Wilson is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. In this book, he ponders the question of how well do we really know ourselves. He states, “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.” Wilson suggests that our adaptive unconscious plays a large part in regulating our interactions with the outside world. All humans exhibit “selective attention. We are equipped with a nonconscious filter that examines the information reaching our senses and decides what to admit to consciousness. We can consciously control the “settings” of the filter to some degree…. The operation of the filter, however—the way in which information is classified, sorted, and selected for further processing—occurs outside of awareness…. [The adaptive unconscious] also monitors what we are not paying attention to.”
The adaptive unconscious interprets behavior and presents it as a singular reality. However, behavior is open to many interpretations. Expectations color these interpretations. That is why “first impressions are powerful, even when they are based on faulty information…. The adaptive unconscious is thus more than just a gatekeeper, deciding what information to admit to consciousness. It is also a spin doctor that interprets information outside of awareness. One of the most important judgements we make is about the motives, intentions, and dispositions of other people, and it is to our advantage to make these judgments quickly…. Accessibility is determined not only by the self-relevance of a category but also by how recently it has been encountered…. Another determinant of accessibility is how often a concept has been used in the past…. Our nonconscious minds develop chronic ways of interpreting information from our environments; in psychological parlance, certain ideas and categories become chronically accessible.”
Our brains are evolutionarily adapted to interpret reality “correctly”. But they also have a bias to interpret a pleasant worldview. “People go to great lengths to view the world in a way that maintains a sense of well-being. We are masterly spin doctors, rationalizers, and justifiers of threatening information.” We tell stories to ourselves about the facts at hand to interpret them in the most pleasant possible light. Wilson suggests that our adaptive unconscious follows this rule of thumb: “Select, interpret, and evaluate information in ways that make me feel good.” However, our conscious selves never like to feel we are massaging the facts. “Psychological defenses work best when they operate in the back alleys of our minds, keeping us blind to the fact that any distortion is going on.” Unfortunately, our adaptive unconscious is often a rigid system. “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 often unconsciously bend new information to fit our preconceptions.”
A person’s personality is a combination of their conscious and unconscious selves. “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.” All humans essentially have a self that is beyond their conscious control. “Chronic dispositions, traits, and temperaments are part of the adaptive unconscious, to which [humans] have no direct access.” Walter Mischel stated, “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.” Wilson continues, “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…. has distinctive, characteristic ways of interpreting the social environment and stable motives that guide people’s behavior…. They are rooted in early childhood, are in part genetically determined, and are not easily changed…. The constructed self consists of life stories, possible selves, explicit motives, self-theories, and beliefs about the reasons for one’s feelings and behaviors…. These two selves appear to be relatively independent…. The adaptive unconscious is more likely to influence people’s uncontrolled, implicit responses, whereas the constructed self is more likely to influence people’s deliberative, explicit responses.”
Humans develop different heuristics to guide us efficiently through everyday life. Scanning patterns “guide our construals of our social environments…. [They] allow people to pick up information from their social environments quickly…. We have our antennae up for certain information about other people, depending on which categories are accessible to us…. As a result of [our] background and learning history, people develop regular, idiosyncratic ways of construing the world.” Because of the pasts that we bring to the present, two people will interpret and then remember the same event drastically differently. Humans also use transference as a heuristic device. “Our mental representations of other people are stored in memory like any other chronic category. Because representations of relationships with significant others are self-relevant and frequently brought to mind, they become chronically accessible and are often used to interpret and evaluate new people we meet…. This transference process, which occurs outside of awareness, appears to be an important source of individual differences in how people react to new acquaintances.”
Humans often act first and rationalize their actions only after the fact. They create post-hoc stories. “The conscious verbal self often does not know why we do what we do and thus creates an explanation that makes the most sense.” Humans, in actuality, have little access to the internal causes of their responses. “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 mental processing that produces feelings, judgments, and behaviors.” These processes all take place in the adaptive unconscious.
Even one’s feelings are not always properly interpreted by the conscious self. “The conscious system is quite sensitive to personal and cultural prescriptions about how one is supposed to feel…. People might assume that their feelings conform to these prescriptions and fail to notice instances in which they do not…. When people are uncertain about how they feel, they use behavior and bodily reactions as a guide.” Humans have a baseline of emotion that we revert back to with the passage of time. Both positive and negative shocks are processed and transformed “from the extraordinary to the ordinary, in a way that robs them of their emotional power…. Doing this often involves a reconstrual of the event to make it seem more understandable and predictable…. When an event is not easily explained by what we know, we alter what we know to accommodate the new event. We change our worldview in ways that make the event seem relatively normal and predictable.” Often, people overestimate the duration of their emotional responses to any one specific “life-changing” event, because “they fail to take into account the extent to which [other] external events will influence their thoughts and feelings (the focalism bias). Perhaps more importantly, they also fail to anticipate how quickly the novel events will come to seem mundane through the psychological process of ordinization.”
Wilson makes the case that introspection is of limited value. “Introspection is more like literary criticism in which we are the text to be understood. Just as there is no single truth that lies within a literary text, but many truths, so are there many truths about a person that can be constructed.” Introspection, according to Wilson, is more like a personal narrative, not the unvarnished truth. It “does not open magic doors to the unconscious, but is a process of construction and inference.” No matter how much one tries to introspect, the conscious mind does not have access to the adaptive unconscious. Instead, people “construct a story about how they feel that is based on reasons that are not entirely trustworthy. The story has the ring of truth to people, but because they have used faulty information (reasons that happened to be on their minds), it often misrepresents how they really feel.” Attempting to analyze one’s reasons biases the self towards those that are easiest to put into words, those that seem culturally appropriate, and those that first pop to mind.
Wilson suggests trying to look to how others see you in order to better see yourself. In “this form of self-knowledge the “looking glass self” we see our reflection in other people’s eyes, namely how they view our personalities, preferences, and behaviors, and often adopt that reflection—called the reflected appraisal—as part of our self-concept.” It is “self-knowledge by consensus, whereby we adopt the majority opinion of what we are like.” The downsides are “other people often hide their impressions from us…. [and] even when people are giving us signals about what they really think, we often have a hard time seeing them…. This is especially true when reading other people correctly would threaten a positive self-theory.” However, “by being careful observers of our own actions, we can learn a lot about ourselves…. If we want to change some aspect of our adaptive unconscious, a good place to start is deliberately to begin acting like the person we want to be…. People infer their internal states just as an outside observer would, by seeing how they behave and guessing what feelings or traits must underlie that behavior…. The difference between self-revelation and self-fabrication is crucial from the point of view of gaining self-knowledge. Inferring our internal states from our behavior is a good strategy if it reveals feelings of which we were previously unaware. It is not such a good strategy if it results in the fabrication of new feelings…. [People] underestimate the power of the situation over their behavior and mistakenly infer they they did what they did because of their inner feelings or attitudes…. It is quite common for people to overlook situational influences on their actions and infer they acted on the basis of their internal states—so common this phenomenon is called the fundamental attribution error.” Internal states are also open to many stories. When someone’s heart is pounding and they become short of breath, “the way they interpret this arousal will determine the emotion they experience.” Emotions are not a given, they are created by us, by our own interpretation of the interoceptive facts of our body into a coherent story.
In closing, Wilson goes back to the nature of the self. He suggests, “There is no “true self”; rather, in modern life people live in multiple crosscurrents of conflicting social forces, and they construct many narratives specific to particular relationships and cultural circumstances. It makes no sense to judge one of these narratives as “truer” than another…. People can adopt different personas in different circumstances…. Self-stories should be accurate in a simple sense: they should capture the nature of the person’s nonconscious goals, feelings, and temperaments. In short, there must be some correspondence between the story and the person’s adaptive unconscious…. The better a story does at accounting for the “data” of the person’s adaptive unconscious, the better off the person is. By recognizing their nonconscious goals, people are in a better position to act in ways to fulfill them, or try to change them.”
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