by Guy Claxton
A study by C. J. Patton gives a graphic demonstration of this effect. She chose as her experimental subjects two groups of female college students, one comprising women with ‘normal’ attitudes to eating, and the other women who had a history of eating disorders. Clinical data suggested that many women in the latter group would have developed a very ambivalent attitude to food, on the one hand craving it as a source of comfort, and on the other disliking themselves for being so dependent, or for becoming overweight (at least in their own eyes) as a result, and struggling to control the desire to eat, especially when in company. The question was: how would these women behave if they became anxious, but were unaware of either the fact or the source of their anxiety?
Like the Pittman and Bornstein study, Patton’s experiment involved two parts. In the first, all the women took what was described as a ‘visual discrimination test’, in which they were to try to identify sentences that were flashed on a screen. There were two key sentences: one, which has previously been shown to be capable of inducing some anxiety in many subjects, was ‘Mummy is leaving me’, and the other, a neutral control, was ‘Mummy is loaning it’. The sentences were flashed either subliminally, for four milliseconds, or consciously, for 200 milliseconds. Half of each of the two groups was flashed one of these messages, and the other half the other. Following this, the subjects went on to take part in the second experiment, in which they were to do a taste test on three different types of biscuit. After explaining this latter task, the experimenter left each subject alone with three full bowls of biscuits to complete the test. After the supposed taste test was completed, the experimenter checked to see how many biscuits each subject had eaten.
The results showed that the neutral sentence had no effect on biscuit consumption for any of the subjects, regardless of whether it was consciously seen or not. However, after having been shown ‘Mummy is leaving me’, the women with the eating disorders consumed twice as many biscuits as the other women – an average of twenty – but only when the sentence had been projected subliminally. For the ‘normal’ subjects at both exposure durations, and for the eating-disordered subjects when the sentence was clearly visible, the number of biscuits eaten was the same as in the neutral, control condition. When perception is conscious, it becomes possible to override and control our impulses. When we are unconscious of having been affected, we are less able to be vigilant.8
A similar effect can be produced if our attention is distracted from the crucial information. J. M. Darley and P. H. Gross asked people to estimate the intellectual ability of some hypothetical children, given various kinds of information. When the only background they were given was the parents’ jobs and incomes – their ‘socioeconomic status’ – this information did not influence their judgements. However, another group of subjects were additionally shown a videotape of the children apparently performing somewhat ambiguously on an intelligence test; that is, doing well on some of the test items, and poorly on others. Under these circumstances, when people had been told that one of the children they had watched came from a poor family, they would rate that child’s intellectual ability lower than that of an equivalent child whom they had been led to believe came from a better-off family. Apparently, when people are aware that they might be biased by such information, they can take steps to compensate. But the effort of focusing on interpreting the child’s concrete performance on the test seemed to mask the subjects’ awareness of the need to be vigilant about their own stereotypes, and thus their assumptions were able to sidle into their judgements unnoticed.9
An experiment by Larry Jacoby at McMaster University in Canada emphasises both the depth of the unconscious interpretations we make, and the power that conscious awareness has to reorganise these interpretations. His study shows that the unconscious can even mislead us about what kind of experience we are having: whether it is a new perception or a memory, for example. These basic categories of experience are not ‘given’; they, too, are judgements or attributions about which it is possible to be mistaken. Jacoby has shown that these judgements tend to be heavily influenced simply by how easily or fluently something is processed by the undermind. We know from many previous studies that having recognised something once makes it easier to recognise again; there is a residual effect of the first recognition that facilitates the second. And it may be this relative ease of processing that underlies the judgement that something has occurred in the recent past. The decision to treat an experience as a memory, rather than as a fresh perception, is, at least in part, an inference based on the fact that we were able to identify and categorise it faster than might have been expected. If this is so, we might be able to trick the undermind into calling something a memory by making it easier to process. (There is clearly the basis of a psychological explanation for déjà. vu experiences here.)
Jacoby’s experiment managed to create exactly this confusion.10 He and his colleagues showed their volunteers a list of words, and after a short delay, showed them another longer list, one word at a time, that contained the words from the first list mixed up with some new words. Subjects were asked to say, of each word on the second list, whether it had been on the first list or not: in other words, to classify their experience of each word on the second list as a ‘memory’ or just a ‘perception’. The experimenters’ cunning manipulation was to make some of the test words slightly easier to read than others by varying the clarity of the print. They found that new words in clearer type were likely to be falsely ‘recognised’ as having been on the original list. Unconsciously people thought that the relative ease of processing the clear words was due to having seen them before, so they judged them to be memories.
Recent laboratory studies of ‘false memory syndrome’ have shown that judging an experience to be a ‘memory’ (and therefore ‘real’), rather than a fantasy, is also influenced by the nature of the experience. It may be that the more vividly you can get someone to fantasise, the more likely they are subsequently to misrepresent this experience as a true memory.11 Certainly, it is not uncommon to experience some confusion, especially just after waking, as to whether one is recalling a lifelike dream from the night before, or a memory of an event several days ago.
There is an additional feature of Jacoby’s study that is very significant. The illusion of memory is removed if people are told (or if they notice for themselves) that the visual clarity of the second batch of words is being manipulated. If they are conscious that ease of processing is being influenced by another factor, they can take this into account in their judgements. They can keep the two variables separate. But if people don’t know what is going on, then the undermind bundles the two different sources of ease – memory and clarity – together, and comes up with some wrong answers. As with the previous examples, when we are consciously aware of an influence, we may be able to guard against it or compensate for it. We can see that what we are doing is making an inference or an assumption. When we are not aware of the same influence, when it comes to us subliminally and is, so to speak, already dissolved in our perception by the time it has arrived in consciousness, then we implicitly trust it.
In everyday life, this phenomenon of self-monitoring has a large impact on how we form, and deal with, our stereotypes. For example, look at Figure 7 and ask yourself what the doctor might reply.
Figure 7. What does the doctor reply?
Many people think that the doctor might say something like ‘You look quite slim to me’, while thinking to himself ‘I wonder if we have a case of anorexia nervosa here?’ In fact what the doctor says is: ‘Don’t worry; a lot of men tend to put on weight around your age.’ Even those who pride themselves on their sensitivity to gender issues may unconsciously be trapped by the picture into assuming that the man is the doctor. When the stereotype is unconsciously stirred into the perception, then we may start to try to make sense out of a seemingly puzzling situation – not realising that it is the assumption that is problematic, not the reality. But of course on
ce we are aware of the assumption, the whole picture – literally – changes.12
There is a third feature of unconscious perception which the original experiment by Pittman and Bornstein reveals, and that is the tendency for consciousness to ‘fill the explanatory gap’ with a plausible story, and not to recognise that this is what it has done. Their subjects ‘explained’ their selection of one job candidate over the other on the basis of an apparently rational appraisal of the relative importance of computing and writing ability. They did not offer this as a conjecture about their thought processes, but as a bona fide account of what actually happened in their minds. Yet the evidence shows that they are mistaken. Their choice is clearly and powerfully influenced by the manipulation of which they have no conscious knowledge. Their explanation of the choice, though they genuinely believe it to be true, is actually based on what would have been plausible. They do not intrinsically value computing over writing (or vice versa); they are just trying to generate a rationale for how their preference came about.
This tendency to confabulate is not an isolated or occasional phenomenon. There is plenty of evidence that we do it much more than we think. Occasionally we may acknowledge that there is an element of surmise in our reasoning, as when we account for behaving unreasonably by saying ‘I must have been tired’; but often we buy our own reasoning uncritically, and with complete conviction (and confidently assert that ‘I snapped because I was tired’). There are now many experimental illustrations of the ways in which we misconstrue our own motivation. In one, a ‘street trader’ laid out several different pairs of tights and invited people to say which they preferred. Whichever order they were arranged in, it turned out to be the tights that were on the right-hand end of the row that were chosen most frequently. Clearly there is a statistical bias towards choosing the item in that position, regardless (within limits, obviously) of what it is. Yet when asked why they had chosen the tights they did, no one said ‘because they were at the right-hand end’.13
In another series of studies on the so-called ‘bystander’ effect, people were observed in a real-life situation, waiting for a train for example, and a stooge on the platform would suddenly fall to the ground and start groaning. The question is: who goes to the person’s aid? What is observed, across a variety of different conditions, is that the more people there are around, the less likely any one person is to offer help. But if you ask those who stood by why they didn’t get involved, they will tell you all sorts of stories which make no mention of the number of other people. And if you suggest to them that the number of bystanders might have influenced them, they will dismiss the possibility out of hand. In all these cases, people do not know they are confabulating – and would be most indignant if you were to suggest they were. Their conscious interpretation is their reality.14
The more we acknowledge the existence of the undermind, and its incredible ability to register events and make connections, the less we may need to turn to magical explanations for mental phenomena that at first sight appear strange or supernatural. Take what is sometimes referred to as the ‘sixth sense’, the rather mysterious ability which is sometimes invoked to account for the experience of somehow ‘knowing’ that you are being looked at, or that there is someone else in a room that you had supposed to be empty. But is it a sixth sense that is at work, or merely a collection of unconscious impressions derived from the other five? Perhaps this form of intuition could be explained on the basis of a collection of minimal unconscious impressions derived from the five ordinary senses, each of which is too weak to impinge on consciousness itself, but which nevertheless add up to an inexplicable ‘feeling’? There do not seem to be any empirical studies of this, but the possibility is effectively described in Tender is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald, who was himself fascinated by the activities of the cognitive unconscious.
In an inhabited room there are refracting objects only half noticed: varnished wood, more or less polished brass, silver and ivory, and beyond these a thousand conveyors of light and shadow so mild that one scarcely thinks of them as that, the tops of picture-frames, the edges of pencils or ash-trays, of crystal or china ornaments; the totality of this refraction appealing to equally subtle reflexes of the vision as well as to those associational fragments in the subconscious that we seem to hang on to, as the glass-fitter keeps the irregularly shaped pieces that may do, some time. This fact might account for what Rosemary afterwards mystically described as realizing there was some one in the room, before she could determine it.15
We might even venture that a heightened subliminal sensitivity to other people, or even to the contents of one’s own mind, might account for some ‘telepathic’ phenomena. As Pierce and Jastrow suggested, ‘we gather what is passing in one another’s minds in large measure from sensations so faint that we are not aware of having them . . . certain telepathic phenomena may be explained in this way’. It is possible that their thinking on the matter may even have been influenced directly by a study, also reported in the 1880s by the French physician, philosopher and psychologist Theodore Flournoy, of the renowned medium Catherine Muller, or ‘Helen Smith’ as she was pseudonymously known. In her meetings she would fall into a trance and undergo personality changes in which she would re-enact scenes from her previous lives. She became, in turn, a fifteenth-century Indian princess, Marie Antoinette, and a visitor from the planet Mars, in which latter incarnation she was able to talk in ‘Martian’, and discuss the planet’s landscape, vegetation and people in extraordinary detail. All her ‘characters’ were most convincing, and their ‘messages’ for her clients often highly pertinent and perceptive. Flournoy gained her trust and searched open-mindedly for a ‘natural explanation’; one which would credit her with being neither a genuine space and time traveller, nor a fraud.
By meticulously researching her early life, Flournoy was able to show – just as Lowe had done for Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’ – that much of her material had come from books she had read as a child and had, consciously, completely forgotten. He described her behaviour under trance as ‘romances of the subliminal imagination’, and each character represented a reversion of her personality to a different phase of her childhood. His analysis of ‘Martian’, he argued, showed that it was based on the syntax of French, although the linguist Victor Henry, who also studied her, contended that much of the Martian vocabulary was derived from Hungarian – the mother tongue of Helen Smith’s father.16 In this, as in other cases, Flournoy found no evidence to convince him that her perceptions of other people could not similarly be accounted for on the basis of some combination of buried knowledge and an acute subliminal sensitivity to non-verbal, so-called ‘paralinguistic’ cues.
No such investigation, however scrupulous, demonstrates that genuine reversion to past lives, or contact with the spirit realm, does not occur. And any particular case is always arguable. But such careful and even-handed investigations do at least require us to respect the powers of the undermind, and they might, regrettably to some people, advise caution in interpreting such exotic phenomena as out-of-the-body and near-death experiences, clairvoyance and divination, and so on. There are those who see such experiences as incontrovertible evidence of supernatural powers or influences, and use them as ‘proof’ that there is more to life than is dreamt of in our current psychology. It is often claimed that they could not have come from ‘within’; that there must be real spirits out there who are talking to us, or real powers of telepathy which defy the known laws of physics and physiology. Maybe there are. But the case for the very existence of some of these strange experiences, let alone any particular explanation, is not yet established. And at least in some cases the magical conclusion may be premature – because the role of the unconscious has not been fully appreciated. The implicit identification of mind with consciousness is manifested time and again in esoteric circles in the assumption that, if we cannot find an explanation for some phenomenon in conscious terms, then ‘the mind’ cannot have
been responsible at all.
CHAPTER 8
Self-Consciousness
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life
George Meredith
During the course of the second year of his therapy, a middle-aged client, a man of considerable intellect and accomplishment, was talking about the negative patterns in his life. The therapist, Joseph Masling, observed: ‘You seem to think you have no right to be happy.’ The man immediately began to fidget almost uncontrollably, before eventually subsiding into stillness. After a long silence, he said, ‘What did you say?’ Another of Masling’s clients, a young woman on the verge of successfully completing her graduate training programme, behaved in almost exactly the same way when Masling commented, ‘Have you noticed how much easier it is for you to tell me about your failures than your successes?’ She too, after a lot of squirming, had to ask him to repeat what he had said.1
The undermind is a layer of activity within the human psyche that is richer and more subtle than consciousness. It can register and respond to events which, for one reason or another, do not become conscious. We have at our disposal a shimmering database full of pre-conceptual information, much of which is turned down by consciousness as being too contentious or unreliable. Conscious awareness decides what it will accept as valid – and thereby misses dissonant patterns and subtler nuances. While in d-mode, consciousness tends to present to us a world that is somewhat cautious and conventional. Sometimes this is appropriate, but if we get stuck there and lose the key to the twilight world that subserves it, we mothball valuable ways of knowing which can find sense and weave meaning out of a collection of the faintest threads and scraps.