The Mind Working Below Awareness

The idea

Most of what my mind does, it does without asking me. I read words without trying to, finish familiar tasks on autopilot and get a feeling about a situation before I can say why. This automatic layer is not a flaw. It is what makes skilled action possible. But it also means my explanations for my own behavior can be guesses made after the fact.

An example

My Work Measurement & Learning Lab models something I find quietly remarkable: people get faster at a job with practice, and lose some of that speed in the days between repeats. The lab only models the timing, but part of the real speed-up is the work moving from deliberate thought into automatic skill. The same shift happens with habits of mind. A reaction practiced often enough stops feeling like a choice.

What I think (and don't know)

I think the useful question is not whether to trust intuition, but which intuitions have been trained on honest feedback. Habits (Small Habits Shape Who I Become) are the deliberate way to shape this layer: repeat the response you want until it runs on its own. Thinking about my own thinking (Thinking About My Own Thinking) is the check, though it only reaches part of what is happening. I don't know how much of the automatic layer can be reshaped this way.

Where it connects

Emotions (What My Emotions Are Telling Me) often arrive by this same fast route, as signals before reasons. And much of what I call a default, rather than a choice (Free Will and Choice), lives here.

Questions I'm still exploring

• Which of my quick judgments have earned my trust, and which have not?
• Can I change an automatic habit directly, or only by changing the situations that trigger it?
• When I explain why I did something, how often am I describing the real cause?

Sources and further reading

• Richard E. Nisbett & Timothy D. Wilson (1977), "Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes", Psychological Review 84(3) — Includes the stockings study: people gave reasons for choices that their choices did not actually follow.
• Daniel Kahneman (2011), Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux — A popular account of fast, automatic thinking and slow, deliberate thinking.