The adaptive unconscious, first coined by social psychologist Daniel Wegner in 2002,[1] is described as a set of mental processes that is able to affect judgement and decision-making, but is out of reach of the conscious mind.
Lacking the need for cognitive tools does not make the adaptive unconscious any less useful than the conscious mind as the adaptive unconscious allows for processes like memory formation, physical balancing,[further explanation needed] language, learning, and some emotional and personalities processes that includes judgement, decision making, impression formation, evaluations, and goal pursuing.
The adaptive unconscious is affected by things like emotional reaction, estimations, and experience and is thus inclined to stereotyping and schema which can lead to inaccuracy in decision making.
In other theories of the mind, the unconscious is limited to "low-level" activities, such as carrying out goals which have been decided consciously.
[5] He said that if an individual realized that a truck is about to hit him, there would be no time to think through all of his options and, to survive, he must rely on this kind of decision-making apparatus, which is capable of making very quick judgments based on little information.
A team of scientists vouched for its authenticity but some historians, such as Thomas Hoving, instantly knew otherwise - that they felt an "intuitive repulsion" for the piece, which was eventually proved as fake.
Working within the adaptive unconscious involves browsing through a series of sense impressions and making comparisons regarding a situation and using past experiences to dissolve sensory boundaries which then results in intuition.
There is also a study that cited intuition as a result of the way our brain stores, processes and uses the information of our subconscious.
[8] The debate over the existence of introspection began in the late 19th century with experiments involving placing people in different stimuli contexts and them thinking about their thoughts and feelings after.
These research efforts have however been hampered by the fact it is currently impossible to know if they are actually accessing their unconscious as they do this, or if the information is just coming from their conscious mind.
In some experiments, subjects provide explanations that are fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories, but not lies – a phenomenon called confabulation.
The difficulties of finding a method that worked (i.e. not self-reporting by the patient) mean there was a halt in this area of research until the cognitive revolution.
[17] Arguably, this argument of the independence of introspection existence based on the implicit-explicit relationship may actually be more conditional than originally thought.
This view coincides with the idea that access to our unconsciousness is dependent on the competition between processes and their surrounding contexts.
Analysing information, attitudes and feelings in the unconscious mind first which then contributes and creates our conscious versions of this.