138 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
Conscious vs. Unconscious Processing
The word “unconscious” has a long history in psychology, and
it has referred to various phenomena at different times. The
way we are using it here derives from cognitive science, which
treats the brain as a computer and investigates what kinds of
“computational machinery” are used to perform cognitive
functions such as attention, vision, language, and decision
making. It’s important to distinguish this conceptualization
of the unconscious from that posited by Sigmund Freud. The
scientific literature has found little support for Freud’s theory
that the unconscious is the seat of inappropriate desires that
are repressed from conscious awareness. Instead, the uncon-
scious is used to refer to automatic cognitive processes that
escape the notice of the person in whose mind they occur.
To illustrate this difference, we can take a look at a fasci-
nating study that investigated implicit and explicit moral
decision making (Hauser et al. 2007). In this study, people
were presented with a variety of “trolley problems.” (In psy-
chology, a “trolley problem” usually entails the presentation
of a moral dilemma in which a speeding train can take one of
two tracks. One track will cause the train to collide with
multiple people, killing them instantly. The other will cause
the train to collide with just a single person. The participant
in the study must decide on which track the train will travel.
Is it best to do nothing and let fate take its course, killing a
number of people, or is it best to divert the train and pur-
posely kill one person in favor of saving several? There are
many variations on this basic idea, but overall it’s used to
derive basic moral decision-making rules to which most
people adhere.) In this particular experiment, participants
were asked to (a) decide whether the train would run over a