Ego

A Course in Miracles

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The Ego and Social Psychology

Chapter 2 What Makes Us Go Wrong? (from Creating Harmonious Relationships)

Everything one encounters is preconsciously screened and classified as either good or bad,

Psychologists have been aware that the mind makes some decisions automatically, without conscious attention. We can drive, for example, without giving it a thought. This wasn’t true when we were first learning. Then, not popping the clutch took our full attention. But as adults, most of us drive unconsciously. We cruise down familiar streets while talking to a passenger, listening to the radio, or planning the future.

Because of the tremendous amount of data streaming in to the mind every second from our senses, our mind’s ability to perform routine tasks unconsciously is essential. The human eye, for example, scans two billion bits of data per second. If all this data were not already organized somehow, the conscious mind would have to start from scratch to figure out what each pattern of light and dark meant. We simply can’t afford to consciously process all the data every time we move our eyes. It would take all day just to get dressed. So the mind uses automatic processes to organize data and carry out routine tasks. Unconscious processing is much faster than conscious processing.

An automatic process is similar to multitasking on a computer. The computer can be downloading a program from the Internet (the routine task) while the operator is using the computer for word-processing (the conscious task).

When a child is young, her parents show her a chair and say the word, “chair.” Gradually the child learns that a certain pattern of visual data mean a chair. As the child looks for similar patterns, she is able to recognize other chairs more quickly. Eventually, her mind delegates chair-finding entirely to an unconscious process and conscious thought is no longer required.

While psychologists have known about automatic processes for a long time, they assumed our minds consciously monitored them to make sure they were doing what we wanted.

If unconscious processes are the cause of the irrational behavior that destroys our relationships, we need to know the answers to the following questions:

4. Can we control or influence the unconscious so we can be more accurate in our judgments, more able to understand and get along with other people?

The Breakthrough Discoveries

On August 8, 1995, Daniel Goleman reported some startling psychological research results on the front page of the New York Times science section. Dr. John Bargh and Dr. Shelly Chaiken, both at New York University, measured the existence of the unconscious judgment process. The following account is condensed from the great number of experiments they performed to show the heart of their breakthrough.

The researchers used two simple psychological tools to measure the judgment process. The first tool was a list of words. There are some words that everybody likes and judges as good, such as “friend” and “beautiful.” There are others that everybody dislikes and judges as bad, such as “cancer” and “death.” And there are many words in the middle that some people associate with good and others with bad. Prior to the experiment, the scientists had each person who was a subject of the experiment rate words until each had a list of words which they had judged good and a list they judged bad.

The other tool was a tachistoscope. A tachistoscope flashes a brief, timed image on a screen for durations as brief as a quarter of a second. Remarkably, at that speed the subject’s conscious mind does not know anything happened. They don’t think they saw anything. But their unconscious mind sees the image. If the flashed image is a word, the unconscious mind reads, understands and reacts to the word, even though the subject’s conscious mind doesn’t know that there was anything to see. In this way the tachistoscope provides direct access to the unconscious mind.

In the experiment the scientists presented the subjects with two words, one right after the other. The first word was flashed on the screen at a quarter second, too fast to be consciously visible. The second, or “target” word, was projected on the screen long enough to be visible. The subjects were asked to press one button if they thought the target word was “good” or another button if they thought it was “bad.”

Here is an example. Imagine Jill is the subject. She is sitting and looking at a blank screen, ready to see a word and push either the “good” button or the “bad” button. Unbeknownst to Jill, the scientists flash the word “friend,” which carries a good judgmentfor her, on the screen for a quarter of a second. She’s doesn’t know she saw it. Then they put the target word “beautiful” on the screen; Jill quickly judges it as “good” and pushes the “good” button.

The scientists found that all the subjects, like Jill, also responded quickly if they judged both words as good. They also responded quickly if they judged both words as bad, as in a pairing of the flashed word “disease” and the visible target word “nasty.”

But watch what happens to Jill when the flashed word has a different judgment than the target word.

This time the scientists flash the word “cancer” on the screen for a quarter of a second. Jill is not aware that anything happened and, as before, the target word “beautiful” appears. Jill judges beautiful as “good” and pushes the “good” button, but this time it takes her more time than in the last example.

In both examples, Jill saw and judged the target word “beautiful” and hit the “good” button. In the first example she saw “beautiful” and was quick to judge it good. In the second example she saw “beautiful: and was slow to judge it good.

The only explanation for the slower time is that her unconscious mind had first judged the flashed word “cancer.” Then, when she saw “beautiful,” she had to reverse her judgment from bad to good and this reversal of judgment took extra time.

This time difference held true for everyone. Each time the target word required a judgment different from the flashed word, responses were slower. The subjects needed extra time to switch their minds from their judgment of the flashed word to a different judgment of the target word.

The experiment proved that their minds had seen and judged the flashed word, unconsciously, within a quarter of a second.

Bargh and Chaiken performed many experiments similar to this one using other images such as pictures of people's faces. In all cases, when the flashed image was negative and the visible image was positive, the subjects took longer to respond. This indicated they were making instantaneous, unconscious judgments.

The scientists thought of what factors might provide alternate explanations for the results and performed additional experiments to screen those factors out. They consistently found the same pattern of instantaneous, preconscious judgment taking place. Bargh concluded: "Therefore, everything one encounters is preconsciously screened and classified as either good or bad, within a fraction of a second after encountering it.”

This experiment demonstrates that our unconsciousmind always judges everything it perceives, and it does so within a fraction of a second. No word, sound or face is neutral. We interpret everything in the world as good or bad, before our conscious mind even knows what it is.

As a result of these experiments, we know a great deal more about the unconscious. The various experiments have provided answers to the first two of our questions from the beginning of the chapter:

Everything we see, hear, touch, taste or smell is interpreted and acted upon by the automatic processes of the unconscious mind. This includes social events and the actions of others.

Unconscious mental processes make three very important kinds of decision: perceptual, evaluative and motivational. The unconscious mind makes all of these decisions simultaneously within a fraction of a second. Here they are in table form.

Let’s look at these different automatic, unconscious decisions briefly one at a time.

1. Perception

The unconscious determines our perceptions—our recognition and interpretation of sensory stimuli. It decides what the light waves and sound waves in the environment mean. The unconscious makes sense out of what we see and hear. Because of the overwhelming amount of sense data present, the unconscious is very selective. It selects and passes on to our conscious awareness only those sight and sound impressions of a particular event that confirm its initial judgment. In this way the unconscious determines everything we see and hear. We think we see and hear an objective reality, but we do not.

2. Evaluation

The unconscious evaluates everything and everybody as positive or negative and this judgment determines our feelings. If the unconscious judges someone as good, we will have positive feelings, such as joy, and be drawn toward them. On the other hand, if the unconscious judges a person or their behavior as bad, we will see them as a threat and feel afraid, angry or sad, depending on the specific circumstances. This is the source of our irrational negative judgments.

3. Motivation

The unconscious determines our motivation relative to what we perceive. Derived from the Latin verb motere, “to move,” motivation refers to the desire that causes us to move toward a goal . For example, we may be stimulated by the smell of breakfast cooking and our hunger motivates us to seek the goal, food. This stimulus-motivation-goal process gets us out of bed and into the kitchen. Our motivation is linked to the goal.

Unconscious Influences

In 1992 Senator Bob Packwoodwas accused of sexual harassment. He denied it, but after a lengthy investigation the Senate Ethics Committee recommended that he be expelled from the Senate and he resigned. Yet the senator’s diaries clearly reveal that he did not understand that his behavior was harassment. His lack of awareness can be explained by understanding how our mind selects and uses goals.

When we have a goal our unconscious mind influences our behavior in numerous ways to help bring about the goal. For example, when our goal is to achieve something, we automatically concentrate better and become more aware of things that will help us to attain it. Because our goal-states powerfully influence our behavior it is important to know how we set our goals.

Dr. Bargh performed an experiment that radically alters how psychologists have understood the goal setting process.

Using subliminal techniques so that participants were unaware of being primed either way, Barghprimed some participants with achievement-related stimuli and some with neutral stimuli. Then each was given a rack of Scrabble^® letters and asked to make as many words as they could in three minutes. When the “stop” signal was given, more than half of the achievement-primed participants continued working, whereas less than a quarter of the neutral-primed participants continued. The obvious conclusion is that our goals can be set in motion unconsciously. This process affects our daily lives.

A certain situation can become linked in one's mind with a certain goalstate. When we find ourselves in that situation the mind automatically adopts the linked goal. For some men, perhaps including former Senator Packwood, the situation of having power is unconsciously linked to a sexual goal. People in subordinate positions, on the other hand, in his case, women, have a goal of keeping their jobs, and part of that includes being pleasant and smiling.

In this situation the man and the woman are likely to interpret the same behavior differently. She smiles as a professional courtesy. The man interprets her smile as flirtation and makes an advance. She is aware of the power he wields over her job and the implied threat if she doesn’t go along. He is not aware of how power influences his perception and does not understand his subsequent behavior as harassment.

In another experiment, Bargh demonstrated that a person likely to be sexually aggressive will find a woman more attractive when his concept of power has been unconsciously primed.

Our goals are particularly important because they determine what we see, think and do. That our goals themselves are often triggered by the unconscious is cause for major concern. Our goals determine our behavior. Once activated, our goals operate on any relevant input without conscious intent or guidance and direct our information-processing and social behavior.

Unconscious goal setting can have serious consequences in social situations, causing us to behave in a way opposite to how we would otherwise behave. Bargh describes an amazing experiment in which participants initially preferred a person displaying polite behavior. But after they were unconsciously triggered for aggressive goals by the experimenters, they reversed themselves and preferred a person displaying aggressive behavior. They didn’t have any idea they had been easily manipulated. Bargh concludes, “Judgments are made as a result [of an unconscious goal] which are clearly counter to what the individual would make if he or she intended to process that source of information.”

Another study by Bargh found that subjects who were unconsciously influenced with rude words (interrupt, disturb) as part of a language test were four times more likely to behave rudely themselves than were subjects unconsciously influenced with polite words (patient, respectful). Influencing participants' unconscious minds with a behavioral trait such as polite or rude makes the participants more likely to behave that way.

All of the decisions made by the unconscious in response to a social event happen in the same instant and are inextricably bound to each other. We are drawn to approach what we judge to be good and to withdraw from or to push away what we evaluate as bad, and our goals are tied in with our judgments.

Because we are unconscious of these decisions, we don’t know what influenced us to act as we did. We think we know why, but our explanations are inaccurate. Actually, our “logical explanations” are after-the-fact rationalizations. The unconscious always provides a rationalization for our behavior.

For example, Dr. Bargh cites a study in which a woman, while hypnotized, was told “When you awake you will crawl on your hands and knees.” When she woke from hypnosis she began to crawl on her hands and knees. She spontaneously said, “I think I lost an earring down here.” In a similar way, our unconscious always gives us plausible explanations for our behavior.

The new understanding of the psychology of perceptionand response

Bargh states that over ninety-nine percent of our “everyday life—thinking, feeling, and doing—is automatic …” or unconscious. “I believe if one is scrupulously honest about the number of times per day that one actually takes more than a half-second to make a decision (one signature of a control or nonautomatic process), the number could be counted on one’s fingers… This is a very small percentage of all the perceptions, behaviors, judgments, evaluations and intentions one constantly makes each day. When it does happen—when we do override the automatic process—these occasions are memorable and salient precisely because they are effortful and unusual. As a consequence, we are misled by the greater availability of these occasions in memory into hugely overestimating how often we really do engage in acts of deliberate control.”

Unconscious processes combine to create an immediate psychological situation—everything that we know about the world and the individual people in it: what we see and hear, whom we like and dislike, our feelings about them, and our intentions for or against them. The alarming truth is that we are seldom conscious.

Influences beyond our awareness, and therefore beyond our control, are running our lives. This is true virtually all the time. Our relationships with others, our happiness, and our success in life all hinge on our willingness to become aware that we are subject to unconscious, and therefore irrational, decision-making. Without this awareness we cannot stop the damaging cycles of misperception, judgment, and attack that crop up in our relationships. What we don’t know hurts us and hurts other people.