Sublime

Yet the contents of our hidden depths seem to remain perpetually elusive. Freudian psychoanalysts can speculate about our hidden fears and desires; psychologists and neuroscientists can attempt to draw subtle and highly indirect conclusions from actions, heart-rate, skin conductance, pupil dilation and the rate of blood flow in the brain. But no

We’re talking about what psychologists today would describe as the “adaptive unconscious.” Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, has described this in his important book Strangers to Ourselves (a very Augustinian title!). Over the past twenty years psychology has come to appreciate the overwhelming influence of

People don’t lie to you about who they are – they lie to themselves in your presence

What is going on here? Shafir and Tversky argued that when we make choices, we are not ‘expressing’ a pre-existing preference at all; indeed, they would argue that there are no such preferences. What we are doing instead is improvising – making up our preferences as we go along.

Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

Dan Wegner, one of the most perverse and creative social psychologists, has dragged the imp into the lab and made it confess to being an aspect of automatic processing.

Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel