These hidden prompts, Bargh stresses, are liable to have unexpected and far from helpful consequences. “The unconscious workings of our mind send us signals,” says Bargh, about “our passionate likes and dislikes, but also about our most lukewarm, indifferent opinions.” “The white belly of the alligator,” Bargh writes, “was the unconscious, and it was telling me that… our basic human psychological and behavioural systems were originally unconscious, and they existed before the rather late appearance of language.”īefore You Know It, Bargh’s highly engaging survey of recent laboratory and field studies, offers a variegated picture of the ways in which unconscious cues impact on our everyday behaviour and beliefs. Bargh was already an expert on unconscious thinking and automatic behaviour and had conducted many experiments, but his eureka moment came when the beast in his dream flipped over to reveal its underside. In the autumn of 2006, John Bargh, a social and cognitive psychologist at Yale, dreamed that he was being followed though a swamp by an alligator.
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