Adaptive unconscious

The **adaptive unconscious** is a set of unconscious mental processes influencing judgment and decision making. It is different from conscious processing: it is faster, effortless, more focused on the present, but less flexible. It can be described as a quick sizing up of the world which interprets information and decides how to act very quickly and outside the conscious view. 

In some theories of the mind, the unconscious is limited to "low-level" activity, such as carrying out goals which have been decided consciously. In contrast, the adaptive unconscious is thought to be involved in "high-level" cognition such as goal-setting as well.

The term 'adaptive unconscious' suggests it has  value and hence is an adaptation which was strongly selected in the past. Indeed, for much of vertebrate evolution, all mental activity was unconscious. No-one supposes that fish have consciousness. Thus our consciousness is added to an already-existing set of mechanisms which operate but whose operation is normally not felt by us.

An important point made by Reber is that "implicit learning is a fundamental 'root' process, one that lies at the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism". What that means is that implicit learning is very much more ancient than the conscious type of learning that we, as humans, normally notice.

This is an expanding field of research. 
The classic examples are the acquisition of language and the process of socialization. Children learn to speak their native language and become socialized to their society without being conscious of the principles which guide their behaviour.

There has been much debate on the bare existence of implicit learning because of the fact that knowledge gained is not verbalizable.

## Evidence 1: case studies 
The evidence for there being such a thing as the adaptive unconscious is a series of case studies which are hard to explain any other way.

### The Kouros fraud 
After many scientific tests were done on an early Greek statue, the Getty Museum was about to buy it. However, a small group of experts looked at it and said immediately "It's a fake". Eventually, it was found to be a fake. The question was, how could anyone beat the battery of scientific tests just by looking at it? The sceptics were asked how they did it. One said "It doesn't look old, as if it had been centuries under the ground. Another said "Its fingernails don't look right". Apparently they had all seen something which triggered a doubt. Psychologists thought this might be an ancient mental mechanism which has survival value.

### The fireman's 'ESP' 
A firefighter in Cleveland answered a routine call with his men. It was in a kitchen in the back of a one-story house. The firefighters broke down the door, laid down their hose, and began dousing the fire with water. This had little effect. As the fire lieutenant recalls, he suddenly thought to himself, "There's something wrong here", and he immediately ordered his men out. Moments after they fled, the floor they had been standing on collapsed. The fire had been in the basement, not the kitchen as it appeared. When asked how he knew to get out, the fireman thought it was ESP. What is interesting is that the fireman could not immediately explain how he knew to get out. From the 'locked door' in our brains, the fireman just 'blinked' and made the right decision. In fact, had he thought consciously about the situation, he would probably have lost his life and the lives of his men.

### Priming affects test results 
Priming significantly affects test results. A group being tested about the Trivial Pursuit game were split in two. One group was first asked to think about what it would mean to be a professor. They got 55.6% of the questions right. The other half were first asked to sit and think about soccer hooligans. They scored 42.6%. Other tests indicated that the two groups had similar mental ability. The difference between the results is highly significant. The experimenters later asked whether the question about their race affected them. They all said 'no' and added something like "You know, I just don't think I'm smart enough to be here". 
:"It sorts through the mountain of information we get from the outside world, prioritizing it and putting flags on things that demand our immediate attention". Anderson's key distinction is between 'declarative knowledge' (knowledge we are aware of and can talk about) and 'procedural knowledge', which guides action and decision-making, but which happens outside of conscious 'view'.

Learning also takes place in ways which are entirely unconscious to us at the time. A classic example is the way children learn their native language between the ages of about 18 months and four years. They do not study language the way an older person does. It happens automatically. Another example: people under anaesthetic can hear and be influenced by what they hear.

Access to memory also happens unconsciously: even when we try to remember, the actual process is unconscious. It can happen entirely unconsciously. An early experiment by Korsakoff on patients with loss of conscious memory showed this. He gave one patient mild electric shocks. Later, when Korsakoff returned, the patient had forgotten all about it. Yet when he saw the apparatus, the patient showed anxiety, and accused him of wanting to give him an electric shock. The experiment has been repeated since in various ways.

## Failures of judgement 
It is easy to show that our snap judgements can also be quite wrong, especially when we are overwhelmed with information, or when we come to the decisions with unconscious bias and prejudice. This 'introspection illusion' may cause differences between the self and other people, because people trust these unreliable introspections when forming attitudes about themselves but not about others.

## Books 
*Barkow, Jerome H; Cosmides, Lena & Tooby, John (eds) 1992. *The adapted mind: evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture*. Oxford University Press. 

## Related pages 
*Evolutionary psychology
*Sociobiology
*Decision-making
*"In the zone": Flow (psychology)

## References