How Do I Love Thee? Let Me County the Ways -- And Other Bad Ideas
by Sharon Begley
September 6, 2002, p. B1.
Next time you go furniture shopping--for a sofa, say--take a look at half a dozen models, and analyze rigorously what you like and dislike about each one: the fabric...the color...the curve of the back...the arms and feet. Finally, choose one. Odds are, once you're living with the thing, you won't be nearly as happy with your purchase as if you had simply made a choice based on your intuition.
In last week's column about the unconscious, I described how the mental system operating beneath your awareness is able to size up many situations more quickly and accurately than conscious, deliberative thought.
But if you were hoping to get up-close-and-personal with your unconscious to better understand your values, beliefs, prejudices (or feelings about upholstery), forget it.
Introspection about the unconscious can be worse than useless. It "may even mislead people about how they feel," Timothy D. Wilson, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, writes in his book "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious," which reaches stores next week.
He ran a variant of the sofa experiment, asking volunteers to look at five posters, analyze what they liked and disliked about each, and then take home their favorite. Two weeks later, those who introspected about their likes and dislikes reported that they weren't too happy with the cute kitty (or whatever) on their wall. In fact, Dr. Wilson found, they were less happy than a control group of subjects who just picked a poster based on their gut feelings.
Living with a poster you can't stand is hardly the end of the world. But introspection stumbles in more-important tests, too, such as when people analyze a romantic relationship.
When Dr. Wilson and a colleague asked college students to write down why a romance was going well or poorly, the volunteers had no trouble coming up with reasons. But that immediately made many more students change their mind about the relationship--some became happier with it, others less so--than in a control group of students who didn't analyze their feelings to death. What happened?
We don't have meaningful access to the causes of our feelings. Just as introspection can't reveal how we process sights or access memories or perform many other mental functions, so, too, is it stopped short at the door to the unconscious. Faced with this brick wall, when we try to introspect about our unconscious feelings we wing it: We come up with whatever's on our (conscious) mind.
In analyzing why we love someone, we might hit upon a "reason" because we happened to be thinking about it ("he drives a cool little red sportscar") or because it is socially accepted ("she's devoted to our children"). Once these reasons are dredged up, we assume they accurately reflect our feelings. And that can change those feelings ("I must really like a guy with a Porsche").
Dr. Wilson finds that the reasons people offer for their (unconscious) feelings--why they love their partner or feel as they do about a product or social issue--are wonderfully detailed, but often hogwash.
Maybe you tell yourself that you enjoy your job because you like your colleagues or wield power, or that you want to have kids because you love the little things. But "insights" like those, born of introspection, often misrepresent the situation, as you see when you subject them to conscious analysis: "Wait a minute, my colleagues resent me and the boss always vetoes my decisions." "I have zero patience!" If you have a gut feeling about love, work or life, it's probably best not to analyze it to death. The unexamined life has its virtues.
If you're still determined to "know thyself," at least resist navel-gazing as a route to your unconscious. Instead, research shows, you can infer the nature of your unconscious--its beliefs, personality and motives--by how you behave.
Do you avoid socializing with people from a different ethnic group? Maybe you're not without prejudice after all. Do you procrastinate on extra projects? Maybe you're not as ambitious as you tell yourself. Do you disparage colleagues to the boss? You may be more devious than you admit. Do you find excuses to work late? Maybe you're not as devoted to your spouse as you profess. And so on.
Scientists disagree about how smart the unconscious is. Can it make only snap judgments, or decisions for the long term, too? From what researchers know now, Dr. Wilson advises, "We should let our adaptive unconscious do the job of forming reliable feelings and then trust those feelings."