Tim Wilson also talks about decision making and asks us to think about whether or not our conscious thought process that we go through in decision are always the one that do our work in getting us to behave as we do. And I mean decisions not so much about whether to wiggle a finger or not, but rather about broader issues, such as major life decisions. So many of us have been brought up on the Ben Franklin method of decision making, in which you divide up a piece of paper into two columns, and put pro on one side, con on the other. Franklin writes the following. My way is to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro and over the other Con. Then during three or four days' of consideration, Franklin writes, �I put down under different heads the short hints of different motives, that at different times occur to me, for or against each measure. When each reason is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and I'm less likely to make a rash step.� That's a well known very famous method for decision making. And Wilson's point is that it suggests that our decision making process, what makes us prefer one course of action over another is something that we can consciously formulate. Something that we can justify and be consciously articulated on that sheet of paper. But maybe that's not true. Maybe what really does the work in making us decide whether to buy this house, marry this person, take this job, give up this job that we have, study this topic and so forth, is something more like a gut feeling that we may or may not be consciously aware of. Now, if that's right, and many people attest to the idea of a gut feeling in favor of one course of action as opposed to another in big life decisions. Then the Franklin method is not going to be the key to deciding what to do in a difficult situation. We're going to get back to this when we discuss next week Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error, which is very much about the process of decision making. And we'll be considering various methods of decision-making, various theories of decision-making in order to decide which is most accurate characterization of what people do when they behave with that at least mode to come of rationality. So summing up. Unlike that Freud we see that different and more up to date approach to the nature of unconscious mind. Wilson's focus on the subconscious, was as opposed to pre-conscious phenomena. And wants to say, unlike some, at least to the Freudian tradition, and the psychoanalytic tradition more broadly, we want to put our theories of the unconscious up to the highest standards of experimental design and experimental rigor. And once we do so we will still see that the best explanation of various experimental phenomena is that there are mental events that are not just unconscious but subconscious, not open to conscious introspection. But that we need to evoke to explain things like biased behavior, the fact that we're bad at forecasting things in the future both the consequences of good and bad events, enabling you to process language so effectively, the ability to make sense of faces so effectively and so on. These are not things we can know about throughinspection but we can know, so to speak, in a third personal way, and in this respect, we're going back to think about the inspiration that we had from Ryle. Remember, Ryle told us that if you want to know about self knowledge, I know about myself better than I know about others simply because I, so to speak, hang out with myself more than others. But I still know myself in a third personal as opposed to a first personal way. Introspection is not very important for learning about ourselves, he will say; rather seeing how we behave in the world, is a more accurate way of doing so. And further more taking a page from the Wilson approach which is more scientifically rigorous than that of Ryle. Remember Ryle was kind of dismissive of scientific psychology. Wilson is certainly in favor of it. Wilson will say not just hanging out with yourself, but watching yourself and the implications of your behavior and experimental results. What happens when you take tests on the project implicit website and so on, are going to be especially relevant as to what's going on in your unconscious mind, especially because most of us tend to be spin doctors. So if you just asked me what I think of myself based on my self-observation, I might prettify, sugar coat things, in a way that a hard look in the mirror. Or a hard look at the results of the tests and project implicit, and various other relatively objective sources of third-personal information about my unconscious mind. That might be not quite as attractive, but still important to understand what makes me do the things that I do. So the big picture, then, is yes, there's evidence for the existence of an unconscious mind. It is not open to introspection. And nevertheless, it has a big impact in the way that we live our lives. And if you've followed just the tiniest bit of news over the last five years, you'll be aware of the fact that various kinds of racist behavior, sexist behavior are the things that are very much the topic of political discussion, etc. In many countries around the world, are often traceable to sorts of prejudice, sorts of bias, they are not consciously introspectable but nevertheless have a huge impact on daily life.
