Week 4: Wilson Ch. 3-4

Front 1

Division of mental labor

Back 1

"People would never get anything done if they had to attend constantly to their breathing, comprehension of language, and perceptions of the physical world."

Front 2

William James

Back 2

"James seems to imply that we delegate the mundane tasks of living, much as chief executive officers rely on their staffs to attend to the details while they address the truly important questions."

Front 3

Nonconscious minds are not janitorial staff or even low-level managers

Back 3

"what is typically though of as the 'proper work' of consciousness--goal-setting, interpretation, evaluation--can be performed nonconsciously."

Front 4

Conscious and Unconscious

Back 4

"Two information-processing systems have evolved that differ in interesting ways and serve different functions."

Front 5

Which system is older?

Back 5

Evidence suggests that nonconscious processing is older.

Front 6

why did consciousness evolve?

Back 6

explosion of interest on this topic without a solid answer

Front 7

How consciousness seems vs. what consciousness does

Back 7

more progress is being made on what conscious does

Front 8

Function of consciousness

Back 8

•consciousness-as-chief-executive analogy vs.
•consciousness does not do anything at all (child at arcade who 'thinks' he's playing a game but is not) vs.
•consciousness-as-Ronald-Reagan (more of a figurehead/spokesperson, does not exert much control)

Front 9

Adaptive unconscious vs. Consciousness

Back 9

•multiple systems vs. single system
•on-line pattern detector vs. after-the-fact check and •balancer
•concerned with the here-and-now vs. taking the long view
•automatic (fast, unintentional, uncontrollable, effortless) vs. controlled (slow, intentional, controllable, effortful)
•rigid vs. flexible
•precocious vs. slower to develop
•sensitive to negative information vs. sensitive to positive information

Front 10

multiple vs. single systems

Back 10

•adaptive unconscious is a collection of different modules
•consciousness is a single entity, even though there are exceptions (e.g., multiple-personality syndrome)

Front 11

pattern detector vs. fact checker

Back 11

•adaptive unconscious: quickly detect if patterns in environment are good or bad (e.g., nonconscious "danger detector" which sometimes makes mistakes, mistake a stick for a snake on a hike)
•consciousness performs more detailed analysis (e.g., checks and sees that the stick is not a snake)

Front 12

the here-and-now vs. the long view

Back 12

•adaptive unconscious reacts to current environment, but cannot anticipate what will happen tomorrow or next week or muse about past and integrate it into a coherent self-narrative
•consciousness can "anticipate, mentally simulate, and plan," "has a concept of the future and past, and is able to reflect on these time periods at will"

Front 13

automatic vs. controlled processing

Back 13

•adaptive unconscious allows us to ride a bike, type, or play piano without thinking about each tiny movement (automatic thinking/automatic pilot)
•"consciousness thinking occurs more slowly, with intention (we typically think we what want to think), control (we are better able to influence what we think about), and effort (it is hard to keep our conscious minds on something when we are distracted or preoccupied)."

Front 14

the rigidity of the adaptive unconscious

Back 14

•"slow to respond to new, contradictory information."
•inflexible
•"Once a correlation is learned, the nonconscious system tends to see it where it does not exist, thereby becoming more convinced that the correlation is true."
•"People can unknowingly behave in ways that make their expectations come true, as in ...the self-fulfilling prophecy." (told teachers that some children were smarter than others, children who teachers believed were smarter did better in school)

Front 15

doing before knowing

Back 15

•"Children are especially likely to act on automatic pilot, with their adaptive unconscious guiding their behavior in sophisticated ways before they are aware of what they are doing or why they are doing it."
•"Infants have the ability to remember things implicitly (nonconsciously) at birth or or even before (in utero), whereas the ability to remember things explicitly (consciously) does not begin to develop until the end of the first year of life."
•"Children are especially likely to be in the dark, because their conscious interpreter develops more slowly and does not yet have the sophistication to guess what the nonconscious mind is doing."

Front 16

When do children learn the discounting principle?

Back 16

•definition: "the tendency to lower our estimate of the causal role of one factor (intrinsic interest in piano playing) to the extent that other plausible causes are present (the ice cream cone)."
•"Studies that rely on what children do instead of what they say show that children can use the discounting principle at a much earlier age than eight or nine." •"three- to five-year-old preschool children" demonstrate the discounting principle.
•doing = adaptive unconscious
•knowing/saying = consciousness

Front 17

When do children acquire a theory of mind?

Back 17

•"At some point, people come to realize that they are not he only ones with a mind -- other people have them, too."
•"develops around the age of four, as shown by children's performance in what is called the false-belief paradigm." (know where something is hidden, but know that another person does not)
•"There is even evidence that nonhuman primates have a rudimentary theory of mind, judging by where they look during a false-belief task."

Front 18

Does the conscious system ever catch up?

Back 18

•"Although people's conscious theories and insights surely become more sophisticated as they ago, there is reason to believe that people do not gain perfect insight." (adults performed better at a game without ever learning the rule consciously in a study)

Front 19

Is the adaptive unconscious more sensitive to negative information?

Back 19

•"There is at least the possibility that the adaptive unconscious has evolved to be a sentry or negative events in our environments."

Front 20

Is the adaptive unconscious smart or dumb?

Back 20

•"The adaptive unconscious is smarter than the conscious mind in some ways, but less smart in other ways."
•"Rather than playing the role of CEO, the conscious self develops more slowly and never catches up in some respects, such as in the area of pattern detection. But it provides a check-and-balance to the speed and efficiency of nonconscious learning, allowing people to think and plan more thoughtfully about the future."

Front 21

Knowing who we are

Back 21

•we can be blind to the nature of our own personality.
•"Many of people's chronic dispositions, traits, and temperaments are part o f the adaptive unconscious, to which they have no direct access."
•"Consequently, people are forced to construct theories about their own personalities from other sources, such as what they learn from their parents, their culture, and yes, ideas about who they prefer to be."

Front 22

Current State of Personality Psychology

Back 22

•personality definition: "the psychological processes that determine a person's 'characteristic behavior and though' -- a definition that is as good today as when Allport proposed it."
•"field of personality psychology is made up of a fragmented collection of conflicting approaches that disagree on such basic questions as, is there a single, core self that determines people's behavior? If so, what is it, and how can it be measured?"
•extremes: mentalism (how people deal with their repressed drives) & behaviorism
•phenomenological approach (midway between extremes), "which argues that to understand why people do what they do, we must view the world through their eyes, examining each person's unique construals of herself and the meaning she finds in her social world."