A Mind of Its Own

by Cordelia Fine

  To return to our make-mother-proud experiment, the researchers primed the mother schema in some of the volunteers by asking them several questions about their mother: how old she was when she got married, her hobbies, political preferences and so on. In other words, they shook awake all the brain cells involved with information about ‘MOTHER: MAJOR LIFE EVENTS, INTERESTS AND VALUES’. The researchers knew that this would also disturb the brain cells concerned with ‘MOTHER: GOALS PERTAINING TO’, which would all be lying somewhere in the same bed. The unprimed volunteers were instead asked questions about themselves; their mother schema remained untouched. Next, all the volunteers were asked to try a verbal-skills task, which involved generating as many words as they could in five minutes from a set of seven letters. How the volunteers did on the task depended both on whether they had the goal to make mother proud, and whether their mother schemas were primed. Volunteers who wanted to make their mother proud and had had their mother schema activated outperformed all of the other groups.

  Don’t think, however, that these volunteers were consciously thinking, ‘I must do well so I can tell Mum about this and make her proud of me.’ The volunteers were quizzed carefully afterwards, and none realised that answering questions about their mother might have influenced how they did on the verbal-skills task. Rather, it was the helpful unconscious that – while shaking part of the mother schema awake in the first part of the experiment – had also jostled the goal of making mother proud into action, influencing how hard the volunteer worked on the word-generating task.

  Indeed, proof that the unconscious truly acts off its own bat (and not in response to conscious decisions to try harder) comes from priming experiments in which conscious awareness is bypassed altogether. In subliminal priming, a picture or word (for example, the word ‘mother’) is flashed up too briefly for you to become consciously aware of it, but long enough so that the quicker unconscious notices it. (About one tenth to one half of a second does the trick.) Subliminally priming volunteers has just the same sort of effect as the priming in the make-mother-proud experiment. For example, some volunteers were subliminally primed with the word ‘father’ before an analytic reasoning test.5 Afterwards, they were asked if it was important to their father that they, the volunteer, be a good analytic reasoner. Among the volunteers who said yes, it made a big difference whether or not they had been subliminally flashed with the word ‘father’ before the reasoning test. Father-primed volunteers significantly outdid their unprimed peers. Although they were completely oblivious to the surreptitious paternal flickering, it still had the power to make them work harder on the task.

  What these and many other similar experiments show is that seemingly trivial things in our environment may be influencing our behaviour. Dormant goals are triggered without our even realising. It’s not that we’re necessarily unaware of the stimulus itself. However, we are oblivious to the effect that it is having on us. Without our knowledge, we suddenly begin to pursue a goal that has been set off by some seemingly innocuous event. For example, if someone asks you about a good friend and then asks you for a favour, you will be more willing to help. This is because thinking about friends unconsciously primes the goal to help, so one experiment found.6 Seemingly incidental events and objects appear to have dark powers over our behaviour, and the speculation begins where the experiments stop. Is that charming photo of your family on the desk at work imperceptibly encouraging you to head home earlier? If you have a deadline coming up, should you replace the family photo with a portrait of your boss instead? What about that stapler; what’s it up to? Looks innocent enough, but who knows what riot of motives it may be stirring in your brain.

  OK, the stapler is probably guiltless. But there are countless other suspects (the letter from your mother on the doormat, the song you heard on the radio on the way to work, maybe even that dead pigeon on the pavement), all of which may be changing the course of your life in their own, modest little way. And the unconscious doesn’t stop at the willy-nilly firing up of goals, which are at least motives to which you knowingly subscribe. Any sort of schema can be primed. And when it is, our behaviour changes to fit with it. In one of the first extraordinary demonstrations of this phenomenon, volunteers had to unscramble several sentences in which the words were in the wrong order.7 For some of the volunteers, the sentences used words related to the stereotype of old people: ‘wrinkle’, ‘bitter’, ‘knits’, ‘forgetful’, ‘stubborn’, and so on. The rest of the volunteers unscrambled sentences with only neutral words. The point of this was to prime the elderly schema in the first group of volunteers, and to see what effect this had on their behaviour. So once each volunteer had finished the task and gathered their belongings, the researcher thanked them, showed them to the door and pointed out the lift at the end of the hall. But the experiment was not yet over: a confederate lurking in the hallway then secretly timed how long the volunteer took to walk down the corridor. Those who had rearranged words related to old people actually behaved like stooped old frost-tops themselves on the journey to the lift, walking significantly more slowly than the other volunteers.

  As you might imagine, this generous propensity of your unconscious to invite any old schema knocking on the back door to come on in and join the party can be a good thing or a bad thing. It all depends on the schema. Volunteers primed with the schema of professors – a supposedly intelligent and knowledgeable breed – stormed their way to success at Trivial Pursuit, compared with others not so benefited.8 But prime people instead with the football hooligan schema, and what ensues is Trivial Pursuit meltdown. Dust off the polite schema in people’s brains, and the majority will wait patiently for more than ten minutes without interrupting the experimenter’s mundane conversation with another student. Kindle the rudeness schema instead, and most people will butt in long before ten minutes have passed.9

  As if this mental mayhem weren’t already enough to contemplate, do we also need to worry about our promiscuous unconscious being wooed by shameless subliminal marketing campaigns? Many people have heard of the nefarious début of subliminal priming made in the world of advertising back in the 1950s. James Vicary, the executive of a failing advertising company, claimed to have sky-rocketed coke and popcorn sales at cinemas by subliminally flashing ‘DRINK COKE’ and ‘EAT POPCORN’ messages at unsuspecting cinema-goers. It turned out to be a hoax – there had been no secret messages. Vicary was right not to have bothered: subliminal advertising didn’t actually seem to have any real effects on people’s attitudes towards products, or their buying behaviour.10

  However, advertisers hadn’t then fully mastered the tricky technical side of successful subliminal priming (for example, you need many flashes of the prime rather than just a few, and single words work better than sentences).11 These days, social psychologists are becoming disturbingly successful at catching the ‘consumer unconscious’. Using up-to-date priming techniques, they can influence people’s attitudes towards advertised products. Volunteers subliminally flashed with a happy face before being offered a fruit-flavoured drink rated the concoction tastier, drank more of it and were even willing to pay double the price for it, compared with volunteers flashed with angry faces.12 In another experiment, volunteers subliminally primed with words to do with thirst thought that the thirst-quenching ‘SuperQuencher’ drink sounded superior to the energy-giving ‘PowerPro’ beverage. They also drank more of it, compared with volunteers not primed in this way.13 However, in both experiments the volunteers had to be thirsty in order for the priming to work. Priming had no effect at all on volunteers who came pre-quenched. Will this be our best defence, then, when the new wave of underhanded advertising begins – to be sure to visit the movies only when sated and slaked to the gills? Sadly, even this may not protect us. People shown a very special episode of The Simpsons didn’t realise that twenty-four subliminal flashes of Coca-Cola cans and the boxer Sugar Ray Leonard (gleaming with sweat and looking much in need of a long cool drink) had been carefully
inserted between the frames. Yet afterwards, they felt strangely thirsty …14

  Part of the reason why advertisers can so easily sully your opinions with their grubby fingers is that the taciturn unconscious prefers to leave you in the dark about so many things. Rather than interrupt your important ruminations about what you’d like to drink with your lunch, it quietly gets on with the business of helping you to make the decision. Then, loathe to disturb your enjoyment of the chosen beverage, it doesn’t trouble to tell you that a smiling face, flashed too fast for the plodding conscious you to notice, is actually the reason you chose a fruit cordial of such doubtful horticultural origin. Because of this reluctance on the part of our secretive brain to speak up, we often have no great insight into the mysterious cog-turnings from which our opinions spring. But, control-freaks as we are, we do feel the need to cling to the illusion that we know what is going on. To maintain this pleasing self-deception, we have to take on the role of detective and search for clues that will explain our feelings. Unfortunately, though, when the location of the evidence isn’t signalled with a large X to mark the spot, our talent for sleuthing is revealed to be somewhat lacking. Oblivious to the true facts, we’re easily distracted by red herrings. Weaving a theory around them, our conjectures may enjoy the veneer of plausibility, but they are sadly mistaken.

  In everyday life, even though all of your neighbours may have to stifle their sniggers when you offer your own explanation of exactly why it was, one week before your fiftieth birthday, you rushed out and bought that sleek new powerful sports car, not even the most experienced therapist can prove you wrong. Within the stripped-down confines of the psychology laboratory, however, you are far less safe. Here, it is simple to embarrass the brain in its brash postulations. In one such experiment, psychologists asked volunteers to predict in which of three boxes on a computer screen a red circle would appear.15 Following each guess, the selected box revealed either a red or a black circle, superimposed on an abstract pattern. Whenever the volunteers happened to choose the box with the red circle they were given a chocolate to eat and – congratulating themselves on how very clever they had been at intuiting yet another little red dot’s movements – they would joyfully gobble it down. Unbeknown to them, however, whether or not their guesses were correct was predetermined, and the experiment was about something else altogether. It had been designed so that the red circle usually appeared on one particular, if unrecognisable, doodle, whereas the black circle usually appeared on a different one. What the researchers were really interested in was whether the volunteers would, after the experiment was over, think that the abstract squiggle that appeared with the red circle (and the sweet) was aesthetically superior to the picture that appeared with the unrewarded black circle, and to other, previously unseen, meaningless sketches.

  So, pretending that the important bit of the experiment was over, the experimenter asked the volunteers if they’d mind offering their opinions on the attractiveness of some pictures. The pile they were given included the patterns they had already seen. To an unbiased brain there really wasn’t anything between them, but the volunteers – the taste of chocolate still lingering on their lips – revealed a penchant for whichever picture had been discreetly placed beneath the red dots. To us, it is obvious why. Like Pavlov’s dogs, who salivated at the sound of the bell that signalled the arrival of dinner, the volunteers associated the pattern with the taste satisfaction of confection. But they didn’t realise this. In fact, careful questioning revealed that they hadn’t even noticed they’d seen the patterns before. This did not stop them, however, from coming up with explanations as to why they preferred one picture over another. Searching for an answer in the meaningless tangle of lines, the volunteers came up with impressively credible-sounding reasons for their preferences. The picture’s superiority, they confidently claimed, derived from its similarity to the counterpane in their grandmother’s house, for example, or its resemblance to the ocean in Florida. Were they not the victim of a cunningly designed, cold-blooded experiment, there would be no reason on earth to doubt their word. As it is, like the neighbours of the new owner of both a midlife crisis and a splendid new car, we chuckle behind our hands at the poor sap’s humiliating lack of insight.

  As experiments of this sort so mercilessly reveal, our fumbling efforts at detection are more Clouseau than Poirot. As we attempt to understand ourselves, our speculations as to why we are feeling what we are feeling can carry us way off course. Remember the Stanford students described in ‘The Deluded Brain’ who, under hypnotic suggestion, felt unusually aroused but couldn’t recall the reason for it?16 The ideas they came up with to explain their unexpected sensations were not only wrong, they bordered on the pathological.

  And it’s not just our feelings that can bamboozle us this way. According to self-perception theory, the reasons behind our actual behaviour are also something of a mystery to us.17 Lacking enlightenment, we have to perform the cumbersome task of placing ourselves on the psychiatrist’s couch whenever we want to know why we did certain things. And, as we would with anyone else whose inner tickings we wished to probe, we infer our own motives from anything around us. Nursery-school children were the targets in the classic experiment exploring this seemingly improbable hypothesis.18 Researchers, armed with felt-tip pens, descended upon these young innocents. Some of the children were told that, if they busied themselves drawing with the pens, then they’d be rewarded with both a gold star and a ribbon (two thrilling items for your average preschooler). True to this promise, after the children had scribbled away for a while, the researchers solemnly presented them with the sticker and ribbon they had earned. Other children, by contrast, were also given a selection of felt-tip pens to play with, but no particular incentive to use them.

  A few days later the researchers returned to the nursery, once again equipped with the pens. This time, however, the pens were casually left lying about for the children to play with if they pleased. The researchers wanted to know which children would be most drawn to them: those who had been rewarded a few days earlier, or those whose hands remained chastely ungreased by the bribes. Any parent who has sunk to the use of corrupting acts of enticement – that is, any parent – will assume that the proud owners of the stars and ribbons would choose to play longer with the pens. That’s what fits best with our practical philosophy of parenting, after all: you bribe your children into behaving the way you’d like. But in fact it was the unrewarded children who spent more time playing with the pens. The reason, according to self-perception theory, is this. When the children saw this optional pastime spread out on the tabletops for the second time, they had to decide whether or not they wanted to play with them. And so their brains asked themselves, ‘How do I like drawing with felt-tip pens?’ The brains of the children in the unrewarded group answered along the lines of, ‘Well, I spent all that time drawing with the pens last week, so I guess I must enjoy it. I think I’ll have a go at a surrealist portrait of Mum. Tra-la-la!’ But the brains of the kids in the rewarded group replied, ‘Dammit, not bloody pens again. I know I played with them last week, but that was only to get the star and the ribbon. Which way’s the sandpit?’

  These experiments, revealing as they do the cloak-and-dagger methods of the secretive brain, have unsettling implications for us all. When we reflect on major issues in our lives – why we prefer this car or that house, why we are in this particular career, or with that particular person – the answers that we come up with are just best guesses. They may have little to do with the truth.

  We have learned more than a few disturbing facts about our unconscious. Nonetheless, its description as a mental butler still seems reasonably apt. Although, unasked, the unconscious takes matters into its own hands rather often, and keeps you in the dark regarding some rather weighty matters, nonetheless it is basically on your side. And, most important of all, despite these liberties taken by the unconscious, the conscious you is still more or less in charge. You think, ‘I’ll
take a shower’, and then you take a shower. You think, ‘I’ll go upstairs now’ and lo, there you are, trotting upstairs. You think, ‘I shall move my right index finger and tap it on the desk’ and – tap! – your finger submits to the command. Your fingers, like all your limbs and appendages, are servants of the masterful conscious will. All day, every day, we all decide to do things which – save for interruptions or distractions – we will then do. It’s obvious to the meanest intelligence that it’s the conscious will that makes things happen.

  But is that really the chain of command, or do we just think that it is? After all, we know that our bodies do sometimes submit to commands to which our conscious selves can’t possibly lay claim. Consider the hand that flies off the hot saucepan handle before we even feel the pain, or the foot that slams on the brake before we consciously register the traffic hazard ahead. These reflexes aren’t preceded by any conscious decision, and we’re happy to acknowledge the role of our unconscious mind in their speedy initiation. But suppose for a moment that there’s a place in our mind we know nothing about – call it the secret commander – that spends its day sending ideas to our conscious mind. ‘Tell it to think “I’ll tap my right index finger now”’, the secret commander shouts, and off the message goes, up to the conscious. In the meantime, the neuronal grunt workers get going obeying the secret commander by arranging the finger tap itself.