FREE STRANGERS TO OURSELVES: DISCOVERING THE ADAPTIVE UNCONSCIOUS PDF Timothy D. Wilson | 272 pages | 01 Jun 2004 | HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS | 9780674013827 | English | Cambridge, Mass., United States Strangers to Ourselves Quotes by Timothy D. Wilson Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy D. But is introspection the best path to self-knowledge? What are we trying to Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, anyway? In an eye-opening tour of the unconscious, as contemporary psychological science has redefined it, Timothy D. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection ma "Know thyself," a precept as old as Socrates, is still good advice. Wilson introduces us to a hidden mental world of judgments, feelings, and motives that introspection may never show us. This is not your psychoanalyst's unconscious. The adaptive unconscious Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious empirical psychology has revealed, and that Wilson describes, is much more than a repository of primitive drives and conflict-ridden memories. It is a set of pervasive, sophisticated mental processes that size up our worlds, set goals, and initiate action, all while we are consciously thinking about something else. If we don't know ourselves--our potentials, feelings, or motives--it is most often, Wilson tells us, because we have developed a plausible story about ourselves that is out of touch with our adaptive unconscious. Citing evidence that too much introspection can actually do damage, Wilson makes the case for better ways of discovering our unconscious selves. If you want to know who you are or what you feel or what you're like, Wilson advises, pay attention to what you actually do and what other people think about you. Showing us an unconscious more powerful than Freud's, and even more pervasive in our daily life, Strangers to Ourselves marks a revolution in how we know ourselves. Get A Copy. Paperbackpages. Published May 15th by Belknap Press first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions 8. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Strangers to Ourselvesplease sign up. Be the first to ask a question about Strangers to Ourselves. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Feb 08, Richard rated it really liked it Recommended to Richard by: Cognitive Science reading group. Shelves: cognitionnonfictionbookclub. Gladwell claims this book, Strangers to Ourselves as "probably the most influential book I've ever read", and cites it as instrumental in his decision to write Blink. And yet it appears that Gladwell fundamentally misunderstood the nature of how unconscious decision making takes place and whether it can be trusted. That group is meeting tomorrow, and I'm roughly one-third the way into the book, so I want to get some thoughts clarified. We typically read the same book two months in a row, so I'm okay with not having finished it. Accessible cognates are an expansion to me, at least on the idea of the availability heuristic. When we think — consciously or unconsciously — the more recently and more in-depth our cognates are the more easily they are Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious, and the mere act of accessing them bumps their energy state up. This is due simply to efficiency: memories or concepts that are used more often and intensively are kept closer at hand. As a child, the complex of ideas that makes up "mother" or, at least, primary caregiver will always be close to the top of this accessibility hierarchy. The Freudian idea that we frame new relationships in terms of our infantile relationships to our parents is close to this idea, but not quite the same. One peculiar outcome of this: consider the stereotypical talk therapy situation of a man trying to stop acting out his relationship with his mother within the context of his other female intimates. The mere act of talking about his relationship with his mother — over and over, and over — would tend to solidify her premier position as the most accessible female pattern. A better approach would probably be to deeply explore other variations of Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious relationships in order to break that dominance. Perhaps modern talk therapy does deal with this paradox, I Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious know. Normal schizophrenia: perhaps the central theme of the book, so far, is that we all have two personalities. First, the conscious self, which may or may or may not be in control. Second, the agglomeration of many unconscious mechanisms also forms a consistent pattern of behavior and thought, and is thus also a personality. Not all of those varied mechanisms work together, some are more deeply buried than others the fear response to what looks like a snake is different and not really related to one's reaction to Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious in front of peers, for example. But crucially, those two personalities are independent enough that they might work at cross purposes. The conscious mind might find a prospective friend intelligent, charming and interesting all while completely oblivious to the signs that friendly discussions with this person will quickly devolve into acrimony because they they trigger memories of an overbearing older brother. A crucial problem is that the unconscious is unavailable for inspection. Navel gazing, per se, won't reveal these buried tendencies. Furthermore, those tendencies will be heavily context dependent. A person might react to embarrassment in front of peers with clownish bravado, while a similar reaction in front of an attractive person of the appropriate sex results in sheepishness, and an authority figure might witness clumsy and panicked denial. A question Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious "do you embarrass easily? Take this question from the Myers-Briggs personality test Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious True or False: You prefer meeting in small groups to interaction with lots of people. Context is missing: is this with co-workers in front of the group's authority figure? Or a peer-only team meeting? Or Thanksgiving dinner with relatives you haven't seen in a year? Or a reunion with high school friends? And even if the question is made very explicit, the inherent divide between the conscious and unconscious might mean that we might remain fundamentally confused about what we "prefer". Perhaps we think that a small group of peer co-workers would be preferred, but unconsciously we react very poorly to the chaos implied by a lack of direction and thus the typical outcome of such a meeting is less preferred; meanwhile the presence of authority at a larger meeting might be consciously resented as paternalistic, but unconsciously we might end up more satisfied with our performance and behavior when such a control is present. I recall taking that test many years ago and feeling frustrated at these ambiguities. Does "preference" mean who I want to be? Or who I think I actually am? Or, worse, who I'm worried I might have to admit to being if I were more honest with myself? What Wilson promises later in the book is a kind of indirect self-help technique. This isn't nominally a self-help book; with human consciousness under discussion, I'm pretty confident that any book that actually tries to sell itself as such would be uselessly simplistic anyway. At the same time, the possibility for advice is inherent, and many books that examine the many aspects of cognition will offer pointers that the author suspects might help. They'll sometimes call them heuristics, of course, in order not to be tarred with the self-help brush. I haven't gotten to the details yet, but the gist of it seems to be that whereas introspection per se isn't useful, it is possible to use our interactions with others in our past as a dark mirror. By examining situations in which our behavior bewildered or frustrated us, we can try to compose a description of who that "other person" inside our skin is, and learn which situations trigger their antics and how to avoid those situations, and perhaps even to understand where "their" past intersects with our conscious past. Back to the book for a bit more reading before tomorrow's meeting. View 2 comments. May 30, Lissa Carlson rated it it was amazing. Pursuing our goals is as satisfying as achieving them. Avoid rumination. Trust your gut. And perhaps my favorite line: "… if we want to change some aspect of our adaptive unconscious, a good place to start is deliberately to begin acting like the person we want to be. Dec 02, Dhandayutha rated it it was amazing Shelves: non-fictionlove- affairspsychology There is an Ramana maharishi meditation "who am i"? You have to keep on asking who am i? You should not be stupid to chose some petty answers. Timothy Wilson is honest enough to declare that even with the aid of all the psychology we Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious never understand ourselves. We can never know ourselves completely to provide the reason for all actions. He provides lot Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious is an Ramana maharishi meditation "who am i"? He provides lot of ideas via the surveys taken by psychologist to re frame our frame of reference.