Though psychological science
has now come to recognize the importance of the unconscious, the internal
forces of the new unconscious have little to do with the innate drives
described by Freud, such as a boy’s desire to kill his father in order to marry
his mom, or a woman’s envy of the male sexual organ. We should certainly credit Freud with
understanding the immense power of the unconscious—this was an important
achievement—but we also have to recognize that science has cast serious doubt
on the existence of many of the specific unconscious emotional and motivational
factors he identified as molding the conscious mind. As the social psychologist
Daniel Gilbert wrote, the “supernatural flavor of Freud’s Unbewusst
[unconscious] made the concept generally unpalatable.”
The unconscious
envisioned by Freud was, in the words of a group of neuroscientists, “hot and
wet; it seethed with lust and anger; it was hallucinatory, primitive, and
irrational,” while the new unconscious is “kinder and gentler than that and
more reality bound.”12 In the new view, mental processes are thought to be
unconscious because there are portions of the mind that are inaccessible to
consciousness due to the architecture of the brain, rather than because they
have been subject to motivational forces like repression. The inaccessibility
of the new unconscious is not considered to be a defense mechanism, or unhealthy.
It is considered normal.
**
In modern times,
as I mentioned, it was Freud who popularized the unconscious. But though his
theories had great prominence in clinical applications and popular culture,
Freud influenced books and films more than he influenced experimental research
in psychology. Through most of the twentieth century, empirical psychologists
simply neglected the unconscious mind. Odd as it may sound today, in the first
half of that century, which was dominated by those in the behaviorist movement,
psychologists even sought to do away with the concept of mind altogether. They
not only likened the behavior of humans to that of animals, they considered
both humans and animals to be merely complex machines that responded to stimuli
in predictable ways.
**
Conscious thought is a great aid in designing a car or
deciphering the mathematical laws of nature, but for avoiding snake bites or
cars that swerve into your path or people who may mean to harm you, only the
speed and efficiency of the unconscious can save you.
**
Research suggests
that when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of
low ability and high confidence. You might feel certain you took a job because
it presented a challenge, but perhaps you were really more interested in the
greater prestige. You might swear you like that fellow for his sense of humor,
but you might really like him for his smile, which reminds you of your
mother’s. You might think you trust your gastroenterologist because she is a
great expert, but you might really trust her because she is a good listener.
Most of us are satisfied with our theories about ourselves and accept them with
confidence, but we rarely see those theories tested. Scientists, however, are
now able to test those theories in the laboratory, and they have proven
astonishingly inaccurate.
**
In truth,
environmental factors have a powerful—and unconscious—influence not only on how
much we choose to eat but also on how the food tastes. For example, suppose you
don’t eat just in movie theaters but sometimes go to restaurants, sometimes
even restaurants that provide more than just a menu board listing various types
of hamburgers. These more elegant restaurants commonly offer menus peppered
with terms like “crispy cucumbers,” “velvety mashed potatoes,” and
“slow-roasted beets on a bed of arugula,” as if at other restaurants the cucumbers
are limp, the mashed potatoes have the texture of wool, and the beets are
flash-fried, then made to sit up in an uncomfortable chair. Would a crispy
cucumber, by any other name, taste as crisp? Would a bacon cheeseburger,
presented in Spanish, become Mexican food? Could poetic description convert
macaroni and cheese from a limerick to a haiku? Studies show that
flowery modifiers not only tempt people to order the lyrically described foods
but also lead them to rate those foods as tasting better than the identical
foods given only a generic listing. If someone were to ask about
your taste in fine dining and you were to say, “I lean toward food served with
vivid adjectives,” you’d probably get a pretty strange look; yet a dish’s
description turns out to be an important factor in how it tastes. So the next
time you have friends over for dinner, don’t serve them salad from the store
down the street; go for the subliminal effect and serve them a mélange of local
greens.
**
... In that study
participants were asked to read a recipe for creating a Japanese lunch dish,
then to rate the amount of effort and skill they thought the recipe would
require and how likely they were to prepare the dish at home. Subjects who were
presented with the recipe in a difficult-to-read font rated the recipe as more
difficult and said they were less likely to attempt to make the dish. The
researchers repeated the experiment, showing other subjects a one-page
description of an exercise routine instead of a recipe, and found similar results:
subjects rated the exercise as harder and said they were less likely to try it
when the instructions were printed in a font that was hard to read.
Psychologists call this the “fluency effect.” If the form of information is
difficult to assimilate, that affects our judgments about the substance of that
information.
The science of
the new unconscious is full of reports about phenomena such as these, quirks in
our judgment and perception of people and events, artifacts that arise from the
usually beneficial ways in which our brains automatically process information. The point is that we are not
like computers that crunch data in a relatively straightforward manner and
calculate results. Instead, our brains are made up of a collection of many
modules that work in parallel, with complex interactions, most of which operate
outside of our consciousness. As a consequence, the real reasons behind our
judgments, feelings, and behavior can surprise us.
**
In a recent
experiment, he [Antonio Rangel] and his colleagues showed that people would pay
40 to 61 percent more for an item of junk food if, rather than choosing from a
text or image display, they were presented with the actual item. The study also
found that if the item is presented behind Plexiglas, rather than being
available for you to simply grab, your willingness to pay sinks back down to
the text and image levels. Sound weird? How about rating one detergent as being
superior to another because it comes in a blue-and-yellow box? Or would you buy
German wine rather than French because German beer hall music was playing in
the background as you walked down the liquor aisle? Would you rate the quality
of silk stockings as higher because you liked their scent?
In each of these
studies, people were strongly influenced by the irrelevant factors—the ones
that speak to our unconscious desires and motivations, which traditional
economists ignore. Moreover, when quizzed about the reasons for their
decisions, the subjects proved completely unaware that those factors had
influenced them. For example, in the detergent study, subjects were given three
different boxes of detergent and asked to try them all out for a few weeks,
then report on which they liked best and why. One box was predominantly yellow,
another blue, and the third was blue with splashes of yellow. In their reports,
the subjects overwhelmingly favored the detergent in the box with mixed colors.
Their comments included much about the relative merits of the detergents, but
none mentioned the box. Why should they? A pretty box doesn’t make the
detergent work better. But in reality it was just the box that differed—the
detergents inside were all identical. We judge products by their boxes, books
by their covers, and even corporations’ annual reports by their glossy finish.
That’s why doctors instinctively “package” themselves in nice shirts and ties
and it’s not advisable for attorneys to greet clients in Budweiser T-shirts.
