When I had my life-changing alligator dream in the fall of 2006, my daughter was just a few months old. She was a tiny, gurgling, love-inducing promise—a promise of a future life. I hoped the life that lay in front of her would be full of joy and peace, of aspirations and deep satisfaction, though I also knew hardships and disappointments would periodically appear, and I fervently hoped that I had the skills, the ability, and the patience to help her confront and overcome these challenges. As I fell asleep that afternoon and my unconscious sent me a message that would so sharply recast how I saw the human mind, her own mind was rapidly developing. Unbeknownst to her, her brain was already guiding her to have in-group preferences that would divide the world into us and them. Within a few years, as she began to understand that she existed and shared qualities with other people, she would be vulnerable to sabotage of her own performance as a girl because of her society’s prejudices toward women. And as she grew and found that she liked certain things and aspired to others, these preferences and drives would shape who became her friends and how she acted toward them. As you might imagine, knowing what I did about the hidden trapdoors of the mind considerably increased my already numerous worries—but it also helped me know what to watch out for. My research, then, became as much about being a father as being a scientist.
During the ten years it took me to plan and write this book, I have watched my daughter grow up. We’ve gone through a lot together. She has transformed from a noisy and adorable teething infant into a remarkably poised and witty eleven-year-old, complete with braces, who now stands at the doors of adolescence. Along the way she has been my real-life superhero on more than one occasion, and I’ve dedicated this book to her. All parents want to leave their children something valuable that will help them lead happy lives when we are gone. This book, in a certain sense, is that inheritance I hope to give to her—my life’s work, the wisdom and insight I’ve toiled to accumulate during my time on this amazing planet of ours. (That said, I am aware that few children thrill to the idea of reading a book by one of their parents, or even of listening to him talk for more than a minute at a time.) However, this legacy of sorts isn’t just for my daughter. My aim is for it to be useful to anyone and everyone interested in learning how understanding your mind can help you understand yourself better, and thereby better yourself.
Why would we want to better ourselves? From an individualistic standpoint, the answer is obvious: so we can be happier, healthier, and more successful. But no person exists in isolation; no benefit accrues in a vacuum. We send ripples in all directions, just as we receive the ripples of others, and just as our social networks both digital and nondigital tremble with the interactions of friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers. If we truly better ourselves, we have a chance at bettering our community, and by extension, our world. But this process requires something that often seems like it’s in short supply: humility. The humility to accept that we don’t fully understand why we do what we do all of the time. I’m not saying that accepting this is easy; it’s not. But once you let that self-doubt in, as uncomfortable as this can be, other things follow: curiosity, surprise, new ideas, examination of unquestioned assumptions, perhaps hard but important realizations, and finally—miraculously—change. The possibility of leaving behind a better world for our children, even if they don’t read the books we write for them.
Conscious and unconscious mental processes do different things well. If they both did the same things well and the same things not so well, then they’d be redundant, and we would not have evolved both of them. So it is not that one is bad and the other good. It is that each is good but in its own domain. They work together, usually in harmony, and dynamically: one causes the other and vice versa. For example, conscious experiences in one situation linger into the next situation without our realizing it and become the unconscious influences in that subsequent setting. Unconscious processes work on our important problems and goals, and pop answers and solutions into our conscious minds. Unconscious goals direct our conscious attention to things relevant to our goals and cause us to notice and then make use of those things. Both forms of thought are part of you, not only the conscious part. Together they comprise your real, inner self. This is why you need to be careful what you wish for. Those conscious wishes can manifest themselves in unconscious ways when you least expect it and perhaps cause you to do things you’d rather not have done. Your strong needs can have unintended consequences, such as when you shop when hungry, or race a thousand miles home on the interstate to get home before the liquor store closes.
I learned a lot about human motivation from my colleague Peter Gollwitzer, and especially how people can consciously take control over the automatic and unconscious effects that the outside world can have on them before they know it. Peter and I first met in Munich in 1989, when he asked me to his institute to give a talk and do a workshop with his students. My area was social cognition, and his was social motivation, and it was a perfect fit. Before he taught me about motivation, though, he taught me some German. As it was my first time visiting Germany, I didn’t know much, and so one day during my visit I asked him what the German word for consciousness was. “Bewusstein,” he informed me. Bewusstein, I said to myself. Then a few moments later I asked, “And what is the word for unconscious?” He gave me a bemused look and rolled his eyes. “Unbewusstein,” he said. (As in: You dummy. Come to think of it, that alligator in my dream gave me the very same look . . .)
Gollwitzer’s research in the late 1980s was literally decades ahead of its time, and unlike the German word for unconscious, it was nothing I could have figured out for myself. His lab was demonstrating a kind of combination of unconscious and conscious mental effect—the intentional turning-over of control of your behavior to external environmental cues, to future events—a weird mixture of free will and not-free-will. Making conscious use of your unconscious powers. And it was just my good dumb luck to be living in Germany at that time and for him to invite me to Munich to learn all about what he was doing in his lab. Put his research of the 1980s together with my work back then on automatic, unconscious influences of the outside world, and here’s what you get, and what you can do with it:
Your environment is composed of cues that can prompt your behavior, and also primes that might influence you without your realizing it. So why not take control over that environment? After all, if primes are like reminders, we use sticky notes and other means to remind ourselves to do something important, when otherwise we’d have forgotten all about it. So we already make use of the basic idea of priming ourselves, kind of like how the farmers and ranchers of Darwin’s time used the principle of natural selection to breed fatter cows and larger ears of corn, without knowing how it worked. Shape your surroundings to be a more helpful, beneficent influence. There is no reason that you have to permit unwanted influences to continue. Let’s take something simple, such as the photographs on your desk at work, or your teenager’s posters on her wall. What kinds of goals are associated with these? What do you think about, what comes to mind when you look at them? For some of us, a photo of our spouse might not be such a good idea, if it triggers thoughts of romance and attraction in our work setting, where we would rather not have those temptations, or behave toward others in inappropriate ways. But if it instead triggers thoughts of our family, and the goal of working hard to provide for them, then it would be a positive influence. I’m reminded of the famous episode of The Simpsons where Homer has photos of baby Maggie on the wall in front of him at the Springfield nuclear power plant, along with the slogan “Do it for her.” You just have to ask yourself those questions and be honest with yourself about the answers, and take the potential future unconscious influences of those photos seriously.
Some researchers have insightfully pointed out that posters of such luminaries as Einstein and Superman might actually be counterproductive. If we cannot realistically be like them, then those posters might cause lower self-esteem and be demoralizing, not the intended higher self-esteem and motivation. I’ll never be as smart as Einstein, you think, and consequently feel smaller; I’ll never be as strong or fast or brave as Superman, you sadly admit, and feel diminished. So choose your role model prime wisely—someone you look up to but whom you can actually emulate in your life. Lincoln, for example, who was honest and did the hard thing even though it was unpopular. Or Martin Luther King Jr., who preached (and practiced) nonviolence and reconciliation between the races, and inspired millions of people by his example and his words. Remember that the outside world can only prime things inside you that are already inside you—all the Superman priming in the world can’t make you fly, and healthy-eating priming won’t work if you don’t already want it to. But the outside world can activate the goals and qualities you do possess, and the behaviors that are within your realm of possibilities.
Over the years I’ve heard from many people wanting to know if they can prime themselves, or teachers who want to prime their students to achieve more and get higher test grades. This is a great idea but has two main problems. The first we’ve just mentioned: outside primes can only activate what is already inside you. The second problem is that you would be aware that you are doing it—it is no longer an unconscious, passively operating influence if you are doing it consciously and intentionally. It is similar to why you can’t tickle yourself—you are aware of it and are in control over it. But all is not lost. It may well be that for the first few days or weeks after you hang the photograph of Lincoln or MLK on your wall, you are aware of why it is up there. But eventually it will become part of the background—you will stop noticing and paying conscious attention to it. You might even come to forget why you put it up there in the first place. It is after that point, when it is there in front of you but you are no longer paying conscious notice to it, when it has become part of the woodwork, that the priming effects can occur. Do it for yourself, but do it for the long term, and then, as New Yorkers say, fuhgedaboudit!
That’s the beauty of using unconscious influences to your advantage. Because they are natural and happen on their own, you only have to start the process and then relax and let it work for you. Take the chameleon effect, in which just paying attention to a new acquaintance leads naturally to imitation and mimicry, which in turn leads to liking and bonding. All you have to do is pay attention to the other person—look at him and listen to what he is saying. The rest happens on its own. Maybe you want to set an important goal for yourself, to get something done or solve a problem. You need to give your goal some conscious thought in order to “set” it as an important goal, and then you will find yourself working on it unconsciously and reaping the benefits—as though you the CEO delegated the task for a while to a trusted and very capable member of your staff.
Priming does have its unwanted influences, such as through television ads. Kelly Wallace, the CNN correspondent, wrote about the strong effect of beer and alcohol TV ads on underage drinking. She had preteen children of her own at home, so she made the decision to record the football games she (and her kids) wanted to watch, so that she could then fast-forward through the commercials. That’s a great idea, and it was prompted by her taking “what you see is what you do” effects seriously. People who deny that ads influence them certainly have the right to that opinion, and hence may not do anything to stop the influence of those ads, but they should keep in mind that their children might also be watching and thus exposed to those influences—and the evidence is quite clear that they will be influenced.
For other unconscious influences, such as when life lingers from one setting into another, when they create problems in your life you can use implementation intentions to break the spell—“when I get out of my car in the driveway, then I will remind myself to be happy to be home and with my family!” When meeting new people, try to see through the superficial drivers of your impressions, such as their races and faces and their attractiveness, and focus instead on their personality and how they treat you and others. Base your opinions, and your trust, on what they do and not just how they appear.
And you should probably choose your Facebook “friends” more wisely, and take more control over your newsfeed and your social networks in general, because people out there whom you don’t even know are influencing your mood, your weight, your tendencies to help and cooperate—so many things—before you know it. How they act and what they feel and think seep into you through your social networks and become an actual part of you, of who you are inside as well as outwardly to others. You don’t have to be at their mercy; you can control whom you come in contact with, at least much more than most of us do now.
Develop good habits to be the person you want to be. If you want to be less racist and sexist, then use implementation intentions such as “When I see a person of color, I will remind myself to be fair!” See people who are different from yourself as opportunities to practice egalitarianism and fairness. Start to exercise at the same time and place every day and do not excuse yourself for any reason (except actual emergencies); buy healthier foods at the store and snack less. The more you practice these positive behaviors, the more habitual and easier they will become the next time, and the next time, till they become second nature, the new “real you.” And remember that other people see what you do and are influenced by it, just as you see what they do and are influenced by them. Your good deeds and prosocial acts multiply because they are literally contagious to others—but so is the effect of your bad and antisocial behaviors. Set a positive example and it will spread out from you like a wave.
It has been a long road of discovery since I started graduate school in the 1970s, parsing out those operations of our mind that we are aware of from those that we are not. This book is a record of how much we do know our own minds, as well as how much of its workings we are not usually aware of. What our lab has been up to most recently, while I’ve been writing this book, in fact, is extending this fundamental question to how well we know the minds of others. While we are not consciously aware of much that goes on in our own minds, we certainly know even less about what goes on in the minds of other people. And the relatively greater degree to which we know our own conscious thoughts, compared to theirs, leads to some important consequences in how we think about other people, and what they are up to, and even how good and moral they are compared to ourselves.
There has already been insightful research on this issue by Emily Pronin of Princeton and David Dunning of Cornell University and their colleagues. What they have shown is that we don’t know what other people’s thoughts or intentions are, but we do know ours, and so we often give ourselves credit for having good intentions even if we don’t carry them out. Well, we say, I meant to give money to that charity, I just forgot to, so I’m still a good person. But because we don’t have the same access to the good intentions of others, we don’t give other people that same benefit of the doubt and consequently grade them more harshly when they fail to give to a charity or donate their time to a good cause. Even though we didn’t give to the charity either, we see other people as stingy or selfish or uncaring for not doing so, while we meant to but “just forgot.” Hardly seems fair, does it?
But our special access to our own conscious thoughts, combined with our complete lack of access to those of others, has some surprising implications for how we feel special, and even somewhat alone and isolated, in the social world. My Yale colleagues Erica Boothby and Margaret Clark and I have shown that people—all or at least most of us—believe we are (somehow) relatively invisible to others in public settings. Each of knows that we commonly “check out” other people on the train or in the waiting room with us, or sitting in the classroom or on the other park benches. We do this surreptitiously, of course, avoiding eye contact, and we don’t think anyone notices when we do it. But we also do not think anyone is checking us out in turn. Our surveys show that each of us thinks he or she is pretty much the only one doing this—that we are checking others out but not being looked at by anyone else. My colleagues and I called this the “invisibility cloak illusion,” after the Harry Potter stories. But if you think about it, of course we are being looked at and checked out as much as we are doing the same to others. After all, you are my “other person” and I am yours. And you think you are watching me but I am not watching you, and I think you are not watching me but I am watching you, and logically we both can’t be right. In reality, we are both checking each other out and thinking (erroneously) we are the only ones doing it.
In a sense, what we are doing as individuals is making the same logical error that John Watson and the behaviorists did one hundred years ago. Recall that they concluded that because they did not have methods to reliably measure conscious thoughts, therefore conscious thoughts did not matter, and played no important causal role in human emotions or behavior. It is a logical fallacy to conclude that just because you don’t have direct evidence that other people are observing you, they are not doing so. Of course you don’t have evidence of their thoughts and surreptitious attention, any more than they have this evidence about yours. And you don’t have direct evidence of their having good intentions, either, and you (and I, and everyone) therefore conclude they don’t have them. And they conclude that you don’t have them, leading to you (and me, and everyone) protesting that yes, you did intend to do the good thing; how dare they suggest otherwise. This has profound implications for how we judge and form opinions about each other, especially those in out-groups, such as other political parties, and how we can quite easily assume their malevolent intent.
Now take this basic duality between our access to our own mind versus our lack of access to other people’s minds into another domain, not of how much we and others are looking at each other, but of how much we and others are thinking about each other. And the same thing happens. Each of us believes we are thinking, during random moments throughout the day, of the other people in our life—family, children, coworkers—but that those other people are not in turn thinking about us. (Maybe sometimes, but not at all as much as we are thinking about them.) Why not? Well, again, we have no evidence that they are, and why should they, anyway? That would be somewhat egotistical of us, wouldn’t it, to assume that others are thinking about us when we are not around? Yet, again, we know we do this about the other people we know. And when you start to ask people about it, once again, everyone acknowledges thinking about the other people in their lives several times a day, but at the same time believes that those others are thinking about them far less often. (We call this the mind gap, in a play on the famous and ubiquitous sign in the London Underground reminding riders to “mind the gap” between the train and the platform.)
What a boon it would be, especially for people who feel lonely, or unloved and unappreciated, to know that others are indeed thinking about them during the day. How easy it would be for people to keep track, just jot down when it happens, when they have thoughts about the others in their life and then get people together to show each other, that yes, I do think about you, and wow—really—you think about me, too? I bet there would be a lot of happy faces when they found that out.
This is a rewarding new direction for our lab’s research because it extends the question of how aware we are of what is going on in our own minds, with all the important implications and consequences we’ve described in this book, to that of how aware we are of what is going on in the minds of others—and there do seem to be very important implications and consequences for that degree of awareness (and especially, lack of awareness) as well. We certainly seem to base some rather important conclusions about other people, relative to ourselves, on our naked inability to know what is going on in their heads, as if our not being aware of what is going on means nothing is going on. And like many of the negative consequences of the hidden mind operations we’ve described in this book, these mistaken conclusions and logical fallacies about the minds of others seem quite fixable, with even just a moment’s reflection. But most of all, this emerging research reminds us how interconnected we all are, not just through our visible actions, but through our invisible thoughts as well. We are as dependent on other people as our conscious mind is dependent on our unconscious, and welcoming this truth into our outlook can help us better support the people in our lives, and receive their support as well.
* * *
When I first started DJing as a high school student at the college radio station in my town, I was a bit of a disaster. I choked on the weather forecast the first time I spoke into the mic, those fades from one song to the next were trickier than I thought they would be, and I once went to the bathroom while a long song was playing and managed to lock myself out of the control room.
As the DJs of our own lives, things don’t always go smoothly. We can get flustered under pressure, have trouble learning new things (remember when you first started to drive?), and when things really get bad, lose control. (Just ask the racehorse owner Steve Coburn.) But we do learn from those times, we avoid those same mistakes, and things get easier. Our presents, and especially our futures, can be better than our pasts. After a month or two on the air I was actually pretty darn good at segues and mixing songs together, and I learned to not talk so much and get out of the way of the music, which, after all, was what my listeners were tuning in for. What those listeners may not have realized was that I was just as into the music that was currently playing as they were. Sure, I was busy putting the newscast together or getting the next song ready on the second turntable, but I was with them in the present moment, too. My mind was in the future getting ready for what would come on the air next, but my real reason for being a DJ was to experience and have control over the music playing right then in the present.
And today, if you check out my iPhone playlists, you’ll find mostly the same music I was playing back then—a lot of Zeppelin, of course, but also Traffic, Cream, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, plus more obscure bands like Spooky Tooth and Savoy Brown, which I only discovered thanks to the station’s music library. And the 1980s and ’90s are represented, too, with a lot of Talking Heads and a bit of Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Music still has the same power over me it always has. While my mind is being infused with what is blasting through my headphones, a lot of the old emotions and feelings and memories flood back in, too. We can’t help but live in all three time zones simultaneously, remembering and reliving the past, the roots of who we are now, and planning and worrying about what we have to get done for tomorrow and next week, what we hope to get done this year, and what we want our life to be like five years from now. The past and the future constantly shape our present.
The present moments of 1970s Led Zeppelin contained the indelible past of American blues, just as in the present mind of a 1970s Illinois psychology major were the titanic voices of Skinner and Freud. Since then, most of my present moments have been with an eye toward the future goal of understanding just how much free will and control we actually have over what we think, feel, and do. But all of this has been experienced with the soundtrack of my past playing in my head—not just those incredible years at the radio station, but also my wide-eyed wonder as a child, the trees I climbed and the baseball I played, my crazy high school band buddies, and memories of my father. At the radio station, my initially clumsy DJ skills eventually became second nature, and getting used to the routine allowed me to have fun, feel cool, and bring some joy to my late-night listeners. My hope with this book is that you now feel more at home in the DJ booth of your own mind, and can take even better control over the soundtrack of your life.