HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS the product of an endless stream of perceptions, feelings, and thoughts, at both the conscious and the unconscious levels. The idea that we are not aware of the cause of much of our behavior can be difficult to accept. Although Freud and his followers believed in it, among research psychologists—the scientists within the field—the idea that the unconscious is important to our behavior was, until recent years, shunned as pop psychology. As one researcher wrote, “Many psychologists were reluctant to use the word ‘unconscious’ out of fear that their colleagues would think they had gone soft in the head.”6 John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale, recounts that when he started as a graduate student at the University of Michigan, in the late 1970s, it was almost universally assumed that not only our social perceptions and our judgments but also our behaviors were conscious and deliberate.7 Anything that threatened that assumption was greeted with derision, as when Bargh told a close relative, a successful professional, about some of the early studies showing that people did things for reasons they were unaware of. Using his own experience as evidence that the studies were wrong, Bargh’s relative insisted that he was unaware of even a single instance in which he’d done something for reasons he wasn’t aware of.8 Says Bargh, “We all hold dear the idea that we’re the captain of our own soul, and we’re in charge, and it’s a very scary feeling when we’re not. In fact, that’s what psychosis is—the feeling of detachment from reality and that you’re not in control, and that’s a very frightening feeling for anyone.”
Though psychological science has now come to recognize the importance of the unconscious, the internal forces of the new unconscious have little to do with the innate drives described by Freud, such as a boy’s desire to kill his father in order to marry his mom, or a woman’s envy of the male sexual organ.9 We should certainly credit Freud with understanding the immense power of the unconscious—this was an important achievement—but we also have to recognize that science has cast serious doubt on the existence of many of the specific unconscious emotional and motivational factors he identified as molding the conscious mind.10 As the social psychologist Daniel Gilbert wrote, the “supernatural flavor of Freud’s Unbewusst [unconscious] made the concept generally unpalatable.”11
The unconscious envisioned by Freud was, in the words of a group of neuroscientists, “hot and wet; it seethed with lust and anger; it was hallucinatory, primitive, and irrational,” while the new unconscious is “kinder and gentler than that and more reality bound.”12 In the new view, mental processes are thought to be unconscious because there are portions of the mind that are inaccessible to consciousness due to the architecture of the brain, rather than because they have been subject to motivational forces like repression. The inaccessibility of the new unconscious is not considered to be a defense mechanism, or unhealthy. It is considered normal.
If there are times when a phenomenon I discuss sounds vaguely Freudian, the modern understanding of that phenomenon and its causes won’t be. The new unconscious plays a far more important role than protecting us from inappropriate sexual desires (for our mothers or fathers) or from painful memories. Instead, it is a gift of evolution that is crucial to our survival as a species. Conscious thought is a great aid in designing a car or deciphering the mathematical laws of nature, but for avoiding snake bites or cars that swerve into your path or people who may mean to harm you, only the speed and efficiency of the unconscious can save you. As we’ll see, to ensure our smooth functioning in both the physical and the social world, nature has dictated that many processes of perception, memory, attention, learning, and judgment are delegated to brain structures outside conscious awareness.
SUPPOSE YOUR FAMILY vacationed in Disneyland last summer. Looking back, you might question the rationality of having braved the crowds and ninety-five-degree heat to watch your little daughter spin in a giant teacup. But then you might remember that when you planned the trip, you assessed all the possibilities and concluded that her big smile would be all the payoff you needed. We are usually confident that we know the causes of our behavior. And sometimes that confidence is warranted. Yet if forces outside our awareness play a great role in our judgment and behavior, then we must not know ourselves as well as we think we do. I took the job because I wanted a new challenge. I like that fellow because he has a great sense of humor. I trust my gastroenterologist because she lives and breathes intestines. Each day we ask and answer many questions about our feelings and our choices. Our answers usually seem to make sense, but nonetheless they are often dead wrong.
How do I love thee? Elizabeth Barrett Browning felt she could count the ways, but chances are, she couldn’t accurately list the reasons. Today we are beginning to be able to do just that, as you’ll see when you have a look at the following table. It shows who has been marrying whom in three states of the southeastern United States.13 One would think that both the who and the whom married for love, and no doubt they did. But what is love’s source? It can be the beloved’s smile, generosity, grace, charm, sensitivity—or the size of his biceps. The source of love has been pondered for eons by lovers, poets, and philosophers, but it is probably safe to say that none of them has ever waxed eloquent about this particular factor: the person’s name. This table, however, shows that a person’s name can subtly influence your heart—if the name matches your own.
Listed along the horizontal and vertical axes are the five most common U.S. surnames. The numbers in the table represent how many marriages occurred between a bride and a groom with the corresponding names. Note that the largest numbers, by far, occur along the diagonal—that is, Smiths marry other Smiths three to five times as often as they marry Johnsons, Williamses, Joneses, or Browns. In fact, Smiths marry other Smiths about as often as they marry people with all those other names, combined. And the Johnsons, Williamses, Joneses, and Browns behave similarly. What makes the effect even more striking is that these are the raw numbers—that is, since there are almost twice as many Smiths as Browns, if all else were equal, you’d expect Browns to marry the ubiquitous Smiths far more often than the rarer Browns—but even so, by far the greatest number of marriages among Browns is to other Browns.
What does this tell us? People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and we therefore have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits similar to our own, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names. Scientists have even identified a discrete area of the brain, called the dorsal striatum, as the structure that mediates much of this bias.14