“Strangers to Ourselves- Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious” by Timothy D. Wilson

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.”

“Gorgias” by Plato (translated by Donald J. Zeyl)

On the surface, this dialogue deals with the merits of oratory, but, more deeply, it also delves into how a man should live and what role justness plays in this good life. Through the course of this dialogue Socrates deals with three sophist interlocutors in succession, Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles. In turn, they make the case that the powerful live the good life. These sophists argue, particularly, that it is the successful politicians, rulers, and tyrants who truly live well. Socrates disagrees. He states, “Doing what’s unjust is actually the worst thing there is…. I wouldn’t want either, but if had to be one or the other, I would choose suffering over doing what’s unjust…. I say that the admirable and good person, man or woman, is happy, but that the one who’s unjust and wicked is miserable.” Socrates will not be swayed by the consensus of the crowd. “Nevertheless, though I’m only one person, I don’t agree with you. You don’t compel me; instead you produce many false witnesses against me and try to banish me from my property, the truth…. I disregard the things held in honor by the majority of people, and by practicing truth I really try, to the best of my ability, to be and to live as a very good man, and when I die, to die like that…. Choose the orderly life, the life that is adequate to and satisfied with its circumstances at any given time instead of the insatiable, undisciplined life.” 

Callicles denigrates philosophers as skilled in practicing an art only fit for children. For him, greatness lies in the oratory of politicians, skilled in the practice of persuading the masses. Socrates, in turn, questions how Callicles judges what makes a life worthy of being deemed good. “Do you also think as we [philosophers] do that the end of all action is what’s good, and that we should do all other things for its sake, but not it for their sake?… So we should do the other things, including pleasant things, for the sake of good things, and not good things for the sake of pleasant things…. As long as [the soul is] corrupt, in that it’s foolish, undisciplined, unjust and impious, it should be kept away from its appetites and not be permitted to do anything other than what will make it better…. So to be disciplined is better for the soul than lack of discipline.”

Finally, Socrates tries to get at the purpose of oratory, its uses, and how it jives with both the truth and the good. Socrates is particularly concerned with the effect of politician’s speeches on the mass of citizens and on the good of the city as a whole. “Do you think that orators always speak with regard to what’s best? Do they always set their sights on making the citizens as good as possible through their speeches? Or are they, too, bent upon the gratification of the citizens, and, slighting the common good for the sake of their own private good, do they treat the people like children, their sole attempt being to gratify them?” Socrates makes the distinction between the common will and the common weal. For Socrates, it is a great stain on even those Athenian politicians deemed great by posterity, such as Pericles and Cimon, that they left the citizenry in poorer shape than how they found them. “Shouldn’t he [the politician], according to what we agreed just now, have turned [the citizens] out more just instead of more unjust?… I’m not criticizing these men either, insofar as they were servants to the city. I think rather that they proved to be better servants than the men of today, and more capable of satisfying the city’s appetites. But the truth is that in redirecting its appetites and not giving in to them, using persuasion or constraint to get the citizens to become better, they were really not much different from our contemporaries.” Socrates contrasts the purpose of his own speeches with those of all these politicians. “I believe that I’m one of a few Athenians—so as not to say I’m the only one, but the only one among our contemporaries—to take up the true political craft and practice the true politics. This is because the speeches I make on each occasion do not aim at gratification but at what’s best.”

Socrates ends by recapping his view on the just and noble life. “For it’s a difficult thing, Callicles, and one that merits much praise, to live your whole life justly when you’ve found yourself having ample freedom to do what’s unjust…. Doing what’s unjust is more to be guarded against than suffering it, and that it’s not seeming to be good but being good that a man should take care of more than anything, both in his public and his private life.” For Socrates, these are the skills that all men must aspire to before they even contemplate a life concerned with politics. A citizenry composed of men unconcerned with justice is bound to be rotten, no matter their political system. Each man should first concern himself with his own soul, before trying to persuade others. “Nothing terrible will happen to you if you really are an admirable and good man, one who practices excellence. And then, after we’ve practiced it together, then at last, if we think we should, we’ll turn to politics, or then we’ll deliberate about whatever subject we please, when we’re better at deliberating than we are now. For it’s a shameful thing for us, being in the condition we appear to be in at present—when we never think the same about the same subjects, the most important ones at that—to sound off as though we’re somebodies. That’s how far behind in education we’ve fallen.”

“Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom” by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (translated by Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt)

This short treatise is the summation of Schelling’s reconciliation between causal necessity and freedom. Thus, it is also a meditation on theodicy, individual free will, and the capacity for evil. He begins, “The concept of freedom is in fact said to be completely incompatible with [a philosophical] system.” Schelling continues on the matter of individual freedom, “But the real and vital concept is that freedom is the capacity for good and evil…. It affects most noticeably the concept of immanence; for either real evil is admitted and, hence, it is inevitable that evil be posited within infinite substance or the primal will itself, whereby the concept of a most perfect being is utterly destroyed, or the reality of evil must in some way be denied, whereby, however, at the same time the real concept of freedom vanishes…. God appears undeniably to share responsibility for evil in so far as permitting an entirely dependent being to do evil is surely not much better than to cause it to do so.”

Schelling relates his view on the nature of philosophy in general. “Idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is the body; only both together can constitute a living whole. The latter can never provide the principle but must be the ground and medium in which the former makes itself real and takes on flesh and blood.” He continues by defining his dual concepts of general and individual will, “The understanding as universal will stands against this self-will of creatures, using and subordinating the latter to itself as a mere instrument…. In man there is the whole power of the dark principle and at the same time the whole strength of the light. In him there is the deepest abyss and the loftiest sky or both centra. The human will is the seed—hidden in eternal yearning—of the God who is present still in the ground only; it is the divine panorama of life, locked up within the depths, which God beheld as he fashioned the will to nature.”

Finally, Schelling returns to the concept of individual freedom, “Man is placed on that summit where he has in himself the source of self-movement toward good or evil in equal portions: the bond of principles in him is not a necessary but rather a free one. Man stands on the threshold [Scheidepunkt]; whatever he chooses, it will be his act…. The intelligible being can, as certainly as it acts as such freely and absolutely, just as certainly act only in accordance with its own inner nature; or action can follow form within only in accordance with the law of identity and with absolute necessity which alone is also absolute freedom. For free is what acts only in accord with the laws of its own being…. True freedom is in harmony with a holy necessity, the likes of which we perceive in essential cognition, when spirit and heart, bound only by their own law, freely affirm what is necessary.”

“Essays and Aphorisms” by Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by R.J. Hollingdale)

This is a short collection of some of Schopenhauer’s lesser known works and sayings. A lot of its themes retread ground from his greatest treatise, “The World as Will and Representation.” Some view Schopenhauer as a pessimist. “If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world…. Misfortune in general is the rule….Work, worry, toil and trouble are indeed the lot of almost all men their whole life long. And yet if every desire were satisfied as soon as it arose how would men occupy their lives, how would they pass the time?”

Schopenhauer spent much of his time reconciling the freedom of the will with the grounding of the causal chain of history and how both relate to ethics. “For will itself and in itself—even when it appears as an individual and thus constitutes the individual’s original and fundamental volition—is independent of all knowledge, because it precedes all knowledge…. Will itself, since it lies outside of time, is unchangeable for as long as it exists at all…. Consequently the entire empirical course of a man’s life is, in great things and in small, as necessarily predetermined as clockwork…. The outcome however is a moral one, namely this, that by what we do we know what we are, just as by what we suffer we know what we deserve.” He also discusses justice, the law, as well as natural and prescribed rights in society, “The concept of justice is, like that of freedom, a negative concept: its content is a pure negation…. It is accordingly easy to define human rights: everyone has the right to do anything that does not injure another…. Although men possess unequal powers, they nonetheless possess equal rights. Rights are not based on powers: because of the moral nature of justice, they are based on the fact that in each man the same will to live appears at the same stage of its objectivization. Yet this is valid only in respect of original and abstract rights, which men possess as men.”

Often, Schopenhauer compares eastern with the desert religions. “If this Augustinian dogma of the tiny number of the elect and the great number of the eternally damned is understood merely sensu allegorico and interpreted in the sense of our own philosophy, then it agrees with the fact that only very few achieve denial of the will and thereby redemption from this world (as in Buddhism only very few achieve Nirvana). What, on the other hand, this dogma hypostatizes as eternal damnation is nothing other than this world of ours…. Buddha’s Sansara and Nirvana are identical with Augustine’s two civitates into which the world is divided, the civitas terrena and coelestis (The City of this world and the City of God).”

Finally, Schopenhauer urges every philosopher to think for themselves. “The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time…. He who writes for fools always finds a large public…. As a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents…. Students and learned men of every kind and every age go as a rule in search of information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything: it does not occur to them that information is merely a means towards insight and possesses little or no value in itself…. Oh, how little such a one must have had to think about, since he had so much time for reading!”

“The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics” by Arthur Schopenhauer (translated by Christopher Janaway)

Schopenhauer wrote these two essays on ethics in response to prize contests. The first one was offered by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences on the question of morality and free will. He suggests, “Our deeds are truly no first beginning, and so in them nothing really new attains existence: but rather through what we do, we merely come to experience what we are…. The character is the empirically cognized, enduring and unalterable constitution on an individual will…. The strict necessity of our actions nonetheless co-exists with that freedom of which the feeling of responsibility provides evidence, and by means of which we are the doers of our deeds and they are morally attributable to us…. The perfect empirical reality of the world of experience is compatible with its transcendental ideality, in just the same way the strict empirical necessity of acting is compatible with its transcendental freedom. For as an object of experience the empirical character is, like the whole human being, a mere appearance, and so bound to the forms of all appearance, time, space, and causality, and subordinate to their laws; by contrast, that which as thing in itself is independent of these forms and so subordinate to no time distinction, is therefore the enduring and unalterable condition and foundation of this whole appearance, is his intelligible character, i.e. his will as thing in itself, to which, in this capacity, there certainly pertains absolute freedom…. This freedom is, however, transcendental…. By this freedom all deeds of the human being are his own work…. Consequently the will is indeed free, but only in itself and outside of appearance…. We have to seek the work of our freedom no longer in our individual actions, as the common view does, but in the whole being and essence (existentia et essentia) of the human being himself…. Thus freedom, which cannot be encounterable in the operari, must reside in the esse…. In what we do, we come to know what we are…. In one word: a human being does at all times only what he wills, and yet does it necessarily. But that rests on the fact that he is what he wills.”

Schopenhauer’s second prize essay was offered by the Royal Danish Society of Sciences on the topic of the grounding basis of moral laws. The society did not grant the prize to Schopenhauer, nor to anyone else. He was understandably sore about this result. Schopenhauer began, “So in philosophy the ethical foundation itself, whatever it may be, must in turn have its basis and its support in some metaphysics, i.e. in an explanation given of the world and existence in general—seeing that the ultimate and true revelation concerning the inner essence of the entirety of things must necessarily cohere tightly with that concerning the ethical meaning of human acting.” Next, he gets into the grounding of human ethics, as he sees it. “The principle or the highest basic proposition of an ethics is the shortest and most concise expression of the way of acting that it prescribes…. So it is the instruction to virtue as such that ethics gives, expressed in a single proposition, in other words the ‘what’ of virtue—The foundation of an ethics, by contrast, is the ‘why’ of virtue, the ground of that obligation or recommendation or approbation.” The what, for Schopenhauer, is simple, “Harm no one; rather help everyone to the extent that you can.” He continues, “It is the ‘what’ for which the ‘why’ is still being sought.” Furthermore, “Every other moral principle is to be regarded as a circumlocution, an indirect or oblique expression of that simple proposition.” Schopenhauer explains, “The individual—with his unalterable, inborn character, strictly determined in all its manifestations by the law of causality, which here, being mediated by the intellect, is called motivation—is only the appearance. The thing in itself that lies at the basis of this, situated as it is outside of space and time, is free from all succession and plurality of acts, one and unalterable. Its constitution in itself is the intelligible character…. This doctrine of Kant’s of the co-existence of freedom and necessity I hold to be the greatest of all achievements of human profundity…. Freedom belongs not to the empirical but solely to the intelligible character…. In his esse, that is where freedom resides. He could have been another: and in what he is resides blame and merit…. With regard to the matter and the occasion, in other words objectively, a completely different action, even an opposed one, was perfectly possible and would have come about, if only he had been another. But that he is such a one and no other, as emerges from his action—that is what he feels responsible for. Here, in his esse, lies the place where the sting of conscience hits home. For conscience is in fact just acquaintance with one’s own self.” Schopenhauer concludes, “If the ultimate motivating ground for an action, or an omission, resides directly and exclusively in the well-being and woe of someone other who is passively involved in it, so that the active party has in view in his acting, or omitting, simply and solely the well-being and woe of another and has nothing at all as his end but that that other should remain unharmed, or indeed receive help, support and relief. This end alone impresses on an action or omission the stamp of moral worth.”