Resenhas - Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior

Adriana261 10/08/2021

Interessante.
Um livro interessante. Traz fatos de estudos curiosos sobre o subconsciente e como reagimos por conta disso. Valeu a leitura.

Moitta 07/01/2015

“In this chapter I focused on the realm of visual and auditory perception to illustrate the brain’s two-tier system of data processing and the ways in which it supplies information that does not come directly from the raw data in front of it. But sensory perception is just one of many arenas of mental processing in which portions of the brain that operate at the unconscious level perform tricks to fill in missing data. Memory is another”

“first, people have a good memory for the general gist of events but a bad one for the details; second, when pressed for the unremembered details, even well-intentioned people making a sincere effort to be accurate will inadvertently fill in the gaps by making things up; and third, people will believe the memories they make up.”

“Other elements were added or reinterpreted so that ‘whenever anything appeared incomprehensible, it was either omitted or explained’ by adding content.”

“The process of fitting memories into a comfortable form ‘is an active process’, he wrote, and depends on the subject’s own prior knowledge and beliefs about the world, the ‘preformed tendencies and bias which the subject brings to the task’ of remembering.”

“whether or not we wish to, we communicate our expectations to others, and they often respond by fulfilling those expectations.”

“Merely placing objects in groups can affect our judgement of those objects.”

“Unconscious, or ‘implicit’ stereotyping is the rule rather than the exception.”

“Our unconscious judgement, which relies heavily on the categories to which we assign people, is always competing with our more deliberative and analytical conscious thought, which may see them as individuals. As these two sides of our minds battle it out, the degree to which we view a person as an individual versus a generic group member can vary on a sliding scale. That’s what seems to be happening in criminal trials. Serious crimes usually involve longer, more detailed examination of the defendant, with more at stake, and the added conscious focus seems to outweigh the attractiveness bias.”

“The more we interact with individuals and are exposed to their particular qualities, the more ammunition our minds have to counteract our tendency to stereotype, for the traits we assign to categories are products not just of society’s assumptions but of our own experience.”

“In the last chapter I talked about how putting other people into categories affects our assessment of them. Putting ourselves into in - and out-group categories also has an effect - on the way we see our own place in the world and on how we view others.”

“Your in-group identity influences the way you judge people, but it also influences the way you feel about yourself, the way you behave, and sometimes even your performance.”

“The researches pointed out that messages that condemn yet highlight undesired social norms are common, and that they invite counterproductive results.”

“and all have reached the same conclusion: we are highly invested in feeling different from one another - and superior - no matter how flimsy the grounds for our sense of superiority, and no matter how self-sabotaging that may end up being.”

“Much of clinical psychotherapy is based on what is essentially the same ideas: that through intense, therapeutically guided reflection we can learn our true feelings, attitudes, and motives. But remember the statistics on Browns marrying Browns, and investors undervaluing the IPOs of companies with tongue-twister names?”

“Because of the role of subliminal processes, the source of our feelings is often a mystery to us, and so are the feelings themselves.”

“We feel many things we are not aware of feeling. To ask us to talk about our feelings may be valuable, but some of our innermost feelings will not yield their secrets to even the most profound introspection. As a result, many of psychology’s traditional assumptions about our feelings simply do not hold.”

“If we are to have a valid understanding of who we are, therefore, of how we would react in various situations, we have to understand the reasons for our decisions and behaviour, and - even more fundamentally - we have to understand our feelings and their origins. Where do they come from?”

“If emotions are constructed from limited data rather than direct perception, similar to the way vision and memory are constructed, then, as with perception and memory, there must be circumstances when the way the mind fills in the gaps in the data results in your ‘getting it wrong’. The result would be ‘emotional illusions’ that are analogous to optical and memory illusions.”

“Again and again, the left hemisphere responded as if it knew the answer. In these and similar studies, the left brain generated many false reports, but the right brain did not, leading the researches to speculate that the left hemisphere of the brain has a role that goes beyond simply registering and identifying our emotional feelings, to trying to understand them.”

“As Sacks puts it, Thompson ‘must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness’. The term ‘confabulation’ often signifies the replacement of a gap in one’s memory by a falsification that one believes to be true.”

“But we also confabulate to fill in gaps in our knowledge about our feelings.”

“But though we think we know what we are feeling, we often know neither the content nor the unconscious origins of that content. And so we come up the plausible explanations that are untrue or only partly accurate, and we believe them.”

“EVOLUTION DESIGNED THE human brain not to accurately understand itself but to help us survive.”

“but one idea Freudian therapists and experimental psychologists agree on today is that our ego fights fiercely to defend its honor.”

“there are two ways to get at the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. Scientists gather evidence, look for regularities, form theories explaining their observations, and test them. Attorneys begin with a conclusion they want yo convince others of and then seek evidence that supports it, while also attempting to discredit evidence that doesn’t. The human mind is designed to be both a conscious seeker of objective truth and an unconscious, impassioned advocate for what we want to believe. Together these approaches vie to create our worldview.”

“Because motivated reasoning is unconscious, people’s claims that they are unaffected by bias or self-interest can be sincere, even as they make decisions that are in reality self-serving.”

“People find reasons to continue supporting their preferred political candidates in the face of serious and credible accusations of wrongdoing or ignorance but take thirdhand hearsay about an illegal left turn as evidence that the candidate of the other party ought to be banned from politics for life.”

“because we poke holes in evidence we dislike and plug holes in evidence we like, the net effect in these studies was to amplify the intensity of the disagreement.”

“It turns out that when we calculate a completion date, the method we think we follow in arriving at it is to break the project down into the necessary steps, estimate the time required for ache step, and put it all together. But research shows that, instead, our minds often work backward. That is, the desired target date exerts a great and unconscious influence on our estimate of the time required to complete each of the intermediate steps.”

“It is because we make these decisions, and sincerely believe they are realistic, that all of us, whether we are throwing a dinner party for ten people or building a new jet fighter, regularly create overly optimistic estimates of when we can finish the project.”

“As these studies suggest, the subtlety of our reasoning mechanisms allows us to maintain our illusions of objectivity even while viewing the world through a biased lens. Our decision-making processes bend but don’t break our usual rules, and we perceive ourselves as forming judgements in a bottom-up fashion, using data to draw a conclusion, while we are in reality deciding top-down, using our preferred conclusion to shape our analysis of the data.”