3. See, for example, Simon (1997).
4. Freud (1924/1968),p.306.
5. James Miller (1942) offered sixteen distinct definitions of the unconscious. This number is rivaled only by the number of definitions many authors have offered for consciousness (see, e.g., Ryle 1949).
6. Others have used the term the "cognitive unconscious" or the "emotional unconscious" to describe processes I ascribe to the adaptive unconscious (e.g., Kihlstrom 1987, 1999). I believe it makes more sense to consider nonconscious processing as a whole, rather than drawing lines between what is cognitive and what is emotional.
7. See Norretranders (1998) for a detailed discussion of how scientists have measured the capacity of consciousness versus the capacity of our sensory systems.
8. Claparede's (1911/1951) patient may not have been completely amnesiac and thus may have retained some limited abilities to learn things consciously. More typically, amnesiacs are able to learn motor skills, such as tracking a moving target with a stylus, with no conscious memory of ever having performed the task from one day to the next (see Schacter 1996).
9. For a review see Kihlstrom and Schacter (1990).
10. See, e.g., Reber (1993, 1997) and Dulany (1997).
11. Lewicki, Hill, and Bizot (1988), quotation p. 33.
12. Although there is some disagreement on the exact location of the filter in the attentional system (e.g., Deutsch and Deutsch 1963; Treisman 1964; Norman 1968; Marcel 1983), there is agreement that the filter operates largely outside of conscious awareness.
13. Conscious control over the settings of the filter is not perfect. As noted by Daniel Wegner (1994), the desire to attend to something sometimes fails, such that our attention is drawn to precisely what we are trying to ignore.
14. The "cocktail party effect," whereby people recognize their name in an unattended auditory channel, was first demonstrated by Moray (1959). The nonconscious monitor is not perfect; typically, people notice their name in the unattended channel about a third of the time. The fact that they are able to recognize it at all suggests that nonconscious monitoring is occurring. For theories of preattention, see Broadbent (1958) and Treisman (1993).
15. See Bargh and Pietromonaco (1982); Higgins (1996); Mandler (1997).
16. See Damasio (1994); LeDoux (1996); Bargh (1997); Bechara et al. (1997); Clore, Gasper, and Garvin (2001).
17. Bargh et al. (2002); Bargh and Raymond (1995).
18. Bronte (1847/1984),p.270.
19. Damasio (1994).
20. Bronte (1847/1984), p. 259.
21. Gilbert and Wilson (2000). See also Vaillant (1993).
22. See Heine, Lehman, Markus, and Kitayama (1999). Even within a culture, the ways in which people make themselves feel good vary. Bill Swann (1996) has observed that in Western cultures, people with high and low self-esteem react differently to positive and negative feedback. People high in self-esteem prefer positive feedback and attempt to avoid or discount negative feedback, as any good spin doctor would. People low in self-esteem sometimes do the opposite: they prefer negative feedback and avoid or discount positive feedback. This does not necessarily mean, however, that people with low self-esteem fail to use the "feel-good" criterion. Swann argues that people often desire predictable, coherent feedback and that it is very unsettling to have their views of themselves challenged. This explains why people with negative self-esteem, who have low opinions of themselves, prefer negative feedback about themselves: it helps them maintain a predicable, coherent self-view. In short, it satisfies the "feel-good" criterion, albeit in a rather paradoxical way.
23. See Taylor and Brown (1988).l discuss work on positive illusions in more detail in Chapter 9.
3. Who's in Charge?
Epigraph: James (1890), p. 122.
1. The extent to which such evolutionary adaptations explain current human behavior, such as gender differences in mate selection, is hugely controversial. In my opinion, evolutionary psychologists sometimes go too far in claiming that much of current social behavior can be traced back to human adaptations that occurred thousands of years ago. Nonetheless it cannot be denied that the brain has evolved according to the principles of natural selection (see, e.g., Kaas and Collins 2001).
2. See Reber (1992) for an insightful elaboration of this argument.
3. Guzeldere (1997).
4. See Flanagan (1992) for an excellent review of these philosophical positions.
5. See Flanagan (1992), p. 7.
6. Wegner and Wheatley (1999).
7. Flanagan (1992), pp. 7-8.
8. Margolis (1987); LeDoux (1996).
9. See Bargh et al. (2002) for a discussion of the role of consciousness in fulfilling nonconscious needs.
10. Whereas it is true that conscious processes are more controlled than most nonconscious processes, not all nonconscious processing meets all the definitions of automaticity. Arthur Reber (1992), for example, notes that learning an artificial grammar occurs nonconsciously but requires cognitive capacity. Further, we are not always in complete control of our conscious thoughts. Automatic, nonconscious processes can lead to intrusions of unwanted thoughts, as documented by Daniel Wegner (1994). In general, however, it is fair to characterize most nonconscious thinking as automatic and most conscious thinking as controlled.
11. See Rosenthal and Jacobson (1968); Sadker and Sadker (1994).
12. For a review of research on implicit and explicit memory, see Schacter (1996).
13. Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett (1973).
14. Wilson, Hull, and Johnson (1981); Wilson (1985). For recent reviews of research on the effects of rewards on intrinsic interest, see Lepper, Hender- long, and Gingras (1999); 1)eci, Koestner, and Ryan (1999).
15. Clements and Perner (1994).
16. See Hauser (1998); Perner and Clements (2000), Wellman, Cross, and Watson (2001). For evidence that other implicit, nonconscious memory systems develop at the same rate as explicit memory, see Komatsu, Naito, and Fuke (1996) and Rovee-Collier (1997).
17. For evidence on the difficulty of consciously detecting correlations, see Nisbett and Ross (1980); Crocker (1981); and Alloy and Tabachnik (1984).
18. 1 thank Jonathan Schooler for pointing out this interpretation of the Bechara et al. (1997) experiment.
19. For evidence that negative and positive information is processed in different regions of the brain, see Davidson (1995) and Cacioppo, Gardner, and Berntson (1997).
20. Draine and Greenwald ( 1999).
21. See Millward and Reber (1972); Greenwald (1992).
4. Knowing Who We Are
Epigraphs: Amiel (1899/1935), quoted by Whyte (1978), p. 157; Didion ( 1979), p. 1 1 .
1. Shaw (1913/1979),p.43.
2. Allport (1961), p. 28.
3. See, e.g.,'Iellegen et al. (1988); McCrae and Costa( 1990); Loehlin (1992); Goldberg (1993); Plomin (1994).
4. Sampson (1989); Gergen (1991).
5. See Mischel ( 1968, 1973). Subsequent research by Triandis (1989) and Markus and Kitayama (1991) shows that overlooking situational influences is especially predominant in individualistic Western cultures. Cultures with a more collectivist orientation, such as many Asian cultures, recognize more that the social situation is a powerful determinant of behavior.
6. See Nisbett (1980); Ross and Nisbett (1991); Funder (1997).
7. Hogan, Johnson, and Briggs (1997). A more recent handbook of personality includes a chapter on the modern approach to the unconscious (Kihlstrom 1999), but the remaining twenty-seven chapters, save one on psychoanalysis, say little about nonconscious processes and personality.
8. Contrary to my argument, Reber (1992) suggests that there are relatively few individual differences in nonconscious processing. However, Reber focuses exclusively on such invariant systems as implicit learning and memory. He may well be correct that these basic functions of the mind vary little across people, just as there is little variation in our ability to acquire language. I take a broader view of the adapti
ve unconscious, including people's unique environmental adaptations of which they are not fully aware, including their chronic levels of motivation, their chronic construals of the environment, and their chronic representations of other people.
9. Miller (1995),p.64.
10. For a review, see Mischel and Shoda (1999). The experiment with boys in the residential camp is described in Shoda, Mischel, and Wright (1994).
1 I . Kelly (1955).
12. See Higgins, King, and Mavin (1982); Bargh et al. (1986). The experiment on the chronic accessibility of honesty is by Bargh and Thein (1985).
13. Malcolm (1981),p.76.
14. Malcolm (1981), p. 6.
15. Andersen and Glassman (1996), p. 254; Chen and Andersen (1999); Glassman and Andersen (1999); see also Sullivan (1953).
16. Elicker, Englund, and Sroufe (1992). For a review of evidence that responses in the Strange Situation predict later peer relationships, see Schneider, Atkinson, and Tardif (2001).
17. Hazan and Shaver (1987), p. 515.
18. For research on adult romantic attachment and how it is measured, see Hazan and Shaver (1987) and Tidwell, Reis, and Shaver (1996). For research on the Adult Attachment interview, see Main, Kaplan, and Cassidy (1985); Cassidy and Shaver (1999). For research on the correlation between the two measures, see Bartholomew and Shaver (1998).
19. For research on implicit motives see Murray (1938); Atkinson (1964); McClelland (1985); Winter et al. (1998). For evidence on the separation of implicit and explicit motives, see McClelland, Koestner, and Weinberger (1992) and Schultheiss (in press). For a review of research on dependency, see Bornstein (1995).
20. Russo (1997), pp. 373-374.
21. The research findings on self-reports versus peer reports are reviewed by Kenny (1994). For more recent research on the relative validity of selfversus peer reports, see Kolar, Funder, and Colvin (1996) and Spain, Eaton, and Funder (2000).
22. The studies on predicting one's own versus other people's behavior were by Epley and Dunning (2000).
23. For research on the self see Epstein (1973); McGuire and Padawer-Singer (1976); Markus (1977); Markus and Nurius (1986); Higgins (1987, 1996); Triandis (1989); Markus and Kitayama (1991); Baumeister (1998).
24. Some researchers have distinguished implicit and explicit personality processes. Wegner and Vallacher (1981), for example, discussed "implicit psychology," or the nonconscious patterns of interpretation and construal that are responsible for people's subjective impressions of the world. These are the distinctive patterns of interpretation and evaluation that are located in the adaptive unconscious and that, as we have seen, are important determinants of behavior. Wegner and Vallacher also discussed explicit commonsense psychology, or people's conscious beliefs about themselves. We have already encountered examples of such conscious theories, such as people's explicit beliefs about their attachment relationships and their explicit beliefs about their motives, both of which have been found to correlate poorly with nonconscious measures of the same constructs, but to predict interesting behaviors in their own right.
25. See McAdams (1994, 1996, 1999).
26. McCrae (1996), p. 355.
27. For social psychological work on alternative selves, see Markus and Nurius (1986); Higgins (1987); Ruvolo and Markus (1992).
28. McClelland and Pilon (1983); these data are discussed more fully by McClelland, Koestner, and Weinberger (1992).
29. Shaw (1913/1979), p. 42.
30. Brunstein, Schultheiss, and Grassmann (1998); Schultheiss and Brunstein (1999); Schultheiss (in press).
5. Knowing Why
Epigraph: Barnes (1986), pp. 183-184.
1. Sacks (1987), p. 109.
2. Estabrooks (1943), pp. 77-78.
3. Gazzaniga and LeDoux (1978), p. 149.
4. Given the research on split-brain patients and people suffering from brain damage, it is tempting to speculate about the locations in the brain of the adaptive unconscious and the conscious self. Indeed, many neuroscientists are studying the neural correlates of conscious and unconscious processing. The most that can be said about these efforts to date is that complex psychological states such as consciousness are interactions between many areas of the brain and are not located in a single lobe or localized set of neurons.
5. See Milgram (1974). For a general discussion of the power of social influences, and people's failure to recognize these influences, see Aronson, Wilson, and Akert (2002) and Ross and Nisbett (1991).
6. See Schachter and Singer (1962); Dutton and Aron (1974); Zillmann (1978).
7. Nisbett and Wilson (1977), quotation p. 231. Responses include Smith and Miller (1978); Ericsson and Simon (1980); Gavanski and Hoffman (1987).
8. The position I present here is an update of Nisbett and Wilson (1977) by Wilson and Stone (1985).
9. On the difficulty of perceiving covariation, see Nisbett and Ross (1980); Crocker (1981); Alloy and Tabachnik (1984).
10. The mood study, Wilson, Laser, and Stone (1982), was inspired by an unpublished study by Weiss and Brown (1977). Additional evidence for the argument that privileged information both helps and hurts people comes from the fact that in the Wilson, Laser, and Stone study and others like it, there is a positive correlation between participants' reports about the influences on their mood and the actual determinants of their mood, even when the strangers' reports are partialed out (statistically controlled). This result suggests that people achieve some accuracy by relying on privileged information, after shared theories (as measured by the strangers' reports) are subtracted out. However, there is also a positive correlation between the strangers' reports and the actual determinants of the participants' mood, even when the participants' reports were partialed out. This suggests that people lose some accuracy by relying on privileged information and not on shared theories. This and other evidence about the accuracy of people's and strangers' causal reports is reviewed by Wilson and Stone (1985).
6. Knowing How We Feel
Epigraphs: James (1890), p. 211; Begley (1992), p. 35.
1. Kierstead (1981), p. 48.
2. See, e.g., Armstrong (1968); Sheridan (1969); Palmer (1975).
3. For examples of unrecognized jealousy see Hebb (1946); Russell and Barrett (1999).
4. See Freud (1911/1958).
5. See, e.g., Erdelyi (1985) and Holmes (1990); for recent evidence that memories can be deliberately repressed, see Anderson and Green (2001).
6. The study of homosexual attraction in homophobics is by Adams, Wright, and Lohr (1996). The authors are not arguing that the homophobics were latent homosexuals who had no heterosexual feelings. In fact the homophobic men showed a larger increase in erection size in response to the heterosexual video than in response to the homosexual video. Nonetheless they did experience some increase in erection size in response to the male homosexual film, whereas the nonhomophobic men did not.
7. For evolutionary theories of emotion, see Darwin (1872); Tooby and Cos- mides (1990); Lazarus (1991); Ekman (1992). For a discussion of the specific functions of emotions, see Frijda (1994); Keltner and Gross (1999).
8. A Danish physiologist named Carl Lange independently came up with a theory quite similar to James's; thus this approach became known as the James-Lange theory of emotion. See James (1894). For recent discussions of the James-Lange theory, see Ellsworth ( 1994) and Lang ( 1994).
9. LeDoux (1996), pp. 163, 165, and 302.
10. Carpenter (1874), pp. 539-540.
11. Ibid., p. 540.
12. See Hochschild (1979).
13. Schachter and Wheeler (1962 ); see also Schachter and Singer (1962 ).
14. Nisbett and Wilson (1977). For an updated review of this literature, see Wilson (1985).
15. Schachter and Wheeler ( 1962), p. 126.
16. For a theory of dual attitudes, see Wilson, Lindsey, and Schooler (2000). For an analysis of legal prohibitions against discrimination, see Krieger (1995).
17. Devine (1989); Higgins and King (
1991); Fazio et al. (1995); Dovidio et al. (1997).
18. Dovidio (1995); Dovidio et al. (1997).
19. For a discussion of emotional intelligence, see Salovey and Mayer (1990); Goleman (1995).
20. Warnes (1986), p. 99. On emotional intelligence: Salovey, Hsee, and Mayer (1993); Goleman (1995). On alexithymia: Linden, Wen, and Paulhus (1995) lane et al. (2000).
7. Knowing How We Will Feel
Epigraph: Hawthorne (1846/1937), p. 1055.
1. A lot has been written about how to define and measure happiness. Most of the studies I discuss allow people to define happiness for themselves, asking them straightforward questions such as "How happy would you say you are these days?" People's answers to questions like this have been found to be quite valid; for example, they are correlated with family members' and friends' reports of how happy they are and with the likelihood that they will commit suicide in the next five years. See Diener (2000) for a detailed discussion of measurement issues.
2. Richburg (1993), p. A28.
3. Kaplan (1978), p. 67. See also Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman (1978); Abrahamson (1980).
4. See Wortman, Silver, and Kessler (1993); Lund, Caserta, and Dimond (1989).
5. Kaprio, Koskenvuo, and Rita (1987); Lehman, Wortman, and Williams (1987).
6. Janoff-Bulman (1992); Davis, Nolen-Hoeksema, and Larson( 1998).
7. Janoff-Bulman (1992), p. 133.
8. See Larson, Csikszentmihalhi, and Graef (1980); Suh, Diener, and Fujita (1996), p. 1091.
9. Smith (1759/1853), p. 149.
10. Lykken and Tellegen (1996).
11. Quoted in Csikszentmihalyi (1999), p. 825. Csikszentmihalyi has written extensively about the concept of flow, how to achieve it, and its relationship to happiness. For other work on the pursuit of goals and happiness see Emmons (1986); Ryan et al. (1996); Diener (2000).
12. Gilbert et al. (1998).
13. Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman (1978).
14. There is a lesson here, which I have applied to wine. I purposefully keep myself from drinking expensive wines too often, so that I do not ruin my enjoyment of cheap ones. I enjoy an occasional fancy wine, but I know that if I get too used to $25 bottles of Cabernet, I'll no longer enjoy the $7.99 specials in the supermarket. Why ruin something that gives me pleasure?
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