The Open Curriculum

The Mind · Level 3

Strangers to Ourselves + Redirect

Timothy D. Wilson · 2002–2011

Thesis

Much of what drives a person's judgments, feelings and actions happens in an adaptive unconscious that introspection cannot reach, so people know themselves mainly through stories they construct, and small, well-timed edits to those stories change behavior more lastingly than large programs.

The main ideas

The adaptive unconscious

In Strangers to Ourselves (2002), Wilson argues that the mind does most of its work outside awareness. His estimate of the gap: the senses take in about 11 million pieces of information each second, counting the signals sent by sensory receptors, of which the eyes alone send about 10 million. People can consciously process about 40.

The processing that handles the rest is what Wilson calls the adaptive unconscious. It sizes up the world, sets goals and initiates action while conscious attention is elsewhere. It is fast, automatic and attuned to patterns.

Wilson separates his view from Freud's. Freud was right that people lack access to many of their own motives. But the adaptive unconscious is not a store of desires kept out of awareness because they are unacceptable. It is an efficient information processor, and it is inaccessible because it operates outside consciousness, not because its contents are threatening.

Implication: a person's account of why they did something is not privileged evidence about the cause. Treat it as a hypothesis, including when the person is you.

Self-narratives

Because the adaptive unconscious cannot be observed, conscious self-knowledge is a construction. People build a story about who they are and why they act as they do, from what they can see of their own behavior, from what their culture says causes such behavior, and from what seems plausible. Wilson's epigraph is from Henri-Frédéric Amiel's journal: "Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be."

The mechanism of error is that the conscious story and the unconscious processes are separate systems. A person's sincere self-description can contradict their behavior, which follows the unconscious. When people fail to know themselves, Wilson argues, it is usually because they have constructed a plausible narrative that is out of touch with their adaptive unconscious, not because a hidden truth is being repressed.

Implication: when your self-description and your record of behavior disagree, trust the record.

Thinking too much about reasons

Introspection can make choices worse. Wilson's study had students choose a poster to take home from a set that included art prints and humorous posters. Some were first asked to analyze why they liked or disliked each one. Those who listed reasons chose a different type of poster, and when contacted weeks later they were less satisfied with the poster they had chosen than students who had chosen without analyzing.

The mechanism is that the reasons people can put into words are those that are easy to verbalize and plausible, not those that formed the preference. Asking for reasons brings these forward, and people change their stated preference to match them. The new preference is based on a partial and distorted account, and when the analysis wears off, the original feelings return and the choice no longer fits.

Implication: for choices that depend on taste, such as a home, a job or a partner, attend to the overall feeling, and be wary of pro-and-con lists that override it with whatever reasons happen to be easy to name.

Looking outward

If introspection cannot reach the adaptive unconscious, Wilson argues, self-knowledge has to come from outside. The first source is one's own behavior: what one actually does, chooses and avoids is the output of the unconscious and a better guide to it than self-reports. The second is other people. Others observe a person's behavior without the conscious narrative in the way, so their impressions are evidence the person cannot get by looking inward.

Wilson extends this to changing oneself. Because people infer their traits from their behavior, acting in a new way changes the self-story that follows. His summary is "do good, be good": people who act in helpful and caring ways come to see themselves as helpful and caring, and the new self-view then supports further behavior of the same kind.

Implication: to learn what you are like, ask people who see you often and watch what you do when no one is asking. To become different, act the part first; the self-view follows the action.

Story editing

In Redirect (2011), Wilson turns the same model into a method of change. People interpret their lives through stories about themselves and the world, and those interpretations drive behavior. Story editing is a set of techniques for redirecting the stories in ways that lead to lasting change, usually through small prompts and not through lectures or incentives. Prompts work best early, before a person has settled on an interpretation.

His central case is a study he ran with first-year college students who were worried about their grades. Students in the treatment group were told that many students do poorly at first and then improve, and they watched videotaped interviews with older students saying their grade averages had risen after their first year. The message reframed a poor start as common and temporary, not a sign of lacking ability. Compared with a control group, these students improved their grades more and were less likely to drop out of college.

The book's other cases follow the same logic. In values affirmation, students write briefly about a value that matters to them before a test. The Teen Outreach Program has teenagers do community service and discuss it, which changes how they see themselves.

Implication: when someone draws a damaging conclusion from an early setback, intervene on the interpretation, early, with evidence that the setback is common and temporary.

Programs that backfire

Wilson argues that common sense is a poor guide to which interventions work, and that some popular programs make things worse. Scared Straight, which takes at-risk teenagers into prisons to be confronted by inmates, was found in controlled studies to make participants more likely to offend, not less. Critical incident stress debriefing, in which people are asked to talk through a traumatic event soon after it, can increase anxiety and depression by reliving the trauma; in one study of burn victims, those debriefed had more post-traumatic stress, depression and anxiety a year later. He also questions D.A.R.E., the school antidrug program, suggesting it may make drugs seem more attractive.

The mechanism is that these programs push an interpretation from outside, at the wrong moment, and the story people build in response is not the intended one. Debriefing asks people to rehearse a trauma before they have distance from it.

His alternative for painful events is expressive writing: wait until there is some distance from the event, then write about it for 15 minutes on each of four consecutive days. Writing helps people make sense of the event, reinterpreting it from a detached point of view.

Implication: before adopting an intervention because it sounds right, ask for a randomized evaluation. If none exists, run one.

Limits

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