Richard Nisbett's ‘Mindware’ Places Mind Over Matter


Richard NisbettRichard Nisbett University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett has spent his life studying how humans make decisions, and whether we can be taught better reasoning skills.

He joins us tonight to discuss his new book, "Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking," which sheds light on the reasons behind our reasoning and how we can improve common errors in thinking.

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Read an excerpt from the book below.

"Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking"

By Richard E. Nisbett

Part I: "Thinking About Thought"

3. "The Rational Unconscious"

Rather than just mucking about with unacceptable thoughts, the unconscious mind is constantly doing things that are useful — even indispensable.

The unconscious mind “preperceives” for us. Think of our perceptual systems as monitoring unconsciously a vast array of stimuli. The conscious mind is aware of only a small fraction of what’s in that array. The unconscious mind forwards to the conscious mind those stimuli that will interest you or that you need to deal with.

If you doubt this claim, think of the situation of being in a room with a grandfather clock. You’ve been listening to its ticking, whether you know it or not. How can we be sure of that? Because if the clock stops ticking, you instantly notice that. Or consider the “cocktail party phenomenon.” You’re standing in a room with thirty other people straining to hear the person you’re talking to over the hubbub. You’re hearing nothing but what she is saying. But no, actually, you’ve been hearing a lot else besides. If someone five feet away from you mentions your name, you instantly pick that up and orient toward the speaker.

Just as the unconscious mind has a much larger perceptual capacity than the conscious mind, it has a far greater ability to hold multiple elements in thought and a far greater range of kinds of elements that can be held in thought. A consequence of this is that the conscious mind can mess up your evaluation of things if you let it get into the act. If you’re encouraged to verbally express your reactions to objects such as art posters or jams and tell what you like and dislike about each one, your choices are likely to be worse than if you simply think about the objects for a while and then make a choice.8 We know the judgments are worse because people asked to verbalize their thought processes report being less satisfied with the object they chose when they’re asked to rate it at some later point.

Part of the reason conscious consideration of choices can lead us astray is that it tends to focus exclusively on features that can be verbally described. And typically those are only some of the most important features of objects. The unconscious considers what can’t be verbalized as well as what can, and as a result makes better choices.

If you cut the conscious mind out of the process of choosing, you can sometimes get better results. In a study supporting this conclusion, Dutch investigators asked students to pick the best of four apartments. Each apartment had some attractive features (“very nice area of town”) and some unattractive features (“unfriendly landlord”). One apartment was objectively superior to the others because it had eight positive, four negative, and three neutral features — a better mix than the others. Some participants had to make their choice immediately, with little time to think about the choice either consciously or nonconsciously. Other participants were asked to think carefully about their choice for three minutes and review all the information as best they could. These participants had plenty of time for conscious consideration of the choice. A third group saw the same information as the others, but participants weren’t able to process it consciously because they had to work on a very difficult task for the three-minute period. If they were processing the information about the apartments, they were doing so without awareness.

Remarkably, participants in this last, distracted group working on the difficult task were almost a third more likely to pick the right apartment than the group allowed plenty of time for conscious thought. Moreover, the latter group failed to make better choices than the group given scarcely any time to think. These findings obviously have profound relevance for how we should make choices and decisions in life. We’ll have occasion to be reminded of this in the next part of the book, where we discuss theories of how people make choices and how they can maximize the likelihood that those choices will be the best possible.

Excerpted from Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking" by Richard E. Nisbett, published in August 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2015 by Richard E. Nisbett. All rights reserved.

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