In this video I consider how much control we have over our own minds. We may not have as much control as we think and this can be demonstrated in ironic processes of mental control as well as unconscious processes. While exploring this question, I introduce thought suppression and counter-intentional effects, dual-process theory, system 1 (unconscious, low road, fast pathway) and system 2 (conscious, high road, slow pathway), evolutionary theories about unconscious processing, priming, the replication crisis, the mere-exposure effect, and the role of advertising on influencing our behavior.

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Daniel Wegner – The Illusion of Conscious Will

http://amzn.to/2nUGGZj Daniel Kahneman – Thinking, Fast and Slow

http://amzn.to/2nUK0E0 Darwin’s description of his snake experience:https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Darwin/…

Psych File Drawer http://www.psychfiledrawer.org/

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at mental control. We’re going to ask just how much control we have over our own minds.

Now in the previous video I talked about the idea of selective attention. We have this narrow focus and we filter out all the other things that are irrelevant and one thing that we saw is we don’t have full control over this narrow focus of attention. Because let’s say you’re at a cocktail party and you suddenly hear your name in a conversation behind you and your attention sort of immediately shifts to that, it kind of feels like you didn’t choose to do that, it just happened right? Outside of your conscious control.

Now we also see this in things like if you’re walking in the woods and a snake crosses your path, you’ll suddenly jump right? You’ll be startled and this isn’t a conscious process; you didn’t choose you didn’t look at the snake and say “well that’s a snake and snakes are potentially dangerous and so I should probably get out of the way and so I think I’ll jump back”. No, it happened much faster than that. You jumped back before you even recognized that it was a snake right? So you didn’t really have control consciously over that behavior.

Now another way we can see a lack of control is when it comes to trying not to think of certain things. So if I asked you not to think of a white bear, of course you end up thinking of a white bear and this effect is even stronger if you really try not to think of a white bear. So this brings us to a study by the late Daniel Wegner, who I had the good fortune of taking a seminar with when I was in college and what Wegner did is he asked people to try to suppress their thoughts.

So if you went into this lab you might be asked “okay for the next few minutes you can think about whatever you want and if you happen to think of a white bear press this counter here and we’ll keep track of how many times you think of white bears”. But other people are given this thought suppression challenge so they’re told “don’t think of white bears so think of whatever you want but avoid thinking about white bears and if you think of one press this button and we’ll keep track”. And it turns out people who are told not to think of white bears end up thinking of white bears more than people who are told, you know, if you think of a white bear you know let us know.

All right so this shows this ironic process of mental control. This is the idea that we get the opposite effect of what we’re intending to do. It’s counter-intentional, we try not to think of white bears and it causes us to think of white bears more often. Now one proposed explanation for this is that we have this monitoring process which is checking our thoughts to make sure they’re not white bears and as a result you know every time we think a thought this monitoring process asks “was that a white bear?” and that causes us to think of white bears over and over again.

Now Wegner also demonstrated this in a number of other studies, other types of ironic processes of mental control and other counter-intentional effects like having participants do a golf putt so they try to put a golf ball into a hole but they’re told specifically not to overshoot. You know, try your best to make the shot, just don’t overshoot and of course in some conditions this actually causes people to end up overshooting more often.

So this is another demonstration of how we don’t have full conscious control over our behavior. Now we can sort of roughly divide our mind up into two main parts: this is known as Dual Process Theory and the idea is that we have conscious processing and unconscious processing and they’re both happening at the same time. So we have these two systems and these are called system one and system two. And system one refers to the unconscious processing and this is also sometimes called the “fast pathway” or the “low road” the idea is this is like the quick and dirty processing that we do and it happens beneath our awareness. We have this system that’s collecting and analyzing information and it’s happening without us being aware and so this is system one.

And then system 2 is the conscious processing that we are aware of that we have conscious access to and this is also called the “slow pathway” or the “high road” and it is this is where we can sort of deliberate and consider things and make decisions. So how can we demonstrate differences between these two systems?

Well when people think about the unconscious processing in this low road or fast pathway there’s a tendency to think of it as being primitive right? Because people think about the old brain or the reptilian brain as it is sometimes called. You know, the subcortical structures, limbic system, the hypothalamus and there’s this tendency to think of these as being primitive but we really shouldn’t. It’s really the opposite of that; these are the structures that we’ve had the longest, and so in that sense they’re the most refined right? They have specific tasks and they’re very very good at doing those tasks and they could do them very very quickly. And so for instance, with the the idea of being startled by a snake right? You don’t want to be consciously doing that process it’s too slow right? You want to have a system that’s been built and refined over millions of years of evolution that causes you to immediately be startled by snake-like things that enter your field of vision. And you’re actually able to have the startle response before you can even consciously recognize it as a snake. You don’t wait for that information to go all the way back to your occipital lobes and be processed and say “okay it’s you know this is this particular type of snake”. That’s too slow. You want to be startled before that happens.

Now the other thing that we see here is that we can’t take conscious control over these unconscious processes no matter how much we try. So this is seen in something that Darwin tried to do where he went to the Zoological Gardens and he tried not to have a startle response to a snake. So he put his face right up to the glass where there was a puff adder snake and he told himself he wasn’t going to move. You know “I’m not going to flinch. If the snake moves I’m gonna stay exactly where I am”. And of course the snake lunged towards him and he immediately jumped back and he wrote that “my will and reason were powerless” and it shows the power of these unconscious processes that we can’t take conscious control over them. And that’s a good thing right because when we take conscious control we do stupid things like trying not to jump back from a snake. I mean you know anybody in our evolutionary past who was trying to do that probably end up getting attacked by a snake and dying right? That was probably not a wise choice.

So we have this unconscious processing we don’t have control over and generally that’s a good thing and this is in addition to all the non-conscious things I talked about in the previous video; things like controlling your heart rate or your breathing or your digestion. You don’t have conscious access to these things and that’s a good thing because it means you don’t have to worry about them. They take care of themselves.

Okay so this is dual process theory we might about the relationship between unconscious and conscious decision making some of this unconscious information that’s being collected is that influencing our conscious decision-making and how, so this brings us to a potentially controversial subject in psychology. It actually wasn’t all that controversial a few years ago but now it’s more controversial, so how did this happen?

Well there’s been this replication crisis in psychology recently as people are calling it and this is the idea that many classic studies have failed to replicate. So researchers try to repeat the studies and they end up not finding the same effect and so one focus of this replication crisis has been research on priming. So I’m going to describe priming here, I’m going to talk about a well-known study on priming with the caveat that there’s a great deal of controversy on the concept of priming and exactly how these subtle influences influence our behavior, or subtle cues I guess I should say.

Ok, so what is priming? Priming is the idea that certain mental associations can be primed and this can happen unconsciously. We can sort of activate certain ideas in people’s minds and that this can then influence their behavior without them being aware. So the famous study on this was conducted by John Bargh and colleagues and maybe you’ve heard of it. It was a study where participants did a word task and some of the participants were exposed to words that were meant to prime stereotypes about the elderly so words like “bingo” and “Florida” and “nursing home” and the idea was they were going to prime these participants without the participants realizing this, right? These words were just mixed in in the task with other words and then the researchers discreetly measured the time it took participants to walk down a hallway after they did the word task. And what they found was that the people who had been exposed to these elderly-related words walked more slowly down the hallway. And they said this was evidence for this priming effect of this unconscious influence on behavior.

Now as I said, there’s been some controversy over this and I’ll post a link in the video description to the Psych File Drawer website and this is a website that catalogs replication attempts in psychology and you’ll see that the top viewed study on this site is this study by John Bargh and colleagues and it’s failed to replicate a number of times although there’s also been some successful replications and so it’s not really clear exactly what’s going on here. Now my view is that I think priming is probably a real thing, there are probably ways that unconscious cues can influence our behavior but exactly what those cues are and exactly how they influence our behavior and exactly how we can measure it is probably what a great deal of the debate is over. And you know, we see some sort of perhaps exaggerated claims about just you know how subtle something can be and just how large the effect on the behavior can be, but I think it makes sense that we can activate associations and they can influence us later.

So for instance if I were to talk about sports or talk about playing with your dog or something and then a few minutes later I asked you to do a word task and I asked you to like come up with some four-letter words here. Well you might come up with “ball” more quickly if I was previously talking about sports right? Whereas if I have been talking about fashion and shopping you might come up with “mall” and you might not necessarily be aware of this influence. You might not realize that it was because I was talking about sports earlier that that caused you to come up with it but this would be a subtle effect right? Not like a major change in your behavior. Now another way we can see unconscious influence on behavior is what’s called the Mere-Exposure effect.

So the mere-exposure effect is the idea that when we’ve been exposed to things previously, when they’re more familiar to us, we tend to like them more. Now this makes sense you know if it’s a face. Let’s say if I’ve seen a particular person a number of times and nothing bad has happened to me, you know, they haven’t attacked me or harmed me in any way then this is probably a safe person to be around. So I can sort of relax and feel more comfortable and I might find myself liking this person more than a face that I’ve never seen before because like who knows what this person could be. Maybe they’re going to harm me in some way, maybe they’re dangerous, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about them, whereas the other person is like “ok, I’ve seen them a few times and nothing bad happened so they’re probably okay”.

Now this makes sense and this idea of familiarity and fondness being associated is logical but the interesting thing is that this mere exposure effect occurs even when we aren’t consciously aware of being exposed to the stimulus beforehand. So we’ve seen a face a bunch of times but we don’t remember seeing it. We don’t know that we recognize it and it still influences how much we like that person. So this has been demonstrated in a number of studies by Robert Zajonc and one of the things that Zajonc did was he exposed participants to Chinese characters and these were people who didn’t read Chinese so they couldn’t understand the characters. In fact he exposed them to the characters so quickly the people didn’t know they were seeing Chinese characters. So they were flashed on the screen too quickly for conscious awareness but they were unconsciously seeing these characters. And then what Zajonc did was he asked people to rate some Chinese characters. He showed it to them consciously look at this character “how much do you like this character?” “Do you think this is a positive or negative word?” and what he found was that people tended to like the characters that they had been exposed to previously even though they weren’t even consciously aware of the earlier exposure.

All right so this indicates this unconscious influence on our conscious decision-making. Now they’re asked to rate these characters and they give them more positive ratings. They think that, they tend to guess that they’d be more positive words and they say that they like them more. And this has been demonstrated with other stimuli as well not just Chinese characters but also with made-up nonsense words or even with faces. All right now this brings us to consider how advertisers might be using this mere exposure effect right? Now most people when they think about advertising say advertising doesn’t influence them. Everybody seems to say that advertising has no effect on them.

Of course, it must have an effect because we can see that advertising works. I mean advertisers spend billions of dollars putting products in front of our faces and they get a return on that investment. So what’s happening is it’s not a conscious process and this is why people say the ads don’t affect them because consciously they really don’t. It’s not the case that you watch an advertisement and you immediately run to the store and buy the product and if that were the case you would have to admit that ads influence you, right? You’d say “yeah I was watching TV and then this ad came on and the next thing I know I was in the store buying the product”. But that’s generally not how it works. Instead it’s an unconscious process. We build familiarity with a particular brand or a particular product and then later when we’re making a conscious choice about you know “which brand am I going to buy here?” that idea that this one is a little more familiar to us even if we’re not aware of this familiarity might cause us to be more likely to buy that product rather than one of the competitors next to it, right?

So this is probably a way that we have this unconscious influence on our conscious behavior and again one way we can see that it works is the fact that advertising works. We see that you know putting ads in front of people’s faces causes them to buy those products more even though the people don’t consciously admit to this. Okay so these are some ways of thinking about mental control and thinking about just how much control we have over conscious and unconscious processing and how it might influence our behavior. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!