Timothy D. Wilson > Quotes

“Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be. —H. F. Amiel, The Private Journal”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Consider that at any given moment, our five senses are taking in more than 11,000,000 pieces of information. Scientists have determined this number by counting the receptor cells each sense organ has and the nerves that go from these cells to the brain. Our eyes alone receive and send over 10,000,000 signals to our brains each second. Scientists have also tried to determine how many of these signals can be processed consciously at any given point in time, by looking at such things as how quickly people can read, consciously detect different flashes of light, and tell apart different kinds of smells. The most liberal estimate is that people can process consciously about 40 pieces of information per second.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Just as we possess a potent physical immune system that protects us from threats to our physical well-being, so do we possess a potent psychological immune system that protects us from threats to our psychological well-being. When it comes to maintaining a sense of well-being, each of us is the ultimate spin doctor.21”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Susan Sontag said in her journal, “I write to define myself—an act of self-creation—part of [the] process of becoming.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“There is some evidence that peer reports (Suzie’s friends’ ratings) predict people’s behavior better than their self-reports (Suzie’s own ratings). In one study, for example, college students were worse at predicting how nervous and talkative they would be when chatting with a new acquaintance than were peers who had just met them for the first time.21 Other studies have found that people are worse at making specific predictions about how they will behave than they are at predicting how other people will behave. When asked whether they would purchase a flower as part of a campus charity drive in the upcoming weeks, students made overly rosy predictions; 83 percent said they would, whereas in fact only 43 percent actually did. When asked how likely it was that other students would purchase a flower, people were more accurate; they predicted that 56 percent would, which was closer to the 43 percent figure. In another study, people predicted that they would donate an average of $2.44 of their earnings in an experiment to charity, whereas other people would donate only $1.83. Once again they were more accurate in their predictions about other people; the actual figure donated was $1.53. One reason people fail to predict their own behavior very accurately is that they believe that they are “holier than thou” and would be more likely than the average person to perform moral acts of kindness. Another is that people use different kinds of information when predicting their own versus other people’s behavior. When predicting other people’s actions, we rely mostly on our cumulative experience of how the average person would act, including our hunches about the kinds of situational constraints people will face (“Probably many people who intended to buy a flower will never walk past one of the people selling them”). When predicting our own actions, we rely more on our “inside information” about our own personalities (“I am a kind person who wants to help others”). This can be a problem for two reasons: relying only on inside information causes people to overlook situational constraints on their actions, such as the possibility that they, too, will fail to pass by someone selling the flowers; second, as we have seen, people’s inside information is not the full story about their personalities and might not be completely accurate.22”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Given all the evidence for how resilient people are, it is striking that people don’t realize this when predicting their emotional reactions to future events. Daniel Gilbert and I have found evidence for this lack of appreciation of resilience—the durability bias—in numerous studies. In one, college football fans predicted how happy they would be in the days following a victory or loss by their favorite team. They anticipated that the outcome of the game would influence their overall happiness for two to three days, but it did not. By the following day, people were back to their normal level of happiness. In another, assistant professors predicted that the outcome of their tenure decision would have a large impact on their overall happiness for five years after the decision. In fact, professors who had received tenure in the previous five years were not significantly happier than professors who had been denied tenure.22”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“In another experiment, Stanley Schachter and Ladd Wheeler asked participants to take part in a study of the effects of a vitamin compound on vision. Participants received an injection and then watched a fifteen-minute comedy film. Unbeknownst to the participants, the “vitamin” was actually epinephrine in one condition, a placebo in another, and chlorpromazine in a third. Epinephrine produces physiological arousal in the sympathetic nervous system, such as increased heart rate and slight tremors in the arms and legs. Chlorpromazine is a tranquilizer that acts as a depressant of the sympathetic nervous system. The researchers reasoned that because the participants did not know that they had received a drug, they would infer that the film was causing their bodily reactions. Consistent with this hypothesis, people injected with the epinephrine seemed to find the film the funniest; they laughed and smiled the most while watching it. People injected with the chlorpromazine seemed to find the film the least funny; they laughed and smiled little while watching”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Further, in a review of personality research published in 1968, Walter Mischel found that none of the approaches met the gold standard of personality research very well, namely Allport's criterion of predicting with any certainty what people actually do. An extravert should make friends more easily than an introvert, whereas a conscientious person should meet more deadlines than a person who is not conscientious. Mischel found, however, that the typical correlation between personality traits and behavior was quite modest. This news shook up the field, because it essentially said that the traits personality psychologists were measuring were just slightly better than astrological signs at predicting behavior.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“A better working definition of the unconscious is mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Implicit motives are needs that people acquire in childhood that have become automatic and nonconscious. Self-attributed motives are people’s conscious theories about their needs that may often differ from their nonconscious needs. McClelland reports a study, for example, that measured people’s need for affiliation with both the TAT and a self-report questionnaire. People’s affiliation needs, as assessed by the TAT, predicted whether they were talking with another person when they were beeped at random intervals over several days, whereas a self-report measure of affiliation did not. Affiliation needs as assessed with the self-report measure were a better predictor of more deliberative behavioral responses, such as people’s choices of which types of behaviors they would prefer to do alone or with others (e.g., visit a museum). The picture McClelland paints is of two independent systems that operate in parallel and influence different types of behaviors. In our terms, the adaptive unconscious and the conscious explanatory system each has its own set of needs and motives that influence different types of behaviors.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“If there are two sides to people’s personality—a nonconscious and a conscious one, each producing unique behavior—then it is interesting to consider how other people get to know us. People could form impressions from our automatic, uncontrolled actions that reflect our implicit motives and traits (e.g., our implicit need for affiliation), or they could form impressions from our controlled, deliberative actions that reflect our explicit motives. It seems likely that people attend at least in part to behaviors that emanate from the adaptive unconscious (e.g., “Jim says that he’s shy, but he’s often the life of the party”). If so, other people might know us better than we know ourselves.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“If I were to give one piece of advice for how to be happier, it would be to carve out more time to spend with friends and loved ones, because, as we’ve seen, the best predictor of happiness is the quality of our social relationships.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“Researchers in California used the social norms approach to try to get people to reduce their use of electricity. They took readings from the electricity meters at 290 houses twice within a two-week period, in order to get a baseline measure of how much electricity each house was consuming. Then they left a flyer on the doorknob of each house that showed how much electricity that household had been using and the average amount of electricity that their neighbors were using. Think about what this would be like: you come home one day and see the flyer on your doorknob, and read that you are using more electricity than your neighbors. “Whoa,” you might think. “I guess I’m more of an energy hog than I thought.” This probably makes you feel a little embarrassed, and so you stop leaving lights on when you leave a room and maybe even use your air conditioning a little less. This is just what the researchers found: people who discovered that they were above-average electricity users decreased their use of electricity over the next few weeks. But what about the people who found out that they were using less electricity than their neighbors? The feedback had the opposite effect, leading to an increase in power use. “Why should I skimp on the air conditioning,” these folks seemed to say, “when the Joneses and the Smiths are pumping out a lot more cool air than I am?” Thus we see the danger of social norms campaigns: they can backfire among people who find out that they are doing better than average. Perceived norms are a powerful thing. If we think we’re conserving more energy than others, we slack off on our electricity use; if we find out we are drinking less than others, we might down a few more beers at the next party.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“Why does taking part in a scared-straight program make kids more likely to commit crimes? The story-editing approach suggests an answer, by asking how these programs change kids’ interpretations of why they should stay out of trouble. The problem is that the programs provide kids with external motivation—wanting to avoid the horrors of prison—that can, paradoxically, undermine their internal motivation to take the straight path. A number of years ago, Daniel Lassiter and I demonstrated this phenomenon in a two-session experiment with college students.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“In one study, the Sadkers showed teachers a film of a classroom discussion and asked who was contributing more to that discussion—boys or girls. The teachers said that the girls had participated more than the boys. Only when the Sadkers asked the teachers to watch the film and count the number of times boys and girls talked did the teachers realize that the boys had outtalked the girls by a factor of three to one.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“There is very little research on the consequences of having disparate conscious and nonconscious “selves” that are out of synch. An exception is the work of Joachim Brunstein and Oliver Schultheiss. In several studies, they measured people’s nonconscious agentic motives (needs for achievement and power) and communal motives (needs for affiliation and intimacy), using the TAT test. They also included self-report measures of these same motives. As in previous studies, they found little correspondence, on average, between people’s nonconscious and conscious motives. Some individuals, however, did have nonconscious and conscious motives that corresponded, and these people showed greater emotional well-being than people whose goals were out of synch. In one study, students’ nonconscious and conscious goals were assessed at the beginning of the semester and their emotional well-being tracked for the next several weeks. The students whose conscious goals matched their nonconscious goals showed an increase in emotional well-being as the semester progressed. The students whose conscious goals did not match their nonconscious goals showed a decrease in emotional well-being over the same period. It appears to be to people’s advantage to develop conscious theories that correspond at least somewhat with the personality of their adaptive unconscious.30”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“An extravert should make friends more easily than an introvert, whereas a conscientious person should meet more deadlines than a person who is not conscientious. Mischel found, however, that the typical correlation between personality traits and behavior was quite modest. This news shook up the field, because it essentially said that the traits personality psychologists were measuring were just slightly better than astrological signs at predicting behavior. Mischel did not simply point out the problem; he diagnosed the reasons for it. First, he argued that personality researchers had underestimated the extent to which the social situation shapes people’s behavior, independently of their personality. To predict whether a person will meet a deadline, for example, knowing something about the situation—the consequences of not meeting it, how much time the person has, how much work remains to be done—may be more useful than knowing the person’s score on a measure of conscientiousness. Situational influences can be very powerful, sometimes overwhelming individual differences in personality.5 This argument set off a turf war between personality psychologists, who place their bets on individual differences as the best predictors of behavior, and social psychologists, who place their bets on the nature of the social situation and how people interpret it.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“The important thing is to pursue goals that give us a sense of autonomy, effectiveness, and mastery. If we can do so in a way that draws us closer to other people, so much the better, given how important social relationships are to happiness.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By

“the idea that material riches make us happy has been around for a long time. In fact, the original definition of the word “happiness,” traced back to 1530 by The Oxford English Dictionary, was “good fortune or luck in life,” which reflected the belief that happiness comes from external circumstances largely outside of a person’s control. Psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, who has examined the historical definitions of happiness, notes that it was not until the 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary that the definition of happiness as “good fortune; good luck; prosperity” was deemed archaic. Rather than uncontrollable things that happen to people, happiness came to mean a pleasant internal state or the satisfaction of one’s desires. Oishi suggests that because life became more controllable over time, happiness was no longer viewed as the result of whims of fortune but something that people could strive for and achieve.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“Rather than a collection of static traits that we can use to classify people, Mischel argued, personality is better conceived as a set of unique cognitive and affective variables that determine how people construe the situation. People have chronic ways of interpreting and evaluating different situations, and it is these interpretations that influence their behavior. Barbara’s cognitive and affective personality system causes her to feel threatened when she suffers academic setbacks, and it is then that she is most likely to act aggressively. Sam’s cognitive and affective personality system causes him to feel threatened when he perceives that he is being ignored by significant others, and that is when he is most likely to act aggressively. According to this view it makes little sense to try to classify how aggressive Barbara and Tom are on a single trait dimension; instead, we must understand how each person interprets and understands a social situation and acts accordingly.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“Recall that a fundamental property of the adaptive unconscious is that people have no access to the ways in which it selects, interprets, and evaluates information. Thus, asking people to report their nonconscious reactions is fruitless; people may not know how they are likely to react. Alternatively, we could observe people’s behavior very closely and try to deduce the “if-then” patterns of their adaptive unconscious. Though by no means easy, this approach bypasses the conscious explanatory system and may get directly at nonconscious encodings. This is the approach that Mischel and his colleagues have adopted. In one study, they systematically observed children in a residential camp for many hours, carefully noting the ways in which they behaved in a variety of situations. They were able to find “distinctive behavioral signatures” that permitted them to infer the children’s “if-then” patterns of construal. For example, they observed how verbally aggressive the children were in five situations: when approached by a peer, when teased by a peer, when praised by an adult, when warned by an adult, and when punished by an adult. Some children were found to be very aggressive when warned by an adult, but relatively unaggressive in the other situations. Others were found to be very aggressive when a peer approached them, but relatively unaggressive in the other situations. Each of these children’s “behavioral signatures” was stable over time; they seemed to reflect characteristic ways in which they interpreted the different situations.10 Although this result might seem pretty straightforward—even obvious—it contrasts strongly with the way in which most personality psychologists study individual differences. Trait theorists would give the boys a standardized questionnaire and classify each on the trait of aggressiveness. The assumption would be that each boy possesses a certain level of aggressiveness that would allow predictions of their behavior, regardless of the nature of the situation. But clearly the trait approach would not be very useful here, because it does not take into account the fact that (1) the boys’ aggressiveness would depend on how they interpret the situation (e.g., how threatening they found it); (2) not everyone interprets a situation in the same way; (3) their interpretations are stable over time; and (4) the interpretations are made by the adaptive unconscious. By taking each of these points into account we can predict the boys’ behavior pretty well—better than if we had given them a questionnaire and assigned them a value on a single trait dimension.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“There are several well-known studies that fell into this trap and yielded misleading results, sometimes with life-and-death consequences. One was a survey that asked thousands of women questions about their health and whether they were taking hormone replacement therapy at menopause. The researchers found that the women who used hormone replacement therapy had fewer heart attacks than those who did not, after statistically controlling for a host of potential confounding variables. Many physicians relied on this study to recommend hormone therapy for their patients. But a later clinical trial, in which women were randomly assigned to receive hormone therapy or not, yielded the exact opposite results: hormone therapy increased the risk of heart attacks. It now appears that women in the first study who chose to undergo hormone replacement therapy were healthier at the outset in ways that the researchers did not measure, which led to the misleading results. Only by randomly assigning people to conditions can researchers be confident that they have controlled for all possible confounding variables and have identified a true causal effect.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“Although this intervention was successful, it required facilitators to guide people through the exercises. Fortunately, there is also a simple exercise that you can do on your own. Here’s how it works: Think about your life in the future and write for twenty minutes, on four consecutive days, about how “everything has gone as well as it possibly could” and your life dreams have come true. (The exact instructions are at the end of this chapter, on page 73.) College students who completed this “best possible self” writing exercise, compared to students who were randomly assigned to write about a neutral topic, reported greater optimism on the questionnaire reproduced on page 65 and greater satisfaction with their lives—not just right away but three weeks later. And, in the five months following the study, the students who had written about their best possible selves visited the health center significantly less often than did students who wrote about the neutral topic.24”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“We can dismiss one claim about the achievement gap outright: there is no credible evidence for innate differences in intelligence between racial groups. I will not summarize all the evidence against the hereditarian view, because Richard Nisbett has done so cogently in his book Intelligence and How to Get It. Here are a couple of the most telling findings: first, if there were genetic differences in intelligence between people of African and European descent, then the more ancestors a person has from Africa, the lower his or her IQ should be, on average. Several studies have tested this hypothesis by, for example, measuring people’s racial heritage with blood tests and correlating that with their IQs. Overwhelmingly, these studies show no relationship between racial ancestry and intelligence. Second, the gap between blacks and whites on IQ tests and standardized tests narrowed substantially in the fifteen-year period from 1975 to 1990, which is much too rapid a change to be accounted for by changes in the gene pool. And finally, there is ample evidence that environmental factors are completely responsible for the differences between the races in IQ and standardized tests.2”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“Black students at a predominantly white university, for example, might be particularly prone to feel that they don’t fit in or belong at that university, especially if they experience an academic setback, as many students do in their first semester. If so, then an intervention designed to redirect their narratives from “I don’t fit in here” to “Everyone experiences bumps in the road” might increase their sense of belonging and improve their academic performance. To find out, researchers conducted a study with black and white first-year students at a predominantly white university. In the treatment condition, the students received statistics and read interviews with upper-class students indicating that most students worry that they don’t belong when they begin college, but that these worries lessen over time. To reinforce this message, the students wrote a speech illustrating how this lesson applied to them; that is, how their own worries about belonging were likely to be temporary. They delivered this speech in front a video camera, ostensibly so that it could be shown to future students at their school. Participants in the control group underwent the same procedure, except that they learned that social and political attitudes change over the course of one’s college career—they heard nothing about changes in one’s sense of belonging. The entire session lasted only an hour. Yet, as with other story-editing interventions, it had dramatic long-term effects on the black students’ performance and well-being. Those who got the message about belonging, relative to those in the control group, believed they fit in better at college, became more engaged in college academically (by studying more, attending more review sessions, and asking more questions in class), and achieved better grades in the rest of their college careers. Not only that, but on a questionnaire they completed right before they graduated, black students who had received the “belonging” intervention reported that they were in better health, had visited a doctor fewer times, and were happier than did black students in the control group. The “belonging” message had no effect on the white students, because most of them already felt that they fit in at their university.22”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By

“A review of seven experimental tests that measured how likely participants and nonparticipants were to commit crimes, in time periods ranging from three to fifteen months after a scared-straight intervention, found that the kids who attended the interventions were more likely to commit crimes than were kids in the control groups in every single study.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“As we have seen, there is nothing like a good experiment to settle the question, and researchers in the Netherlands obliged by experimentally manipulating the existence of public signs of lawlessness and observing whether this influenced people’s criminal behavior. In one study, for example, they put a five-euro bill in an envelope that had a cellophane window and placed the envelope halfway out of a mailbox, so that the bill was clearly visible to passersby. Then, from a hidden location, they observed how many passersby stole the envelope. When there were no visible signs of lawlessness, only 13 percent of the passersby gave into temptation and pocketed the envelope. But when the researchers added signs of lawlessness—graffiti painted on the mailbox or litter scattered on the ground below—this percentage doubled. This study shows that signs of disorder, such as graffiti and litter, can cause people to reinterpret a situation as one in which other kinds of disorder are permissible, such as stealing money. People are highly sensitive to social norms (information about what other people are doing and what they approve of), and subtle indicators of these norms can have dramatic effects on people’s behavior (we will encounter this lesson again in the next chapter). When there are signs that lawlessness is the norm, people are more likely to act lawlessly.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“What kinds of perspectives make us happy? Research reveals three key ingredients: meaning, hope, and purpose. First, it helps to have answers to the most basic questions about human existence and our place in the world, in a way that allows us to make sense of why bad things sometimes occur. Second, it helps to be optimistic—not because positive thoughts magically attract things to us, but because optimistic people cope better with adversity. Third, it helps to view ourselves as strong protagonists who set our own goals and make progress toward them; in other words, to have a sense of purpose. The good news is that there are relatively simple story-editing exercises any of us can do to shape our views in these directions.”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change

“A small percentage of the population can be easily hypnotized, and, when given posthypnotic suggestions, they end up doing things with no conscious awareness of why. G. H. Estabrooks notes that when this happens, the person “finds excuses for his actions and, strange to say, while these excuses may be utterly false, the subject tends to believe them.” He relates the following example: The operator hypnotizes a subject and tells him that when the cuckoo clock strikes he will walk up to Mr. White, put a lamp shade on his head, kneel on the floor in front of him and “cuckoo” three times. Mr. White was not the type on whom one played practical jokes, in fact, he was a morose, nonhumorous sort of individual who would fit very badly in such a picture. Yet, when the cuckoo clock struck, the subject carried out the suggestion to the letter. “What in the world are you doing?” he was asked. “Well, I’ll tell you. It sounds queer but it’s just a little experiment in psychology. I’ve been reading on the psychology of humor and I thought I’d see how you folks reacted to a joke that was in very bad taste. Please pardon me, Mr. White, no offense intended whatsoever,” and the subject sat down without the slightest realization of having acted under posthypnotic compulsion.2”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious

“It is worth noting, though, that kids who have been spanked or slapped are bad at what psychologists call “moral internalization.” Rather than learning that “I shouldn’t hit my little sister because that’s the wrong thing to do,” kids learn that “I shouldn’t hit my little sister because Mom will slap me if I do.” This means that the child won’t hit his little sister when his mom is around, but what happens when she is out of the room or at work? Watch out—the kid who behaves only to avoid Mom’s wrath is now free to unload on his sister. Further, his mother has taught him that violence is a reasonable way to try to control someone else’s behavior, so why shouldn’t he use it himself? Studies have shown that kids are excellent imitators of the techniques other people use to get what they want, including aggression. In short, many parents who use corporal punishment focus too much on controlling their children’s behavior and too little on what they are doing to their kids’ narratives. Ultimately, we want our kids to internalize appropriate values and attitudes, rather than obeying in order to avoid being punished.10”
― Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change