It’s All in Your Head

Rolf Olsen


"What you don't know about what you know affects your behavior more than you think it does," according to University of Tulsa psychology professor Paul Lewicki. Moreover, sometimes this "unknown" knowledge can get you into trouble.

To illustrate, he poses this paradox: A man and his son are involved in a terrible car accident. The father dies, and when the boy is taken into the emergency room, the surgeon on duty looks at the child and says, "I cannot operate. He is my son." What is the explanation?

If you answered that the surgeon is the boy's mother, then you are among the few who get the answer correct. But like many of us -- including even ardent feminists -- you might have fallen into a trap of our own unconscious devices and assumed that the surgeon was a male.

Such a mistake may be the result of a bias that a person subconsciously reinforces, although on a conscious level they would not concede it is a personal belief.

"People are capable of perceiving and processing information of which they are not consciously aware and which plays an important role in their judgments and decisions," says Lewicki. "In our lab, we are interested in understanding nonconscious processing and the influence it exercises upon an individual's social, psychological and occupational well-being."

"The part of mental activity that we can observe represents only a tiny fraction of the activity that is in fact going on," says Lewicki. "Thousands of decisions have to be made, even in a simple conversation with another person. Complex syntactic rules have to be followed, and different words might be chosen, depending on whether we are speaking to a child, to a college student, or to a professional colleague."

He notes that in speaking there are thousands of rules to follow -- "and most are acquired by the age of six." For instance, a child of three -- without instruction from adults -- to add "ed" to a verb to communicate that the action she is talking about occurred in the past, even though sometimes the child might say, "I putted the cup there." A child of that age has no conscious knowledge of such a grammatical rule nor can explain it, but has learned the rule by listening to spoken language and unconsciously detecting a pattern.

A vast majority of unconscious processing is absolutely necessary and normal. "Operations of considerable complexity can be performed without conscious awareness," Lewicki says. "For instance, if someone holds up a piece of paper at an angle, we can determine at a glance if it is rectangular or square, although we could not explain how we reached that conclusion."

But human nonconscious cognitive systems are capable of extensive manipulation of information "of which the individual has no conscious awareness. The implications of these findings to understanding human social interaction, the development of biases, and the generation of psychopathological responses constitute crucial research problems for cognitive psychology."

In the past six years, research headed by Lewicki and his colleague Thomas Hill, also a TU psychology professor, has received more than $1 million in federal funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Some of their results were reported in the June 1992 issue of American Psychologist, which was devoted to scientific reports on research of the unconscious mind. This year the research was included in a section on psychology in the Science and Technology volume of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and it was cited at length in the June 23, 1992, issue of The New York Times. His book, "Non-Conscious Social Information Processing," was published by Academic Press in 1986.

After earning his doctorate at the University of Warsaw in 1977, Lewicki taught and conducted research at the universities of Michigan and Texas. Lewicki, 42, has been at TU since 1984.

Lewicki's own lab results indicate that subjects "have no idea they have learned anything from the stimulus material, even though the newly acquired knowledge consistently guides their behavior."

For example, he had students track an "X" that appeared on a computer screen in what seemed to be random order. The volunteers were to press a button that corresponded to the quadrant of the screen where the X appeared at that moment. The X appeared to be moving at random, and the volunteers believed it to be so. However, the letter was appearing in secret and very complicated pattern. Yet despite this complexity, Lewicki says the subjects unconsciously learned the pattern. The proof is that after a while, their ability to track the X improved. And later -- when the X's pattern was changed surreptitiously to a truly random pattern -- scores fell.

To prove his point, Lewicki administered the test to a group of TU professors -- "unusually critical subjects" -- who knew that he was investigating unconscious learning. "None of them came even close to discovering the real nature of the manipulation," he says. None had any clue as to what kind of knowledge they had nonconsciously acquired, and while they noticed the sudden decrease of their performance, "they attributed the decrease to factors that were entirely unrelated," he says. Some even said that some distracting, subliminal stimulus had been flashed on the screen.

He even offered $100 to some TU students, who had earlier learned the pattern unconsciously, to uncover the "hidden" pattern. Some spent many hours seeking the clue; none succeeded, even though their performance clearly indicated that they had a "working knowledge" of the pattern.

Lewicki says unconscious learning can reinforce a prejudice or biased belief. For example, in another experiment, one group of volunteers taking a test were slightly derided by an experimenter while explaining to them how to fill out a form. Another group completed the form without this minor aggravation. Later, all subjects were told to go to another room and give the form to whichever of two assistants was not busy. Although neither assistant was busy, the subjects in the first group tended to avoid the assistant whose hairstyle resembled that of the "rude" experimenter, even though they later denied that the annoyance had influenced their behavior.

In another study, Lewicki showed students computer-generated faces. For each face, there was a normal version, one that had been slightly shortened and another that had been slightly lengthened. The students were told that the faces were of professors who had been judged to be either fair or unfair in grading. They were not told that for the fair professors, the distance between the eyes and the mouth has been made slightly greater than for the unfair teachers.

The students were then shown other faces and asked to decide which were more fair. "After seeing 20 new faces, it became apparent that they had learned -- unconsciously -- to infer fairness from facial proportions, though they were unaware that this is how they had come to that conclusion," says Lewicki. "When asked how they made their decision, the students said they were just guessing."

Lewicki says such biases can become self-confirming theories. A bias can become self-confirming because a person can unknowingly make a conclusion about someone -- such as whether a person is fair or unfair -- without really testing such a belief. Because there is a lot of ambiguity in the world, one's bias interprets events. "As a result, a person can become increasingly convinced of their bias if there's never a chance to disprove the belief."

"We store judgments about individuals and groups -- often unconsciously," he says. Such biases could creep into our decisions when evaluating people applying for a job or when forming initial impressions of others.

These nonconscious processes are very rapid. "We can determine in a split second whether a paper is square or rectangular. The complexity of the knowledge far exceeds what we can do on the level of consciousness." He says an "experienced" person is someone who has a treasure of non-conscious knowledge that can't be summarized or written down and can't be easily passed on from one individual to another, such as a person who reads x-ray images. The rules are so complex that they can't be articulated.

Lewicki became interested in unconscious processes while working as a clinical psychologist and observing a discrepancy between rational conscious beliefs and behavior.

How does one change undesirable biases that we have learned unconsciously? "We can't change them by appealing to a person's conscious awareness." For instance, if a person has a phobia about white stuffed toys, it might be best to take a back-door approach -- (sending a new message via the same non-conscious channel through which it was acquired) -- by making positive associations, such as tucking a white stuffed toy in a corner of a room in a pleasant environment.

Psychology has traditionally focused on conscious thought because it is easily accessible, Lewicki says. But interest in non-conscious information processing has grown, even though it can only be investigated through indirect methods such as Lewicki and Hill's experiments.

Lewicki says that every thought that a person experiences in consciousness is supported by millions of behind-the-scenes unconscious processes that permit conscious events to take place. "It's like we have a million little guys in our head keeping track of all these things that happen at every instant and how often they occur."

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Rolf Olsen

Dialog • Spring 1996