The Influence Of Unconscious Thinking

People make unconscious decisions in their life every single day. Many are not aware that this is happening. There are unconscious factors taking part in every day decision making. It is important for us to understand our unconscious minds. If we can come to understand what is going on in our unconscious it will help us to be much more aware of how and why we make the decisions we do, and understanding these aspects will also help us to better understand other people and the decisions they make. Our unconscious mind plays a role in our social behaviors and attitudes, and it also forms judgments about others in our society we may not even know about. There are many controversial ideas about the unconscious mind which range from the theories

They allow a simple stimulus to connect effortlessly in our mind with the meaning of the stimulus (Bargh 2014). A schema is like a mental framework that organizes and interprets information in our brains (Myers 2014). Automatic thought processes and schemas are related in many ways. Schemas, in a sense, make up our automatic thought processes. By developing a schema in our minds we are creating a base for our automatic thought processes to be drawn out of. Schemas can also be a set of expectations you formed about someone or something, and when your automatic thought processing takes place, it generates the expectations of other people’s behaviors and personalities from minimal information retrieved by using your

The best ways to learn how your own unconscious works is to understand what the unconscious is, explore the different theories of Freud and modern psychologists, look at the research that has been done that supports some different ideas, and learn how your automatic thought processes work to overcome your unconscious influences. A common phrase people often say is, “trust your gut.” I disagree with this phrase because I believe that it is not always the best solution. Trusting your gut does not require you to think consciously about it and studies have shown that your conscious and unconscious thoughts usually are not the same. These “gut instincts” come from our brain and what our brain automatically connects a stimulus to (Bargh 2014). I believe we should have a chance to consciously think about a decision before we make it because our “gut instincts” can sometimes be the opposite of what we really want to