Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do
By John Bargh, PhD
Last Spring, I got cornered by one of my friends, a psych analyst, while vacationing with her and her husband. We’d been having some heavy discussions and I’d been taking a solid position on the conscious brain and ignoring the unconscious (Only nerds like me do such things.) Finally, she asked the question: “Well, Dan, do you believe in the unconscious?” Recognizing she was probably pissed, I stared at her for about 30 very quiet seconds and finally responded, “I’m agnostic.” That discussion went no further.
But after working through John Bargh’s book, I’m a convert to the phenomenal role of the unconscious brain. Bargh had me from the first line of his book: “In college, I majored in psychology and minored in Led Zeppelin. Or maybe it was the other way around.” The scholarship doesn’t get any better, and the fun never stops. .
For example, you’ll discover:
- How getting a flu shot can affect your attitude toward immigration.
- How holding a warm cup of coffee will make you friendly and open to others: iced coffee will have the opposite effect.
- Why being afraid makes you more conservative and feeling safe makes you feel more liberal.
That’s just the fun stuff, but there’s a lot of highly useful stuff, too.
Initially, I was very curious about how these scientists could do empirical studies on the unconscious. But they have put it together and provided us with a great deal of enlightenment about how that world of the unconscious actually works. As I’ve worked through it in bits and pieces and reread again and again, it’s as though I only understood half of what was going on around me. I’ve been playing with these ideas day in and out for nearly three weeks. All kinds of relationships that were once a puzzle have cleared up.
For example, one of the most distinctive characteristics of how my brain works is that when I fear I’ve created a conflict, or when I think my relationship with a client just hit the fan, I usually spend a very sleepless night, playing and replaying the conversation and planning how to deal with it effectively. And I’ve spent hundreds of nights doing that. Occasionally, even though I’m a ripe 84-year-old it still happens. What I realized years ago is that I typically tend to over-interpret these settings. I’ll go back to the situation a day or two later, and my friend or my client doesn’t know what I’m talking about. It was nothing to be concerned about.
No question but what I’ve gotten better at my over-interpretation through the years, but it all still surfaces. Bargh’s book is very enlightening in that I was able to track back to the original family cause of the issue, experiences that were buried since my teens and that built and built and continue to linger around in the unconscious. He’s also been very helpful in providing a means for identifying some of the causal cues that I pick up so very readily with my radar system so I can decide whether to take them seriously or deal with them effectively.
Though there are numerous insights, here are just three that I’ve found immensely valuable. If you’re really interested, you’ll find explanations and examples throughout this great book.
- The unconscious brain is more powerful than the conscious brain.
- The unconscious was developed primarily for appraisal (can you trust that person?).
- Your unconscious always kicks in on a subject before your conscious. (It would take four seconds to figure out what to do when a car was coming at 40mph. But for the unconscious? Instantaneous.)
Well, I hope I’ve whetted your appetite for a resource that the Business Insider named one of the very best science books of 2017.