The power and the workings of your unconscious

Traditionally, a goal has been understood as a conscious desirable thing or state that triggers a set of actions, if one decides to pursue it. However, goals and intentions are different concepts. So different that one can be pursuing a goal without the intention of doing so. In other words, goals can be pursued unconsciously.

An important source of unconscious actions is one that we are all familiar with, habits. We all know the feeling of automatically finding yourself doing something automatically that you have done hundreds of times before, because the context or a particular action triggered your habit. But the power of our unconsciousness goes far beyond that. Your unconscious is able to pursue a goal even if to do so it needs to innovate. It works in very subtle but powerful ways.

There are interesting consequences to this unconscious system. Firstly, your conscious goals are affected if you have unconscious goals “in the pipe,” as these will require and consume part of your mental capacities. Secondly, the unconscious can activate and pursue a goal outside of one’s awareness. But what’s mind-blowing, it can even create one that never existed before.

This sounds a bit like science fiction; however it has been tested empirically in many studies. One of these studies ran tests where subjects were primed unconsciously to be successful or collaborative, just by doing a brief exercise that included a few words related to these behaviors. They were then presented with tests that required an intellectual or collaborative task. The consequences of the unconscious priming were consistent. They enhanced the skills associated to the primed goal and showed the following effects on the participants:

  1. Promoted goal directed actions to be successful/collaborative and they performed better.
  2. The desire to reach the goal increased in strength until acted upon, meaning the unconscious goal stays in your system and grows stronger until it has been satisfied.
  3. In face of obstacles, the persistence increased and it favored the resumption of the task even when more attractive distractions were present.

This shows the power of our unconsciousness, which developed to liberate our conscious mind to do with it other tasks of our choice. But, what are its limitations? And how does it compare to our conscious thinking?

In line with our previous paper on the use of gut feelings, our conscious is a focused but low capacity system. As Dijksterhuis shows through his work, when thinking consciously, we are quite bad at weighing the importance of the different variables, giving more importance to those few that are more accessible in our memory and easy to verbalize and ignoring the rest. Therefore, if we are dealing with complex decisions, our unconscious performs better.

However, we also have great researchers like Kahneman that are not convinced by its performance. He has shown through decades of tests and research that trusting our intuitions or using heuristics will be biased by overconfidence, anchoring, or availability bias among others. Some of these were also found and explained in our papers on expert forecasts and planning in the aerospace industry.

Contrary to A. Dijksterhuis, G. Gigerenzer, or G. Klein, Kahneman argues that one should not trust their intuition too much, especially those of experts unless they have dealt with the exact same situation many times before. He encourages us to try to gather as much information as possible before taking a decision.

Besides this ongoing discussion, It’s surprising to learn how subtle messages can influence so much our behavior. Our environment, our friends, or a positive motto on the wall make a huge impact on us. The power of context has been explained in Gladwell’s book. In The Tipping Point, he gave us a great example of this effect on a larger scale when the crime rate in NY was reduced by implementing a zero tolerance policy for minor crimes and vandalism in their subway.

The workings of how our unconscious does all this seems like magic, but further tests have shed some light on how it works.

While we are distracted by other tasks, our unconscious shapes the representations of things in our mind, by organizing the information in our memory and by polarizing the positive aspects of those we like and negative aspects of those we dislike to later facilitate our decision making.

A question that remains without a clear answer is whether the biases that Kahneman presents are inherent to unconscious thinking, or if they are a byproduct of our conscious thinking—when we are making sense of our thoughts and decisions. He finds pitfalls in using our intuition, but these may only apply to an immediate response, or a conscious reasoning, and less so after letting the unconscious work on the problem. Dijksterhuis work seems to point to this direction, but B. Newel and many other reaserchers are questioning his findings and calling for more research on this topic.

As a conclusion we learned that our unconscious can create and pursue a goal just by being primed by our environment. But, will any priming of any sort of goal work? This would make us extremely easy to manipulate. What’s the level of freedom of our unconscious to create or change our goals without us being aware? Furthermore, how does unconscious priming work? It’s in our interest to understand it well in order to use it for our own benefit.

Author: C. Criado-Pérez #
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