Before You Know It

The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do

John Bargh

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501101236
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Dr. John Bargh, the world's leading expert on the unconscious mind, presents a "brilliant and convincing book" (Malcolm Gladwell) cited as an outstanding read of 2017 by Business Insider and The Financial Times —giving us an entirely new understanding of the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior. For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has conducted revolutionary research into the unconscious mind, research featured in bestsellers like Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow. Now, in what Dr. John Gottman said was "the most important and exciting book in psychology that has been written in the past twenty years, " Dr. Bargh takes us on an entertaining and enlightening tour of the forces that affect everyday behavior while transforming our understanding of ourselves in profound ways. Dr. Bargh takes us into his labs at New York University and Yale—where he and his colleagues have discovered how the unconscious guides our behavior, goals, and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction. With infectious enthusiasm he reveals what science now knows about the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind in who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more. Because the unconscious works in ways we are completely unaware of, Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as useful tricks to help you remember items on your to-do list, to shop smarter, and to sleep better. Before You Know It is "a fascinating compendium of landmark social-psychology research" ( Publishers Weekly ) and an introduction to a fabulous world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to knowing yourself and unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

PART 1

THE HIDDEN PAST

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The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner

CHAPTER 1

The Past Is Always Present

Around 3200 BC, a man with brown eyes and wavy hair lay dying in a boulder-choked gully in what is now the Italian Alps, at more than ten thousand feet above sea level. The man had fallen facedown on the ground, his left arm crossed under his neck. He was five foot two, around forty-five years old, and had tattoo-like markings on his skin and a gap between his two front teeth. He had recently eaten some grains and ibex meat, and had a fractured rib. It was either spring or early summer, yet at this harsh altitude, with snowcapped peaks rising all around, the weather was unpredictable. He wore a goat-hide coat and leggings, carried a copper-bladed ax and other implements, and had a small medicinal kit with him, though it wouldn’t save him.

He died, and not long after, a storm descended, sealing his body in ice.

Five thousand years later, on September 19, 1991, two German hikers were making their way down a mountain in the Ötztal Alps and decided to take a shortcut. As they left the customary path, they passed by a gully and noticed an odd shape down on its rocky floor, which was half-flooded with meltwater. They approached it for a closer look, only to discover a human corpse. Shocked, they alerted the authorities, who were eventually able to remove it from the ice in which it was still partially stuck. Soon they realized it wasn’t a tragically unlucky mountaineer, as first believed, but one of the world’s oldest mummies. Thanks to the ice that had covered the brown-eyed man, and the tucked-away positioning of the gully, which put it out of the path of the crushing movements of the glacier, the body was a monumental scientific find: an exceptionally well-preserved specimen of human life in the Copper Age, offering insights as well into human death.

In the years following the discovery of Ötzti—one of the several nicknames that the media gave to the man who met his end in that lonely ravine—scientists carefully analyzed his remains and the objects found with him. One thing they wanted to know was what had killed him. This turned out to be a less than cut-and-dried forensic task. While Ötzti had suffered a head wound on that long-ago day before the storm rolled in to freeze him, it wasn’t so clear that this was the main cause of his death. For example, he had a parasitic worm (scientists found its eggs in his stomach), and a test on one of his fingernails revealed that he suffered from a chronic malady of some sort (possibly Lyme disease). The same test also revealed that his immune system had undergone periods of acute distress three times during the last four months of his life. Maybe he had just become weak from a combination of altitude and poor health, and fell off the mountain into the gully. Also, dangerous levels of arsenic were present in his blood, leading researchers to believe that he worked as metallurgist. As if this weren’t enough, he also had past bone fractures and a cyst that probably was an aftereffect of frostbite.

And you thought you had problems.

While there were many different leads about the nature of his demise, one thing was clear: Ötzti’s life was an ongoing assault from his environment. He must have been quite hardy to have made it to the age that he did. And all of this happened to a man who likely enjoyed high status in his community, as his possession of a copper ax suggests. But in the end, scientists discovered it wasn’t his health that killed Ötzti, but a more intimate peril—other humans.

In 2001, X-rays revealed an object hidden beneath the skin of his left shoulder. After a detailed inspection, researchers concluded that it was a flint arrowhead, and its sharp point had punctured a blood vessel that would have caused him to bleed out in a very short time. In other words, Ötzti had been murdered, leaving behind one of the coldest cold cases in human history.

The revelation cast his demise in a new light. His head wound, it now appeared, was related to the assault that took his life. He was either bludgeoned by the same attackers who had shot him with the arrow, or he had bashed his head from a fall brought on by the heavy blood loss. Perhaps he was even shoved into the gully by his assailants. Whatever the specific sequence of events that led to his death, it was surely a ghastly scene—a fight for survival that Ötzti lost. Yet this one fateful day arguably resulted in less bodily trauma than the forty-plus years of his daily existence, which was beset with disease, painful physical damage, and a variety of hostile factors in his surroundings. Ötzti’s life, just like his death, speaks to the tremendous dangers and difficulties the average human encountered throughout life during our species’ long evolution. This is crucial to understand, since it was amid these same dangers and difficulties—which go back much further than the Copper Age, a relative yesterday on the timescale of human evolution—that our adaptive unconscious brain systems were shaped and honed.

The obvious yet profound thing is that, unlike the personal experiences that shape who we are in the present, we have no memory of this past. We have no recollections of our evolution. It is hidden from us, which is slightly unsettling considering how dramatically it influences what we think, say, and do. We are born “factory-equipped” with some very basic motivations that came into being during a very different period in human history. (We also come preassembled, of course, though we grow in size.) As Charles Darwin wrote in 1877, “May we not suspect that the vague but very real fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times?” Yep, we may. Humans are not a tabula rasa, or blank slate. We have two fundamental, primitive drives that subtly and unconsciously affect what we think and do: the need to survive and the need to mate. (And in the next chapter we’ll focus on a third innate drive, to cooperate with each other, which is useful for both survival and reproduction.) Yet in modern life, these ancient, unremembered drives, or “effects” of the mind, often operate without our knowledge; they can cause us to be blind to the real reasons we feel or do things. By peeling back the layers on this hidden past that still affects us, and exposing the ways in which survival and reproduction are always at work in our minds, we can better understand the present.

Where’s My Button?

Now, I’ve never had to flee murderous assailants armed with flint-tipped arrows on a mountain in the Alps, like Ötzti did. But I have—like most people—felt the same will to survive surge through my body the way it must have for him.

It was August 1981, and I had just moved to New York City to begin teaching at NYU. I was twenty-six years old, fresh out of grad school, and the only other time I’d been to the city was for my job interview a few months earlier. Right away, I was on edge. Every morning at around six o’clock, an angry man would start yelling on the street below my studio apartment. I had no air-conditioning and it was the peak of summer, so my windows were wide open. For a week or so his shouts would wake me up, and occasionally a bottle would smash close to my window. I eventually learned that then mayor Ed Koch, who was up for reelection, lived in my building, up in the penthouse, and the angry guy’s projectile bottles were meant for him. Now, Angry Guy couldn’t throw high enough to reach the penthouse apartment, but he sure could throw high enough to reach my studio. While knowing I was not his intended target made me feel slightly safer (only slightly), the city outside my apartment didn’t.

Washington Square was a rougher neighborhood in the 1980s than it is today. (The same is true of many other parts of Manhattan.) During my first week there, two men ran right past me near the Washington Arch, the second one chasing the first one with a switchblade. Those first few months, I was too apprehensive to go anywhere but work during the day, and I never went outside after dark. My only furniture at that point was a wooden chair and a folding table, and every night I would double-check the four different locks on my door and wedge the top of the chair under the doorknob. Although I managed to go to sleep each night having lived another day, my flight-or-fight system was on constant high alert. I didn’t yet have a sense of belonging in New York, which would only come years later. I had had a wonderful childhood in small-town America, climbing trees and playing baseball and riding my bike around with the gang of kids on my block, and then going to college in my hometown, followed by graduate school in another midwestern college town, Ann Arbor. None of this was any preparation for the multicultural, densely packed, and constantly noisy streets of New York City. It was culture shock, big-time, and I had to have my eyes wide open and attention constantly vigilant if I was going to survive in it—much less thrive in it.

Working on my degree at Michigan a year earlier, I had read an important paper by the psychologist Ellen Langer pointing out the artificiality of many of the social psychology laboratory studies of the time. This paper turned out to presage my own experiences after moving to the city, maybe because Langer based her paper on studies she ran in New York. In real life, she reminded us, the world is a fast-moving, busy place, quite unlike the quiet and calm psychology laboratory rooms where an experimenter works with her participants. Reading Langer’s paper while still in Ann Arbor, I understood her argument at an intellectual level, but boy, did I really understand it on a personal one after moving to the city itself.

In many of the studies in the emerging psychology research area of “social cognition”—just starting up when I arrived at NYU—the study participants would be given a button to press when they were ready to move on to the next piece of information. They could read and think about a sentence—say, describing a particular behavior by a person in a story—as long as they wanted to, then press the button to get the next piece of information. Langer said in effect, Gee, this would be great, but in real life we do not have a magic button to press whenever we want the world to stop for a moment so we can figure out what is happening and why. We have to deal with things on the fly, in real time, and we have a whole lot of other things to do in any given instant than just form impressions of the personalities of the people we are with. Our attention has to be focused on several different tasks simultaneously, including what we need to get done at the moment, and there’s not all that much attention left to ponder the world at leisure.

New York was overwhelming to me: so many people, so much traffic, so much going on to pay attention to. I wondered if I could bring impressions of the city together with Langer’s point in order to create a study. One morning, I stepped out of my office building, wended my way through the crowds on the street, looking in every direction at street crossings, then suddenly came to a complete stop in the middle of the sidewalk on Washington Place. “Where’s my button?” I said to myself. I wanted a button to stop the real world so I could figure it out and also navigate it safely. But of course, there is no such button. The question I soon asked myself then was, How do we do it without one?

In the history of humankind, we never had the luxury to pause what is happening around us until we figured out the right/best/safest thing to do. We needed to make sense of the world—especially the dangerous social world—quickly and efficiently, faster than our slow conscious thinking was capable of. We often needed to react to dangerous situations immediately. Not long after expressing my wish for a stop button, I benefited from these unconscious skills firsthand when I stepped off a curb on the way back to my apartment, and was nearly hit by a bicycle whizzing the wrong way down that one-way street. With no time to think, I jumped back onto the curb just in time. In fact, I found myself back on the curb before I was aware of the bicycle that had just sped past. (And I made a mental note for the next time that not everyone obeys one-way-street signs, so always look both ways.) Reflexive, automatic mechanisms (or instincts) for physical safety had protected me, bypassing slower thought processes. I thought that this faster, unconscious form of thought and behavior must be one important reason we were able to deal with the busy world on a real-time basis.

Back in the lab, we set to work to test this idea, designing a research program with the premise that there was, in addition to relatively slow conscious thought processes, a faster, automatic, and not-conscious way in which people dealt with their social worlds. This was a radical premise, because at this time much of psychology continued to assume that everything we decided and did was the result of intentional, conscious thought. Like Langer, we wanted to make our laboratory studies true to the constant onrushing of the world. After all, the point of our research was to understand what was happening out there in real life, not just what happened in quiet, simple lab environments. In one of our first experiments, we redid one of the “button” studies in which the participant could look at a piece of information we gave them as long as he or she wanted before making a judgment about a person, and only then pressing a button to continue. But we added a twist.

Seated in front of a computer screen, our participants read about Gregory, a fictitious person, and twenty-four different things that Gregory had done during the past week, one behavior at a time. In the “honest Gregory” condition, he did twelve honest things, such as “returned the lost wallet”; six dishonest things, such as “did not admit his blunder”; and six neutral things, such as “took out the day’s garbage.” In the “dishonest Gregory” condition, he did more dishonest things. The twenty-four behaviors of honest and dishonest Gregory were presented in a random order. We asked the participant to form an impression of Gregory while reading the behaviors. Half of the participants had a button so that they could consider each behavior as long as they wanted, before advancing to the next one. Now, so far this was just a standard social cognition experiment, the kind that Langer had criticized. The wrinkle we added was a second condition where everything was the same except the participants did not have a button. Instead, the behaviors were presented very quickly, with participants allowed just enough time to read each of them once before the next one came on the screen, and they had to do the best they could in “real time” in figuring this guy Gregory out.

As you might expect, having the button made a tremendous difference. With it there, with the magic ability to stop the world until they’d figured things out, participants had no problem judging Honest Gregory as more honest than Dishonest Gregory. After all, Honest Greg did twice as many honest as dishonest things, and Dishonest Greg did twice as many dishonest as honest things. But without the luxury of the stop button, the participants could not tell any difference between the two! Their impression ratings were based only on those behaviors they could later remember; they were not able to form an impression while Gregory’s behaviors were coming at them rapid-fire. Without a button to stop the world for a critical moment, they could not detect even such an obvious difference between people as between Honest and Dishonest Gregory in our study. They couldn’t, but another group of our participants could. This other group was able to tell the difference between Honest and Dishonest Gregory even under the rapid-fire conditions, without the stop button to help them. We had selected them for the study in advance, because we predicted they would be able to deal with the overload just fine.

Who were these special people? They are you and me. What I mean is that there was nothing particularly special about this group, except that they were especially attuned to honesty and dishonesty. How honest a person was really mattered to them, in terms of whether they liked that person or not. Honesty is of course important to all of us, but for this group it was the number one important thing about a person. It was the first personality trait that came to mind for them when asked to write down the features of a person they liked (on a questionnaire we had given to all of our potential participants several months earlier), and dishonesty came first when writing down on a blank piece of paper the characteristics of a person they disliked. They chronically thought first about a person’s honesty when deciding whether they liked or disliked him. But each of us has our own particular sensitivities—for you it could be how generous a person is; for the person near you right now it could be how intelligent that person is. Or shy, or hostile, or conceited, or whatever. There are a wide range of personality traits we can develop these automatic antenna for; we just picked one to study as an example standing in for all the rest.

That this group with the honesty antenna was able to deal with the no-button conditions just as if they were in the button condition tells us that we are all able to develop radar to pick up the important blips of meaning in our social world, without having or needing to stop and consciously figure them out. We are able to detect aspects of another’s personality and behavior that are most important to us even when our mind is very busy. We can certainly do this by the time we are adolescents and young adults—but this is not something that young children can do before they’ve had enough experience with the social world. It develops over time like any skill does, such as typing on my keyboard now, or driving a car—activities that are often terribly difficult and overwhelming to start with but with experience become easy and effortless.

The bigger picture our button study paints is that—just as Charles Darwin argued in his seminal book on emotions—often the same psychological process can operate in an unconscious mode as well as a conscious mode. Our participants who had the ability to automatically and unconsciously deal with honesty information formed very similar impressions of Gregory as did those who didn’t have that ability but did have the button. That is, through using the button to slow the world down to a speed their conscious processes could handle, they were able to deal with the information as well as, and in the same way as, those who could do it using much faster and more efficient unconscious processes. But those participants who could not do either—who did not possess the unconscious antenna for honest behavior, and were not given a button to be able to deal with it consciously—were unable to notice the difference between the very different honest and dishonest versions of Gregory.

So now we had the beginnings of an answer to the question I first asked myself out on Washington Place, the busy New York street, that morning. Thanks to our ability to develop perceptual skills that can operate quickly, efficiently, and unconsciously under real-world conditions, quite often we don’t need a button.

The Alligator of the Unconscious

Our study with Gregory and the magic button was one of the first to show that automatic, unconscious ways of dealing with our social world did exist, and that their existence within us made sense given the busy and dangerous conditions—especially regarding other humans—under which we evolved. Back then (as well as today) we didn’t always have time to think, so we needed to size people up quickly based on how they acted, and we also needed to be able to act and react quickly. To paraphrase the old saying, “She who hesitates has lost”—her life, a limb, her health, her child. But there is an importa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again
• Part One: The Hidden Past
• Part Two: The Hidden Present
• Part Three: The Hidden Future
• Conclusion: You Are the DJ
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright