Strangers to Ourselves

by Timothy D Wilson

  What's the Agenda?

  The adaptive unconscious thus plays a major executive role in our mental lives. It gathers information, interprets and evaluates it, and sets goals in motion, quickly and efficiently. This is a wonderful set of mental abilities to have, and if we were to lose them, like Mr. D., we would find it very difficult to make it through the day. But how does the adaptive unconscious decide what to select, how to interpret and evaluate, and which goal to set in motion? In short, what is its agenda?

  Clearly, in order to be adaptive, nonconscious processes have to be concerned with making accurate assessments of the world. As Charlotte Bronte wrote in Jane Eyre, "The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens ... and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision."" All organisms have to represent their worlds accurately enough to find food, avoid danger, and produce offspring, or they will perish. An early primate who appraised tigers as "fun to pet" and edible plants as "scary, icky things" would not have survived for very long. Those who can spot dangers and opportunities fastest are at a huge advantage. In the Bechara card game study, for example, people seemed able to figure out which decks had the best payoffs quickly and nonconsciously, without being able to verbalize why they preferred decks C and D. Think of the advantage such an ability gives us in everyday life. 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.

  Though it is a wonderful thing that our nonconscious minds are so quick to make accurate judgments of the social world, people cannot live by accuracy alone. There is a lot of information out there to analyze, and it is clearly to our advantage to prioritize it, recognizing what we should focus on and what we can safely ignore.

  Consider a college basketball player who is dribbling the ball up the court in the closing seconds of an important game. There is a lot to analyze-possible openings in the opposing team's defense, the sight of her teammate setting a pick on the right baseline, the knowledge that her center has always played well against the opposing player who is guarding her. It is by no means easy for people to process such complex information quickly and decide on a good course of action. We tend to take for granted, however, that at least people can narrow their attention to the most important task at hand. Think of all the other things that the basketball player could focus on, if she so chose: what the fans in the first row are shouting, the new routine being performed by the cheerleaders, the fact that she is thirsty and would like a drink of water, the knowledge that she has a history paper due the next day. Instead of thinking about these things, her attention is like a spotlight at the theater, able to focus narrowly on what is happening on center stage and keeping everything else in the dark.

  People with damage to the prefrontal cortex find it difficult to know where to point the spotlight of attention. A college basketball player with damage to this area of the brain might be very skilled athletically but would be quite frustrating to watch. In the last seconds of a close game, she might decide to put the ball down and tie her shoes more tightly, or chat with the fans in Row 3. I)amasio relates the case of a businessman whose prefrontal cortex was damaged during surgery for a brain tumor. This man retained much of his intelligence, such as his ability to read and analyze complex business reports. But he couldn't judge the relative importance of different tasks. He might spend all day at the office organizing his desk drawers, believing that this should take priority over finishing a report that was due that day.'9

  How do normal people focus on relevant information and screen out everything else? The cocktail-party example I gave earlier, in which we were able to ignore Sidney's account of his operation but pay close attention when he mentioned our name, suggests that the more relevant to us a piece of information is, the more likely it will be on the nonconscious filter's "A' list of information to notice. Damasio's businessman seemed unable to judge the self-relevance of the different tasks with which he was faced-he did not recognize that it was more to his advantage to finish the report than to put his paper clips in their proper place.

  It turns out, though, that self-relevance isn't quite the right way to describe how the adaptive unconscious decides what is important and what is not. Rather, the decision rule is how accessible a particular idea or category is. "Accessibility" is a somewhat technical psychological term that refers to the activation potential of information in memory. When information is high in activation potential it is "energized" and ready to be used; when it is low in activation potential it is unlikely to be used to select and interpret information in one's environment. Accessibility is determined not only by the self-relevance of a category but also by how recently it has been encountered. In the Bargh and Pietromonaco study mentioned earlier, for example, the concept of hostility was accessible in people's minds because of the words that had been flashed a few minutes earlier, not necessarily because this concept was self-relevant.

  Another determinant of accessibility is how often a concept has been used in the past. People are creatures of habit, and the more they have used a particular way of judging the world in the past, the more energized that concept will be. Our nonconscious minds develop chronic ways of interpreting information from our environments; in psychological parlance, certain ideas and categories become chronically accessible as a result of frequent use in the past. The college basketball player has been in hundreds of games similar to the current one and has learned what information to attend to and what to ignore. She notices that the forward is late getting around the pick and that the center just cut toward the basket, a half-step ahead of the defender-without having to decide whether this information is more or less important than what the cheerleaders are doing.

  The adaptive unconscious is not governed by accuracy and accessibility alone. 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. Jane Eyre observed this motive in her aunt, Mrs. Reed, when she visited her on her deathbed: "I knew by her stony eye-opaque to tenderness, indissoluble to tears-that she was resolved to consider me bad to the last; because to believe me good would give her no generous pleasure: only a sense of mortification.""

  One of the most enduring lessons from social psychology is that like Mrs. Reed, people go to great lengths to view the world in a way that maintains a sense of well-being. We are masterly spin doctors, rationalizers, and justifiers of threatening information. Daniel Gilbert and I have called this ability the "psychological immune system." Just as we possess a potent physical immune system that protects us from threats to our physical well-being, so do we possess a potent psychological immune system that protects us from threats to our psychological well-being. When it comes to maintaining a sense of well-being, each of us is the ultimate spin doctor.21

  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. Nonetheless, nonconscious spin doctoring occurs in order to maintain a sense of well-being, though the form of the doctoring differs. 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.'-'

  To what extent is the psychological immune system part of the adaptive unconscious? Sometimes we act on the "feel-good" motive
quite consciously and deliberately, such as avoiding an acquaintance who is always criticizing us, or trying to convince ourselves that we failed to get a promotion not because we were unqualified, but because the boss was an insensitive ox. Given that the adaptive unconscious plays a major role in selecting, interpreting, and evaluating incoming information, though, it is no surprise that one of the rules it follows is "Select, interpret, and evaluate information in ways that make me feel good" Furthermore, there is reason to believe that the adaptive unconscious is a better spin doctor than the conscious mind. As Freud noted, psychological defenses often work best when they operate in the back alleys of our minds, keeping us blind to the fact that any distortion is going on. If people knew that they were changing their beliefs just to make themselves feel better, the change would not be as compelling.

  A key question concerns how the accuracy and "feel-good" criteria operate together, because they are often incompatible. Consider Jack, who failed to get an anticipated promotion. If accuracy were his only criterion, Jack might well conclude that he did not have the experience or ability to handle the new position. Instead, he uses the "feel-good" rule and concludes that his boss is an idiot. But is it really in his best interests to pat himself on the back and blame his boss? If he does not have the experience or ability to do the job, wouldn't he be better off to swallow his pride and work harder?

  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, and how this battle is waged and how it is won are central determinants of who we are and how we feel about ourselves. The best way to "win" this battle, in terms of being a healthy, well-adjusted person, is not always obvious. We must, of course, keep in touch with reality and know our own abilities well enough to engage in self-improvement. But it turns out that a dose of self-deception can be helpful as well, enabling us to maintain a positive view of ourselves and an optimistic view of the future .21

  Mr. D. Revisited

  It should now be clear that Mr. D.'s loss of nonconscious processing would be incapacitating. Not only would he lose his lower-order mental capacities, such as his perceptual abilities, but his higher-order cognitive processing would also be severely impaired. The adaptive unconscious is actively involved in learning, selection, interpretation, evaluation, and goal-setting, and the loss of these abilities would be devastating.

  But the fact that nonconscious processes are adaptive does not mean that they always produce error-free judgments. One reason for this is that it is not always to people's advantage to see the world accurately; a dose of congratulatory self-deception can be useful as well.

  Further, just because a trait or process has evolved due to natural selection does not mean it is a perfect system that cannot be improved. The human visual system confers a survival advantage; in our evolutionary past, people who could see extremely well were more likely to survive than those who could not. Human vision is not perfect, however; surely we would be even better off if we had the night vision of an owl, or 20/5 vision instead of 20/20. Likewise, though generally beneficial, nonconscious mental processes are not perfect.

  Second, many advantageous traits come with a trade-off: though generally beneficial, they have by-products that are not. The human visual system suffers from predictable optical illusions, not because these illusions are themselves adaptive, but because they are by-products of a system that is. Similarly, the advantages conferred by many types of nonconscious mental processes (e.g., the ability to categorize objects and people quickly, correctly "filling in the blanks" when we encounter ambiguous information) can have negative consequences (e.g., the ten dency to overcategorize people, leading to stereotyping and prejudice). Further, because much of our mental life resides outside of consciousness, we often do not know how we are sizing up the world or even the nature of our own personalities. We will see many examples of the cost in self-insight we pay for having such an efficient and sophisticated adaptive unconscious.

  First, however, we should consider how the nonconscious and conscious minds differ. Many of the nonconscious processes we considered, such as evaluation and goal-setting, can be performed by our conscious minds as well. If the nonconscious mind is so sophisticated and extensive, what is the function of consciousness? Do the conscious and nonconscious systems differ in fundamental ways, or do they perform the same tasks?

  Who's in Charge?

  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 (1890)

  Few would disagree with William James's observation about the division of mental labor. People would never get anything done if they had to attend constantly to their breathing, comprehension of language, and perceptions of the physical world. A key question, though, is what we are able to "hand over" to the nonconscious mind. James seems to imply that we delegate the mundane tasks of living, much as chief executive officers rely on their staffs to attend to the details while they address the truly important questions. It is better for a CEO to plan the long-term fate of the company than to sweep the office floors.

  But our nonconscious minds are not just the janitorial staff or even low-level managers. As we have seen, what is typically thought of as the "proper work" of consciousness-goal-setting, interpretation, evaluation-can be performed nonconsciously. Once we acknowledge that people can think in quite sophisticated ways nonconsciously, however, questions arise about the relation between conscious and nonconscious processing. Exactly what is the division of labor between these two parts of the mind? Is consciousness really the CEO? Who's in charge, anyway?

  Perhaps the nonconscious and conscious systems operate in the same way according to the same rules. By this view, humans are blessed with two redundant systems, like modern jet liners that have backup systems in case one fails. Maybe we have two information-processing systems for the same reason that we have two kidneys and two lungs. Effective thinking is so critical to our well-being, this argument goes, that we have developed two redundant minds that are capable of performing exactly the same duties. If one stumbles, the other is there to take up the slack.

  But surely this can't be right. Although Freud underestimated the sophistication and adultlike nature of the unconscious, he was correct that it has a different character from the conscious self. Two informationprocessing systems have evolved that differ in interesting ways and serve different functions.

  Consciousness, Evolution, and Function

  Few would disagree with the premise that selection pressures operate on the mind/brain as well as the body. The fact that humans have brains so similar to other primates' is surely not a coincidence but a result of similarities in our evolutionary past. And the fact that the frontal cortex is proportionately largest in humans, second largest in the great apes, and smallest in prosimians such as lemurs and tarsiers, is surely due to the forces of natural selection.'

  What are we to make of this fact when we try to understand the nature of the mind, such as the roles of conscious and nonconscious thinking? It is reasonable to assume that the adaptive unconscious is older, in evolutionary terms, than consciousness. That is, consciousness may be a more recent acquisition than nonconscious processing, and hence has different functions. Nonconscious processing shares the features of all biological systems that evolved early in the organism's history. For example, older systems are less easily disrupted or damaged than newer systems, they emerge earlier in the individual organism, and they are shared by more species than newer adaptations. Each of these properties is true of nonconscious processing.2

  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. Although on the face of it this might seem obvious, it is actually an
unsettled question that is the topic of much debate.

  Now that it is accepted that Descartes was wrong on two fronts-the mind is not separate from the body, and consciousness and the mind are not the same thing-there has been an explosion of interest in the nature of consciousness, both in the popular press and in scholarly circles. Discover magazine recently dubbed this question as one of the most important mysteries yet to be solved. Dozens of books, journals, and professional conferences are devoted solely to the topic. A few years ago the philosopher Daniel Dennett declined an invitation to review recent books on consciousness, for the simple reason that there were too many (thirty-four, by his count).

  Philosophers are wrangling, with renewed energy, over age-old questions: How can the subjective state of consciousness arise from a physical brain? What is the nature of conscious experience? Can we ever hope to understand what it is like to be another species or even another human? Are humans the only species that possess consciousness? Does consciousness have a function, and if so, what is it?

  These questions are of two types: how consciousness seems versus what consciousness does.' We are making more progress on the second question than on the first, at least in a scientific sense. It is telling that there are as many theories about the nature of consciousness (how it "seems") as there are philosophers studying it, and it is not at all clear how to address this question scientifically.