of those expecting tickly, tingly shocks expressed that preference.
Joining support groups is a reflection of the human need to associate with others, of our fundamental desire for support, approval, and friendship. We are, above all, a social species.
Social connection is such a basic feature of human experience that when we are deprived of it, we suffer.
Many languages have expressions - such as “hurt feelings” - that compare the pain of social rejection to the pain of physical injury.
There are two components to physical pain: an unpleasant, emotional feeling and a feeling of sensory distress.
Scientists have discovered that social pain is also associated with a brain structure called the anterior cingulate cortex – the same structure involved in the emotional component of physical pain.
Compared to those who took the placebo, those who took the Tylenol reported a reduced level of hurt feelings. (Context: to see if Tylenol impacts emotional pain.) Tylenol, it seems, really does reduce the neural response to social rejection.
The connection between social pain and physical pain illustrates the links between our emotions and the psychological processes of the body. Social rejection doesn’t just cause emotional pain; it affects our physical being. In fact, social relationships are so important to humans that a lack of social connection constitutes a major risk factor for health, rivaling even the effects of cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and lack of physical activity.
Some scientists believe that the need for social interaction was the driving force behind the evolution of superior human intelligence.
Could the need for innate skill at social interaction have been the reason we developed our “higher” intelligence – and could what we usually think of as the triumphs of our intelligence, such as science and literature, be just a by-product?
In a brief period of time, the archaeological record of human activity changed more than it had in the previous million years. The sudden manifestation of the modern capacity for culture, ideological complexity, and cooperative social structure – without any change in human anatomy to explain it – is evidence that an important mutation may have occurred within the human brain, a software upgrade, so to speak, that enabled social behavior, and thereby bestowed on our species a survival advantage.
When we think of humans versus dogs and cats, or even monkeys, we usually assume that what distinguishes us is our IQ. But if human intelligence evolved for special purposes, then it is our social IQ that ought to be the principal quality that differentiates us from other animals.
What seems special about humans is our desire and ability to understand what other people think and feel. Called “theory of mind,” or “ToM,” this ability gives humans a remarkable power to make sense of other people’s past behavior and to predict how their behavior will unfold, given their present or future circumstances.
It is theory of mind that enables us to form the large and sophisticated social systems, from farming communities to large corporations, upon which our world is based.
Humans are the only animal whose relationships and social organization make high demands on an individuals theory of mind.
In our species, rudimentary theory of mind develops in the first year. By age 4, nearly all human children have gained the ability to assess other people’s mental states.
“Some thing was going on between the other kids,“ he described Temple Grandin as thinking, “something swift, subtle, constantly changing – an exchange of meanings, a negotiation, a swiftness of understanding, so remarkable that sometimes she wondered if they were all telepathic“– Temple Grandin, a high functioning, autistic woman.
One measure of theory of mind is called intentionality. An organism that is capable of reflecting about its own state of mind, about its own beliefs and desires, as in I want a bite of my mothers pot roast is called “first order intentional.“ Most mammals fit in that category. But knowing about your self is a far different skill from knowing about someone else. A second order intentional organism is one that can form a belief about someone else’s state of mind, as in I believe my son wants a bite of my pot roast. Second order intentionality is defined as the most rudimentary level of theory of mind and all healthy humans have it, at least after their morning coffee. If you have third order intentionality you can go a step further, reasoning about what a person thinks a second person thinks, as in I believe my mom thinks that my son wants a bite of her pot roast. And if you are capable of going a level beyond that, of thinking I believe my friend Sanford thinks that my daughter Olivia thinks that his son Johnny thinks she is cute or I believe my boss, Ruth, knows that our CFO, Richard, thinks that my colleague John doesn’t believe her budget and revenue projections can be trusted, then you’re engaging in fourth order intentionality, and so on. Fourth order thinking makes a pretty complicated sentence, but if you ponder these for a minute you’ll probably realize you engage in it quite frequently, for it is typical of what is involved in human social relationships.
Fourth order intentionality is required to create literature, for writers must make judgments based on their own experiences of fourth order, intentionality, such as I think that the cues in this scene will signal to the reader that Horus thinks that Mary intends to dump him.
The evidence on nonhuman primates seems to show that they fall somewhere between first and second order thinking.
The size of a species’ neo cortex – the most recently evolved, part of the brain – as a percentage of that species whole brain seems to be related to the size of the social group in which members of that species hang out.
In primates, clique members regularly clean each other, removing dirt, dead skin, insects, and other objects by stroking, scratching, and massaging. Individuals are particular about both whom they groom and whom they are groomed by because these alliances act as coalitions to minimize harassment from others of their kind.
Humans relate to one another in many different types of groups, with different sizes, different levels of mutual understanding, and different degrees of bonding.
The human group size comes out to be about 150, just about what the neo cortex size model predicts.
Out of the initial 300 or so individuals, 64 did generate chains that ultimately found the man in Sharon, Massachusetts. How many intermediaries did it take until someone knew someone who knew someone who knew someone… who knew the target? The median number was only about five. The study led to the coining of the term “six degrees of separation,” based on the idea that six links of acquaintanceship are enough to connect any two people in the world.
One of the interesting aspects of most nonhuman mammals is that they are “small – brained.” By that, scientists mean the part of the brain that in humans is responsible for conscious thought is, in nonhuman mammals, relatively small compared to the part of the brain involved in unconscious processes.
Animals react more and think less, if at all.
The organization and chemistry of the unconscious brain is shared across mammal, species, and many automatic neural mechanisms in apes and monkeys and even lower mammals are similar to our own, and produce startlingly human like behavior.
The birthing process transforms the mother. It seems magical, that transformation from shrew to nurturer. But it doesn’t seem to be due to conscious maternal thoughts of her child’s love. It’s chemical, not magical. The process is instigated by the stretching of the birth canal, which causes a simple protein called oxytocin to be released in the ewe’s brain. This opens a window of a couple hours, duration in which the ewe is open to bonding. If a lamb approaches her while that window is open, the ewe will bond with it, whether it is her baby, her neighbors, or a baby from the farm down the street. Then, once the oxytocin window is closed, she’ll stop bonding with new lambs. After that, if she has bonded with a lamb, she’ll continue to suckle it and to speak soothingly to it – which in sheep talk means low pitched bleats. But she’ll be her nasty old self to all other lambs, even to her own if it didn’t approach her during the bonding window. Scientists, however, can open and close this bonding window at will, by injecting the ewe with oxytocin or inhibiting her from producing it herself. It’s like flipping the switch on a robot.
In another study, in which subjects played an investment game, investors who inhaled an oxytocin nose spray were much more likely to show trust in their partners, by investing more money with them.
One of the most striking pieces of evidence of our automatic animal nature can be seen in a gene that governs vasopressin receptors in human brains. Scientists discovered that men who have two copies of a certain form of this gene have fewer vasopressin receptors, which makes them analogous to promiscuous voles. And, indeed, they exhibit the same sort of behavior: men with fewer vasopressin receptors are twice as likely to have experienced marital problems or the threat of divorce, and half as likely to be married as men who have more vasopressin receptors.
Odd as it may sound today, in the first half of the century, which was dominated by those in the behaviorist movement, psychologist even sought to do away with the concept of mind altogether.
Cognitive psychology was inspired by the computer revolution. Like behaviorism, cognitive psychology, generally rejected introspection. But cognitive psychology did embrace the idea that we have internal mental states such as beliefs. It treated people as information systems that process those mental states much in the way a computer processes data.
Wondering whether our social behavior might also be influenced by some unconscious playbook, cognitive psychologist postulated the idea that many of our daily actions proceed according to predetermined mental “scripts” – that they are, in fact, mindless.
Throughout the 1980s, study after studies seemed to show that because of the influence of the unconscious, people did not realize the reasons for their feelings, behavior, and judgments of other people, or how they communicated nonverbally with others.
The first sign that the brain could be observed in action came in the 19th century when scientists noted that nerve activity causes changes in blood flow and oxygen levels. By monitoring those levels, one could, in theory, watch a reflection of the brain at work.
Angelo Mosso recorded the pulsation of the brain in patients who have gaps in their skull following brain surgery. Mosso observed that the pulsation in certain regions increased during mental activity, and he speculated, correctly, that the changes were due to neuronal activity in those regions.
The 19th century scientists had concluded correctly that the key to identifying what part of the brain is at work at any given time is that when nerve cells are active, circulation increases, because the cells increase their consumption of oxygen.
The genus, Homo, of which humans, Homo sapiens, are the only surviving species, first evolved about 2 million years ago. Anatomically, Homo sapiens reached its present form about 200,000 years ago, but as I’ve said, behaviorally, we humans did not take on our present characteristics, such as culture, until about 50,000 years ago. In the time between the original Homo species and ourselves, the brain doubled in size. A disproportionate share of that growth occurred in the frontal lobe, and so it stands to reason that the frontal lobe is the location of some of the specific qualities that make humans humans.
It is interesting to note that control of the motor movements of the face is based in the frontal lobe… the fine nuances of facial expression are also crucial to survival because of the role they play in social communication.
It is in the prefrontal cortex that we most clearly see our humanity. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for planning and orchestrating our thoughts and actions in accordance with our goals, and integrating, conscious thought, perception, and emotion; it is thought to be the seat of our own consciousness.
What we’ve learned is that much of our social perception - like our vision, hearing, and memory - appears to proceed along pathways that are not associated with awareness, intention, or conscious effort.
Part II: The Social Unconscious
Chapter 5: Reading People
“Your amicable words mean nothing if your body seems to be saying something different.” – James Borg
Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, and those messages may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them.
Through our nonverbal cues we unwittingly communicate a great deal of information about ourselves and our state of mind.
Instead, it is the dog, which originated from wolves, that is best at reading human social signals. At that task, dogs appear even more skilled than our primate relatives. That finding surprised a lot of people because primates are far superior at other typical human endeavors, like problem-solving and cheating.
The researchers found that the rats the students thought were brilliant performed significantly better than the rats believed to be on the dumb side.
Whether or not we wish to, we communicate our expectations to others, and they often respond by fulfilling those expectations.
Labeling children as gifted had proved to be a powerful self fulfilling prophecy. Wisely, Rosenthal hadn’t falsely labeled any kids as being below average. The sad thing is that such labeling does happen, and it is reasonable to assume that the self-fulfilling prophecy also works the other way: that branding a child a poor learner will contribute to making the child exactly that.
That need (communication) is so powerful that even deaf babies develop language-like gesture systems and, if taught sign language, will babble using their hands.
Our facial expressions are also governed subliminally by muscles over which we have no conscious control. So our real expressions cannot be faked.
There are two distinct neural pathways for the smile muscles: a voluntary one for the zygomatic major, and an involuntary one for the orbicularis oculi.
In viewing photographs of the two types of smiles given to him by Duchenne de Boulogne, Darwin remarked that though people could sense the difference, he found it very difficult to consciously pinpoint what that different was, remarking, “it has often struck me as a curious fact that so many shades of expression are instantly recognized without any conscious process of analysis on our part.“
Smiles we intuitively recognize as fake are one reason used car salesman, politicians, and others who smile when they don’t mean it are often described as looking sleazy.
This universal capability to create and recognize facial expressions starts at or near birth.
It is doubtful that these are learned behaviors. In fact, congenitally blind young children who have never seen a frown or a smile express a range of spontaneous facial emotions that are almost identical to those of the sighted. Our catalog of facial expressions seems to be standard equipment – it comes with the basic model.
As in other primate societies, gaze direction and stare are important signals of dominance in human society.
We subliminally adjust our gazing behavior to match our place on the hierarchy.
One can adjust the impression one makes by consciously looking at or away from a conversational partner.
Our sensitivity to other people’s signals regarding their thoughts and moods helps make social situations proceed smoothly with a minimum of conflict. From early childhood on, those who are good at giving and receiving signals have an easier time forming social structures and achieving their goals in social situations.
There haven’t been a lot of studies on the efficacy of the hundred and one ways these books tell you to act, but it’s probably true that assuming those different postures can have at least a subtle effect on how people perceive you, and that understanding what nonverbal cues mean can bring to your consciousness clues about people that otherwise only your unconscious might pick up.
Chapter 6: Judging People By Their Covers
“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.” – G. K. Chesterton
Why do I say her response is automatic, and not part of some thoughtful strategy aimed at wooing the fellow with whom she’d like to share birdseed in her golden years? Because upon hearing the males song, the female will commence her come on behavior even if that song is coming not from a live bird but from a stereo speaker.
Do we respond like the smitten cowbird, even in situations in which our logical and conscious minds would deem the reaction inappropriate or undesirable?
Those who had female voiced tutors for the love and relationships material rated their teachers as having more sophisticated knowledge of the subject than did those who had a male voiced tutors, even though the two computers had given identical lessons. But the “male” and “female“ computers got equal ratings when the topic was a gender-neutral one, like mass media. Another unfortunate gender stereotype suggests that forcefulness is desirable in men but unseemly in women. And sure enough, students who heard a forceful male voiced computer tutor rated it as being significantly more likable than those who heard a forceful female-voiced tutor, even though, again, both the male and the female voices had uttered the same words. Apparently, even when coming from a computer, an assertive personality in a female is more likely to come off as overbearing or bossy than the same personality in a male.
What if the one asking for the input was a talking computer? Would the students have the same inhibition against delivering a harsh judgment “face-to-face” to a machine? Nass and his colleagues asked half the students to enter their course evaluation on the same computer that had tutored them, and the other half to enter it on a different machine, a machine that had a different voice. Certainly the students would not consciously sugarcoat their words to avoid hurting the machines feelings – but as you probably guessed, they did indeed hesitate to criticize the computer to its “face.“
Having social relations with a pre-recorded voice is not a trait you want to mention in a job application. But, like the cowbirds, these students did treat it as if it were a member of their species, even though there was no actual person attached.
While our conscious minds are busy thinking about the meaning of the words people utter, our unconscious is busy judging the speaker by other criteria, and the human voice connects with a receiver deep within the human brain, whether that voice emanates from a human being or not.
People spend a lot of time talking and thinking about how members of the opposite sex look but very little time paying attention to how they sound. To our unconscious mind, however, voice is very important.
Though we may pack our heads full of 21st century knowledge, the organ inside our skull is a Stone Age brain. We think of ourselves as a civilized species, but our brains are designed to meet the challenges of an earlier era.
Females are attracted to males by certain aspects of their “call.“… When asked to rate men they can hear but not see, women miraculously tend to agree: men with deeper voices are rated as more attractive.
The researchers found that when the participants believed they were physically dominant – that is, more powerful and aggressive – they lowered the pitch of their voices, and when they believed they were less dominant, they raised the pitch, all apparently, without realizing what they were doing.
A woman’s attraction to men with low voices is most pronounced when she is in the fertile phase of her ovulatory cycle.
The obvious conclusion is that our voices act as subliminal advertisements for our sexuality. During a woman’s fertile phase, those ads flash brightly on both sides, tempting us to click the “Buy” button, when we are most likely to obtain, not only a mate, but for no extra (upfront) cost, also a child.
We’ve seen that – in a woman’s eyes – a deep voice is considered indicative of men who are taller, hairier, and more muscular. The truth is, there is little or no correlation between a deep voice and any of those traits. However, studies show that what does correlate with a low pitched voice is testosterone level. Men with lower voices tend to have higher levels of that male hormone.
The researchers found that while the pitch of women’s voices was not a predictor of their reproductive success, men with lower pitched voices on average fathered more children.
The pitch, timbre, volume, and cadence of your voice, the speed with which you speak, and even the way you modulate pitch and volume, are all hugely influential factors in how convincing you are, and how people judge your state of mind and your character.
Our minds are, in parallel, analyzing, judging, and being affected by qualities of voice that have nothing to do with words.
The result: speakers with high-pitched voices were judged to be less truthful, less emphatic, less potent, and more nervous than speakers with lower pitched voices. Also, slower talking speakers were judged to be less truthful, less persuasive, and more passive than people who spoke more quickly. “Fast talking“ may be a cliché description of a sleazy salesman, but chances are, a little speed up will make you sound smarter and more convincing.
Just as people signal the basic emotions through facial expressions, we also do it through voice.
In an experiment involving eight servers and several hundred restaurant diners, the servers were trained to touch randomly selected customers briefly on the arm toward the end of the meal while asking if “everything was all right.” The servers received an average tip of about 14.5% from those they didn’t touch, but 17.5% from those they did.
Touching has been found to increase the fraction of single women in a nightclub who accept an invitation to dance, the number of people agreeing to sign a petition, the chances that a college student will risk embarrassment by volunteering to go to the blackboard in statistics class, the proportion of busy passerby in a mall willing to take 10 minutes to fill out a survey form, the percentage of shoppers in a supermarket who purchase food they have sampled, and the odds that a bystander who had just provided someone with directions will help him pick up a bunch of computer discs he drops.
They found that the number of “fist bumps, high-fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, half hugs, and team huddles“ correlated significantly with the degree of cooperation among teammate… The teams that touched the most cooperated the most, and won of the most.
Touch seems to be such an important tool for enhancing social cooperation and affiliation that we have evolved a special physical route along which those subliminal feelings of social connection travel from skin to brain. Scientists have discovered a particular kind of nerve fiber in people’s skin – especially in the face and arms – that appears to have developed specifically to transmit the pleasantness of social touch.
The result: on average, looking more like a leader equated to a vote swing of 15% at the polls.
In high school, our vote for class president might be based on looks. It would be nice to think that we outgrow those primitive ways, but it’s not easy to graduate from our unconscious influences.
There is a man or woman behind the curtain of everybody’s persona.
A human being, by nature, cannot help but pick up on the emotions and intentions of others. That ability is built into our brains, and there is no off switch.
Chapter 7: Sorting People and Things
“We would dazzle if we had to treat everything we saw, every visual input, as a separate element, and had to figure out the connections a new each time we opened our eyes.” - Gary Klein
If you read someone a list of 10 or 20 items that could be bought at a supermarket, that person will remember only a few. If you recite the list repeatedly, the person’s recall will improve. But what really helps is if the items are mentioned within the categories they fall into - for example, vegetables, fruits, and cereals. Research suggests that we have neurons in our prefrontal cortex that respond to categories.
We understand an objects gross significance first and worry about its individuality later.
If we conclude that a certain set of objects belong to one group and the second set of objects to another, we may then perceive those within the same group as more similar than they really are – and those in different groups as less similar than they really are.
When we categorize, we polarize.
“The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance… And although we have to act in that environment, we have to construct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.” That simpler model was what he, Lippmann, called the stereotype.
We like to think we judge people as individuals, and at times we consciously try very hard to evaluate others on the basis of their unique characteristics. We often succeed. But if we don’t know a person well, our minds can turn to his or her social category for the answers.
In each of these cases our subliminal minds take incomplete data, use context or other cues to complete the picture, make educated guesses, and produce a result that is sometimes accurate, sometimes not, but always convincing.
Even well into the 1980s, many psychologists viewed discrimination as a conscious and intentional behavior, rather than one commonly arising from normal and unavoidable cognitive processes related to the brain’s vital propensity to categorize.
“Implicit,“ stereotyping is the rule rather than the exception.
We are only beginning to come to grips with unconscious bias.
Experience can trump bias.
Without our ability to categorize we would not have survived as a species, but I’ll go further: without that ability, one could hardly survive even as an individual.
Chapter 8: In-Groups and Out-Groups
All groups… develop a way of living with characteristic codes and beliefs.
The boys at Robbers Cave that summer had been enrolled in a pioneering and ambitious – and, by today’s standards, unethical – field experiment in social psychology.
One point of interest to the researchers was whether, how, and why each collection of boys would coalesce into a cohesive group. And coalesce they did, each group forming its own identity, choosing a name (the Rattlers and the Eagles), creating a flag, and coming to share “preferred songs, practices and peculiar norms“ that were different from those of the other group. But the real point of the study was to investigate how and why, once the groups had coalesced, they would react to the presence of a new group.
Stephen Hawking… It would be better to beware of aliens than to invite them in for tea.
The researchers had hoped that by setting up groups with competitive goals but no inherent differences, they could observe the generation and evolution of derogatory social stereotypes, genuine intergroup hostility, and all other symptoms of intergroup conflict we humans are known for.
If competing in a tug-of-war contest generated intergroup hostility, imagine the hostility between bands of humans with too many mouths to feed and two few elephant carcasses to dine on.
Long before communism, democracy, or theories of racial superiority were invented, neighboring groups of people regularly fought with, and even massacred each other, inspired by the competition for resources. In such an environment, a highly evolved sense of “us versus them“ would have been crucial to survival.
Scientists call any group that people feel part of an “in-group,“ and any group that excludes them an “out-group.“
Putting other people into categories affects our assessment of them. Putting ourselves into in and out-group categories also has an effect.
We all belong to many in-groups. As a result, our self identification shifts from situation to situation.
Switching the in-group affiliation we’re adopting for the moment is a trick we all use, and it’s helpful in maintaining a cheery outlook, for the in-groups, we identify with are an important component of our self-image.
People will make large financial sacrifices to help establish a feeling of belonging to an in-group they aspire to feel part of.
Once we think of ourselves as belonging to an exclusive country club, executive rank, or class of computer users, the views of others in the group seep into our thinking, and color the way we perceive the world. Psychologists call those views “group norms.“
Muzafer Sherif… showed that a group norm can affect something as basic as the way you perceive a point of light.
Sherif showed the dot (of light) to three people at a time and instructed them that whenever they saw the dot move, they should call out how far it has moved. An interesting phenomenon occurred: people in a given group would call out different numbers, some high and some low, but eventually their estimates would converge to within a narrow range, the “norm” for that group of three. Although the norm varied widely from group to group, within each group the members came to agree upon a norm, which they arrived at without discussing or prompting.
This shared experience or identity causes us to see our faith as being intertwined with the faith of the group, and thus the group’s success and failures as our own.
We have a special place in our hearts for our in-group members.
Studies show that common group membership can even trump negative. personal attributes.
One may like people as group members even as one dislikes them as individual persons.
Another way the in and out-group distinction affects us is that we tend to think of our in-group members as more variegated and complex than those in the out-group.
Your in-group identity influences the way you judge people, but it also influences the way you feel about yourself, the way you behave, and sometimes even your performance.
The conflicting norms of our in-groups can at times lead to rather curious contradictions in our behavior.
Which message wins out, the ethical appeal or the group norm reminder?… An ad that simply denounced littering was successful in inhibiting the practice, while a similar ad that included the phrase “Americans will produce more litter than ever!“ led to increased littering.
Researchers created a sign condemning the fact that many visitors steal the wood from Petrified Forest National Park. They placed the sign on a well-used pathway, along with some secretly marked pieces of wood. Then they watch to see what affects the sign would have. They found that in the absence of a sign, souvenir hunters stole about 3% of the wood pieces in just a 10 hour period. But with the warning sign in place, that number almost tripled to 8%.
The researchers pointed out that messages that condemn yet highlight undesired social norms are common and that they invite counterproductive results
A large body of research replicates the findings that our group-based social identity is so strong that we will discriminate against them and favor us, even if the rule that distinguishes them from us is a kin to flipping a coin.
Dog person versus cat person. Rare meat versus medium. Powdered detergent versus liquid. Do we really draw broad inferences from such narrow distinctions as these?
We are highly invested in feeling different from one another – and superior – no matter how flimsy the grounds of our sense of superiority, and no matter how self sabotaging that may end up being.
It takes less than we think to erase those grounds.
These and several other scenarios that gave the groups common goals and required cooperative intergroup actions, the researchers noted, sharply reduced the intergroup conflict.
The more that people in different traditionally defined in-groups, such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, or religion, find it advantageous to work together, the less they discriminate against one another.
As that first plane hit the north tower and chaos erupted, as the fiery debris fell toward us and a horrific sight of death unfolded above us, something subtle and magical also transpired. All those divisions seemed to evaporate, and people began to help other people, regardless of who they are.
Chapter 9: Feelings
“Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us.” - Oliver Sacks
Suddenly she asked - with obvious embarrassment - if hearing an imaginary voice meant she was insane. As the therapist thought about it, Sizemore altered her posture, crossed her legs, and took on a “childishly daredevil air” he had never before seen in her. As he later, described it, “1000 minute alterations of manner, gesture, expression, posture, of nuances in reflex or instinctive reaction, glance, of eyebrow tilting and eye movement, all argued that this could only be another woman.” Then that “other woman” began to speak of Chris Sizemore and her problems in the third person, using “she” or “her” in every reference… Sizemore was eventually cured. It took 18 years.
We all have many identities.
We change throughout the day, depending on circumstances and our social environment, as well as on our hormonal levels.
Studies show that people make different moral decisions after seeing a happy film.
We can even be two different people at the same time, an unconscious “I“ who holds negative feelings about blacks – or the elderly, or fat people, or gays, or Muslims – and a conscious “I“ who are abhors prejudice.
Psychologists have traditionally assumed that the way a person feels and behaves reflects fixed traits that form the core of that individual’s personality. They have assumed that people know who they are, and that they act consistently, as a result of conscious deliberation.
Much of clinical psychotherapy is based on what is essentially the same idea: that through intense therapeutically guided reflection we can learn our true feelings, attitudes, and motives.
Because of the role of subliminal processes, the source of our feelings is often a mystery to us, and so are the feelings themselves. We feel many things we are not aware of feeling. To ask us to talk about our feelings may be valuable, but some of our innermost feelings will not yield their secrets to even the most profound introspection. As a result, many of psychology’s traditional assumptions about feelings simply do not hold.
“I’ve gone through years of psychotherapy,“ a well-known neuroscientist told me, “to try to find out why I behave in certain ways. I think about my feelings, my motivations, I talk to my therapist about them, I finally come up with a story that seems to make sense, and it satisfies me. I need a story I can believe, but is it true? Probably not. The real truth lies in structures like my thalamus and hypothalamus, and my amygdala, and I have no conscious access to those no matter how much I introspect.“
Among the patients who did receive the real operation, 76 % saw improvement in their angina pain. But so did all five in the sham group. Both groups, believing that a relevant surgical procedure had been performed, reported far milder pain than they had had before surgery.
Both groups would have continued to experience the same level of sensory input to the pain centers of their brains. Yet both groups had a greatly reduced conscious experience of pain. It seems our knowledge of our feelings – even physical ones – is so tenuous that we can’t even reliably know when we are experiencing excruciating pain.
The view of emotion that is dominant today can be traced to William James.
William James credited his recovery not to the treatment he received but to his discovery of an essay on Freewill by the French philosopher, Charles Renouvier. After reading it, he resolved to use his own free will to break his depression. In truth, it doesn’t seem to have been that simple, for he remained incapacitated for another 18 months and suffered from chronic depression for the rest of his life.
We don’t tremble because we are angry or cry because we feel sad; rather, we are aware of feeling angry because we tremble, and we feel sad because we cry. James was proposing a physiological basis for emotion, an idea that has gained currency today – thanks in part to the brain imaging technology that allows us to watch the physical processes involved in emotion as they are actually occurring in the brain.
Emotions, in today’s neo-Jamesian view, are like perceptions and memories – they are constructed from data at hand. Much of that data comes from your unconscious mind, as it processes environmental stimuli picked up by your senses and creates a physiological response.
If emotions are constructed from limited data rather than direct perception, similar to the way vision and memory are constructed, then, as with perception and memory, there must be circumstances when the way the mind fills in the gaps in the data results in your “getting it wrong.“ The result would be “emotional illusions“ that are analogous to optical and memory illusions.
Our subliminal brain combines information about our physical state with other data arising from social and emotional contexts to determine what we are feeling.
Walking up a few flights of stairs before evaluating a new business proposal may cause you to say, “Wow” when you would have normally said, “Hmmm.”
Mental stress leads to unwanted physical effects, but what is less discussed is the other half of the feedback loop: physical tension, causing or perpetuating mental stress.
We often don’t understand our feelings. Despite that, we usually think that we do.
It’s one thing when people claim to have no opinion, but quite another when you can’t even trust them to know what they think. Research, however, suggests that you can’t.
The left hemisphere did not allow the patient to admit ignorance… In these and similar studies, the left brain generated many false reports but the right brain did not, leading the researchers to speculate that the left hemisphere of the brain has a role that goes beyond simply registering and identifying our emotional feelings to trying to understand them. It’s as though the left hemisphere has mounted a search for a sense of order and reason in the world in general.
As Sacks put it, Thompson “must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning, overan abyss of meaninglessness.“ The term “confabulation“ often signifies the replacement of a gap in one’s memory by a falsification that one believes to be true. But we also confabulate to fill in gaps in our knowledge about our feelings.
When asked to explain ourselves we engage in a search for truth that may feel like a kind of introspection. But though we think we know what we are feeling, we often no neither the content, nor the unconscious origins of that content. And so we come up with possible explanations that are untrue, or only partly accurate, and we believe them. Scientist who study such errors have noticed that they are not haphazard. They are regular and systematic. And they have their basis in a repository of social, emotional, and cultural information we all share.
When you come up with an explanation for your feelings and behavior, your brain performs an action that would probably surprise you, it searches your mental database of cultural norms and picks something plausible.
Evolution designed the human brain not to accurately understand itself, but to help us survive. We observe ourselves and the world, and make enough sense of things to get along. Some of us, interested in knowing ourselves more deeply – perhaps to make better life decisions, perhaps to live a richer life, perhaps out of curiosity – seek to get past our intuitive ideas of us. We can. We can use our unconscious minds to study, to identify, and to pierce our cognitive illusions.
My unseen partner, my unconscious, always providing the support I need as I walk and stumble my way through life.
Chapter 10: Self
The stronger the threat to feeling good about yourself, it seems, the greater the tendency to view reality through a distorting lens.
Do we really believe the enhanced versions of ourselves that we offer up to our audiences?
Psychologists call this tendency for inflated self-assessment the “above average affect.”
In one study, in fact, physicians who diagnosed their patients as having pneumonia reported an average of 88% confidence in that diagnosis, but proved correct only 20% of the time.
By the time we were two, most of us had a sense of ourselves as social agents.
Our ego fights fiercely to defend its honor.
As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists, gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want to convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn’t. The human mind is designed to be both a scientist and an attorney, both a conscious seeker of objective truth and an unconscious, impassioned advocate for what we want to believe.
It is the irrational that would probably make you happier. And the mind generally seems to opt for happy.
The “causal aero“ in human thought processes consistently tends to point from belief to evidence, not vice versa.
Visual perception, memory, and even emotion are all constructs made of a mix of raw, incomplete, and sometimes conflicting data.
Psychologist call the approach taken by our inner advocate “motivated reasoning.” Motivated reasoning helps us to believe in our goodness and competence, to feel in control, and to generally see ourselves in an overly positive light.
Biased interpretations of ambiguous events are at the heart of some of our most heated arguments.
There is no such thing as a game existing out there, in its own right, which people merely observe.
Because motivated reasoning is unconscious, peoples claims that they are unaffected by bias or self-interestinterest can be sincere, even as they make decisions that are in reality self-serving.
“Illusion of objectivity“… The talent we are blessed with in this regard is the ability to justify our rosy images of ourselves through credible arguments, in a way that does not fly in the face of obvious facts.
We poke holes in evidence we dislike and plug holes in evidence we like.
It’s a cliché, but the experience of walking in the other sides shoes does seem to be the best way to understand their point of you.
As the studies suggest, the subtlety of our reasoning mechanisms allows us to maintain our illusions of objectivity, even while viewing the world through a biased lens. Our decision-making processes bend but don’t break our usual rules, and we perceive ourselves as forming judgments in a bottom-up, fashion, using data to draw conclusion, while we are in reality, deciding top-down, using our preferred conclusion to shape our analysis of the data.
When we apply motivated reasoning to assessments about ourselves, we produce that positive picture of a world in which we are all above average.
We even recruit our memories to brighten our picture of ourselves.
Much has been made of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs ability to create what has come to be called a “reality, distortion field,” which allowed him to convince himself and others that they could accomplish whatever they set they’re mind to.
There are a few accomplishments, large or small, that don’t depend to some degree on the accomplisher believing in him or herself, and the greatest accomplishments are the most likely to rely on that person being not only optimistic but unreasonably optimistic. It’s not a good idea to believe you are Jesus, but believing you can become an NBA player – or, like Jobs, come back from the humiliating defeat of being ejected from your own company, or be a great scientist, or author, or actor or singer – may serve you very well indeed.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future.” – Steve Jobs.
The extent to which my inner unknown self guides my conscious mind came as a great surprise. An even greater surprise was the realization of how lost I would be without it.
Our unconscious is at its best when it helps us create a positive and fond sense of self, a feeling of power and control in a world full of powers far greater than the merely human.
“Every morning upon awakening, I experienced a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this, Salvador Dalí?” – Salvador Dalí
Motivated reasoning enables our minds to defend us against unhappiness, and in the process it gives us the strength to overcome the many obstacles in life that might otherwise overwhelm us. The more of it we do, the better off we tend to be… Studies show that the people with the most accurate self-perceptions tend to be moderately depressed, suffer from low self-esteem, or both. An overly positive self evaluation, on the other hand, is normal and healthy.
Natures provided us with the means to create an unrealistically rosy attitude about overcoming [barriers in life] – which helps us to do precisely that.
As you confront the world, unrealistic optimism can be a life vest that keeps you afloat.
The natural optimism of the human mind is one of our greatest gifts.
We choose the facts that we want to believe. We also choose our friends, lovers, and spouses not just because of the way we perceive them, but because of the way they perceive us.
It is a gift of the human mind to be extraordinarily open to accepting the theory of ourselves that pushes us in the direction of survival, and even happiness.