Strangers to Ourselves Quotes

“Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be. —H. F. Amiel, The Private Journal”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Consider that at any given moment, our five senses are taking in more than 11,000,000 pieces of information. Scientists have determined this number by counting the receptor cells each sense organ has and the nerves that go from these cells to the brain. Our eyes alone receive and send over 10,000,000 signals to our brains each second. Scientists have also tried to determine how many of these signals can be processed consciously at any given point in time, by looking at such things as how quickly people can read, consciously detect different flashes of light, and tell apart different kinds of smells. The most liberal estimate is that people can process consciously about 40 pieces of information per second.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Just as we possess a potent physical immune system that protects us from threats to our physical well-being, so do we possess a potent psychological immune system that protects us from threats to our psychological well-being. When it comes to maintaining a sense of well-being, each of us is the ultimate spin doctor.21”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Given all the evidence for how resilient people are, it is striking that people don’t realize this when predicting their emotional reactions to future events. Daniel Gilbert and I have found evidence for this lack of appreciation of resilience—the durability bias—in numerous studies. In one, college football fans predicted how happy they would be in the days following a victory or loss by their favorite team. They anticipated that the outcome of the game would influence their overall happiness for two to three days, but it did not. By the following day, people were back to their normal level of happiness. In another, assistant professors predicted that the outcome of their tenure decision would have a large impact on their overall happiness for five years after the decision. In fact, professors who had received tenure in the previous five years were not significantly happier than professors who had been denied tenure.22”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“In another experiment, Stanley Schachter and Ladd Wheeler asked participants to take part in a study of the effects of a vitamin compound on vision. Participants received an injection and then watched a fifteen-minute comedy film. Unbeknownst to the participants, the “vitamin” was actually epinephrine in one condition, a placebo in another, and chlorpromazine in a third. Epinephrine produces physiological arousal in the sympathetic nervous system, such as increased heart rate and slight tremors in the arms and legs. Chlorpromazine is a tranquilizer that acts as a depressant of the sympathetic nervous system. The researchers reasoned that because the participants did not know that they had received a drug, they would infer that the film was causing their bodily reactions. Consistent with this hypothesis, people injected with the epinephrine seemed to find the film the funniest; they laughed and smiled the most while watching it. People injected with the chlorpromazine seemed to find the film the least funny; they laughed and smiled little while watching”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“There is some evidence that peer reports (Suzie’s friends’ ratings) predict people’s behavior better than their self-reports (Suzie’s own ratings). In one study, for example, college students were worse at predicting how nervous and talkative they would be when chatting with a new acquaintance than were peers who had just met them for the first time.21 Other studies have found that people are worse at making specific predictions about how they will behave than they are at predicting how other people will behave. When asked whether they would purchase a flower as part of a campus charity drive in the upcoming weeks, students made overly rosy predictions; 83 percent said they would, whereas in fact only 43 percent actually did. When asked how likely it was that other students would purchase a flower, people were more accurate; they predicted that 56 percent would, which was closer to the 43 percent figure. In another study, people predicted that they would donate an average of $2.44 of their earnings in an experiment to charity, whereas other people would donate only $1.83. Once again they were more accurate in their predictions about other people; the actual figure donated was $1.53. One reason people fail to predict their own behavior very accurately is that they believe that they are “holier than thou” and would be more likely than the average person to perform moral acts of kindness. Another is that people use different kinds of information when predicting their own versus other people’s behavior. When predicting other people’s actions, we rely mostly on our cumulative experience of how the average person would act, including our hunches about the kinds of situational constraints people will face (“Probably many people who intended to buy a flower will never walk past one of the people selling them”). When predicting our own actions, we rely more on our “inside information” about our own personalities (“I am a kind person who wants to help others”). This can be a problem for two reasons: relying only on inside information causes people to overlook situational constraints on their actions, such as the possibility that they, too, will fail to pass by someone selling the flowers; second, as we have seen, people’s inside information is not the full story about their personalities and might not be completely accurate.22”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“If there are two sides to people’s personality—a nonconscious and a conscious one, each producing unique behavior—then it is interesting to consider how other people get to know us. People could form impressions from our automatic, uncontrolled actions that reflect our implicit motives and traits (e.g., our implicit need for affiliation), or they could form impressions from our controlled, deliberative actions that reflect our explicit motives. It seems likely that people attend at least in part to behaviors that emanate from the adaptive unconscious (e.g., “Jim says that he’s shy, but he’s often the life of the party”). If so, other people might know us better than we know ourselves.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Implicit motives are needs that people acquire in childhood that have become automatic and nonconscious. Self-attributed motives are people’s conscious theories about their needs that may often differ from their nonconscious needs. McClelland reports a study, for example, that measured people’s need for affiliation with both the TAT and a self-report questionnaire. People’s affiliation needs, as assessed by the TAT, predicted whether they were talking with another person when they were beeped at random intervals over several days, whereas a self-report measure of affiliation did not. Affiliation needs as assessed with the self-report measure were a better predictor of more deliberative behavioral responses, such as people’s choices of which types of behaviors they would prefer to do alone or with others (e.g., visit a museum). The picture McClelland paints is of two independent systems that operate in parallel and influence different types of behaviors. In our terms, the adaptive unconscious and the conscious explanatory system each has its own set of needs and motives that influence different types of behaviors.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“A better working definition of the unconscious is mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Further, in a review of personality research published in 1968, Walter Mischel found that none of the approaches met the gold standard of personality research very well, namely Allport's criterion of predicting with any certainty what people actually do. An extravert should make friends more easily than an introvert, whereas a conscientious person should meet more deadlines than a person who is not conscientious. Mischel found, however, that the typical correlation between personality traits and behavior was quite modest. This news shook up the field, because it essentially said that the traits personality psychologists were measuring were just slightly better than astrological signs at predicting behavior.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“A small percentage of the population can be easily hypnotized, and, when given posthypnotic suggestions, they end up doing things with no conscious awareness of why. G. H. Estabrooks notes that when this happens, the person “finds excuses for his actions and, strange to say, while these excuses may be utterly false, the subject tends to believe them.” He relates the following example: The operator hypnotizes a subject and tells him that when the cuckoo clock strikes he will walk up to Mr. White, put a lamp shade on his head, kneel on the floor in front of him and “cuckoo” three times. Mr. White was not the type on whom one played practical jokes, in fact, he was a morose, nonhumorous sort of individual who would fit very badly in such a picture. Yet, when the cuckoo clock struck, the subject carried out the suggestion to the letter. “What in the world are you doing?” he was asked. “Well, I’ll tell you. It sounds queer but it’s just a little experiment in psychology. I’ve been reading on the psychology of humor and I thought I’d see how you folks reacted to a joke that was in very bad taste. Please pardon me, Mr. White, no offense intended whatsoever,” and the subject sat down without the slightest realization of having acted under posthypnotic compulsion.2”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“There is very little research on the consequences of having disparate conscious and nonconscious “selves” that are out of synch. An exception is the work of Joachim Brunstein and Oliver Schultheiss. In several studies, they measured people’s nonconscious agentic motives (needs for achievement and power) and communal motives (needs for affiliation and intimacy), using the TAT test. They also included self-report measures of these same motives. As in previous studies, they found little correspondence, on average, between people’s nonconscious and conscious motives. Some individuals, however, did have nonconscious and conscious motives that corresponded, and these people showed greater emotional well-being than people whose goals were out of synch. In one study, students’ nonconscious and conscious goals were assessed at the beginning of the semester and their emotional well-being tracked for the next several weeks. The students whose conscious goals matched their nonconscious goals showed an increase in emotional well-being as the semester progressed. The students whose conscious goals did not match their nonconscious goals showed a decrease in emotional well-being over the same period. It appears to be to people’s advantage to develop conscious theories that correspond at least somewhat with the personality of their adaptive unconscious.30”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“David McClelland and his colleagues offer the hypothesis that nonconscious motives are rooted in early infancy, whereas conscious, self-attributed motives result from more explicit, parental teachings. To test this idea, McClelland and his colleagues interviewed a sample of adults in their early thirties, measuring both their nonconscious motives (i.e., their responses to TAT pictures) and their conscious, explicit motives (their responses on a self-report questionnaire). The fascinating thing about this study is that the participants’ mothers had been interviewed twenty-five years earlier about their childrearing practices, allowing the researchers to test the extent to which people’s implicit and explicit motives, as adults, were related to the childrearing practices of their mothers twenty-five years earlier. There was some evidence that early, prelingual childrearing experiences were correlated with implicit but not explicit motives. For example, the extent to which mothers used scheduled feedings correlated with the implicit but not explicit need for achievement in the adult sample, and the extent to which the mothers were unresponsive to their infants’ crying was correlated with the implicit but not explicit need for affiliation. Postlingual childhood experiences were more likely to correlate with explicit than with implicit motives. For example, the extent to which children were taught not to fight back when provoked was correlated with the explicit but not implicit need for affiliation, and the children of parents who set explicit tasks for them to learn were more likely to have an explicit but not implicit need for achievement.28 The nonconscious and conscious selves thus seem to be influenced by one’s cultural and social environment, but in different ways. The kinds of early affective experiences that shape a child’s adaptive unconscious surely have a cultural basis, given that childrearing practices differ markedly from culture to culture. The conscious theories people develop about themselves also are shaped by the cultural and social environment.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“There is some evidence that supports this startling conclusion. First, the correspondence between people’s ratings of their own personality and other people’s ratings of their personality is not very high. It depends somewhat on the trait; for example, people tend to agree with others about how extraverted they are, but on most other personality traits the level of agreement is modest (correlations in the range of .40). Thus, Suzie’s judgment of how agreeable and conscientious she is correlates only modestly with how agreeable and conscientious her friends think she is. Furthermore, other people agree more among themselves about what another person is like than they agree with that person’s own ratings. Jane, Bob, Sam, and Denisha are likely to agree more with each other about how agreeable and conscientious Suzie is than they are to agree with Suzie. But who is more “right”?”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“If we were to make a list of the goals that are most important in life, surely the desire for close relationships, success in life (e.g., a career), and power would make most people’s short list. There is a long tradition in personality psychology of studying these three motives; indeed, psychologists such as H. A. Murray and David McClelland have argued that people’s level of needs for affiliation, achievement, and power are major components of human personality. There is growing evidence that these motives are an important part of the personality of the adaptive unconscious. Murray and McClelland assumed that these basic motives are not necessarily conscious and must therefore be measured indirectly. They advocated the use of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), in which people make up stories about a set of standard pictures, and these stories are then coded for how much of a need for affiliation, power, or achievement people expressed. Other researchers have developed explicit, self-report questionnaires of motives, with the assumption that people are aware of their motives and can freely report them. A controversy has ensued over which measure of motivation is the most valid: the TAT or self-report questionnaires. The answer, I suggest, is that both are valid measures but tap different levels of motivation, one that resides in the adaptive unconscious and the other that is part of people’s conscious explanatory system. David McClelland and his colleagues made this argument in an influential review of the literature. First, they noted that the self-report questionnaires and the TAT do not correlate with each other. If Sarah reports on a questionnaire that she has a high need for affiliation, we know virtually nothing about the level of this need that she will express, nonconsciously, on the TAT. Second, they argued that both techniques are valid measures of motivation, but of different types. The TAT assesses implicit motives, whereas explicit, self-report measures assess self-attributed motives.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Recall that a fundamental property of the adaptive unconscious is that people have no access to the ways in which it selects, interprets, and evaluates information. Thus, asking people to report their nonconscious reactions is fruitless; people may not know how they are likely to react. Alternatively, we could observe people’s behavior very closely and try to deduce the “if-then” patterns of their adaptive unconscious. Though by no means easy, this approach bypasses the conscious explanatory system and may get directly at nonconscious encodings. This is the approach that Mischel and his colleagues have adopted. In one study, they systematically observed children in a residential camp for many hours, carefully noting the ways in which they behaved in a variety of situations. They were able to find “distinctive behavioral signatures” that permitted them to infer the children’s “if-then” patterns of construal. For example, they observed how verbally aggressive the children were in five situations: when approached by a peer, when teased by a peer, when praised by an adult, when warned by an adult, and when punished by an adult. Some children were found to be very aggressive when warned by an adult, but relatively unaggressive in the other situations. Others were found to be very aggressive when a peer approached them, but relatively unaggressive in the other situations. Each of these children’s “behavioral signatures” was stable over time; they seemed to reflect characteristic ways in which they interpreted the different situations.10 Although this result might seem pretty straightforward—even obvious—it contrasts strongly with the way in which most personality psychologists study individual differences. Trait theorists would give the boys a standardized questionnaire and classify each on the trait of aggressiveness. The assumption would be that each boy possesses a certain level of aggressiveness that would allow predictions of their behavior, regardless of the nature of the situation. But clearly the trait approach would not be very useful here, because it does not take into account the fact that (1) the boys’ aggressiveness would depend on how they interpret the situation (e.g., how threatening they found it); (2) not everyone interprets a situation in the same way; (3) their interpretations are stable over time; and (4) the interpretations are made by the adaptive unconscious. By taking each of these points into account we can predict the boys’ behavior pretty well—better than if we had given them a questionnaire and assigned them a value on a single trait dimension.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Rather than a collection of static traits that we can use to classify people, Mischel argued, personality is better conceived as a set of unique cognitive and affective variables that determine how people construe the situation. People have chronic ways of interpreting and evaluating different situations, and it is these interpretations that influence their behavior. Barbara’s cognitive and affective personality system causes her to feel threatened when she suffers academic setbacks, and it is then that she is most likely to act aggressively. Sam’s cognitive and affective personality system causes him to feel threatened when he perceives that he is being ignored by significant others, and that is when he is most likely to act aggressively. According to this view it makes little sense to try to classify how aggressive Barbara and Tom are on a single trait dimension; instead, we must understand how each person interprets and understands a social situation and acts accordingly.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“An extravert should make friends more easily than an introvert, whereas a conscientious person should meet more deadlines than a person who is not conscientious. Mischel found, however, that the typical correlation between personality traits and behavior was quite modest. This news shook up the field, because it essentially said that the traits personality psychologists were measuring were just slightly better than astrological signs at predicting behavior. Mischel did not simply point out the problem; he diagnosed the reasons for it. First, he argued that personality researchers had underestimated the extent to which the social situation shapes people’s behavior, independently of their personality. To predict whether a person will meet a deadline, for example, knowing something about the situation—the consequences of not meeting it, how much time the person has, how much work remains to be done—may be more useful than knowing the person’s score on a measure of conscientiousness. Situational influences can be very powerful, sometimes overwhelming individual differences in personality.5 This argument set off a turf war between personality psychologists, who place their bets on individual differences as the best predictors of behavior, and social psychologists, who place their bets on the nature of the social situation and how people interpret it.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“It is fair to say that the tendency for the adaptive unconscious to jump to conclusions, and to fail to change its mind in the face of contrary evidence, is responsible for some of society’s most troubling problems, such as the pervasiveness of racial prejudice (discussed in Chapter 9).”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“In one study, the Sadkers showed teachers a film of a classroom discussion and asked who was contributing more to that discussion—boys or girls. The teachers said that the girls had participated more than the boys. Only when the Sadkers asked the teachers to watch the film and count the number of times boys and girls talked did the teachers realize that the boys had outtalked the girls by a factor of three to one.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious