Takeaways from Before You Know It
Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do By John Bargh Simon and Schuster 352 pp; $35
Why do we do the things we do? It’s an age- old question, impacted as much by alcohol as inhibition, but Yale University professor Dr. John Bargh is out to prove there’s more than spirits and suspicion at play up top. A long-time student of the unconscious mind, Bargh’s first book tackles the spectrum of silent forces that shape our day-to-day decisionmaking. From touch and temperature to toe- tapping and take- out, Bargh lays out the base behaviours that impact who we are and how we show it. Here’s what we learned:
1. Political predisposition.
Bargh relies on simple, widely known primordial psychology to help explain simple human instincts: fighting, flighting and our overall will to survive. But with time, it seems, the root cause of these instincts – fear – has come to shape attitudes well beyond our physical well-being, finding stead in human perception of sociological well-being as well. One breakthrough University of California research study monitored a group of preschool children for 20 years, checking on the youngsters intermittently to test their evolving interpretation of fear and inhibition with time. Turns out those kiddos most fearful at age four would also be the batch that, two decades later, identify as most socially conservative. Overall aversion to radical change is a widely held tenet of social conservatism, and psychology proves there’s something to be said about a certain amount of measurable preschool predisposition when it comes to those political views.
2. Monkey see.
If Johnny jumped off the bridge, would you? Mom’s favourite reprimand might have something to it after all, says Bargh, who proved firsthand that people are predisposed to mimic the actions of those in close proximity. Told they’d be participating in a completely unrelated experiment, Bargh placed several unwitting test subjects in a small room with one of his specially primed staff members. Under the guise of an inkblot interpretation study, each guinea pig looked on as their interviewer enacted some subtle behavioural tick. We’re talking real small – a jiggly foot or little lobe tug – but these meager actions proved to have enormous effect. Cycled through rooms where they’d be exposed to different adjacent behaviours, without exception each subject directly mimicked the actions of those interviewers across from them, right down to the toe tap.
3. Hungry for more.
There’s nothing more I can tell you about grocery shopping on an empty stomach that last month’s three a.m. Dorito-peanut butter-plumcot No Frills receipt hasn’t already – a gotta-get-it-gimme combo as bad for digestion as personal debt. But Bargh says it isn’t just your questionable cuisine combination at risk during those desperate bodega binges. One Minneapolis study showed that not only were hungry shoppers more likely to buy beyond their means food-wise, but in other departments as well, often purchasing unrelated goods in gluttonous abundance alongside. Those same famished folks were more likely to take a freebie, too: when confronted with marketers hawking small promotional materials (such as a paper clip or office folder), hungry shoppers would grab the free goods at a far greater rate. Underlying hunger can trigger a base human interest in acquiring goods – of any variety, really, binder collection be damned – no matter their ability to satisfy the starvation at hand.
4. Mind control.
While the bulk of Bargh’s research focuses on those unconscious forces affecting our day-to-day behaviour, his best tip for goal-setting and realization comes directly from conscious thought. “Implementation intention” is a psychological method of achieving predetermined goals by actively setting aside specific time to think about them. The habit of intentionally implementing behaviour through a series of conscious thoughts can have significant impact on our ability to overcome temptation and achieve a goal. Here’s how it works: when confronting a choice that puts us head-to-head with some fatal attraction relate to yourself a sentence that replaces that temptation with a conscious thought opposite to the trigger and is mindful of your longterm goals. For example, decide now that the next time you want to buy some fresh kicks, you’ll think instead about that RRSP sitting idle. Bargh says this method beats the traditional “I won’t do it” by subbing the unconscious denial for a greater goal.