by David Brooks
Some researchers argue that whatever its merits, the unconscious is still best seen as a primitive beast or an immature child. In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, then of the University of Chicago, say that the conscious Level 2 is like Mr. Spock—mature, reflective, and far-seeing. Unconscious Level 1, they say, is like Homer Simpson—an impulsive, immature goof ball. When the alarm clock rings at five a.m., the mature Spock knows that it’s in his best interest to get out of bed, but Homer just wants to throw the thing across the room.
And there’s some truth to that goofball view of Level 1. The unconscious is subjective. It treats information like a fluid, not a solid. When information gets stored in the brain, it doesn’t just get filed away. It seems to get moved about. The recall process of a seventy-year-old activates different and more scattered parts of the brain than the recall process of a twenty-six-year-old. Memory doesn’t actually retrieve information. It reweaves it. Things that happen later can transform your memory of something that happened before. For these and many other reasons, your unconscious data-retrieval system is notoriously unreliable.
One day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded, Ulric Neisser asked a class of 106 students to write down exactly where they were when they heard the news. Two and a half years later, he asked them the same question. In that second interview, 25 percent of the students gave completely different accounts of where they were. Half had significant errors in their answers and less than 10 percent remembered with any real accuracy. Results such as these are part of the reason people make mistakes on the witness stand when they are asked months later to recall a crime. Between 1989 and 2007, 201 prisoners in the United States were exonerated on the basis of DNA evidence. Seventy-seven percent of those prisoners had been convicted on the basis of mistaken eyewitness accounts.
The unconscious is also extremely sensitive to context—current feelings influence all sorts of mental activities. Research by Taylor Schmitz of the University of Toronto suggests that when people are in a good mood, they have better peripheral vision. In another experiment a group of doctors was given a small bag of candy and another group was given nothing. Then they were all asked to look at a patient’s history and make a diagnosis. The doctors who got the candy were quicker to detect the liver problem than those who didn’t.
Happiness researchers go around asking people if their lives are happy. They’ve noticed that when they ask on sunny days, people are more likely to say their entire lives are happy, whereas if they ask on rainy days the wet weather changes their entire global perspective on the state of their existence. (Though if people are told to consciously reflect on the day’s weather, the effect goes away.)
In one ingenious experiment researchers asked young men to walk across a rickety bridge in British Columbia. Then, while their hearts were still thumping from the frightening bridge, a young woman approached them to fill out a questionnaire. She gave them her phone number, under the pretext of doing further research. Sixty-five percent of the men from the bridge called her later and asked for a date. Only 30 percent of the men she approached while they were sitting on a bench called later. The bridge guys were so energized by the rickety bridge, they attributed their excitement to the woman who met them on the other side.
Then there is the problem of immediate rewards. The unconscious is impulsive. It wants to have good feelings now. After all, Level 1 evolved to protect us from immediate pain, the kind that might result from being jumped by a lion.
As a result, we may be aware of our long-term desire to lose weight, but we want the donut now. We may know the virtues of objective perspective, but we still love hearing a commentator affirm a position we already share. Fans at a baseball game become utterly convinced that their own player beat the tag at home plate, while the fans of the other team select their perceptions differently and arrive at the pleasing conclusion that he was out. “We hear and apprehend only what we already half know,” Henry David Thoreau observed.
Then there is the problem of stereotypes. The unconscious mind finds patterns. It even finds them where none exist and makes all sorts of vague generalizations. For example most people believe shooters in a basketball game go through hot and cold streaks. They detect the pattern. But a mountain of research has found no evidence of hot and cold streakiness in the NBA. A shooter who has made two consecutive shots is as likely to miss his third attempt as his career shooting percentage would predict.
People are also quick to form stereotypes about one another. Research subjects were asked to guess the weight of a certain man. When they were told he was a truck driver, they guessed more. When told he was a dancer, they guessed less. Most people, no matter how well intentioned, no matter what their race, harbor unconscious racial prejudices. As part of Project Implicit, psychologists at the University of Virginia, the University of Washington, and Harvard have administered hundreds of thousands of tests in which they flash white or black faces and ask test takers to make implicit associations. This project’s work indicated that 90 percent of the people showed unconscious bias. The prejudices against the elderly in similar studies were even more profound.
Finally, the unconscious mind is really bad at math. For example, consider this problem: Let’s say you spent $1.10 on a pen and pad of paper. If you spent a dollar more for the pad than the pen, how much did the pen cost? Level 1 wants to tell you that the pen cost 10 cents, because in its dumb, blockheaded way, it wants to break the money into the $1 part and the 10-cent part, even though the real answer is that you spent 5 cents for the pen.
Because of this tendency, people are bad at calculating risks. Level 1 develops an inordinate fear of rare but spectacular threats, but ignores threats that are around every day. People fear planes, even though everybody knows car travel is more dangerous. They fear chain saws, even though nearly ten times more people are injured each year on playground equipment.
Overall, the unconscious mind has some serious shortcomings when it comes to making good decisions. So there is a reason Taggert and his deference committee went to college and B-School, a reason why they mastered methodical ways of analyzing data. But there is another side to this coin. There are things Level 1 sees that Level 2 just doesn’t. There are reasons to think that the unconscious mind is quite smart indeed.
The Hidden Oracle
In the first place, conscious processes are nestled upon the unconscious ones. It is nonsensical to talk about rational thought without unconscious thought because Level 2 receives its input and its goals and its directional signals from Level 1. The two systems have to intertwine if a person is going to thrive. Furthermore, the unconscious is just more powerful than the conscious mind. Level 1 has vast, implicit memory systems it can draw upon, whereas Level 2 relies heavily upon the working memory system, the bits of information that are consciously in mind at any given moment. The unconscious consists of many different modules, each with its own function, whereas the conscious mind is just one module. Level 1 has much higher processing capacity. Measured at its highest potential, the conscious mind still has a processing capacity 200,000 times weaker than the unconscious.
Moreover, many of Level 1’s defects are the flip side of its virtues. The unconscious is very sensitive to context. Well, sometimes it’s really important to be sensitive to context. The unconscious treats information like a fluid, not a solid. Well, sometimes situations are ambiguous and it is useful to be flexible. The unconscious is quick to make generalizations and to project stereotypes. Well, daily life would be impossible if you didn’t rely on generalizations and stereotypes. The unconscious can be fuzzy. Well, most of life is conducted amidst uncertainty, and it’s useful to have mental processes that can handle uncertainty.
If you want to get a sense of the difficult tasks the unconscious performs day to day, start with some of the most basic. The unconscious monitors where your body parts are at any moment through a sixth sense called proprioception. The physician Jonathan Cole documented the
case of Ian Waterman, who suffered nerve damage and lost parts of this unconscious sense. Through a process of painstaking work over many years, Waterman was able to use conscious thinking to monitor his body. He laboriously taught himself to walk again, to get dressed, and even to drive a car. The problem came when he was standing in the kitchen one night and there was a power outage. He could not see where his limbs were and hence could not control them. He collapsed to the floor into a tangle of body parts.
This unconscious ability to converse with the sensations of the body is not trivial. The body delivers messages that are an integral part of thinking, in all sorts of strange ways. If you read people an argument while you ask them to move their arms in a “pushing away” direction, they will be more hostile to the argument than if you read it to them while they are making a “pulling in” movement. A brain could not work if it was just sitting in a jar somewhere, cut off from motor functions.
The unconscious is also capable of performing incredibly complex tasks without any conscious assistance. It takes conscious attention to learn to drive, but once the task is mastered, the knowledge gets sent down to the unconscious, and it becomes possible to drive for miles and miles while listening to the radio and talking to a passenger and sipping coffee without consciously attending to the road. Without even thinking about it, most people treat strangers courteously, avoid needless confrontations, and feel pained by injustice.
The unconscious is responsible for peak performance. When a beginner learns a task, there is a vast sprawl of brain activity. When an expert does it unconsciously, there is just a little pulse. The expert is performing better by thinking less. When she’s at the top of her game, the automatic centers of her brain are controlling her movements. The sportscasters would say she’s “unconscious.” If she were to think more about how to swing her golf club or sing her aria, she would do worse. She would, as Jonah Lehrer observes, be “choking on thought.”
Then there is perception. As it absorbs data the unconscious simultaneously interprets, organizes, and creates a preliminary understanding. It puts every discrete piece of information in context. Blindsight is one of the most dramatic illustrations of unconscious perceptions. People who have suffered damage to the visual areas of the brain, usually as the result of strokes, cannot consciously see. But Beatrice de Gelder of Tilburg University asked a man with this damage to walk down a cluttered hallway. He deftly zigzagged down the hall, navigating around the obstacles to get to the other end. When scientists flash cards with shapes on them to other sufferers of this “blindness,” they guess the shapes on the card with impressive accuracy. The unconscious proceeds when conscious sight is gone.
These perceptual skills can be astonishingly subtle. Many chicken farms employ professional chicken sexers. They look at newly hatched chicks and tell whether the chicks are male or female even though, to the untrained eye, the chicks all look the same. Experienced sexers can look at eight hundred to one thousand chicks an hour and determine their gender with 99 percent accuracy. How do they figure it out? They couldn’t tell you. There is just something different about the males and females, and they know it when they see it.
In a test that has been conducted by many researchers, subjects are told to follow an X as it jumps from one quadrant of a computer screen to another. The movement of the X is governed by a complex formula in which the location of the next X appearance is governed by the previous sequence of appearances. Nonetheless, subjects can guess where the X will appear at a rate better than that of chance, and their guesses improve the longer they play the game. When researchers change the formula in the middle, the subject’s performance deteriorates, though they have no idea why.
Studies of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, meanwhile, suggest that some soldiers are much better than others at scanning a scene and detecting tiny clues—an out-of-place rock, an odd-looking pile of garbage—where there might be a roadside bomb in the area. Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney does not understand how he knew that a certain car contained a bomb and decided to take the evasive action that saved his life. “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling,” he told Benedict Carey of The New York Times.
In a landmark study, Antonio and Hanna Damasio and their colleagues asked their subjects to play a card game. They were given $2,000 and told to choose cards from four decks. If they picked good cards, they would win money. If they picked bad cards, they would lose. The decks were stacked. Two of the decks had slightly disproportionate numbers of very good cards and the other decks had disproportionate numbers of bad ones. By the fiftieth turn, many of the subjects declared that they “liked” certain decks better than others, though they could not tell you why. As soon as their tenth turn, some started sweating slightly as they reached for the risky deck.
The unconscious mind’s next great achievement is the ability to construct implicit beliefs. The Swiss doctor Édouard Claparède conducted a small experiment with one of his patients, who suffered from amnesia. He had to introduce himself each time he came to see her. But during one visit he concealed a pin in his hand. When they shook hands, the pin pricked her hand. The next time he came to see her, she still did not recognize him. He had to introduce himself all over again. She was happy to “meet” him but when he held out his hand for their traditional handshake, she refused to shake it. Unconsciously she had learned to associate his hand with pain.
This sort of implicit learning pervades every aspect of life. For example, there is no computer powerful enough to catch a fly ball. It would have to calculate too many trajectories to get the glove to hit the exact spot where the ball would land. But even a ten-year-old eventually learns the implicit rule that enables you to catch a ball. If a fly ball is hit to you, you look at the ball at a certain angle. You run toward where the ball is hit while keeping the angle of your gaze constant. If the angle drops, then speed up. If the angle rises, slow down. That one implicit rule will guide you to where the ball will land.
This ability to accumulate implicit heuristics applies to things even more important than baseball. The unconscious seems to encode information in two ways. There is what scientists call “verbatim encoding,” which seeks to encode exactly what happened during a certain event. There is also fuzzy-trace theory, which posits that the unconscious also tries to derive a gist, an imprecise rendering of an event that can be pulled out and applied the next time some vaguely similar event happens. If every time you went to a funeral you remembered the exact details of your behavior at all past funerals, you would get bogged down in useless details. But if you remember the gist of how to behave at a funeral—what to wear, how to walk, what tone of voice to adopt—then you will have a general idea of the socially acceptable form of behavior.
Implicit beliefs and stereotypes organize your world, and are absolutely essential to performing the normal activities of life. They tell you what sort of behavior you are likely to find when you attend a party, what sorts of people you are likely to see if you go to a Star Trek convention or a Bible study group or a rock concert. The unconscious understands the world by building generalizations.
By using these flexible tools, the unconscious is quite good at solving complex problems. The general rule is that conscious processes are better at solving problems with a few variables or choices, but unconscious processes are better at solving problems with many possibilities and variables. Conscious processes are better at solving problems when the factors are concretely defined. Unconscious processes are better when everything is ambiguous.
In one experiment Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran F. Nordgren of the University of Amsterdam and colleagues gave a group of subjects a complex string of forty-eight pieces of information about four different apartments. One of the apartments was made more convenient and attractive than the others (it was described in positive ways, while the others were described in mixed or negative ways). Then the subjects were split into three groups. One group was asked to choose the best apartment i
mmediately. Another group was given a few minutes to think about it. A third group was told they would make a choice in a few minutes, but was then distracted during that entire period with another unrelated task.
Fifty-nine percent of the people in the distracted group chose the favored apartment, compared to 47 percent of those in the conscious thinkers group and 36 percent of those in the one for immediate choosers. While they were distracted, their Level 1 processes had been churning away. Because they had relied upon Level 1 with its superior processing capacity, they had made a holistic choice, factoring in the full array of variables. The conscious thinkers tended to pick out just a few characteristics, and couldn’t process the whole. The immediate choosers did worst, illustrating the important point that unconscious thinking is not the same as snap-judgment thinking. Level 1 does better when it has time to think, just as Level 2 does.
Timothy Wilson did an experiment, later replicated by Dijksterhuis, in which he gave students a choice of five different art posters, and then later surveyed to see if they still liked their choice. People who were told to consciously scrutinize their choices were least happy with their posters weeks later. People who looked at the poster briefly and then chose later were happiest. Dijksterhuis and his colleagues then replicated the results in the real world with a study set in IKEA. Furniture selection is one of the most cognitively demanding choices any consumer makes. The people who had made their IKEA selections after less conscious scrutiny were happier than those who made their purchase after a lot of scrutiny. At a nearby store called De Bijenkorf, where the products on sale tend to be simpler, people who relied on conscious scrutiny were happier.
