Chapter 1. Freud’s Genius, Freud’s Myopia

This book is concerned with two main questions: Why is it that people often do not know themselves very well (e.g., their own characters, why they feel the way they do, or even the feelings themselves)? And how can they increase their self knowledge? (3)

People cannot directly examine how many parts of their minds work, such as basic processes of perception, memory, and language comprehension, not because it would be anxiety provoking to do so, but because these parts of the mind are inaccessible to conscious awareness–quite possibly because they evolved before consciousness did… Consciousness is a limited-capacity system, and to survive in the world people must be able to process a great deal of information outside of awareness. (8)

It is often better to deduce the nature of our hidden minds by looking outward at our behavior and how others react to us, and coming up with a good narrative. In essence, we must be like biographers of our own lives, distilling out behavior and feelings into a meaningful and effective narrative. The best way to author a good self-story is not necessarily to engage in a lot of navel-gazing introspection, trying to uncover hidden feelings and motives. (16)

Chapter 2. The Adaptive Unconscious

“Outside consciousness there rolls a vast tide of life which is perhaps more important to us than the little isle of our thoughts which lies within our ken.” -E. S. Dallas (1866) (17)

An important part of personality is the ability to respond in quick, habitual ways to the social world. It also means having a healthy psychological defense system, warding off threats to the self in reasonable, adaptive ways. Much of this personality system operates outside of awareness. (22)

A better working definition of the unconscious is mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior. (23)

The adaptive unconscious is capable of learning complex information, and indeed, under some circumstances it learns information better and faster than our conscious minds. (26)

The ventromedial prefrontal region of the brain, a small area located behind the bridge of the nose, is associated with the production of gut feelings. (33)

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. (36)

How do normal people focus on relevant information and screen out everything else? The cocktail-party example… 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…
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 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 how recently it has been encountered. (37)

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 out environments; in psychological parlance, certain ideas and categories become chronically accessible as a result of frequent use in the past. (37)

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. (38)

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. (38)

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. (39)

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. (40)

Chapter 3. 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)

In other words, we know less than we think we do about our own minds, and exert less control over our own minds than we think. And yet we retain some ability to influence how our minds work. Even if the adaptive unconscious is operating intelligently outside our purview, we can influence the information it uses to make inferences and form goals. One of the purposes of this book is to suggest ways this can be done. (48)

Table: The adaptive unconscious versus consciousness (49)

Perhaps the best use of consciousness is to put ourselves in situations in which our adaptive unconscious can work smoothly. This is best achieved by recognizing what our nonconscious needs and traits are and planning accordingly. (52)

Automatic thinking has five defining features: it is nonconscious, fast, unintentional, uncontrollable, and effortless. (52)

The Rigidity of the Adaptive Unconscious:
A disadvantage of a system that processes information quickly and efficiently is that it is slow to respond to new, contradictory information. In fact we unconsciously bend new information to fit our preconceptions, making it next to impossible to realize that our preconceptions are wrong. (54)

We rarely pretend to be a rock or try to deceive a tree, precisely because we presume that they do not have minds that contain beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. (60) #inanimateobjects

To be sure, the adaptive unconscious can be rigid and inflexible, clinging to preconceptions and stereotypes even when they are disconfirmed, in contrast to the more flexible conscious mind… The adaptive unconscious is an older system designed to scan the environment quickly and detect patterns, especially ones that might pose a danger to the organism. It learns patterns easily but does not unlearn them very well; it is a fairly rigid, inflexible inferencemaker. It develops early and continues to guide behavior into adulthood.
Rather than playing the role of CEO, the conscious self develops more slowly and never catches up in some respects, such as in the area of pattern detection. But it provides a check-and-balance to the speed and efficiency of nonconscious learning, allowing people to think about and plan more thoughtfully about the future. (66)

The human mind is an incredible achievement, perhaps the most amazing in the history of the Earth. This does not mean, however, that it is an optimal or perfectly designed system. Our conscious knowledge of ourselves can be quite limited, to our peril. (66)

Chapter 4. Knowing Who We Are 

Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.
– H. F. Amiel, The Private Journal of Henri Frederic Amiel (1889)

We tell ourselves stories in order to live… We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
– Joan Didion, The White Album (1979)

Many of people’s chronic dispositions, traits, and temperaments are part of the adaptive unconscious, to which they have no direct access. Consequently, people are forced to construct theories about their own personalities from other sources, such as what they learn from their parents, their culture, and yes, ideas about what they prefer to be. These constructions may be driven less by repression and the desire to avoid anxiety than by the simple need to construct a coherent narrative about ourselves, in the absence of any direct access to our nonconscious personalities. (68) #freewill

But it makes little sense to talk about a single “self” when we consider that both the adaptive unconscious and the conscious self have regular patterns of responding to the social world. This distinction has largely been overlooked by psychological theories of personality. (68) #noself

It contrast to all these approaches, postmodernists argue that there is no single, coherent personality or self. In today’s complex world, the argument goes, people are subjected to a multitude of conflicting influences, making it very difficult to have a single, unified sense of “me.” The self may be fluid, changing as our culture, roles, and context change, and attempts to measure and define a core set of traits that people carry with them is meaningless. (70)

Situational influences can be very powerful, sometimes overwhelming individual differences in personality. (71)

Rather than a collection of static traits that we can use to classify people, Mischel argued, personality is better conceived as a set of unique cognitive and affective variables that determine how people construe the situation. People have chronic ways of interpreting and evaluating different situations, and it is these interpretations that influence their behavior. (71)

A lot of the confusion about personality and its relation to behavior has resulted from a failure to distinguish between the conscious and nonconscious systems. I believe that Mischel’s cognitive and affective personality system is best thought of as part of the adaptive unconscious, whereas other personality theories have focused more on people’s conscious construals of themselves. (72)

My central thesis is that human personality resides in two places: in the adaptive unconscious and in conscious construals of the self. The adaptive unconscious meets Allport’s definition of personality. It has distinctive, characteristic ways of interpreting the social environment and stable motives that guide people’s behavior. These dispositions and motives are measurable with indirect techniques (i.e., not by self-report questionnaires). They are rooted in early childhood, are in part genetically determined, and are not easily changed.
But the conscious self also meets Allport’s definition. Because people have no direct access to their nonconscious disposition and motives, they must construct a conscious self from other sources. The constructed self consists of life stories, possible selves, explicit motives, self-theories, and beliefs about the reasons for one’s feelings and behaviors. As Joan Didion says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Oddly, these two selves appear to be relatively independent. There is increasing evidence that people’s constructed self bears little correspondence to their nonconscious self. One consequence of this fact is that the two personalities predict different kinds of behavior. The adaptive unconscious is more likely to influence people’s uncontrolled, implicit responses…
Because people cannot directly observe their nonconscious dispositions, they must try to infer them indirectly by, for example, being good observers of their own behavior (e.g., how often they argue with their coworkers). How important is this kind of insight? It doesn’t have to be perfect, because some positive illusions are beneficial. However, it is to people’s benefit to make generally accurate inferences about the nature of their adaptive unconscious. (73)

In Jonathan Miller’s words, “Human beings owe a surprisingly large proportion of their cognitive and behavioral capacities to the existence of an ‘automatic self’ of which they have no conscious knowledge and over which they have little voluntary control.” (73) #freewill

As we have seen, Walter Mischel and his colleagues argued that people possess a unique set of cognitive and affective variables that determine how they react to the social world. They describe five components of this “personality mediating system” that guide people’s behavior: encodings (people’s construals of themselves, others, and situations); expectancies about themselves and the social world; affect and emotions; goals and values; and competencies and self-regulatory plans. In short, they argue, people have distinctive “if-then” rules that determine how they respond in a particular situation. (74)

It is as if we have our antennae up for certain kinds of information about other people. depending on which categories are accessible to us. And this happens quickly, with no conscious awareness. (77)

Perhaps the AAI taps people’s chronic level of attachment that has become the signature of the adaptive unconscious, whereas self-report questionnaires tap people’s conscious beliefs about their attachment relationships. But how can this be? Can we really have such disconnected systems that disagree on something as basic as an internal model of attachment relationships? The answer may be that we can, not only in the area of attachment but in other basic areas of personality as well. (82)

A controversy has ensued over which measure of motivation is the most valid: the TAT or self-report questionnaires. The answer, I suggest, is that both are valid measures but tap different levels of motivation, one that resides in the adaptive unconscious and the other that is part of people’s conscious explanation system… The TAT assesses implicit motives, whereas explicit, self-report measures assess self-attributed motives.
  Implicit motives are needs that people acquire in childhood that have become automatic and nonconscious. Self-attributed motives are people’s conscious theories about their needs that may often differ from their nonconscious needs. (82)

Dan McAdams has studied an important part of the conscious self-concept, namely the life stories that people construct about themselves, which he describes as a continuing narrative that people tell about their past, present, and future. The major function of these stories, McAdams argues, is to integrate the many aspects of oneself into a coherent identity that is stable over time but also subject to revision. McAdams’ work suggests that an important role of this deliberative system is to link together the many disparate parts of the self into a coherent story.
McAdams argues that life stories do not (and need not) correspond perfectly with external reality. They are people’s construals of their lives rather than the fact-based reporting of an objective historian. (87)

The personality psychologist Robert McCrae phrased this question well: “I do not yet know quite what to make of them. Are life stories the unifying themes that guide our life, as the jet stream guides weather systems, or are they mere epiphenomena, more-or-less adequate rationalizations and secondary elaborations that convey the gist of our life history in a form suitable for the occasion?” (87)

The conscious self system is not completely epiphenomenal; as we have seen, explicit beliefs about attachment and motivation influence some important social behaviors. (88)

Possible selves are conscious embodiments of our hopes and fears about ourselves, and these constructions shape our behavior, at least to some extent. (88)

There is evidence that some of the dispositions of the adaptive unconscious, such as temperament, have a genetic basis. It is also clear that culture and experience play a role. A hallmark of the adaptive unconscious is automaticity, whereby information is processed in rapid, nonconscious, involuntary ways. One way a construct can become automatic is through lots of repetition. People are not born with the kinds of “if-then” patterns of construal discussed by Mischel, or the chronically accessible constructs discussed by social psychologists. These constructs, rooted in childhood experiences, become automatic through frequent use. (89)

It appears to be to people’s advantage to develop conscious theories that correspond at least somewhat with the personality of their adaptive unconscious. (91)

Chapter 5. Knowing Why 

You are allowed to think that adult life consists of a constant exercise of personal will; but it wasn’t really like that, Jean thought. You do things, and only later do you see why you did them, if ever you do. 
-Julian Barnes, Staring at the Sun (1986)

But Gazzaniga and LeDoux have made the startling suggestion that we all share the tendency to confabulate explanations, arguing that the conscious verbal self often does not know why we do what we do and thus creates an explanation that makes the most sense. (97)

The point is that personality is not the only cause of behavior and people might be better at knowing how factors in their immediate social environments influence their feelings, judgment, and behaviors. (98)

Ah, Nisbett and I argued, it is true that people have privileged access to a great deal of information about themselves, such as the content of their current thoughts and memories and the object of their attention. But these are mental contents, not mental processes. The real action in the mind is the mental processing that produces feelings, judgments, and behaviors. Although we often have access to the results of these processes… we do not have access to the mental processes that produce them. (105)

In other words, to the extent that people’s responses are caused by the adaptive unconscious, they do not have privileged access to the causes and must infer them, just as Nisbett and I argued. But to the extent that people’s responses are caused by the conscious self, they have privileged access to the actual causes of these responses; in short, the Nisbett and Wilson argument was wrong about such cases. (106)

There may be relatively few cases in which a response is the pure product of only the adaptive unconscious or only conscious thoughts. (107)

The causal role of conscious thought has been vastly overrated; instead, it is often a post-hoc explanation of responses that emanated from the adaptive unconscious. (107)

There is considerable evidence that people are not very skilled at consciously observing the covariation between their responses and its antecedents. Sometimes a convaration is so striking that we can’t help but notice it, such as the fact that we broke out in hives immediately after eating pecans for the first time. More commonly there are many antecedents of our responses, and it is difficult to tease apart which ones are the causes. Because of this difficulty, people’s beliefs about covariation are often a function of their shared cultural theories, rather than deductions based on accurate observations of their own behavior. (109)

Averaging across several studies, there seems to be no net advantage to having privileged information about ourselves: the amount of accuracy obtained by people about the causes of their responses is nearly identical with the amount of accuracy obtained by strangers. (112)