So, we've seen reasons for doubting the particular argument that Wilson gives in favor of the snowball on top of the iceberg metaphor. But that does not mean that the claims about the adaptive unconscious are untrue. Fortunately, Wilson does provide evidence from both his laboratory, and laboratories and many other researchers around the world, in favor of the idea that there must be some unconscious mentality, mentation occurring, that explains behavior that would otherwise be very difficult to explain. So, the researchers Bargh, and Pietromonaco for example have a study in which subjects are subliminally flash charged words such as hostile, insult, unkind, and the way the subliminal priming works is that these words are flashed for only a couple 100 milliseconds. Then they're covered on a screen with X's. This is known as a masking technique. So that you can't consciously be aware of what word you saw. So the word hostile might appear on the screen but for such a short period of time and then followed by X's that your conscious mind can't answer the question what word was that? Nevertheless, subjects are given vignettes. They tend to respond to those vignettes in a way that seems to be influenced by which words they were primed by. So, for example, you get an ambiguous sentence such as "A salesman came to the door but George refused to let him in". Then the subject is asked, was George behaving in an inappropriate, improper, unethical way? Was he being mean, whatever? If the subject had been primed with one of these words such as hostile, unkind or insult, they're much more likely to answer that question in the affirmative. They're much more likely to interpret that ambiguous scenario in negative terms, in which, for example, George did something unkind, or unfair or inappropriate. Whereas if they had not been primed with those words, they're as likely to interpret it in a negative way as they're in a positive way. The idea is that, remember inference to the best explanation. If the best explanation, that seems to be the case here, the best explanation of their behavior in response to this ambiguous scenario is that they've been unconsciously affected by the words that they were primed with. Not consciously because they have no inkling of the fact that they were shown these particular words, and yet that seemed to make a difference, further responded to the ambiguous situation. That's one experiment. Another experiment is a famous one by Bechara and the husband wife pair of Antonio Damasio. We'll be talking about the Damasios in our next class. They have a gambling game. There are four decks of cards: A, B, C, and D. With all these decks, you either win money, or lose money when you choose one card from one of the decks. But when you choose a card from A or B, you will get a large sum or a large loss. Over time, choosing cards from decks A or B is likely to result in a loss. Whereas, choosing cards from deck C or D, where you'll have smaller gains, and smaller losses, is likely over time to result in your getting gains. Now, subjects generally over time gravitate towards choosing cards from decks C and D, but they don't show any awareness of the fact that they tend to win more when they do so, and lose more when they choose cards from decks A and B. Say, learn to select from C and D but don't know why. If you ask them, why are you doing that? They won't be able to tell you that "Oh well it seems like A and B are more productive of losses than C and D; they are not able to verbally form like that at all". You can also see that when they're considering choosing a card from A or B after a certain amount of experience with this experiment, there's a change in their skin conductivity. That is, the degree of galvanic skin response is a measure of your degree of arousal, either negatively or positively. Galvanic skin response increases in response to choosing from decks A or B. Subject are not aware of this. They nevertheless do respond in that way. So the suggestion is that most subjects who play this game, or most subjects who play this game start choosing from C or D, they have somehow learned that the A and B decks are less productive and are likely to cause them losses, but they don't know that they have learned that. They just find themselves doing this. As described by these researchers. First point. Second point, and we're going to see this more in our next class, when we talk about people with different kinds of lesions or losses to brain tissue. We're going to see that some patients known as Prefrontal patients. Patients who've had damage to the prefrontal area of their brain. Roughly speaking, the area of the brain right behind the bridge of the nose. Patients who've had damage there do not learn the rule consciously or unconsciously. They keep on choosing cards just as likely from A and B as they do from C or D, and generally as a result end up losing a lot more than do the rest of the subjects. Somehow, the emotional response that so-called normal subjects give to the prospect of choosing from A or B is not one that these prefrontal patients are able to make. As a result, the latter do poorer over time.
