This chapter asks, How can we respond to complex social events before we are aware of what we think? It answers that question by reviewing research studies that show that humans can make use of what they have stored in memory without being aware of that knowledge. Evidence gathered from behavioral economics, social psychology, developmental psychology, discourse analysis, brain research, physiology, linguistics, and clinical psychology points to a view of how we think that should change our understanding of how we communicate. Social intuition theory captures that view and entails our rethinking how human communication works.
וְהָיָה לָכֶם לְצִיצִת וּרְאִיתֶם אֹתוֹ וּזְכַרְתֶּם אֶת־כָּל־מִצְוÊת יהוה וַעֲשִׂיתֶם אֹתָם וְלֹא־תָתֻרוּ אַחֲרֵי לְבַבְכֶם וְאַחֲרֵי עֵינֵיכֶם אֲשֶׁר־אַתֶּם זֹנִים אַחֲרֵיהֶם׃
That shall be your fringe; look at it and recall all of the commandments of the LORD and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your lustful urge. (Torah, Numbers 15:39)
TopWhat Communication Theory Has Ignored
The way we think about human communication has not only ignored the elephant in the room, it has ignored the elephant in our minds. Jonathan Haidt (2006, pp. 13-17) described our minds as having controlled and automatic processes; his metaphor is a person riding on an elephant. The rider is control and the elephant is automatic processes, intuition and emotion. The rider is small and no contest for the much larger and stronger elephant. The automatic system evolved earlier in our evolution to trigger fast and reliable action. The rider evolved later to help out, but the rider is not the boss.
We have managed to ignore an obvious fact about our communication lives, one that perhaps has been seen for some time but not noticed and not accounted for. The obvious fact is that we typically respond to the world—including the world of symbols, signs, and their meanings, often complex social contexts-- extraordinarily fast, faster than the time it would take to consciously deliberate. That is the elephant in the room. It is not that we haven’t been aware of the importance of language, cultural knowledge, background knowledge, instantaneous acceptance and rejection of ideas, and inference, as we communicate. We have. But we have not stopped to ask what that means for how we communicate with one another, how we communicate with ourselves, what implications that has for what we communicate and how we are affected by the stimuli we encounter, interpret and respond to in a flash. If we slow down and consider this fact seriously—that we respond before we are aware of why we are responding the way we do--many questions not only about cognition but also about human communication follow. How can we respond to complex social events before we are aware of what we think? What can we learn about our everyday interactions by considering our speedy responses? What can we learn about ourselves, who we are? Would taking this fact about the speed of our responses into consideration lead to improving critical thinking? Would we improve our effectiveness in education, persuasion, decision-making, and psychotherapy? Would we improve our interpersonal communication? Would understanding the operations and function of high speed responses to social contexts help us understand the operations and functions of conscious, covert speech? Does understanding intuitive thought contribute to understanding journal writing? Other forms of writing? In one communication course where students kept a private journal, one commented at the end of the course: “The journal allowed me to write out thoughts I did not even know I had.” The chapters that make up this book attempt to begin to answer some of these questions.
Perhaps we find clues to the interplay between deliberation and intuition in a remark such as this one from Bertrand Russell (1956) describing his experience with writing:
Very gradually I have discovered ways of writing with a minimum of worry and anxiety. When I was young each fresh piece of serious work used to seem to me for a time--perhaps a long time--to be beyond my powers. I would fret myself into a nervous state from fear that it was never going to come right. I would make one unsatisfying attempt after another, and in the end have to discard them all. At last I found that such fumbling attempts were a waste of time. It appeared that after first contemplating a book on some subject, and after giving serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of sub-conscious incubation which could not be hurried and was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking. Sometimes I would find, after a time, that I had made a mistake, and that I could not write the book I had had in mind. But often I was more fortunate. Having, by a time of very intense concentration, planted the problem in my sub-consciousness, it would germinate underground until, suddenly, the solution emerged with blinding clarity, so that it only remained to write down what had appeared as if in a revelation.