Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

by Rory Sutherland

Our conscious mind tries hard to preserve the illusion that it deliberately chose every action you have ever taken; in reality, in many of these decisions it was a bystander at best, and much of the time it did not even notice the decision being made. Despite this, it will still construct a story in which it was the decisive actor. For instance, ‘I saw the bus coming and jumped back on the kerb,’ while in fact, you may well have started jumping before you were even consciously aware of the bus. In the words of Jonathan Haidt,fn1 1 ‘The conscious mind thinks it’s the Oval Office, when in reality it’s the press office.’ By this he means that we believe we are issuing executive orders, while most of the time we are actually engaged in hastily constructing plausible post-rationalisations to explain decisions taken somewhere else, for reasons we do not understand. But the fact that we can deploy reason to explain our actions post-hoc does not mean that it was reason that decided on that action in the first place, or indeed that the use of reason can help obtain it.