Some impressions of Bargh

Having mentioned the John Bargh book about the unconscious (reference 1) eight times (reference 2) since I started reading it towards the end of last year, I seems appropriate to offer some general remarks now that I have finally finished it.

I was probably prompted to buy it by his article, drawn from the book, in the November 7th issue of the TLS, picked up by chance in our local Waitrose when I was buying my bread flour.

In what follows I use UCS for unconscious systems, and CS for conscious systems, that is to say systems at least some of the workings of which make it to consciousness. Bargh makes it clear that UCS can do or can be trained to do all kinds of surprising things, and do them well – for example, writing a learned paper or telling a story. There is not much – if indeed there is anything – which is the exclusive preserve of the CS. It is also true that it is quite easy to manipulate the workings of UCS from the outside, thus gaining some control of some part of behaviour.

While in some ways an irritating book, it contains lots of interesting material about the ways of the unconscious and has sparked off plenty of interesting digressions and red-herrings and my own notes (in Microsoft Word) sport near twenty annexes covering the bigger ones. I associate to an aside made by T. E. Lawrence somewhere in reference 3 to the effect that some people might be perfect in what they do, but other people are better at sparking off activity in others. The latter being a useful virtue when you are trying to encourage tribesmen to blow up lots of trains, with tribesmen being proud men who want to do better than their teacher, rather than be shown up by their teacher.

Some of the irritation stems from the jolly style, one presumes jolly in the interests of accessibility and sales. Which includes omitting all the tiresome technical details about the conduct of the many experiments mentioned and the computing of their statistics. But jollity which I find a little tiresome when sustained over getting on for 300 pages - and jollity which sometimes seem to slip into sloppiness. But I did like the way that notes and references had been consigned to the back of the book, with the notes providing an easy bridge from the text to the references. And I might say that nearly all the references that I followed were available, free of charge, from somewhere on the Internet, a trick that Google is slightly better at than Bing.

The text had an introduction and a conclusion, with ten chapters arranged in three parts sandwiched between the two. I offer a few crumbs from the cake.

Part 1 – the hidden past

The world in which we evolved was a dangerous place. We needed fast responses to avoid some of these dangers – with speed trumping accuracy. Which lives on in our gut reactions and in our emotional reactions to all kinds of things. But gut reactions are often wrong and it is best to check when there is time so to do. Television detectives take note!

Bargh reports on a early experiment at reference 5 which bears on this, an experiment which demonstrated that gut reactions were often wrong when the system was overloaded. But which were often right if CS was allowed to kick in and slow things down a bit.

Bargh seems quite Freudian in the importance he gives to things learned in infancy. With one example being the way our attachments in infancy drive our attachment style as adults.

UCS is often trained in bad ways by our environment. With one example being the way we – girls included – are brought up to believe that girls have no interest in and are no good at mathematics. At least it turns out that this is one more thing which can easily be tweaked in experiments by a technique called priming. By poking bits of our unconscious into action without our being aware of it. Often done in experiments by including the poking words in among a whole lot of noise and rubbish which we do not consciously attend to. Think of the famous – but seemingly untrue – story about subliminal Coca Cola advertisements inserted in a film at the cinema.

In sum, UCS is tweaking the way we behave all the time – sometimes in ways we might not be proud of. So experiment might well reveal clear prejudice, for example, about people of colour, prejudice which we would otherwise, quite conscientiously, deny.

Part 2 – the hidden present

Discussion of variations of attraction and repulsion, should I stay or should I go. Snap judgements which we are making all the time.

We seemed to be hard wired to imitate each other, something we are quick to notice in babies and in others. Also to like others who imitate us. Or as Charles Colton, an old Etonian from the end of the eighteenth century had it: ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ – an aphorism later borrowed by Oscar Wilde for one of his. One bad consequence of this that we apt to behave badly when we see bad behaviour in others. So Mayor Giuliani (the chap who is now one of President Trump’s minders) believed that if we did not see graffiti everywhere we would be much less likely to drop litter.

We put a lot of faith in our judgement of faces, and in the case of still photographs are often wrong – with evidence of this being the number of truly bad people who get elected to public office on the strength of a clever photograph on their flier. We are much better with video clips.

Part 3 – the hidden future

It is hard for men to avoid choosing pretty women when there is a choice between pretty and ugly, and we will always be able to come up with respectable reasons for not choosing ugly. But the statistics tell another story.

When we are hungry we tend to buy more stuff, not just food. So it is a good idea to eat something before one goes shopping.

UCS is very good at spotting stuff in the great haystack of inbound stimulation which is relevant to current goals.

We tend to be positive about stuff which supports current goals – even when we might be a bit sniffy otherwise. So I might think pork is very bad, not least for the pigs, but if a good friend is coming to dinner who I know likes pork… Another example of which being the well-known tendency of otherwise respectable professional sportsmen to cheat.

Around half your waking thoughts are nothing to do with the task or activity to hand. But a lot of them will be goal related.

Quite a lot of space is given in this part to self-help, to learning how to get the CS and the UCS to work together to get the best outcome. And this includes CS leaving UCS to get on with the stuff that it is good at, rather than going into denial about it being there at all. One wheeze is a device called ‘implementation intentions’ – about which there is plenty of stuff out on the Internet.

Comments

A good part of the text consisted of reports of neat experiments done to illuminate the many tricks and treats of the unconscious. But Bing, unsolicited, turned up a failure to replicate at least one of them, at reference 4.

A lot of the experiments reported on appeared to depend on the participants not knowing that their unconscious was being tweaked. I am not sure that you could so depend.

A lot of the experiments reported on appeared to depend on deception of the participants about the objectives of the experiment. I am not sure about the wisdom of making deception routine in this way. Does not Bargh’s own work, noticed above, argue against it?

Perhaps the fact that it is easy to manipulate the working of UCS from the outside is on a par with the fact that it is easy to trick the senses into illusion or error. This sort of manipulation and trickery did not go on in the wild, as it were, and it was not important that there be good defences against it.

Trivia

Bargh observes that ‘… It’s hard to accept that there are forces moving the ship of self besides the conscious captain at the helm…’. To which I respond that captains of ships do not generally take the helm. With a more serious question being what do we deem to be the self in these circumstances? How do we carve a person up into body and soul?

I was interested to read of Washington Place and Washington Square, having just started to read the Henry James novella named for this last, a large format pick-me-up from the platform library at Raynes Park. Clearly not the place it was back in 1880.

The stock market performs better when the sun in shining than when it is raining. Something to do with some UCS connection between being warm and good things in general.

Experiments have been devised in which one comes to like things that one pulls towards one and to dislike things that one pushes away. With the UCS making the necessary connections.

Conclusions

There is lots of stuff here about the workings of the UCS, both for good and for bad. Rather less is said about what is left for CS.

And there is clearly lots of interest in this kind of thing from people who want to persuade us to do something – like buy a hamburger from McDonald’s or vote for Donald Trump – which we might not otherwise do. In all the ways that we can be more or less subtly manipulated.

A good read, well worth the near £20 I paid for it. Another example of Amazon knocking a few quid off the sticker price and then adding most of it back on again in the form of postage and packing.

References

Reference 1: Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do - John Bargh – 2017.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=bargh.

Reference 3: Seven Pillars of Wisdom – T. E. Lawrence – 1926.

Reference 4: Behavioral Priming: It’s all in the Mind, but Whose Mind? - Stéphane Doyen, Olivier Klein, Cora-Lise Pichon, Axel Cleeremans – 2012.

Reference 5: Individual construct accessibility, person memory, and the recall-judgement link: The case of information overload – Bargh and Thein – 1985. For once, I did not turn up a free copy.