The Rational Unconscious

3. The Rational Unconscious

We generally feel that we’re fairly knowledgeable about what’s going on in our heads—what it is we’re thinking about and what thinking processes are going on. That confidence can exceed what we can actually observe.

Many influences on judgment and behavior escape our notice. Stimuli we hardly take conscious note of—if we pay attention to them at all—can have marked effects on our behavior. Many of the stimuli that we do notice have consequences far beyond what seems plausible.

The priming studies discussed in this book report effects that participants did not recognize. In one, people walked more slowly after thinking about elderly people. We don’t know that we rated Jennifer’s performance more highly than Jasmine’s in part because we know that Jennifer has higher social class origins than Jasmine. We don’t realize that, contrary to our usual voting behavior, we endorsed higher tax rates for education in our community in part because the vote took place in a school in this election. We don’t realize that we signed Bob’s petition but not Bill’s in part because of the clearer font in Bob’s petition. We don’t realize that we found Marian to be a warmer person than Martha in part because we shared coffee with Marian and iced tea with Martha. Although it feels as if we have access to the workings of our minds, for the most part we don’t. But we’re quite agile in coming up with explanations for our judgments and behavior that bear little or no resemblance to the correct explanations. These facts about awareness and consciousness are laden with important implications for how we conduct our daily lives.

Consciousness and Confabulation

Many years ago, Timothy Wilson and I began a program to find out how people explain to themselves cognitive processes that influence their judgments in ordinary everyday situations.1 We expected to find that when people lack a theory about what’s going on in their heads, or hold to a wrong theory, they can misidentify what really was happening. And they do this because they have no window on cognitive processes—just theories about what those processes might be.

In one simple study we had people memorize word pairs. Then we asked them to participate in a word association study. For example, one of the word pairs in the first study was “ocean-moon.” In the word association task in the “second study” we asked them to name a detergent. You probably won’t be surprised to know that having memorized that particular word pair made it more likely that the detergent named would be “Tide.” (Some participants, of course, were not exposed to the “ocean-moon” pair so that we would have a base for comparison.) After the word association task was over, we asked participants why they came up with the word that they did. They almost never mentioned the word pair they had learned. Instead, participants focused on some distinctive feature of the target (“Tide is the best-known detergent”), some personal meaning of it (“My mother uses Tide”), or an emotional reaction to it (“I like the Tide box”).

When specifically asked about any possible effect of the word cues, approximately a third of the subjects did say that some of the words had probably had an effect. But there is no reason to assume that those participants were actually aware of the link. For some of the influential word pairs, not a single participant thought they had had an effect on their associations. For other pairs, many participants claimed there had been an influence of the word pairs, whereas in fact only very few had been influenced. (We know this because we know the extent to which learning the word pairs actually affected the probability of coming up with the target word.) This study establishes that not only can people fail to be aware of a process that went on in their heads, they can fail to retrieve that process when asked directly about it.

People can fail not merely to identify that some factor A influenced some outcome B, they may actually believe that it was outcome B that influenced factor A.

In some of our studies, participants’ reports about the reasons for their judgments actually reversed the real causal direction. For example, we showed students an interview with a college teacher who spoke with a European accent. For half the participants the teacher presented himself as a warm, agreeable, and enthusiastic person. The other half of the participants saw the teacher present himself as a cold, autocratic martinet who was distrustful of his students. Participants then rated the teacher’s likability and also three attributes that were by their nature essentially invariant across the two experimental conditions: his physical appearance, his mannerisms, and his accent.

Students who saw the warm teacher of course liked him much better than participants who saw the cold version of the teacher, and the students’ ratings of his attributes showed they were subject to a very marked halo effect. A halo effect occurs when knowing something very good about a person (or very bad) colors all kinds of judgments about the person. The great majority of the participants who saw the warm version rated the teacher’s appearance and mannerisms as attractive, and most were neutral about his accent. The great majority of the participants who saw the cold version rated all these qualities as unpleasant and irritating.

Were the participants who saw the friendly version of the teacher aware that their positive feelings for him had influenced their ratings of his attributes? And were those who saw the cold version aware that their negative feelings had influenced their ratings of his attributes? We asked this question of some of the participants. They strongly denied any effect of their positive or negative feelings for the teacher on their ratings of his attributes. (In effect, “Give me a break, of course I can make a judgment about someone’s accent without being influenced by how much I like him.”) We asked other participants the reverse question—how much did their feelings about the teacher’s attributes influence their overall liking for him? Participants who saw the warm version denied that their feelings about the teacher’s attributes influenced their overall evaluation of him. But participants who saw the cold version felt that their dislike of each of the three attributes had probably contributed to their dislike of him. So those participants got things exactly backward. Their dislike of the teacher had lowered their evaluation of his appearance, his mannerisms, and his accent, but they denied such an influence and maintained instead that their dislike of these attributes had decreased their overall liking of him!

So we can be confident that we have not been influenced by something that did in fact influence us, and we can be equally confident that something that did not influence us did have an effect. This degree of confusion can wreak havoc on our decisions about people. We don’t always know why we like them or dislike them, and therefore can make serious mistakes in dealing with them, trying, for example, to get them to change attributes and behavior that we think are making us dislike them but that are in fact neutral and have nothing to do with our overall feelings about them.

Subliminal Perception and Subliminal Persuasion

People needn’t be aware of a stimulus at all in order for it to affect them. The term “subliminal” is used to refer to a stimulus that a person is not consciously aware of. (A limen is the point at which a stimulus such as a light, noise, or occurrence of any kind becomes detectable.)

A famous finding in psychology is the discovery that the more times people are exposed to a stimulus of a given type—ditties, Chinese characters, Turkish words, people’s faces—the more people like the stimulus (so long as they don’t dislike the stimulus to begin with).2 This so-called mere familiarity effect is shown by a study in which people listen to a communication played for one ear while having various tone sequences piped into the other ear. It turns out that the more frequently people hear a given tone sequence, the more they like it. And this is true even when people have no awareness that the tones were played for them and no ability after the experiment is over even to distinguish tone sequences that had been played for them many times from those they had never heard.

The psychologists John Bargh and Paula Pietromonaco presented words on a computer screen for one-tenth of a second, and then to make sure the participants were unaware of what they had seen, they presented a “masking stimulus” consisting of a line of Xs where the word had been.3 Some participants were exposed to words with a hostile meaning and some to neutral words. The participants then read about “Donald,” whose behavior could be construed either as hostile or as merely neutral. (“A salesman knocked at the door, but Donald refused to let him enter.”) Participants exposed to the hostility-related words rated Donald as being more hostile than did participants exposed to the neutral words. Immediately after reading the paragraph, participants couldn’t distinguish words they had seen from those they hadn’t, and didn’t even know that words had been flashed at all.

Findings such as these raise a question as to whether there is such a thing as subliminal persuasion—being influenced to believe something or do something in response to a stimulus presented at such a low intensity that people can’t report whether they have seen anything. There’s been quite a bit of research on this topic over the years, but very little of it was well enough conducted to be convincing one way or the other.

Some of the marketing research discussed here suggests that subliminal stimuli can in fact influence product choice. For example, if you make people thirsty and then expose them to a particular brand name presented so briefly that they’re unaware of it, they’re more likely to choose that brand when given a choice between it and a brand that wasn’t presented.4

But there’s no question that stimuli that are supraliminal (above the level of awareness)—but seemingly incidental and little noticed—can have an effect on consumer choices.5 Even so trivial a stimulus as the color of the pen someone uses to indicate product choice can be influential.6 People writing with an orange pen choose more orange products in a consumer survey than people writing with a green pen. Contextual cues matter for consumer choice as for everything else.

How to Perceive Before Perceiving

In the popular mind, the unconscious is primarily the repository of repressed thoughts about violence and sex and other things best unmentioned. In fact, however, the conscious pot has no right to call the unconscious kettle black. There’s plenty of sex and violence roaming around in the conscious mind. If you give a buzzer to college students and have them write down what they were thinking about each time the buzzer goes off, much of the time it’s a sexual thought. And the great majority of college students report that they’ve entertained thoughts of killing someone.7

Rather than just mucking about with unacceptable thoughts, the unconscious mind is constantly doing things that are useful—even indispensable.

The unconscious mind “preperceives” for us. Think of our perceptual systems as monitoring unconsciously a vast array of stimuli. The conscious mind is aware of only a small fraction of what’s in that array. The unconscious mind forwards to the conscious mind those stimuli that will interest you or that you need to deal with.

If you doubt this claim, think of the situation of being in a room with a grandfather clock. You’ve been listening to its ticking, whether you know it or not. How can we be sure of that? Because if the clock stops ticking, you instantly notice that. Or consider the “cocktail party phenomenon.” You’re standing in a room with thirty other people straining to hear the person you’re talking to over the hubbub. You’re hearing nothing but what she is saying. But no, actually, you’ve been hearing a lot else besides. If someone five feet away from you mentions your name, you instantly pick that up and orient toward the speaker.

Just as the unconscious mind has a much larger perceptual capacity than the conscious mind, it has a far greater ability to hold multiple elements in thought and a far greater range of kinds of elements that can be held in thought. A consequence of this is that the conscious mind can mess up your evaluation of things if you let it get into the act. If you’re encouraged to verbally express your reactions to objects such as art posters or jams and tell what you like and dislike about each one, your choices are likely to be worse than if you simply think about the objects for a while and then make a choice.8 We know the judgments are worse because people asked to verbalize their thought processes report being less satisfied with the object they chose when they’re asked to rate it at some later point.

Part of the reason conscious consideration of choices can lead us astray is that it tends to focus exclusively on features that can be verbally described. And typically those are only some of the most important features of objects. Reactions that are hard to put into words may matter too. In these tasks, requiring people to explain their preferences could draw attention away from those reactions.

If you cut the conscious mind out of the process of choosing, you can sometimes get better results. In a study supporting this conclusion, Dutch investigators asked students to pick the best of four apartments. Each apartment had some attractive features (“very nice area of town”) and some unattractive features (“unfriendly landlord”).9 One apartment was designated the best because it had eight positive, four negative, and three neutral features—a better mix than the others under the study’s scoring rule. Some participants had to make their choice immediately, with little time to think about the choice either consciously or nonconsciously. Other participants were asked to think carefully about their choice for three minutes and review all the information as best they could. These participants had plenty of time for conscious consideration of the choice. A third group saw the same information as the others, but participants weren’t able to process it consciously because they had to work on a very difficult task for the three-minute period. If they were processing the information about the apartments, they were doing so without awareness.

Remarkably, participants in this last, distracted group working on the difficult task were almost a third more likely to pick the right apartment than the group allowed plenty of time for conscious thought. Moreover, the latter group failed to make better choices than the group given scarcely any time to think.10 This result concerns a particular laboratory choice task. It does not show that distraction generally improves complex decisions, or that conscious comparison of the options should be abandoned.

Learning

The unconscious mind can actually be superior to the conscious mind in learning highly complex patterns. More than that, in fact: it can learn things that the conscious mind can’t. Pawel Lewicki and his coworkers asked people to pay attention to a computer screen divided into four quadrants.11 An X would appear in one of the quadrants. The participant’s task was to press a button predicting which quadrant the X was going to appear in. Though participants didn’t know it, whether an X appeared in a given quadrant was dictated by a very complicated set of rules. For example, an X never appeared twice in a row in the same quadrant, an X never returned to its original location until it had appeared in at least two of the other quadrants, an X in the second location determined the location of the third, and the fourth location was determined by the location on the previous two trials. Could people learn such a complicated rule system?

Yes. We know people can learn them because (1) participants became faster over time at pressing the correct button and (2) when the rules suddenly changed, their performance deteriorated badly. But the conscious mind was not let in on what was happening. Participants didn’t even consciously recognize that there was a pattern, let alone know exactly what it was.

Participants were adept, however, at accounting for suddenly worsened performance. That may have been especially true because the participants were psychology professors (who incidentally knew they were in a study on nonconscious learning). Three of the professors said they had just “lost the rhythm.” Two accused the experimenter of putting distracting subliminal messages on the screen.

Why don’t we recognize consciously just what pattern it is that we’ve learned? I’ll ask the curt question, “Why should we?” For most purposes, what’s crucial is that we learn a pattern, not that we be able to articulate exactly what the rules behind the pattern are.

The unconscious mind is very good at detecting all kinds of patterns. Imagine a computer grid with one thousand pixels that can be either black or white. Take half of that grid and randomly make some proportion of the pixels black and some white. Then flip the half-grid over and create the mirror image of the original. Place the two images side by side. You will instantly see the symmetry between the two halves. How is it that you see there is perfect symmetry? It’s certainly not by conscious calculation, determining whether each pixel in the mirror-image location is the same or not. A direct check of a one-thousand-pixel grid would compare five hundred pairs of pixels. The striking point about human perception is that we notice the symmetry without consciously making those comparisons.

Laborious calculation is clearly not involved in complex pattern detection. Seeing a mirror image is instantaneous and automatic. We often notice it immediately. And if someone were to ask you what the pattern of pixels was exactly, you would be utterly stumped (unless by some miracle the pixels formed themselves into a few clear and readily describable shapes). Your nervous system is an exquisitely designed pattern detector. But the process by which it sees patterns is completely opaque to us.

Unfortunately, we’re a little too good at detecting patterns. We see them even when they aren’t there. As we’ll see in Part III, we’re often confident that a collection of events that are utterly random have been caused by some agent such as another person.

Problem Solving

Prime numbers are positive integers greater than 1 that are divisible only by themselves and unity. Euclid proved more than two thousand years ago that there are an infinite number of prime numbers. An interesting fact about prime numbers is that they often appear as “twins” differing only by 2—such as 3 and 5, 17 and 19. Are there an infinite number of twin primes? This problem has fascinated eminent mathematicians and amateurs alike but no solution appeared for the past two millennia and more. At the time of this account, computers had found a twin-prime pair whose smaller member was 3,756,801,695,685 × 2⁶⁶⁶,⁶⁸⁹ −1. But brute computing power could never establish the truth of the conjecture, and a solution to the twin prime problem has long been a mathematical holy grail.

On April 17, 2013, the Annals of Mathematics received a paper from an obscure mathematician at the University of New Hampshire that claimed a giant leap toward verifying the twin primes conjecture.12 The author was fiftysomething Yitang Zhang, who had spent many years adrift in jobs such as accountant and even Subway employee before he finally got a job at UNH.

Mathematics journals are constantly fielding grandiose claims from obscure mathematicians, but the editors at the Annals found Zhang’s arguments plausible on the surface and promptly sent the paper out for review. Three weeks after receipt of the paper by the Annals—warp speed by academic standards—all the referees pronounced the claims valid.

What Zhang proved was that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers that differ by 70 million or less. No matter how far you go into the region of spectacularly large prime numbers, and no matter how infrequent they become, you will keep finding prime pairs that differ by less than 70 million.

Number theorists pronounced the result “astounding.” At the invitation of Harvard University, Zhang gave a lecture on his work to a huge crowd of Cambridge academics. His talk impressed his hearers as much as the paper had wowed reviewers.

Zhang had worked on the twin prime conjecture for three years, making no progress whatsoever. Then the solution suddenly came to him, not while he was toiling away on the problem in his office, but while he was sitting in a friend’s backyard in Colorado while he waited to leave for a concert. “I immediately knew that it would work,” he said.

The sudden insight was followed by hard conscious work. It took Zhang several months to work out all the details of the solution.

Zhang’s experience is quite typical of creative problem solving at the very highest level. There’s a striking uniformity in the way creative people—artists, writers, mathematicians, and scientists—speak about how they created their products. The American poet Brewster Ghiselin collected into one volume a number of essays on the creative process by a variety of highly inventive people from Poincaré to Picasso.13

“Production by a process of purely conscious calculation seems never to occur,” Ghiselin says. Instead, his essayists describe themselves almost as bystanders, differing from observers only in that they are the first to witness the fruits of a problem-solving process that’s hidden from conscious view.

Ghiselin’s essayists insist that (a) they had little or no idea what factors prompted the solution, and (b) even the fact that thought of any kind about the problem was taking place is sometimes unknown.

The mathematician Jacques Hadamard reports that “on being very abruptly awakened by an external noise, a solution long searched for appeared to me at once without the slightest instant of reflection on my part … and in a quite different direction from any of those which I previously tried to follow.” The mathematician Henri Poincaré records that “the changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work … At the moment when I put my foot on the step [of the omnibus] the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.” The philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead wrote of “the state of imaginative muddled suspense which precedes successful inductive generalization.”

The poet Stephen Spender describes “a dim cloud of an idea which I feel must be condensed into a shower of words.” The poet Amy Lowell wrote, “An idea will come into my head for no apparent reason; ‘The Bronze Horses,’ for instance. I registered the horses as a good subject for a poem; and, having so registered them, I consciously thought no more about the matter. But what I had really done was to drop my subject into the subconscious, much as one drops a letter into the mail-box. Six months later, the words of the poem began to come into my head, the poem—to use my private vocabulary—was ‘there.’”

What’s true for the most creative people in history working on the most interesting ideas is true for you and me working on much more mundane problems.

The better part of a century ago, the psychologist N.R.F. Maier showed people two cords hanging from the ceiling of a laboratory strewn with many objects such as clamps, pliers, and extension cords.14 Maier told the participants that their task was to tie the two ends of the cords together. The difficulty was that the cords were placed far enough apart that the participants couldn’t reach one while holding on to the other. Maier’s participants quickly came up with several of the solutions, for example, tying an extension cord to one of the ceiling cords. After each solution, Maier told the participants, “Now do it a different way.”

One of the solutions was much more difficult than the others, and most participants couldn’t discover it on their own. While the participant stood perplexed, Maier would be wandering around the room. After the participant had been stumped for several minutes, Maier would casually put one of the cords in motion. Then, typically within forty-five seconds of this clue, the subject picked up a weight, tied it to the end of one of the cords, set it to swinging like a pendulum, ran to the other cord, grabbed it, and waited for the first cord to swing close enough that it could be seized. Maier immediately asked the participants to tell how they thought of the idea of a pendulum. This question elicited such answers as, “It just dawned on me,” “It was the only thing left,” “I just realized the cord would swing if I fastened a weight to it.”

A psychology professor participant gave a particularly rich account: “Having exhausted everything else, the next thing was to swing it. I thought of the situation of swinging across a river. I had imagery of monkeys swinging from trees. This imagery appeared simultaneously with the solution. The idea appeared complete.”

After hearing their explanations, Maier grilled his participants about whether the swinging cord had had any effect on them. Almost a third allowed that it had. But there’s no reason to believe that those participants were actually aware of the role of the cord. Rather, they might simply have found the theory plausible and endorsed it. To test the reliability of those reports, Maier conducted a new study in which he twirled a weight on a cord. This hint was useless; no one solved the problem after this cue was provided. For other participants, Maier twirled the weight and then shortly afterward swung the cord. Most participants then promptly applied the pendulum solution. Upon being questioned, however, all of these participants insisted that the twirling weight had helped them to solve the problem and denied that swinging the cord had had any effect!

The lesson of Maier’s experiment is profound. Problem-solving processes can be as inaccessible to consciousness as any other kind of cognitive process.

Why Do We Have Conscious Minds Anyway?

The most important thing to know about the unconscious is that it’s terrific at solving certain kinds of problems that the conscious mind handles poorly if at all. A sudden idea for a symphony or a mathematical proof still needs deliberate development and checking. For comparison, try asking for the product of 173 and 19 without consciously working it out. Ask yourself to figure that out as you drift off to sleep and see if the product pops into your mind while you’re brushing your teeth the next morning. For most of us, that is not a reliable way to calculate.

So there’s a class of rules—probably a very large class of even simple rules like those of multiplication—that the unconscious mind can’t operate with. (Yours and mine, that is. Savants can do it somehow.) It seems paradoxical in the extreme that an operation any fourth grader can carry out consciously couldn’t be handled by a von Neumann unconsciously. The unconscious mind operates according to rules, for sure. The examples here do not give us a clear boundary between rules that require conscious attention and those we can apply without it.

We do know that a given task can be carried out using either conscious rules or unconscious ones. But the solutions yielded by the one can be, and perhaps usually are, utterly different. Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize–winning economist–computer scientist–psychologist–political scientist, attacked the contentions by Tim Wilson and me that there was no such thing as conscious observation of mental processes. He had found that people who were solving problems while thinking aloud could describe accurately the processes by which they solved them. But his examples only showed that people were capable of generating theories about what rules they were using to solve the problems and that these theories were sometimes accurate—not at all the same thing as observing the processes.

In conscious problem solving we’re aware of: (1) certain thoughts and perceptions that are in our heads, (2) particular rules that we believe govern (or should govern) how we deal with those thoughts and perceptions, and (3) many of the cognitive and behavioral outputs of whatever mental processes are going on. I know the rules of multiplication, I know the numbers 173 and 19 are in my head, I know I must multiply 3 by 9, save the 7 and carry the 2, and so forth. I can check that what’s available to my consciousness is consistent with the rules that I know to be appropriate. But none of this can be taken to mean that I am aware of the process by which multiplication is carried out.

In conversation, Simon actually gave me the perfect example of how a given task can be carried out operating either by unconscious rules or by rules that are represented consciously.

When people first play chess, they move the pieces around without being able to tell you what rules, if any, they’re following. But they are indeed following rules. Their technique is called “duffer strategy”—whose rules are well known to experts.

Later, if people stick with chess for a while—read books on it and talk to highly competent players—they play according to rules that are quite conscious and that they can describe accurately. But I would insist they can’t see what’s going on; they can simply check that their behavior is consonant with the consciously represented rules and with the thoughts they have while using those rules.

It’s unfortunate that we can’t monitor the processes that underlie the solutions to complex problems. But it’s even more unfortunate that we often are convinced that we can. It can be hard to change someone’s mind about the wisdom of some strategy or tactic when the person is dead certain that he knows just what’s going on and he’s not making the mistake you’re trying to point out to him.

When players become genuinely expert, they once again can no longer accurately describe the rules they’re using. This is partly because they no longer have conscious representation of many of the rules they learned as an intermediate player and partly because they have induced unconsciously the strategies that made them masters or grandmasters.

The assertion that we have no access to the processes that underlie our judgments may not seem so radical in light of two considerations.

1. We claim to know the processes that underlie judgment and behavior, but we make no claim that we have awareness of the processes underlying perception or retrieval of information from memory. We know the latter processes are completely beyond our ken. Perfectly adequate processes producing perception and memory take place without our awareness. Why should cognitive processes be any different?

2. From an evolutionary standpoint, why would it be important to have access to the mental processes that are doing the work for us? The conscious mind has enough to do without also having to be aware of mental processes that are producing the needed inferences and behavior.

To say that there’s no direct awareness of mental processes is not to say that we’re usually wrong about what goes on behind the scenes. Often, maybe usually, I can say with justified confidence what were the most important stimuli I was attending to, and why I behaved as I did. I know that I swerved the car to avoid hitting the squirrel. I know that the main reason I gave at the office was because everyone else was making a donation. I know that I was anxious about the exam because I hadn’t studied very much.

But in order to be right about what drives my judgments and behavior, I have to have a correct theory. I have no theory that says I’m less likely to cheat if there’s a picture of a coconut hanging over the honesty box, or that voting in a church has made me more likely to vote against abortion. Or that hunger is making me unsympathetic to a job applicant. Or that fishy smells make me doubt what I’m reading. Or that holding a hot coffee cup makes me think you’re a warm person. Indeed, what would a theory of such things look like? Anything less general and less useless than “Who knows what all is going on to affect my behavior?”

If we had theories about the processes underlying those behaviors, we would draw on them as reasons for behaving as we do. In many cases, in fact, we would resist those processes and often produce a better outcome. But, lacking the correct theories about these kinds of processes, we can’t have correct explanations for why we behave as we do.

Summing Up

This chapter has many implications for how we should function in daily life. Here are a few of the most important.

Don’t assume that you know why you think what you think or do what you do. We don’t know what may have been the role played by little-noticed and promptly forgotten incidental factors. Moreover, we often can’t even be sure of the role played by factors that are highly salient. Why should you give up belief in self-knowledge, and do so at the cost of self-confidence? Because you’re less likely to do something that’s not in your best interest if you have a healthy skepticism about whether you know what you really think or why you really do the things you do.

Don’t assume that other people’s accounts of their reasons or motives are any more likely to be right than are your accounts of your own reasons or motives. I frequently find myself telling other people why I did something. When I do that I’m often acutely aware that I’m making this up as I go along and that anything I say should be taken with more than a grain of salt. But my hearers usually nod and seem to believe everything I say. (With psychologists I usually have the grace to remind them there is no particular reason to believe me. Don’t try that with nonpsychologists.)

But despite my recognition that my explanations are somewhere between “probably true” and “God only knows,” I tend to swallow other people’s explanations hook, line, and sinker. Sometimes I do realize that the person is fabricating plausible explanations rather than reporting accurately, but more typically I’m as much taken in as other people are taken in by my explanations. I really can’t tell you why I remain so gullible, but that doesn’t prevent me from telling you to carry a saltshaker around with you.

The injunction to doubt what people say about the causes of their judgments and behavior, incidentally, is spreading to the field of law. This concern also applies to witnesses, defendants, and jurors: an honest account of a reason can still be mistaken about what influenced a judgment.15

You have to help the unconscious help you. The film Amadeus portrays Mozart writing down music effortlessly, without blotting a note. That portrayal is no evidence that composition requires no conscious work. But for ordinary mortals, creative problem solving seems to require consciousness at two junctures.

1. Consciousness seems to be essential for identifying the elements of a problem, and for producing rough sketches of what a solution would look like. The New Yorker writer John McPhee has said that he has to begin a draft, no matter how crummy it is, before the real work on the paper can begin. “Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun” (McPhee, 2013). Another good way to kick the process off, McPhee says, is to write a letter to your mother telling her what you’re going to write about.

2. Consciousness is necessary for checking and elaborating on conclusions reached by the unconscious mind. The same mathematicians who say that a given solution hit them out of the blue will tell you that making sure the solution was correct took hundreds of hours of conscious work.

The most important thing I have to tell you—in this whole book—is that you should never fail to take advantage of the free labor of the unconscious mind.

I teach seminars by posting a list of thought questions to serve as the basis for discussion for the next class. If I wait until the last minute to come up with those questions, it’s going to take me a long time and the questions won’t be very good. It’s tremendously helpful for me to sit down two or three days before my deadline—just for a few minutes—and think about what the important questions might be. When I later start to work on the questions in earnest, I typically feel as if I’m taking the questions by dictation rather than creating them. If you’re a student, a question for you: When is the right time to begin working on a term paper due the last day of class? Answer: The first day of class.

If you’re not making progress on a problem, drop it and turn to something else. Hand the problem off to the unconscious to take a shot at it. When I used to do calculus homework, there would always come a point when I hit a problem that I absolutely could make no progress on. I would stew over the problem for a long time, then move on in a demoralized state to the next problem, which was typically harder than the previous one. There would follow more agonized conscious thought until I shut the book in despair. Contrast this with how a friend tells me that he used to deal with the situation of being stumped on a calculus problem. He would simply go to bed and return to the problem the next morning. As often as not the right direction to go popped into his head. If only I had known this person when I was in college.

I hope that having a clearer understanding of how your mind works will make it easier to understand how useful the concepts in this book can be. The fact that it may seem to you that it’s unlikely that a given concept would be helpful doesn’t mean you wouldn’t use it—and use it properly—if you knew it. And the more you use a given concept, the less aware of using it you will become.