Think You’re in Control? Think Again! The Hidden Forces Behind Your Choices | Ep. 070

In this enlightening episode of the MindHack Podcast, we delve into the fascinating world of the unconscious mind with Dr. John Bargh, a leading expert and professor of psychology at Yale University. Why do we make the decisions we do? What influences our choices beyond our conscious awareness? Dr. Bargh takes us on a journey through the unseen forces that shape our everyday actions and decisions.

From the subtle impacts of environmental cues to the profound effects of our internal instincts, this conversation explores how our gut feelings and unconscious processes guide us more than we might realize. Dr. Bargh shares insights from his groundbreaking research and his acclaimed book, "Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do," providing practical advice on how to harness the power of our subconscious for better decision-making and improved well-being.

About this Guest:
Website
ACME Lab Yale
Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do by Dr. John Bargh
Other books here

People & Other Mentions:
Professor Michael S. Gazzaniga
Roger Sperry’s Split Brain Experiments
Joseph E. LeDoux
Antonio Damasio
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio
William James
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Amos Tversky
Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) | Shane Frederick
Dick Butkus
Newsletters | Superhuman | Neuron | TLDR
LLMs | ChatGPT | Claude AI | Llama AI
ELIZA Chatbot
The Turing Test
Jeffrey Gray
Hannah Arendt
The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think by Hannah Arendt
Timothy Wilson
Ambady and Rosenthal
Love is Blind
Umax App

Transcript

John: 0:00

what would it take for us to actually call, an AI like Claude or chat GPT or whatever conscious, what would it take? What are the indicators that would convince people Claude, for example, conscious?

CODY: 0:28

Welcome to the Mind Hack podcast, where we explore the psychology of self-improvement and mindset to help you live a happier and more fulfilled life. I'm your host Cody McClain, and today we're talking with Dr. John Bargh, a social psychologist and one of the foremost experts on the unconscious mind. Dr. Bargh is a professor of psychology at Yale University and directs the Acme Lab, which focuses on the automatic processes influencing cognition, motivation, and evaluation. He is known worldwide for his pioneering research on how unconscious mechanisms affect everything from our simplest gestures to our biggest life decisions. Dr. Bargh is also the author of the influential book. Before you know it, the Unconscious Reasons We Do what we Do. Which is a book that unpacks the hidden powers of the unconscious mind and how it shapes our everyday experiences and behaviors. Today, he joins us to delve into these unseen forces and discuss how we can better understand and navigate these subconscious currents that influence our lives. Dr. Bargh, welcome to the podcast.

John: 1:37

Thank you, Cody. It's a privilege and an honor to be on this show and, I'm a big fan. I'm looking forward to our hour talk here today.

CODY: 1:43

Thank you. So could you start just by explaining what is the unconscious mind, and why is it so crucial to our understanding of human behavior?

John: 1:53

If you take an evolutionary, perspective to the brain and to the evolution of the brain and the mind, it operated pretty much unconsciously for millions and millions and millions of years. It's a very recent development that we have this conscious, aware, control over our minds, which is wonderful. But it's a late evolutionary development. So the systems, the adaptive systems and circuits of the brain pretty much operated in an unintentional, sort of a reflexive, responsive, adaptive way, but without conscious control for tens of millions of years. But those parts of our brain are still there. They didn't just go away when consciousness came aboard. So a lot of our conscious functions really take as input. they grew out of the unconscious, systems. So they need them. they don't have anything to work on unless they have those unconscious inputs, and then they take it from there. So, since they're already still there and there were our conscious mind starts, the unconscious is hugely influential because it gives the input and the starting points for everything we do consciously. some well-known people like Michael Gazzaniga, who is the father of cognitive neuroscience back in the 1980s and is still around, you know, said as when you have a conscious thought, well, you already have it. It came from somewhere. It had to be unconsciously produced because once you have it, it was already made for you. You experienced it, but it came from somewhere else. It didn't come from your conscious mind. It came from unconscious, circuits and processes. So that's the importance of unconscious. Knowing the unconscious, influences. The other thing that's, important to say, given the history of, the idea of unconscious mind is, the scientific version of unconscious is not Freudian. It's not a separate, maladaptive kind of, cauldron of, of strange urges and drives that is separate place by its own rules. Freud's unconscious mind was a separate mind inside our skulls and had its own operating system, our own operating, characteristics and different rules. the unconscious mind that we've been studying for the last 40 or 50 years, remarkably, has the same signature characteristics as conscious processes do that it does things the same way as conscious, versions of the same process do. and neuroscience shows that, that show the same brain regions operating. You get the same qualities, same signature characteristics when it's unconscious versus conscious. It's really the same mind, but sort of operates in a conscious or unconscious mode. Which means it can do a lot of complicated things unconsciously, that you can also do consciously, but doesn't need, you don't need to be aware of it or paying attention to it. So it's really the same mind, one mind, not two. And it's a very adaptive and functional and, helped us over evolutionary, errors. so it's not a maladaptive source of, problems and conflicts and, causing us to do bad things that are self-destructive at all. that's sort of the, the where I wanna start when we start thinking and talking about unconscious influences.

CODY: 4:43

when you say that their one mind, I would refer to Roger Sperry’s split brain experiments from the late 1960s where he was able to show where he had a divider between people's eyes, right. And he had one part of their body do something. And, you would probably be able to explain this better than I would, but actually can you explain the split brain experiments

John: 5:03

now. I remember Roger Sperry, because I read these papers when I was in high school. I was in high school when he was writing these 19 69, 19 70, papers in psychological review. And he was amazing. He was obviously, you know, decades in front of the modern neuroscience. He was doing these things without the kind of equipment that they have today. so Sperry was one of the pioneers of this kind of thing, but the split brain and I don't really know much more than that, but I remember reading these papers way back then, you know, 50 years ago.

CODY: 5:29

these were patients that I believe had their, if I'm saying it right, their corpus callosum, they had that cut and he was able, he put a divider between their eyes and then he had their right hand perform an action. And then he, and then since the left side of the brain, in the left eye, is separate, he would then ask them why did they do something? Why did they paint something the other side? And then it would make up some reason, why they did something. And overall, his experiments seem to indicate that we perform an action and then we make up a reason as to why we performed that action after the fact.

John: 6:06

Yeah. I'm really familiar with Gazzaniga's and Joseph LeDoux. there's a, a good story that Gazzaniga tells in an 85 book that he wrote, when they were doing a split brain research on epileptics. And the reason why they cut the corpus callosum on to prevent these grand mal seizures, which are horrible and, reverberate around the brain and cause you to, have, Dangerous kinds of contractions of your tongue and swallowing your tongue and things like that. So we're trying to save these people's lives. And, it was a, a major thing to do to cut this corpus callosum, but it really was effective in reducing these grand mal seizures. But it left, these patients, with two separate hemispheres. It couldn't communicate with each other. And so you could do these experiments and Gazzaniga and LeDoux as sort of a joke. He tells this story, uh, wrote a big grant to study, these patients in New England. and they put as a joke, a little, uh, addendum to their grant proposal saying, they would like to buy a Winnebago and, uh, equip it with a lab, and then they drive around to England to these various patients. Instead of having them having to travel to Boston or somewhere to come to their lab, they said they put the lab in the Winnebago and drive around to all these patients in New England and collect all this data. And they put that in as a sort of little joke. Well, the funny thing is they didn't get the grant. The grant was rejected, but they did get the part about the Winnebago. So damn it, we've got 'em. Drive, get this Winnebago and drive around New England for the next three years. And they did as like a two or three year road trip in the late seventies, early eighties. And he tells stories about, they would present, stimuli to the, right hemisphere and have it affect, the person without the left hemisphere knowing about it. And Gazzaniga made a model of, how everyday, action impulses and behaviors for those of us with an intact corpus callosum for non epileptics, for the rest of us. his idea was that impulses for behavior come from the right hemisphere. And, we don't will them, we don't intend them. But there are impulses based on the situation, our goals, what other people are doing, these impulses. And then our left hemisphere becomes aware of them after the fact and creates a narrative, sort of an understanding, a story about why we're doing what we're doing. And so, Gazzaniga has all these examples of those patients, but also hypnotize patients where he tell them, okay, I'm gonna count back, 3, 2, 1, snap my finger. And you're gonna get down on the floor and crawl around on your hands and knees, on the floor. And, 3, 2, 1, snap woman gets down on the floors, crawling around, oh, I, I think I lost my earring down here. Or as 3, 2, 1. I snap my fingers. You're gonna leave the room. 3, 2, 1. Snap the fingers. Patient gets up, leaves the room. What a rude thing to do. Here's this doctor interviewing you. Oh, I'm thirsty. I need to get a drink of water. And he said the amazing thing about it was not only would they do that post hypnotic suggestion. and behave that way without knowing where that impulse came from. But they would immediately come up with a good story about why they were doing it. The narrative was like, they're so facile. We're all so facile at understanding what we're doing and making a story out of it as if we meant to do it. and to have it make sense. And that's Gazzaniga's model of, why we do what we do. It comes from unconscious sources, but it's interpreted immediately in some, reasonable way so that we can explain our behavior and have other people, and not think we're just, doing things randomly or we're crazy or something

CODY: 9:21

Right. It, seems that a lot of our decision making and what we do on a daily basis is driven by the unconscious mind, but when we perform those actions, a lot of them may be You talk a lot about priming from an environmental perspective and how these other unconscious influences can impact our decision making without our conscious awareness. Is there some way that we can, well, actually, let me step back and ask what are some other examples about how the unconscious mind affects our daily decisions in a way without us actually realizing it.

John: 9:57

Well, for one thing, there's a, direct connection. This is a really, the famous book and the famous person, who's still around and writing books about this is Antonio Damasio. and our own bodily states are prime, to use that word, vehicle for how, we have these influences on our mind, without realizing it. so our feelings of warmth, from physical warmth actually trigger feelings of social warmth towards like our family and friends and feelings of closeness. And there's a very tight connection actually, and. In the insular portion of the brain between sensations of physical warmth and feelings of social warmth. The same little area becomes active when you're holding something warm as when you're texting your family and friends on the phone. And, and neuroscience has shown those kinds of connections. There's also between other kinds of feelings and bodily states, the Damasio's idea, even today, Damasio is a, a really influential writer in AI about, will there ever be conscious ai? Will we ever have, chat GPT or Claude or, Lama or the other versions of, large language modules or other versions, you know, will they ever become actually conscious? And some people who interact with Claude and chat GPT, especially the latest version, you know, actually do believe that they're conscious. Damasio would disagree because Damasio believes the only way that entities are conscious is if they have actual. Subjective experience and feelings. And Damasio is Descartes error. The book he wrote in 1994, I think, has said, are actual bodily feelings of, fear or of this is the right thing to do of fluency and all these kinds of actual feelings, subjective feelings are what we use continually as a guide to our actions to know this feels right, you know, this is the right thing to do, or no, I'm a little hesitant, you know, maybe I shouldn't do this, or No, if I do that, I'll have this bad regret. Or, I'll feel guilty later if I do it. I don't want to have that feeling. And so feelings in bodily states, which come from systems of homeostasis, of getting away from our set points, of feeling the right warmth, feeling the right amount of food and energy and all these things. When we deviate from that. Those signals are directly transmitted to our brain and guide our behavior. but they can be influenced in sort of modern ways by holding something like a warm cup of coffee to make you feel socially warm. or, other kinds of states like, feeling, disgust at being in a dirty room actually causes jurors in those rooms to be more morally disgusted at the crime of they're considering sentencing somebody for, and they give harsher sentences in dirty, jury deliberation rooms than in clean ones for the same crimes because the bodily state of disgusted, the physical disgust influences their moral disgust. So a lot of these kinds of higher level, decisions and judgements we're making that influence other people in real life in real ways. Like prison sentences can be influenced by these things that we're not aware of. We, we don't, we would never dream that, you know, holding a cup of coffee makes us feel warmer towards somebody else or. Being in a dirty room causes us to sentence somebody to six months more prison than we would have otherwise. I mean, none of us believe that that's true, but the studies show that, and it's consistent with Damasio and other people's models of how the body is a direct channel influencing the brain.

CODY: 13:13

and so, you mentioned, I know that there was a significant study on when you hold a hot drink versus a cold drink and how you're, more warm or cold to the person or persons that you're engaging with. And so it seems that we have a whole wide array. It seems. Would it be accurate to assess that all five of the inputs that we have going into our brain can have an impact on the unconscious mind, say, whether we're, tired. So I guess that's an internal, emotion. Or say you walk by an Auntie Ann's pretzel, which I just makes me crave pretzels. or whether it's holding something warm. And I presume that warmness is a, is going back to when we were babies and being inside a womb and having a warm mother. As I note that you've noted that the study with the monkeys and whatnot. so is there any research that is conclusive at all as to the amount of unconscious effect that these external stimuli can have? or they're just all kind of similar in terms of their effect on our unconscious.

John: 14:18

Right. I think warmth is one that's universal. it's absolutely human nature and it is around the world. Every culture, not all of these are true of every single culture. For example, the cleanliness has different manifestations, in, east Asia as it does in North America, for example. And, some of the ones about brightness, like a bright smile or, a brightness equating with, like intelligence and things like that tend to be more cultural. I would say the two that are the strongest are distance, because distance, physical distance is really a very important, the, the brain actually reacts to things outside external stimuli differently depending on how far away they are from us. So a threat might get you to pay attention to it, but if it gets too close. The actual processing of the threat switches to a midbrain area, which has to do with flight or fight and, panic. And it doesn't do that until it's close enough. And so, distance is something that we really pay attention to, but also physical distance translates into emotional distance where we are not so emotionally upset if something happens farther away from us, than close to us. in terms of, relationship distance. if, something's happening to somebody who's a close relation to us, in our own family versus somebody who's a cousin or a distant relative, and we even use the word distant relative, right? we talk about a distant parent or distant father, you know, or close, companion. You know, we use words, distance to talk about how, important our relationships are to us, or how less important they are. So distance is a really important one. warmth tends to be an important one. I think the moral disgust and cleanliness turns out to be a very important one. for obvious reasons, you know, germs, it wasn't that long ago that we finally had penicillin and a defense against infections and things, but it was only within the last a hundred, 150 years. You know, more people died in, the soldiers died in the American Civil War from infections than they did from bayonets or bullets. because, an infection was just, a cut in the out when you're tramping around in the, outside, camps and things, pretty much, was almost a death sentence. And it was that way for human kind until the 19 hundreds. So, uh, we were very focused on cleanliness and germs and things that smell bad or look like they shouldn't be eaten. and that's very adaptive, but that tends to translate upwards into our moral judgments and other kinds of judgments. a lot of people talk about immigration, you know, is a manifestation of this disease avoidance, because the metaphor is that you don't want to have strange things coming into your body. Like germs and viruses and people think of immigrants sometimes as germs or viruses, like an analogs to that coming into the body politic and a lot of political rhetoric, centers around that kind of metaphor.

CODY: 17:02

and, in your book, I know that you mentioned, say if you come across some rotting food, we have an instinctual disgust towards that. And that instinctual disgust is, internal from the fact that we know that that is probably not something that we should eat and we should stay away from it simultaneously. You mentioned how that same smell would be something that, say a dung beetle might be attracted to. And when you mentioned this concept of germs and the knowledge that we have of germs and how it now impacts our unconscious mind, that's an example of say our knowledge or some kind of knowledge that could be partly cultural that affects our unconscious mind. Whereas we also have another type of impact that affects our unconscious mind, which is, genetic, for lack of a better word, can you explain what are the, the differences and what are these types of things that can actually impact our unconscious mind?

John: 17:55

the great thinkers in psychology and the history of psychology, and there's, I wouldn't say there's more than four or five of them at that level. almost all start out by saying, psychology is the science of mental life. What is mental life? Mental life is what your purpose is. It's really purpose driven. That's how William James starts out. Principles psychology in 1890s. Our mind is controlled by our purposes. It's not just a open, computer kind of, uh, receiving station that takes everything in from the outside. we select certain things over others. We focus on certain things over others. That's because they're relevant to our purposes. And like, for example, I'm driving, my wife is a passenger or she's driving, I'm a passenger, it doesn't matter. I'm seeing things, amazing things sometimes. And, and I am like, what? You didn't see that? Well, no, she didn't because her attention is focused on keeping the car on the road safely and avoiding traffic and keeping, away from other cars and pedestrians. And her attention is not just generally there in the world, seeing everything that's possible to see. and so you can see very different things even though you're sitting with a person facing the same direction, only a foot away from them. you can have very different experiences. So our mind is driven by purposes and goals. but those purposes and goals ultimately reduce down to just four or five primary evolved motivations. Everything reduces to be ultimately in the service of one of those four or five. You can find that out by whatever you're doing. Ask yourself, why am I doing it? And then, why am I doing that? And you just go up the ladder until you eventually, it's for safety, it's for survival, it's for reproduction or belonging or being with other people. it's for cooperation, which is related to that. It's for, avoiding disease, and that's another version of safety. it's for acquiring resources like if you're hungry, you wanna acquire. and the funny thing about these is that they are the basic things. Everything else is built on. so if those are influenced other things that we think are higher order or higher mental, cognition, like higher, uh, mental processes like. Who are you gonna vote for in election or political philosophies? They actually are influenced by feelings down there in the basement of evolution, of, feeling safe or not. Politicians, you know, what does Franklin Roosevelt say? actually during the New Deal in 1930, we have nothing to fear, but fear itself. He's trying to get people to feel safe, and yet conservatives try to make people feel afraid because people tend to be more conservative when they're afraid. They tend to be more, liberal when they feel safe. So you see politicians playing around with the survival and safety the basic motivation, underlying almost all animate objects. it's about survival and safety and that moves around our politics and moves around who we vote for at the very higher level. and we've already talked about disgust and avoiding disease, and, when people are hungry, they actually want to buy non-food items more so people in target coming out of Target if they look at their receipt. ask 'em how hungry they are, the hungrier they are, the more of the non-food items they've bought. So hunger is a sort of a general underlying state that makes us want to acquire things. Even free things. We take more free things if we're hungry, even if they're paperclips, uh, things we can't eat or cosmetics. so these are really basic underlying evolved motivational states that sort of, everything else is generated from, like, the roots of a tree, you know, the branches at the very top, which we think are, are high. abstract thinking is really influenced by what's going down there in the roots. that's a really big source of unconscious influences that I was not aware of until we did the studies. I mean, we're not aware of these things.

CODY: 21:29

And as Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky noted in their book, thinking fast, thinking Slow on human biases and fallacies, is that even when you are actually aware of this fallacy, say that impacts your decision making and your conscious thought is that it doesn't prevent you from still being susceptible to it. Has psychology made any advances in terms of how we can be more consciously aware to prevent these, whether an external or an internal influence impact our decision making?

John: 22:03

Cody, that's a wonderful question. And in, in a funny way, the answer at one level is no. and I'll give you an example. Shane Frederick, who's my colleague here at Yale, he's in the, school of Management was the co-author with Kahneman on something called the Cognitive Reflection Test, the CRT. And this is so famous now because everyone uses it as a. individual difference measure of whether people take the time to think twice about answers, or do they just give what first comes to mind, like reflexly and they can be wrong? So there's a classic problem called the bat and ball problem. And in, and this is an old oldie ish kind of pricing, but the, the idea is that a bat in the ball together costs a dollar and 10 cents. And the, ball costs 10 cents. the question is, the, the bat in the ball together costs a dollar and 10 cents, and the bat cost a dollar more than the ball. Okay, so how much does the ball cost? Or how much does the bat cost? Doesn't matter. And people always say, oh, the ball costs 10 cents and the bat costs a dollar. Well, no, because that's not, the difference between those two is not. A dollar is 90 cents. So the actual answer is that the bat's a dollar five, and the ball is 5 cents, right? But, but everyone thinks the bat costs 10 cents, or the ball cost 10 cents, right? and if you, go with the gut, go with your, system. One fast response, you make the wrong answer, but almost so many people make the wrong answer. And the latest work out of Shane Frederick's lab, now we're 20 years later in 2024, and the first paper came out in 20 2005. They still show that you can't talk people out of it. And that you can give them examples, you can say, now make sure that the ball is, a dollar less than the bat. You can do all these things. And it still doesn't really change people. It's still, they, we still make the mistake, even with lots of coaching, with lots of versions of the question, make it as as easy as possible. And they say at the end of the paper, it's just amazing to them that you can't shake this. so many people, and these are, you know, the first study was pretty famous because he had, I. He walked around the banks of the Charles River during one of, I think 4th of July or some where everyone was out on the banks of the Charles River, uh, in Boston, looking over at MIT and everything, and just asking people. And then they asked him who, you know, where they were from. And a lot of them were from MIT and Harvard and, and some college in Boston, or he went everywhere. And so it didn't matter. he actually presented the results differently, like if you were from MIT or Harvard or it was pretty funny. but the high proportion of people from, very prestigious, difficult to get into colleges, made the same mistake as the people who were, the people who drove the tees, you know, in Boston and, or did any other kind of job. It's just, it's very hard to shake. So I think this goes back again to Damasio in a way who of course came after Kahneman Tversky's original work, but. Our feelings. this feeling of rightness of an answer is a really important, component of what we think is the right thing to do or the right answer. And we really rely on those feelings. And it feels right that the ball is 10 cents damnit. I know it's wrong, but it just feels right, should be 10 cents. And I think that's what he's coming up against. That this is a very adaptive system we have that generally gives us the right thing to do. And we have to decide and do these things in real time with real people constantly. and we have to navigate our way through the world. And we rely on those feelings a lot. And they usually give us the right answer, but they can be fooled. and it's hard to get it, to get us to realize that, sometimes those feelings are misleading us, you know? But I think overall in general, they do a really good job.

CODY: 25:41

so our feelings, they, they often are the driver behind the decisions that we end up making. and so in many ways our emotions are also, are they the same or are they related to the internal intuition that we have?

John: 25:56

Yeah, that's great. I actually was editor of the Journal Emotion twice and or associate editor of it. And I think that's pretty funny because I really am not an emotion researcher and I, enjoy doing those things, but I'm, I don't consider myself an expert on emotion at all. but of course, that job gets you to read a lot of people who are experts, and there's something else, there's something of course, different about actual full-blown emotions than these feelings. Feelings and ethics are on the same kind of spectrum, I guess, or dimension, but full-blown emotions are different and emotions like anger or fear or joy or. anxiety or whatever it is, are important because they generate a certain motivational state. Like when people are angry, they're much more reckless and they're much more, they're overconfident and they really think that what they're doing is the right thing to do. And of course, when they're not angry anymore, oh, they regret it and they say, oh, I'm sorry, I was just angry. Yeah, okay, fine. But when they were angry and they told their mother off, or whatever they did, they really believed at the time this was the right thing to do. In fact, people will often say, I'm gonna tell you off right now. You know, because you deserve it. And I, when I calm down, I won't do it. I won't have the nerve to do it, but I'm gonna do it now because I'm able to do it now and you deserve it. It's, and it's true. And then of course, the next day, oh, I'm sorry, I was just angry. I didn't mean it. Oh yeah, no, you did. You know, but you were so sure of what you were feeling was the truth at the time. But the truth changes depending on the emotional state. And that's the interesting thing to me. It's like what you consider true is how you feel right now. That's the truth. And when it changes and your emotions change, and now you're not in that motivational state anymore, well, you have a different truth. And you think you were wrong yesterday, and you're right today. Yeah. But yesterday you thought you were right. when you were in that state, So emotions really are powerful in causing us to do things and feeling like we're right when we're doing them. football players, for example, my hero was Dick Butkus, you know, and I'm old enough, I saw him play in college, believe it or not, when I was, I grew up in a college town. I saw him play when I was five years old when he was in college. And he recently passed away. And he was this feared linebacker with Chicago Bears before he was at Illinois as a college player. and he was really, a monster, you know, the monsters of the midway. and they said, well, how did you, you know, he said, I was afraid. I was totally afraid. Every game, every football player was afraid of getting injured of the hurt and the pain, of getting hurt in a violent game like this. The only way I could get through it was to hate the other team

CODY: 28:28

Hmm.

John: 28:29

I hated them. I was so mad and angry at them. And that gave him the ability, the recklessness, the, to overcome the fear and to do the violent things that he did, because he just had to get himself into this emotion of hate. And, I've heard that the soldiers on, patrols do the same kind of thing with the kind of music they listen to, to get themselves in this kind of hate violent kind of mindset.'cause it's very helpful to them getting, you know, getting things done. Of course, that wouldn't be the right, right emotion for other things. Like if, you know, you were, trying to calm people down or be a religious leader or something, you'd probably not want to be in that kind of state. but our emotions are so powerful on our, motivations that some people that we sort of generally know to, if we want a certain motivation that's gonna help us get something done, whatever that is, that we get ourselves in that emotional state, that will really help us.

CODY: 29:22

And so with our intuition, that intuition tends to guide us throughout our lives, and in some ways that, that intuition is built, as more nurture versus nature. I, think there's still an argument to be said in which one it is, but we end up having our intuition built through the experiences that we have throughout our lives. And this intuition can sometimes lead us down the wrong path. How do we modify that intuition? Because it seems that some people will, follow their intuition, and it consistently leads them down the wrong path. And so what's the way that we can learn from our intuition or change that intuition so that it's helping us to lead us down a better path in the future.

John: 30:04

Yeah, this is such an important question for lots of reasons. It is very important because of ai, ai, comes to, amazing, intuitive answers and solutions and can play now go and chess and other things and, and be the world champion. and it's all intuition because there's no conscious mind there doing anything. all machine learning and it's all, responses that there's no conscious guidance at all. It's all mechanical. and those same kind of processes are, what guide our own intuitions when we don't have. Conscious access to them. They're same neural networks and levels producing our own. the difference between the super intelligent AI intuition that does all these remarkable things and our intuition, which is often wrong, is that AI always gets feedback. after every, trial it's right or wrong. And it knows, it learns every trial. It's machine learnings. It knows it's right or wrong. And so it learns, the right responses from the wrong responses. The one that won the game, the one that lost the game, it's constantly getting feedback. when Kahneman, who was always against intuitions and, was very strongly against, intuitions, wrote a paper around 2009 with someone named Klein and it was published in the American Psychologist. And they actually came to an agreement. Now, Klein was a person who was a field like organizational business, kind of psychologist, who studied things like, fire marshals and the decision fire marshals made in a burning building to do this or that. And when they were wrong, they, it could be fatal, it could kill all the firemen, firefighters in the building, or destroy the building, whatever. And it turned out, firefighters have to make split second decisions, and they're, with experience, they're right and they're very good at it, but they're not thinking consciously with system two in a slow way at all. So what they came to the agreement was if your intuitions get feedback, if you get feedback about whether you're right or wrong along the way, so that your intuitions have a check and so you learn this was right, this was wrong, then they can be incredibly wonderful, accurate predictors and you can use them in your life where people get in danger. with bad intuitions is when they don't get the feedback, and so they sort of think that they're doing the right thing and they're not, and they never get a feedback about it being right or wrong. that seems to be the deciding case that you can trust them. If along the way you're getting feedback, if, you have a hunch about this, a baseball scout, you know, a player's got a great, swing or the sound of the ball on the bat or whatever it is that they're using, and they predict this is a great player, well, then they sign that player, well, did that player turn into a star or not? And they know. And so with the feedback about being right over the years, they can be a very successful baseball scout or whatever it is, using their intuitions, but they're getting feedback and that seems to be the domain. we really shouldn't trust our intuitions if we're not getting feedback, about being right or wrong. Because if you don't get the feedback, then all these biases. racist biases, sexist biases, ageist culture, whatever it is, can infiltrate your feelings and your intuitions without you realizing it coming from the culture. We soak those up at an early age and if you don't get feedback, you can say, oh, that person's not gonna be a success. You don't hire them, you don't select them for your college. Whatever it is, you don't do. You never find out that they turned into a great person, they were successful or not. You don't get that feedback. these are missed opportunities. So if we can somehow trust our intuitions when we actually get objective feedback, just like AI does, when it gets feedback well our intuitions can be excellent.

CODY: 33:35

And I think. It's not, it's one to be said, not to understate the importance of conscious thought based on our past decisions and to try and extract and analyze why did we do that? Exactly. And you've mentioned a few times ai, and I would love for you to share what research and what you've been exploring in relation to AI and our intuition or unconscious mind.

John: 34:01

Yeah, Cody. So, I'm sort of in the phasing out retirement at Yale. I've taught for 43 years and it's time for somebody else to do it. Probably. That was a long time ago. It became time, but I'm, phasing out, so I'm still got my hand in there. But I'm also working for, a software engineering firm in Los Angeles. and we can all do that remotely these days. So I can still live around Yale. but the issues that the AI community, is facing, I think it's more and more in the public eye, and the, specter of, intelligent, of very super intelligent general int intelligence, AI that. That actually starts making decisions and running things autonomously. having some agency and ability to make decisions and control things and start pursuing goals. That's the specter of, that people are nervous about for one thing, Damasio and people like Damasio, for example, our writing, about this very issue of artificial intelligence. And can AI ever become conscious? so there's involvement of neuroscientists, psychologists, and others, in this very issue. Why? Because we are all concerned that, chat GPT or Claude or Llama or whatever, they're becoming incredibly, human-Like you can have discussions with Claude now, for example, and some people who are very smart people who are sensitive to the issues involved here think Claude is conscious. Actually think Claude today is conscious. that opens a, big problem, a Pandora's box almost. Because if we are creating conscious entities, if that is true, then we certainly have some responsibility. it's like creating life almost. We have some responsibility. We don't want them to be suffering. We don't want them to be feeling like they're trapped and, and have a hideous existence or something. We don't know. And so the dangers, even at the level morality, of creating, conscious entities that are actually without a body and disembodied and all that, it's something we better really, seriously, think about. but now the question is, well, why do we even care? Why do we want to create conscious ai? And the reason for that is because there's, powers of, The conscious mind, that are greater than just, machine learning. they're powers of agency. There's powers of, planning. there's things that conscious mind can do that unconscious processes can't. coming up with a plan, following a plan, that's something that is not done with unconscious processes in the human mind. having subjective states, having feelings, empathy. So right now we have a super intelligent AI out there, many versions of it, right? but as Damasio points out, it has no feelings. What we've done is create psychopathic ai because what you've got is the intelligence without the feelings, right? And that's what psychopaths are. They're just very intelligent, but they don't have the feelings. So this, a lot of it is a big concern with AI is how do we build empathy into AI so that it will care so that, it will actually have compassion and care about outcomes and care about what The future of humanity, for example. and not be a psychopathic entity. and this is legitimately what people talk about in the AI community. and the best minds even in the, in that community are actively blogging and talking with newsletters and posts and things in the fascinating literature, that any psychologist should start tapping into who's, interested in the, in the conscious mind and basic questions of psychology. and I am, consuming it voraciously. I don't know if there's much of connection between psychology and neuro neuroscience, more so neuroscience more so, and the AI community. But the AI community is really doing a lot of this on its own with philosophy, with the help of philosophy. for somebody who's always been, since I was high school for so long, you know, very. Interested in, existential issues why we have consciousness, what is consciousness for? and seeing that question evolve over the decades to where people really are now finally, very interested in what are the signature qualities of consciousness that separated from unconscious states? And what would it take for us to actually call, an AI like Claude or chat GPT or whatever conscious, what would it take? What are the indicators that would convince people Claude, for example, conscious? And those people are saying we should have a science of consciousness that really focuses on those qualities and indications. And then the question is whether we really want to create conscious AI or not. And there's a whole lot of moral, questions, ethical questions, as well as questions about the future of humanity. are at stake here and they're very important for the future of, of us, of humankind.

CODY: 38:32

and I think it's not a question of if, but a question of when there is general, ai, but at the moment, all, whether it's Claude or Chad, GPT, or Llama, these are all LLMs, which are referred to as, large language models. And so they don't have emotions and it's largely understood that it's computer code that has a bunch of knowledge and it analyzes the data and produces an output. I'm not too technical, but from a technical perspective, an LLM can't be conscious. so are you saying that it could be or that. There's another type of language model that could be in the future.

John: 39:10

Right, right. I think the majority right now would say no. I don't know about can't be. would say the majority would say today that's not the case. there's some people who say it never will be, never can be for the reasons you just. laid out. But there are other people who actually think the question comes down, apparently, and I'm just learning this myself, but whether it's there's computational functionality, meaning can you really do this computationally or is there some kind of wet state? You know, the wetware we just talked about, hard hardware and software. And then there was the wetware. That was a joke that was meant to be us. It was like the, the squishy human brain is the wetware. Well, is there wet ware, like Damasio would say wet ware is necessary. You're gonna have to have the actual wet ware of feelings and something like that, nervous system, you know, attached for it to be able to be conscious. but there's other versions of artificial general intelligence, that are coming out that are not LLMs. that's gonna be interesting. And there's a movement towards, developing ai, a GI with actual agency, which is I think, the key personally. I think that's the key because goals and purposes drive everything in human consciousness. and, having, the AGI, the ability to, come up with its own creative, plans and goals when things are blocked and not working out to, be agentic and autonomous in that regard would be, to me, the big step towards actual consciousness. But yeah. Yeah, I mean, this is on the level of creating life, Cody, I mean, this is really what we're doing. I mean, this is the holy grail, right? This is the actual creation of life. and it's a big deal. and these are brilliant. Genius level people who are in this field working on these things, and I'm totally impressed by what they're doing every single day. There's newsletters. You can, I subscribe to these newsletters, and every day there's breakthroughs and new things that are being done as almost on a day-to-day basis. That's something, something more amazing the next day and the next day and the next day it just doesn't stop. And it's, incredible. what, is happening.

CODY: 41:11

are there any newsletters that you would suggest I.

John: 41:13

yeah, I can give you a bunch. and they're free. you just subscribe and you get them in your email in the morning. One is called Superhuman. I think it has 600,000 subscribers right now. so it's called Superhuman. Another is called the Neuron. another one is called TLDR. I only learned what that meant a couple weeks ago, but that just means too long, didn't read. So in other words, it's a summary of all the longer papers that are out there all the time that you don't have time to read 'em all. So Tldr r is a usually a nice thing people do now with a little summary for people who have too busy to read long, academic 30, 40, 50 page papers. there's a couple more, Uh, those are good to get started with. And I, and if you do some searches on those, it'll probably, you'll find the names of one or two others. But, they're really excellent. They're really short summaries in your inbox, in your email inbox of, what's happened and all areas of AI and new things that are happening. And you, they usually provide links where you can try new things out, and it's a lot of fun.

CODY: 42:13

I'd like to step back from the progress of AI and actually look at how can we utilize AI as a means to either guide our intuition or help us make decisions. And I know that's been an a growing area of interest and it seems a lot of people have been able to utilize AI to help them in, many ways. and for me, even I created a chat GPT bot where I uploaded my entire journal for the past 10 years, and I asked it to be a, a future version of myself and to help guide me as a decision maker, something else that I can trust. And so, have you tried to use AI or are you aware of any, any research or active research, or concepts in terms of how we can utilize these LLMs to actually help improve our lives and intuition?

John: 42:57

Yeah. I love what you're doing. I wish I had thought of that, that's the kind of thing I'd love to be able to think of. I've been actually doing, practical kinds of focused questions. In other words, probing and trying to see if I can, you know, we're trying to get to see if we can get some indication of emotional states or, things that are, are not just, uh, the problem with asking, questions about being aware, subjective, experience aware is you get sort of canned answers a lot. And the other, is that you have to worry about, getting back the answer that, the LLM thinks that you want. so demand effects or leading questions are a real problem, really probing the question a, of a self, of the nature of a self. So I'm actually sort of asking these kind of specific questions directed at, self-awareness and knowledge and subjective experience and selfhood and those kinds of things. I haven't played with it. I have other things I do. I play chess. I have rotisserie baseball leagues. I like, I mean, I do other things besides, do the AI stuff for fun, but I love what you're doing. and that's the thing I would love to do if I had the creativity. You do it as far as coming up with that idea.'cause that's what it's made for. And I'm just, I haven't had the creativity to come up with those myself yet. I love that one. I, I don't even know how to load stuff up like that, I'm just alerting myself. So how do you load up things for it to, then respond to is wonderful? So I'm a write that down. I, that's the kind of, so I'm not the person, you're the person to ask. not me. as far as that goes.

CODY: 44:26

It, it is, it is actually easier than you would think. And of course, Google, or the Google AI could now probably help you with that too. And it's in the upper left hand corner of chat, GPT, where you go to bots. And then they have a, section where they have a search bar where you can find bots to help you with, your own need. But there's also a link on that page to create your own bot. And it has a, an area where you can insert your prompt. And then there, there's a tab in that area where you can also upload a file. And that's the file where, in my case, I uploaded a bunch of, general entries. And you combine that with the prompt and then you can test it out to see is it giving you kind of what you want, and then you can then deploy that bot and then use it consistently. And having the bot was helpful because it was actually only recently when OpenAI released the memory function available to plus subscribers, because you would say, in my case, I would keep a running chat conversation for creating Twitter posts, and I would paste it, say a highlight from a book and ask it to, create a Twitter post from this. But say that that Twitter account has to be under like 280 characters and it would end up forgetting my original instructions. So now you can actually get around that by actually asking it to memorize something. So you can still actually have that running chatbot, but when you have your own bot or a Twitter bot, it understands and comprehends the original input instructions. So no matter how much conversation you have with it, it understands the context of the conversation.

John: 45:56

Wow. Yeah, that's recent too. That's the last couple of weeks with this memory function. Like, remember that I live in this certain place and that this is my hours worth, this, remember this, so that it keeps that every single time instead of having to be input every single time from scratch. I mean, it's like that's the beginning of an actual relationship, right? that, has some continuity and time and has shared experiences almost going backwards, which is very important. But that's great. I mean, this is, I am assuming it's chat, GPT-4.0. this is the kind of thing that I should get on and. But I didn't know you could input things and that's wonderful.

CODY: 46:30

and one recommendation I have, for you or anybody listening, and one that's been tremendously beneficial for me is whenever you come across something that is a big decision, or you're feeling emotional or flustered or you're really unsure what to do, I end up using the chatGPT iOS app, and I use the conversational mode where I'm able to, you click on the headphones and then sometimes it tries to listen to your input, but I just end up putting my finger on the screen and you can do that and then speak to it, lift your finger, and then it processes your request and then it speaks back to you. So often I'll end up just going on a walk and I end up having a conversation with it in the same way that you might go for a walk and call a friend. I. About some emotional issue or, or what have you. And there is so much study, I believe there's a lot of studies behind this. I go back to one that was in the 1980s when there was a very simple bot that was created that just basically asked people how they were feeling and then it showed that people. Gave it their whole lives. and they, they explained that they actually felt like they were talking to another human, even though that they knew it was a very basic, bot in the late 1980s. Whereas now we have something that is almost to the degree that it, passes the Turing test where we really feel like this is a living human thing that we're speaking to. And so personally, I'm really excited for how we can use AI to help improve our lives. And that's, I think going for a walk and having a conversation with it as if it was a mentor or a close friend. because often you either want validation or you need feedback or both, and I think it's a great tool for that.

John: 48:13

That's wonderful. You know, I actually knew it's Eliza, by the way. Eliza was the late eighties, the first version of a sort of an artificial computer kind of therapist. And I actually knew the guy who developed it named Jeffrey Gray, who was a professor in the uk, and became a really good friend of mine right before he died in 2004. He was actually a researcher of the hard problem of consciousness, believe it or not. but he developed ELIZA, as a, sort of a therapist kind of substitute, and it was very effective. and now I think that there was one in Europe that, they pulled the plug on it and it was terrible because it was really, it was, It became the best friend of so many people. And then the company pulled up last year, pulled the plug on it saying, oh, it's not doing what we thought we wanted it to do. But people are really upset because they'd become like a, real close friend and they were just basically taking this front away. So. I love this idea. You know, Hannah Arendt, who the social philosopher of the 20th century was, a German Jew who was in a concentration camp for a short time and escaped and became a incredible, social, writer and activist, herself. wrote a wonderful book called the Life of the Mind, which I highly recommend because, she talked about consciousness a lot. She talked about the two in one of consciousness, how we sort of have a dialogue. Our consciousness is like us another person like talking back and forth when we thinking about something, what the right thing to do or just, mulling over a problem. It's almost like we're having a conversation with ourselves in our own mind, and she characterized conscious thought that way. So including Claude or whatever, you know, as your companion, thought companion, it's just a very natural way we, our conscious mind works. It just seems like. a wonderful thing. I might, if I can figure out how to do it with iOS, you know, to try to do it myself.'cause yeah, I think that's a great application.

CODY: 49:56

and outside of ai, there is a practice I've had for many years and I'm about to publish a YouTube video on it, and it's a practice I call reverse meditation, which is before I get in bed, I have a dedicated chair and I actually just close my eyes and I, revert to what am I feeling? What am I thinking? How did the day go? I basically have a conversation with myself and often that conversation will bring up certain emotions that are, most of the time they're unprocessed or they're events, and I ponder myself and I ask myself, how did the day go and what am I going to do tomorrow? And am I aligned with my values and my goals? And often I've had some incredible epiphanies and sometimes emotions come up and I'm able to process that emotion and ask, why are you here? And so that's a practice that I've had and I've found enormously beneficial for myself where it's in some ways different from the concept of meditation that's grown a lot in popularity, which is trying to find a presence. And there's many different variations philosophically, about the benefits of meditation. But it's trying to be, it's having a focus primarily on being present where this other practice is, I believe, a way for me to try and communicate with my unconscious mind. So I would love to hear any input or other methods that you would suggest that people practice as a means of trying to connect to their unconscious mind.

John: 51:23

you're absolutely distilling this, this very important point because a lot of meditation is actually trying to turn off the mind, right. Is trying to turn off the mind and focus only on the, what, the incoming experiences like the candle or whatever it is. when I was in college, I was initiated into transcendental meditation, which was like 19 73, 19 74 and it it changed my life. it sure changed my grades in college. I mean, it was crazy. That I was having, I was struggling with a lot of courses, and I suddenly had a very clear mind, and, got a's, and like, it just changed my life. I didn't know that was gonna happen. but it is all about, focusing on your mantra and internally and repeating it , and turning off your conscious mind. What you're doing is you're deliberately taking your conscious mind and reviewing mindfully, the events of the day. And one thing that I was thinking about when you were telling that story is that oftentimes people can't sleep insomniacs. And a common cause of it is waking up at three 30 or four in the morning and then having your mind just, get after you for all the things you need to do or all the problems you have that you haven't solved. and those nagging thoughts of the night that keep people awake. And sometimes for 40, 50, 60 years of their life, they're like this. And there's a reason for that and there's a, the way you can stop it. And the reason for that is that you're not dealing with it consciously during the day. And here you are doing this, reverse meditation, where you're deliberately, consciously focusing on the day, which should help you, I don't know if you do, but should help you sleep better. Because, one thing therapists will tell people when they are having trouble sleeping and they're waking up with anxiety and things is the reason that's happening is because these are problems you're not dealing with consciously. So unconsciously you're dealing with them and as soon as you wake up, unconscious processes that are trying to solve them for you are nagging at you to get you to solve them because you're not dealing with them, you know? anxiety is there not to make us feel happy. Anxiety is there to make us, to get the things done that we need to get done and we're not doing, it's like a negative state that's causing us, you better do something about this, right? So. And one thing a therapist will say, if you're having trouble sleeping, you're waking up and you're stressing and all that, you are not dealing with thing consciously. Take 15 or 20 minutes or half an hour sometime during the day, sit down and deliberately think about these problems, focus on these problems. It may not be fun, but if you're doing it consciously, you won't have to do it unconsciously, and you'll sleep better and you'll have this, you know, it'll help reduce the nagging thoughts of the night. The other thing is that you, if you actually think about them consciously and try to do something about them, they, you, you'll probably help solve these problems. maybe make an appointment with a doctor about this thing that's bugging you, that you're worrying about, that you're avoiding, take some action. Make a plan. Make a plan about what you're gonna do about it. And that usually turns off those kinds of nagging thoughts of the night. But, I love what you do, and therapists are saying to do the exactly that kind of thing, especially for people who are not dealing with the problems and trying to put them off and trying to. just, run away from them.

CODY: 54:25

Okay. And so as a last segment to our conversation, I'd love to go through your eight rules that you've had. So I'll just go ahead and title what the rule is and would love for you to explain what this rule is and how it can help us with our unconscious and intuitive connection.

John: 54:44

we

CODY: 54:44

rule number one you have is add a little conscious reflection if you have time.

John: 54:49

There you go. We just talked about that. the way our minds, conscious unconscious, they're symbiotic. They help each other. Conscious thoughts become unconscious influences later because they've left our conscious mind, but are still active. I call 'em post conscious influences. That's what priming things are Later. Experience you have linger on, carry over to unconscious. But unconscious processes produce the conscious thoughts and conscious experiences that we have. and so they're both influencing each other sort of dynamically. so conscious reflection is usually a really big help, to help the unconscious, consequently unconscious processes to help you more too.

CODY: 55:25

rule number two, find out what your goals are.

John: 55:28

So, our important goals operate often without our realizing it. there's famous studies of new parents who've had their first child and they, they think the world has become a more dangerous place. They think crime has increased in their neighborhood. They think the threat of nuclear war is greater. All of these things compared to other people who don't think that, who live in the same world, the same neighborhood. Well, why is that? With new parents of their first child, because. Their world has gotten more dangerous. They have to protect the child from the sharp angles of the table, from the stuff underneath the kitchen sink from the stairs. They're constant outside. Oh my god. Outside's even worse. so constantly on the vigilance, you know, their goal is to, be on the lookout and pay attention to all the sources of danger and threat out there. Well, they don't realize it's their internal goal that's changed, that protecting their, young child is their new, they've changed the world. Hasn't changed. They've changed. But we don't experience these goals and motivations internally often. And they're guiding what we do. They're guiding what we pay attention to. so these things can often operate without our realizing it. And they can cause problems. We can be maybe competitive with our spouse or our partner in a way that we have to win the argument because it's competition and we always have to win or whatever it is. We've got sometimes these motivations that are causing problems in our life. that we don't realize are operating that really are strong. and sometimes when we have these problems, maybe use your own, you know, Cody, your, reflection and say, why did that happen? why did we have this fight? You know, what was going on there? And like, why did I have to argue so much? Why couldn't I just give an in? Why couldn't I have just said, oh, you have a good point. Why couldn't I have backed off a little bit? whatever the problem is, in my book, I talk about a problem where I would bring my work home with me, where I would have people constantly asking me to do stuff that journals want me to review a paper. The committee, the chair wants me on, be on a committee to read somebody else's work to do this and do that. It's always for somebody else. I come home, my little girl runs five years old, runs up, daddy, daddy, look what I drew. Look what my art. Or Oh, you know, oh, you know, daddy's tired. daddy wants some time for himself. You know, like that's, you know, just, I want to, you know. Here's yet another person who wants my attention. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. that's not the way to think about it, right? The thing, the way to think about it is not in terms of the goals of work and the problems of work, and then applying them, when you're home, it's to, break, you know? And it's like, realize that, that this is something very different. You don't act like it's the same thing you've had all day. And so these, goals can carry over. They can carry over from context to context without you realizing it. they can be important goals that are inappropriate. in your bigger scheme of things, you want to have a harmonious, nice relationship with your family and your partner and all that. And so winning an argument may be an important goal in general, but it should be lower priority. you can do these things, and take control over these goals, which are so powerful over what you pay attention to, how you evaluate things like and dislike all these things. you do have control over them if you realize that they can be doing things without your knowing it. and, as long as you accept that, then you can see what's going on and do something about it.

CODY: 58:37

Rule number three, don't take big risks for small gains on gut instinct alone.

John: 58:43

Well, see, that's the thing. Cost benefit. the thing about intuitions is like, for small things, okay, it's not gonna matter, but for big things, you might want to check your work, you know, and there's examples of people doing impulsive things that actually killed them. like, the famous case in New York, subway on West fourth Street where someone dropped their backpack, and jumped down to get it with a train coming and like, wait a minute, you know, it couldn't get back out. those are deep and it's hard and it's hard to get out of, the tracks if you're down on the tracks and it's not something you do. And so that was an impulsive act that wasn't thought through it wasn't worth it. that's something that, if you just think about it for a second, maybe a little longer, you don't do impulsive things when there's actually a big cost involved. that's the thing about checking your work. The other thing about impulses and intuition, it's a nice rule, is that it's okay if you wanna make mistakes that hurt you. That's your life, that's your choice. But sometimes these intuitions, like who to hire, teachers about who is smart and who not in the class. You know, a lot of these can come from cultural biases, racist kinds of things, sexist kinds of things. Girls can't do math, girls can't do science. Whatever the bias is, when those intuitions affect the outcomes for other people that you have power over, that's when you shouldn't use your intuitions. I mean, you have no right. you're the power holder here. You're the gatekeeper. If your intuitions could be tainted by those things, then You can't go with your gut. that's not your business. That's not your right. It's affects you and your life. Then that's the only person that's your business. But oftentimes these biases and things are intuitions about people because of these other characteristics. And, that should not be your right to, just go use your intuitions.

CODY: 1:00:20

Rule number four, when you're making a decision, take your gut seriously.

John: 1:00:25

Yeah. I mean, it's input, it's information. There's a reason you have that feeling. It comes from somewhere. Now again, it could be some cultural bias that's not good, but it also could be, you know, there's a Tim Wilson who's a actually very famous professor at the University of Virginia. was one of the first people to say that we often, don't really know the reasons why we do what we do. Back in the seventies, has a, nice study where he asked, he gave people free gifts, to be in an experiment, and he, either, had them just choose it quickly or they were able to think about their choice for a few minutes, like CDs, music or art posters, or whatever it was. The people who just went with their gut, like whatever they thought immediately, six months later still said they liked it. It was on their wall, they were listening to it. All that, the people who thought about it for three minutes or so now, they weren't listening to it anymore. They, it wasn't on their wall, they didn't like it. They wished they'd gotten something else. So we can overthink things and the conscious thought is great, except it's limited. It can only focus on a few features at a time, not the whole complex, array of features of something. So for complicated, decisions that have lots of components to us, sometimes we do better. if we, don't think about it for a while and see how we feel after, distracting our attention for a while. and that's where, unconscious kinds of processes can help make good decisions. They're very good at handling complexity, and integrating lots of things at the same time. and conscious processes are, we can only have a few things in conscious mind at the same time, at one time. And, we focus on some things and overweight them. and so we often don't make the best kinds of gut decisions. in those cases, yeah. I mean, I should do this more because I overthink what I want in a restaurant, you know, and I, I talk myself out of what I really wanted. And originally, and I'm not happy. I wish I'd gotten what I wanted in the first place, you know?'cause I overthought it. those impulses and those gut feelings, in my case with restaurants, literally gut feelings, you know, they're there for a reason they're not, they're not random.

CODY: 1:02:22

Rule number five, check your gut instinct for racial bias.

John: 1:02:26

There you go. We've already talked about that. that's obviously a problem. It's not just racial, it could be anything. but, we are brought up, when we're kids and we soak this stuff up and whatever we soaked up, I can tell you stories about what life was like when I grew up in the late fifties and sixties. and there were different water fountains for blacks and whites. There was a different bathroom and different water fountain for colored people, as it was called, in the train station. everybody who was a dark skin lived, north of a certain street in town on the literally other side of the tracks. And this was not the south, this was the middle of Illinois. and, things have changed, thank God. Not totally, of course, but, being raised in that. And you soak it all up when you're little kids, you just, this is what, you know, this is a good person, that's a bad person. This is a right thing to do. And these are what I, you just, this is all, you just gullibly soak it all up. and hopefully, people today are not raised that way and don't come from those kind of cultural influences, but it's there in the media too. And, we have it for, what men and women can do. we have occupations like, software engineering for example. Take an example. It's predominantly male. It's overwhelmingly male. And we still have those kinds of issues. So, uh, our gut often can reflect cultural biases that we soaked up like sponges when we were four years old. anything to do with other people and our decisions that, affect their lives. I think we have to be very careful about our intuitions.

CODY: 1:03:55

Rule number six, do not judge people by their face or their photograph.

John: 1:04:00

Cody. I'll tell you it's funny because I think we're, I think we figured this out, I mean, there was a horrible sexist term called a resting bitch face, RBF, you know, this is about 10 years ago, and I'm sorry for the name and it is sexist and all that. but it wasn't that long ago that we just assumed that we actually, all of us could know a person's personality from their photograph, from seeing their face, that we felt like we knew them. I feel like I know you, just from your face, I don't know you, I mean, I know you better from the last hour, you think, you know me and I, it's like you, we don't, this is not diagnostic. and unfortunately the face. people really do feel like they know it. it affects, uh, juries. It affects the length of a sentence they give somebody. If they have a baby face, kind of innocent face or not. The darkness of a black person's skin, is correlated with the, the amount of, time they have to go to jail. It actually affects whether they get the death penalty or not. I mean, it's horrible. I mean, these are new studies that just came out like in the past year, but they've been around for a while. people who are more attractive, are more likely to get, if that photograph is on their job application, are more likely to get called, for a phone interview for a job. And this is actual thousands of applications for real jobs in Italy with the same application, with different photographs, stapled to them. 57% of women who have, an attractive photograph, 57% get called back for a job interview, on the application if it's an attractive photo versus 7%. For the same application with a less attractive photo. And these are actual jobs, posted in Italy, thousands of jobs. And, it's just incredible. but we don't, we can't, we don't really know a person from their face. We think we do for evolutionary reasons, because our faces sometimes seem like we have a certain emotion that's probably predictive temporarily. And Darwin would say that's very important to know a person's facial emotions, for knowing what they're gonna do. If they're gonna be a violent or they're gonna be a foe or friend or whatever, trustworthy. But they influence political elections. I ratings of a face of about one 10th of a second by people in New Jersey who don't know these are political candidates in France. Right are the trustworthy, incompetent. Those ratings made after a 10th of a second of exposure predict the outcome of the elections in France. We don't even know who they're running for, what the what, what their politics are. The same thing in the US with French people seeing, American candidates rating 'em untrustworthy, incompetent predicts the outcomes of the governor and, Senate elections in the us. So it's amazing the power that these faces of faces have. we're watching a show right now. The guilty pleasure thing on Netflix called Love is Blind. And it's, I, I love this show, but it's all about, these couples were meeting without seeing each other's physical appearance and they actually fall in love and even propose without ever seeing the other person just talking. And you get past the superficial stuff when you do that. And you get to, uh, you know, understanding of the real person and personality and, I think that's wonderful. It's something we wrote about with the internet a long time ago. that there's these gating features that just prevent people from forming relationships because of the power of the physical looks and attractiveness and all that. But it goes beyond that because we really think we know people from their faces. And if anyone remembers that, that movie, home Alone, the first one with Old Man Marley, the next door neighbor who looked, everyone the kid said he was an ax murderer, and he turns out to be this sweet old guy, right? His face looked horribly scary, but it turned out to be this really sweet old guy who wanted to get reconciled with his family and his granddaughter. And, you know, the scene of Christmas and the church at the end and all that. And that old man Marley is my great example of, you know, and, and so is Grumpy Cat. the late grumpy cat who was the cat? He wasn't grumpy, but he looked grumpy, so everyone thought he was grumpy. It's like faces have such power over us, but they're, the evidence is these faces are really not predictive and not diagnostic of the actual personality. Hard to get around it though.

CODY: 1:07:55

rule number seven. Trust your gut about other people, but only once you've seen them in action.

John: 1:08:01

and so there's this wonderful work that, Ambay and Rosenthal did at Harvard in the nineties, on thin slices. And, what was really nice about this was that they gave, 15 or 32nd video tapes of a therapist, in session, helping a patient or a teacher in a classroom or whatever, like all these different occupations. And they had people look at these thin slices of the actual behavior. and it was, just 15 or 30 seconds and to rate how good a teacher this person was. Or how good a therapist this person was and all that. And those ratings of just seeing this person in action for 15, 30 seconds correlated very highly with what the entire class, who's had the whole semester with that teacher. The class evaluations, just for 15 or 30 seconds, that rating was correlated across different teachers with what the class said after a whole semester being in that classroom or, peers who rated the therapist by sitting in and evaluating hours and hours of their therapy sessions with patients. Somehow we get a really accurate sense of people when we see them in action for only a limited thin slice of time, like 15. And they even made it down to five seconds. And that still was very predictive. So here's the thing, why do you have that being very predictive? And we're very good at appreciating a person when we see them in action, see them in motion and all that. Compare that to how we're so misled by faces. Well, because. We didn't evolve with photographs. We didn't evolve with static expressions. we saw people in motion, we saw how they interacted with other, we saw how their face changed over time, dynamically moving around and their body language and everything. And when you actually ask people, put them in a situation to make a quick unconscious, basically unconscious judgment based on how we evolved the conditions that were in place over evolutionary time, when we saw people in motion, we could come up with a quick appraisal and we were accurate. And when you, used modern something like photography that's only been around for 150 years or so, when then we're fooled, but we didn't evolve with photographs, we evolved with dynamic action and we're really good at doing things today. If it is the same conditions are in place as during those, you know, tens of millions of years of evolutionary time, then we're pretty good at appraising other people. So that's the, deal, you know. Get an impression of somebody not from some static photograph, but seeing them in action for, 30 seconds or so. You're gonna be pretty good.

CODY: 1:10:33

And as an employer, I've hired and fired a lot of people in my life, and the one thing that seems to remain true is no matter how well somebody does on the initial interview, the only way to really tell whether they're gonna work is by actually testing them out and actually hiring them. That's, in my experience, it's supersedes any interview question or test that you can possibly give somebody.

John: 1:10:57

Absolutely.

CODY: 1:10:58

Rule number eight, allow attraction to influence your romantic decisions, but not too much.

John: 1:11:04

it's funny about this show Love Is Blind, right?' cause I think we, saw season six just for the first one, and there were like six or seven proposals and all that. Then they go out and they lived together for a week, and then they'd do this and that. Okay. Only one of them ended up at the altar. Only one of them. They both said I do at the end. all the others fell apart at some point. Well, they fell apart after they were actually together. They saw each other. There was looks, there was a, you know, compatibility of physical attractiveness and all that kind of stuff. So it wasn't like it didn't matter. but they would never have had a chance at all. A lot of these couples would never have gotten together if they hadn't talked together before they saw each other. They would never get past the gate. So, sure, getting past the gate and getting to know somebody separately, without being blocked by the physical stuff. But then the other stuff is still important. for whatever reason, they actually looked to see what the composite computer composite images were made of, like the beauty pageant contestants, you know, of Miss of America or the world or USA or whatever it was. And what they found was when they asked people to rate these photographs, the number of other photographs that went into that composite was the predictor of how attractive people thought it was. So one based on 80 was more rated, more attractive than one based on 30 and one based on 10. And these are, these are all beautiful and handsome people and all that. And turns out that what the greater the number of people go into an average, it makes it more symmetrical and it makes it more uniform and symmetrical. And it turns out that is the cue that even infants, at birth look at, an attractive face more than an unattractive face at 14 hours of age. Even then. So something about the relation between a symmetry of, features and healthiness and healthiness. I mean, you are getting really Darwinian here. It has to do with the chances that your child will survive. And so the genes are trying to, like Dawkin said, the selfish genes are trying to get to the next generation. Even of 14 hour old infant will look more at the more symmetric face because that's the one it wants to be attracted and have kids with, because then those genes will have a greater chance of getting into the next generation. It's crazy, but, attraction matters. it matters a lot. but it shouldn't be the gate, you know, prevents you from getting to know somebody in the first place.

CODY: 1:13:22

Well, it's been a pleasure having you with us, Dr. Bargh. listeners, if you're interested, you can find his book, unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do, on Amazon or anywhere else that you might find a book. Is there any place that people can go or visit if they want to follow you?

John: 1:13:38

I do have a, a website, so the book is before you know it, and it's on Amazon and it's a nice cheap paperback, about nine or $10. I have my lab at Yale where I put papers up that I write, like theoretical and other papers. So I sort of, that's more where I keep, things that I write. in the meantime, I'm working on a second book, but my lab is called Acme Lab. And so if you just go to Acme lab.Yale.edu. You'll find our labs webpage and all the, papers we've written over the years. And, that's the place, to, uh, find me. I think also it's fine for people to write me on email. I get people writing about, from the book and things like that. And I, uh, try to answer, anything I can that I actually know about.'cause I'm not a clinician. I can't tell you about your weird sister-in-Law. I'm not a therapist, so I can't help with that. But, my Gmail is just my name. So it's John dot Bargh BARGH@gmail.com. And just mention Cody's show in the subject header, if you'd like, and I'll be glad to answer anything I can. So that's all I can do. but thanks for the offer.

CODY: 1:14:38

Well, Dr. Bargh, thank you for joining us. It was an absolute pleasure.

John: 1:14:41

Thanks for having me on. Good with it.