If liberating the unconscious had been Wilson’s only contribution to psychological science, it would have been enough. Today, psychological science is rife with research showing the extraordinary power of unconscious mental processes. The basement door was opened by experimental evidence, and the unconscious took up permanent residence in the living room.
But as the experiments showed, people are telling more than they can know. People don’t realize they are making stuff up, of course they truly believe the stories they are telling about why they did what they did.
#Social hedonic editing series
The unconscious was banished to psychology’s basement for more than half a century.īut in the mid 1970’s, Tim Wilson and Dick Nisbett opened the basement door with their landmark paper entitled "Telling More Than We Can Know," in which they reported a series of experiments showing that people are often unaware of the true causes of their own actions, and that when they are asked to explain those actions, they simply make stuff up. The unconscious was the cornerstone of Freud’s theories about the mind, but William James expressed the views of many early 20 th century scientists when he referred to it as "the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and for turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies." James’s antipathy was contagious and his arguments won the day. Psychology has always had a love-hate relationship with the unconscious, but mainly hate. THE REALITY CLUB: Steven Pinker, Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson, Hugo Mercier His latest trade book is Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, is author of Strangers To Ourselves("the most influential book I've ever read", Malcolm Gladwell), which was named by The New York Times Magazine as one of the Best 100 Ideas of 2002 He is also the coauthor of the best-selling social psychology textbook, Social Psychology, now in its seventh edition. People end up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way.
What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories people tell themselves as to why they're doing what they're doing. You have to get inside people's heads and see the world the way they do. One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it's not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world.
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