Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

Book Review

Reviewed by Keith S. Harris, Ph.D., Research Director, Department of Behavioral Health, San Bernardino County, CA, USA.
In Strangers to Ourselves, Timothy Wilson offers an assessment of the human unconscious that is very different from these extremes. He proposes that the unconscious is neither especially wicked nor spiritual, but rather its role is to assist us in maneuvering through our daily lives. In Wilson’s research, the unconscious mind is shown to house the bulk of our practical decision-making apparatus, conveniently tucked away in the back rooms of our cognitive machinery. He convincingly argues that what this form of the unconscious does for us is useful, adaptive, and even essential; hence his reference to it as the adaptive unconscious. Wilson demonstrates that this unconscious manages most of the lower-level processes that occur without awareness, and he defines the unconscious as that set of “mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior” [italics in text] (p. 23).

We tend to assume that we are consciously in charge of our intentional actions (despite the pressures of that primitive unconscious mentioned above). However, Wilson explains that this is a misapprehension, referencing the recent work of fellow psychologist Daniel Wegner [3]. “We often experience a thought followed by an action, and assume it was the thought that caused the action” (p. 47). However, it may be that, Wegner suggests, both the thought and the action derive from a third, unconscious process. It is only the apparent (consciously experienced) sequence of thought-then-act that gives us the illusion that the thought caused the action.

However, there are natural limitations on the usefulness of the inferential approach, including the self-serving bias [5]. “When it comes to maintaining a sense of well-being,” Wilson notes, “each of us is the ultimate spin doctor” (p. 38). How can we get around this spin doctor? First, by developing our capacity for methodical introspection. It must be as free as possible from the pressures of social and personal expectation, in order to minimize bias. “The trick is to allow the feelings to surface and to see them through the haze of one’s theories and expectations [about one’s self]” (p. 173).

Wilson rounds out this book with a discussion of how we might use this fuller awareness of the unconscious to our advantage. We can, for example, act as though first and self-assess later - that is, behave in ways that are consistent with the type of person we would wish to be, rather than wait to be that type of person and then act like her. Wilson explains, “‘The do good, be good’ principle is one of the most important lessons psychology has to offer” (p. 215).