Last August 18th I posted a piece that reflected
on our subconscious abilities. I related
experimental work about how we discern winning patterns in card “games” fairly
quickly without much conscious figuring; they’re hunches, if you will. And all of that mental work is done by our
subconscious as it, much like a computer, reviews and analyzes a heavy dose of
data – by some estimates, over eleven million bits of data. Let me quote Malcolm Gladwell, “… [see the
subconscious] as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a
lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as a human being.”[1] I applied that ability to the initial
developments of the present presidential race and commented on any early appeal
Donald Trump had. Well, the months have
passed since those early days; a lot has taken place including name calling,
immature references to body parts, fist fights, and a slew of candidates
dropping out of the race. We have five
names left and the two nominees of the major parties seem to have been chosen
even though there are outside chances that one or the other of the apparent
winners could lose by some unforeseen development. So has Trump trumped any chance for a more
traditional campaign season between the conventions and election day? It seems he has.
What seems to have happened, and I am not an expert on these
matters, is that those early gut reactions to the candidates’ messaging have
solidified. Trump followers have become
unyielding Trump supporters. We are led
to believe that due to his popularity among certain segments of the electorate,
seldom voting segments, they have found their man and little to nothing will
budge them from that support. Many, the
media tells us, don’t necessarily like many of his off-the-cuff comments, but
they dismiss those in the same way they may say things at times or perhaps
their neighbors would say things; that is, offensive comments they would
probably take back if given the chance.
After all, a great part of his appeal is that he is neither a politician
– a claim he could make when he first entered the race, but no longer – nor
politically correct – a term the meaning of I am not exactly sure. I believe, since politics is not what many
people like to think about once a decision is made in that area of concern, a
person is likely not to want to revisit it again. Instead, it’s more fun to appreciate the
“show” quality the Trump phenomenon provides.
While subconsciously developed hunches, especially by
experienced commentators of whatever area of concern the hunch is about, tend
to be uncannily accurate, they are subject to mistakes. And the thing is, we are mostly not experts
on most things about which we have to decide.
So let’s look into this subconscious mechanism we carry around.
First, evolutionarily speaking, we as humans would not have
survived if we had not augmented our ability to predict or form conclusions on the
conscious level. We needed this faster
mode of decision-making to meet the challenges of the day. By subconscious, the reference is not the
Freudian sub-consciousness we have come to know about; instead, it is this
calculating mechanism described above.
As such, we are dealing with an adaptive portion of the brain, dealing
with quickly changing environments. And
hence, our survival ability, such thinking permits, developed over centuries. Some of its functions include taking stock of
the environment (with all its variety of information), issuing necessary
warnings when needed, setting up short-term goals, and even sending the
necessary internal signals to initiate action, all done in a very efficient
manner. That’s one very sophisticated
bit of “hardware” with compatible “software” programing built in – truly, a
biological wonder.
To illustrate these capabilities, Gladwell shares an
experiment that demonstrates them. In a
study in which students were shown ten-second video tapes of teachers to
students, the students were asked to rate how good the teachers were. The study then compared these quick evaluations
with student evaluations which were done toward the end of a term of the same
teachers and found the correlation of results between the “ten-second”
evaluations and the term-long evaluations overwhelming. I would probably want to know what constituted
a good teacher in these students’ minds, but the point is that in ten-seconds
they were able to predict what students thought about those professors at the
end of a semester, usually ten to sixteen weeks long.
Now, hunches based on quick judgements are fallible and
knowing the subject under evaluation does help in these hunches – the more one
knows, the better one’s hunches are. Our
subconscious mind can be misled, distracted, or otherwise given wrong
information. So that leaves us with two
areas of interest in considering this other mind. One, why are we, in using our subconscious,
right when we are right? And then, why are
we wrong when we are wrong? The practical
concern would be: how can we improve in
using our subconscious computer? I will
further explore these questions in future postings. If nothing else, a better understanding could
lead us to selecting better political leaders than we seem to be doing
currently.
[1] Gladwell, M.
(2005). Blink: The power of thinking
without thinking. New York, NY: Bay Back Books, p.11.
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