We Act Before We Understand

"Everything conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious"

Understanding why a behavior is effective is not necessary for it to be effective.

Birds don't "know" why they engage in mating calls. Elk don't "know" why they lock antlers during mating season. Spiders don't "know" why they weave webs. They just obey their impulses that have been shaped by millions of years of evolution. ​​

A single-celled organism has no idea of the reasons why it behaves as it does. Yet we still speak about single-celled organisms with phrases like “It wants nutrients” or “It is seeking sustenance,” despite the fact that it has no conscious awareness of this desire.

A chimpanzee mother will withhold nutritious food morsels from her young offspring. This is because if she were to give the baby lots of energy-rich food, the baby would subsequently be less likely to nurse on mother's milk. Absence of nursing, in turn, changes the mother's hormonal profile. This leads her to ovulate and potentially become pregnant again. Thus, nursing reduces the likelihood of another pregnancy. This is beneficial for the existing offspring, because if the mother were to have another baby, her attention and resources would be divided, and the baby would receive less care. So the mother "strategically" withholds food from her offspring, despite not knowing the reasons why she does it. Organisms don't need to know why their behaviors work in order to aid evolutionary fitness.

The same is true for humans. We act out things we don’t fully understand all the time. If that weren’t true, we’d be completely transparent to ourselves. But we’re not. People are a lot more complicated than we realize. Our actions carry more information than we consciously possess. Traces of impulses, habits, and emotional patterns we can’t easily articulate.

Conscious awareness is calorically costly, and evolution wisely made most desires and actions operate unconsciously. For the most part, the unconscious quietly solves your problems for you. It activates your emotions to alter other people’s perceptions of you, with the aim of improving how you are treated. Even if you have no conscious control or awareness that this is what is going on.

We don't always know how our actions and behaviors benefit us in an evolutionary sense.

A spider is weaving a web to catch insects and thereby survive and pass on its genes. "Come on, spiders aren't that calculating and sly. They're not thinking about catching insects and survival and reproduction and all that. The spider is just weaving a web because it enjoys it."

Human beings have always sensed that there is more going on in the mind than what we are consciously aware of. Everyday life points to this truth. You have experienced suddenly remembering something you had forgotten. That memory had to be stored somewhere, quietly waiting until it returned to your awareness.

The unconscious mind seems to have a life of its own, with its own motivations and energy. Every action, thought, and reaction can reveal something about who we are, even when we are not aware of it. Our unconscious quietly nudges us toward behaviors that serve our goals.

The split between conscious and unconscious thought evolved to save energy and avoid mental overload. Conscious thought is slow, focused, and burns a lot of fuel, while the unconscious can handle many tasks at once. Learning to ride a bike is a good example. At first, every movement takes focus and effort, but once you master it, your unconscious takes over. You can ride while thinking about other things, freeing up mental energy for daydreaming, planning, and so on.

Research on implicit learning shows that we absorb patterns and habits without realizing it. In experiments, people could recognize which letter strings followed hidden rules even when they could not explain why. This shows that the mind is always working in the background, processing information we are not aware of.

The unconscious is ancient and remarkably durable. It existed before conscious thought, and consciousness likely evolved to manage what the unconscious was already doing. Because these systems are so old, they keep working even when parts of conscious memory are damaged.

In short, the unconscious is powerful and efficient. It allows us to function in complex environments without overwhelming our limited conscious attention. But this also means we do not fully know ourselves. The brain has many parts that evolved at different times, and they are not always in harmony. Our motives can conflict with one another, fighting battles deep within the mind. What eventually rises to your conscious awareness is the end result of those unseen battles.

That we have an unconscious mind is an established fact. What follows are more speculative thoughts and findings.

To be clear, most of this discussion takes place at the ultimate/evolutionary level of analysis, as opposed to the proximate level. Proximate explanations seek to understand how a trait or system works in the immediate present. Ultimate explanations are about why the trait evolved in the first place, and its adaptive significance. Why do we have friends? The proximate answer is that it feels good to be social, to be with those who care about us, to express concern for others, and so on. But the ultimate (evolutionary) explanation seeks to answer why friendship evolved in the first place. What benefits did it confer to our ancestors’ survival and reproductive success?

Or take eating. If I ask you why you’re eating, you’d say because you’re hungry (or bored, or whatever). That’s the proximate answer. But the ultimate question is, why did hunger evolve in the first place? What is hunger’s adaptive significance? And the answer, of course, is that we require calories in order to survive. But that’s not what we’re thinking about when we’re eating. We’re not consciously motivated to eat based on some cold evolutionary calculations about food and survival. We feel hungry, and we eat. Simple. So if I said you’re eating because you require food to survive and reproduce, and you replied “No, I’m eating because I’m hungry,” we would both be correct.

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Sex and The Unconscious

The unconscious also shapes how we think and act about sex and relationships. Many of our motives in this area run below the surface.

Consider status symbols. A man might say, “I didn’t buy this Lamborghini to impress anyone. I bought it because it makes me feel confident.” A woman might say something similar about wearing makeup. Both statements may be true, but part of the satisfaction comes from knowing others find them more attractive. Evolution has wired you to feel good when you are judged as desirable because that feeling motivates you to repeat behaviors that improve your social and mating prospects. Cars and cosmetics didn’t exist in the ancestral environment, but costly behaviors that drew positive attention from potential allies and romantic partners did.

Psychologist Geoffrey Miller puts it this way: “A costly behavior cannot evolve just because it happens to feel good. Feeling good must have evolved to motivate the behavior, which must have some hidden benefit.”

Research supports this idea. For example, individuals who see themselves as physically stronger than a rival will often (without realizing it) lower their voices in competitive situations, while those who see themselves as weaker tend to raise their pitch. These changes are automatic, not planned.

Other studies suggest that even our moral and political views can be shaped by unconscious reproductive strategies.

A 2010 study led by Rob Kurzban suggests that drug attitudes are not simply about political ideology or concern for harm, but are closely tied to sexual and reproductive strategies. People who favor long-term, monogamous relationships tend to oppose recreational drug use, partly because drugs often lead to casual sex and promiscuity, which threaten the monogamists’ preferred strategy of committed relationships without the threat of mate poachers.

To test this idea, the researchers recruited participants and compared attitudes toward drugs with political views, religiosity, disgust sensitivity, and sexual attitudes. They found that measures of sexual attitudes (like comfort with casual sex) were the strongest predictors of permissive views about drugs. When they statistically controlled for sexual attitudes, the connection between drug attitudes and political or religious beliefs nearly disappeared.

The authors conclude that opposition to drugs is partly a way for people to (unconsciously) influence social norms about sexuality. By discouraging drug use, they indirectly discourage behaviors—like promiscuity—that conflict with their reproductive interests.

Of course, this suggests the converse is true: People who support permissive drug policies hope to (unconsciously) shape a social environment that allows for more no-strings casual sex.

By normalizing drug use, they help create situations where short-term mating opportunities are more likely to arise due to lowered inhibitions.

In other words, support for, or opposition to, drug legalization can be seen not just as a political stance, but as an unconscious strategic move to lower or raise the social costs of promiscuity and increase or decrease access to casual sex.

Or take abortion. A 2025 study by Jordan Moon and Jaimie Krems investigated why people oppose abortion and whether their reasoning is driven solely by “sanctity of life” beliefs or by deeper, unconscious, motives to discourage casual sex. The authors compared two explanations. The face-value account predicts that abortion opponents should support any policy that prevents abortions, no matter how it is achieved. The strategic account suggests that people are especially motivated to back abortion-reducing policies that also make casual sex harder or costlier.

Across a pilot study and two preregistered experiments with nearly 2,000 U.S. participants, the authors conclude that many pro-life policy preferences partly reflect an effort to regulate sexual behavior, not just protect unborn life. They argue that moral arguments about the sanctity of life are held sincerely but also serve as persuasive rhetoric that hides these unconscious reproductive goals.

Of course, the converse of this is that people who support access to abortion want to make casual sex easier and less costly. The above findings also imply that moral arguments about the importance of “choice” are held sincerely but also serve as persuasive rhetoric to hide unconscious goals of increasing short-term, consequence-free sexual encounters.

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Emotions and The Unconscious

Emotions are typically involuntary, which is why they are so effective.

Emotions signal when something important happens—like danger, success, or loss—and guide us toward helpful actions. Because these emotional systems evolved over millions of years, we sometimes feel things we don’t fully understand, which can seem “mysterious” or unconscious.

Take anger as an example.

Anger serves as a way to communicate a clear message: “I’m not as weak as you think. You can’t treat me this way.”

From an evolutionary perspective, the primary goal of anger is to influence another person’s behavior or decisions, aiming to change how they perceive and treat us.

Interestingly, this process unfolds without conscious awareness.

You don’t consciously think to yourself, “This person is mistreating me. I’m going to get angry now in order to orchestrate a series of cognitive, emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses aimed at incentivizing this other person to place more weight on my well-being.”

It's important here to distinguish between two levels of understanding: the ultimate (or evolutionary) and the proximate explanations for anger. The proximate explanation addresses the immediate reasons we feel anger—perhaps we feel disrespected, belittled, or mistreated in some way.

But the ultimate/evolutionary explanation digs deeper, asking why emotions like anger evolved in humans at all. Why does disrespect or mistreatment activate feelings of anger? Why does being slighted feel painful?

Anger evolved because it offered benefits to our ancestors. This idea is known among evolutionary psychologists as the “recalibration theory of anger.”

Essentially, anger works to reset how others treat you. If you feel like you’re being ignored or treated unfairly, anger becomes a tool to demand better treatment from others.

Anger arises when we perceive threats to our well-being or opportunities, motivating others to provide better treatment. From a paper led by the psychologist Daniel Sznycer:

“Anger interfaces with the brain of the target of your anger (e.g., the person who imposed excessive costs on you) and feeds the target information. The subtext of this information is: Pay the cost of valuing me more highly (e.g., ‘Stop borrowing my clothes’), or I will exact an even higher cost from you.”

By expressing anger, our ancestors communicated their discontent, signaling to others that mistreatment could carry significant social costs. These displays aimed to secure vital resources, strengthen social status, forge alliances, and maintain romantic partnerships—factors directly linked to survival and reproductive success.

Emotions, including anger, are involuntary and automatic, which is why they are so effective. Conscious thought burns more calories than automated processes, so evolution streamlined most human desires and responses to operate unconsciously.

People also respond with anger to inanimate objects, but interestingly the response is sometimes similar to what happens when people are angry at other social beings. Your dishwasher doesn’t work or your car stalls out and you want to bang your fist on it, out of some unconscious hope that violence or the threat of it will get the object to do what you want.

Interestingly, I think there can sometimes be an evolutionary misfiring here, especially among young guys. Many years ago, I saw my old roommate get angry at losing at a video game and punching a hole in the wall. This doesn’t make rational sense, but if the mental program is something like feeling mistreated/disrespected → violence then this might just be a glitch in an otherwise adaptive system.

Or consider blushing. In his new book When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker notes that blushing serves a clear purpose: it functions as a nonverbal apology. Because it is controlled by the involuntary autonomic nervous system—the same system that regulates blood flow and other essential bodily functions—blushing is more convincing than mere words. Blushing arises out of feelings of embarrassment. Blushing signals that you recognize you’ve made a mistake, care about how others see you, and intend to do better. Research shows that blushing is effective: it can take the place of a spoken apology, make an actual verbal apology seem more genuine, and increase the likelihood of forgiveness and renewed trust.

This process also unfolds unconsciously.

You don’t think to yourself, “I have made a fool of myself in front of all these people. I’m going to get embarrassed now in order to orchestrate a series of cognitive, emotional, physiological, and behavioral responses to activate my blushing mechanism aimed at signaling remorse and winning back social approval.” Instead, it happens automatically. Your face flushes before you can even decide how you want to react.

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Crying

Crying evolved to signal neediness; to elicit social support from sympathizers. Emotional tearing serves a communicative function. For example, crying is often inhibited during painful or stressful events but released when a caregiver or supporting partner is within range.

People with romantic partners cry more than partnerless individuals. Lonely people cry less than those who feel socially connected. These facts indicate that emotional tears are nonverbal requests for help rather than mere reflections of distress.

The psychologists Daniel Sznycer and Debra Lieberman point out that “children are more likely to express sadness, including through tears, when they are near their parents than when they are with peers, regardless of how much time they spend with each group.”

Intriguingly, some researchers have suggested that colicky infants—babies who frequently cry even in the absence of some obvious need like hunger or physical discomfort—evolved to reduce the withdrawal of parental care.

The idea is that in the ancestral environment, inert, inanimate, lethargic infants were considered by parents to be physically weak or in poor health and thus unlikely to survive. In contrast, being loud and relentlessly fussy signals high energy, strong lungs, and good health. Indeed, infant crying is calorically costly, with a 13% increase in metabolic rate compared to resting.

Exhausted parent: “I’ve tried feeding you, changing you, holding you…What is it that you want?”

Crying baby: “To demonstrate to you how robust I am!”

This is likely why babies will often cry even when there is seemingly no immediate need, such as distress or hunger. Their unconscious, evolutionary aim is to ensure caregivers don’t neglect them or withdraw care or resources from them.

Of course, like most signals individuals send, babies don’t “know” they are signaling strength, health, and robustness.

I see many people who throw around the term “signaling” as if the term refers only to empty gestures or shallow aims.

They conflate signaling in general with cheap talk, or cheap signals, which don’t convey much useful information.

But “signaling” also encompasses costly signals, which are real evidence of an underlying quality. Costly signals tell us what the person is really about.

If someone posts something dumb online, it is silly to say they are just “signaling.” Because everything we say and do carries signals of something.

Imagine a guy jumps in front of a bullet to save his best friend. Is this signaling? Well, yes. It is a signal of the person’s love for his friend, his moral character, his willingness to self-sacrifice, and so on.

But taking a bullet for a friend is not “just a signal” in the sense that it is the same as cheap talk. It is a costly, hard-to-fake indicator of desirable attributes.

And in that split second before catching the bullet, the guy isn’t thinking “If I do this, people will think I am brave, compassionate, righteous, etc.”

Signals are sometimes conscious, but they are often not deliberate at all. Nor are signals even always about the sender of the signal.

What a person does is a signal only insofar as others infer information from it.

If I am trying to signal something but you don’t pick up on it, then this is the same as there being no signal at all.

On the other hand, if I thoughtlessly behave in a certain way and you are inferring useful information from my actions, then I have signaled something even if I didn’t intend to.

In other words, signals are often actually more about the receiver than the sender.

This means we can’t refrain from signaling. And choosing not to signal is itself a signal.

It’s silly to stigmatize signaling. Or use it as a pejorative.

Cheap talk, or cheap signals—that’s a different story.

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I love this clip. The type of behavior lampooned here by Druski is so common among young guys. Most, if not all, are completely unaware that their conduct even changes like this in settings where girls are around. Unconscious desire to display signals of formidability, playful dominance, comfort with physicality.

druski

A post shared by @druski

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Self-Deception

We have evolved to deceive ourselves. If every unconscious motive became conscious, our behavior might give away too much. Subtle cues—tone of voice, facial expressions, hesitation, etc.—could reveal what we were truly thinking, which might harm our chances of success in social and romantic life.

Our ancestors lived in a constant arms race of deception and detection. As groups became more complex, people had to detect cheaters, hide their own flaws, and maintain alliances. This pressure likely drove the evolution of self-deception—hiding the truth from ourselves so we could lie more convincingly to others. Over time, much of our social behavior moved into the unconscious so we could manage these challenges more smoothly.

Researchers note that “self-deception may have evolved as an adaptive strategy for deceiving others... self-deception can prevent the liar from emitting nonverbal cues of guilt, minimize the cognitive load associated with lying, and reduce retribution via pleas of ignorance.”

In other words, “people can persuade someone else better if they believe what they are saying, as opposed to knowingly lying. Self-deception thus enables people to deceive others more effectively and convincingly.”

From The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), philosopher Adam Smith saw this clearly:

“This self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life. If we saw ourselves in the light in which others see us, or in which they would see us if they knew all, a reformation would generally be unavoidable. We could not otherwise endure the sight.”

Smith continues with a striking image:

“He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. Rather than see our own behaviour under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavour to exasperate anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us; we endeavour by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments: we even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose, and thus persevere in injustice, merely because we once were unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so.”

Smith’s words capture why self-deception is so hard to overcome: it shields us from painful truths, even at the cost of keeping us stuck in destructive patterns.

The psychologist William von Hippel observes that “self-deception plays a role in persuasion. Nobody likes being manipulated, but self-deception allows you to achieve your manipulative goals...by acting in ways that benefit yourself while truly believing that your actions are in the service of others.”

This aligns with Robert Trivers’ influential theory of self-deception. Trivers argued that the best way to deceive others about our intentions is to deceive ourselves first. If you know that your motives are selfish, your body language, tone of voice, or hesitation may give you away. But if you genuinely believe that your actions are noble, you become a much more convincing actor.

Randolph Nesse, an evolutionary psychiatrist, adds another layer to this idea. He argues that repression—the mind’s ability to block painful or guilt-inducing thoughts—may function like an emotional painkiller. Just as endorphins dull physical pain, repression dulls mental pain. If you do something selfish, like mocking someone to knock them down a peg, repression can help you see your action as virtuous—perhaps as “teaching them a valuable lesson.”

This raises a question: Is self-knowledge always good for us? I think of it as a J-shaped curve. At the bottom left of the curve, total obliviousness allows you to act effectively on instinct, just as most humans and other animals do. As you gain partial awareness of your hidden motives, you can become hesitant and self-conscious, which can actually make you less effective. But if you keep learning and integrating this knowledge, you eventually reach a point of mastery where you act instinctively again, but with sharper insight and control.

Martial arts training is a good analogy. At first, acting on pure instinct can make you a capable, if unrefined, fighter. After a few weeks of training, you may overthink every move and perform worse. But after thousands of hours of practice, your instincts are retrained. You stop second-guessing yourself and act with natural, fluid precision.

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The Unconscious and Creativity

Bertrand Russell in The Conquest of Happiness (1930):

“My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. Most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying deliberately, and in this way the unconscious can be led to do a lot of useful work. I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity--the greatest intensity of which I am capable-for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered this technique, I used to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits.”

Likewise, from the classic 1986 talk “You and Your Research,” by the mathematician Richard Hamming:

“Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime…I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this…Everybody who has studied creativity is driven finally to saying, ‘creativity comes out of your subconscious.’ Somehow, suddenly, there it is. It just appears. Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you're aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer. For those who don't get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn't produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don't let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.”

From John Cleese’s book Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide (2020):

“And then I started becoming aware of something else that was interesting. And very odd, too. If I wrote a sketch by myself in the evening, I’d often get stuck, and would sit there at my little desk, cudgeling my brains. Eventually I’d give up and go to bed. And in the morning, I’d wake up and make myself a cup of coffee, and then I’d drift over to the desk and sit at it, and, almost immediately, the solution to the problem I’d been wrestling with the previous evening…became quite obvious to me! So obvious that I couldn’t really understand why I hadn’t spotted it the night before. But I hadn’t. This is how I began to discover that, if I put the work in before going to bed, I often had a little creative idea overnight, which fixed whatever problem it was that I was trying to deal with. It was like a gift, a reward for all my wrestling with the puzzle. I began to think to myself, ‘It can only be that while I’m asleep, my mind goes on working at the problem so that it can give me the answer in the morning.’”

Your unconscious spits out material related to whatever you put in. I learned this while writing Troubled, which consumed my life for the better part of four years. Multiple people have told me how the ending stayed with them long after finishing the book. That concluding anecdote only came to me because the book was all I thought about. Your unconscious can produce profound insights seemingly from nowhere. Akin to gifts from the divine. But if you spend your days engaged in Twitter arguments, your mind will generate clever dunks during your walks; read news and current events, and your unconscious will cloud your inner life with gloom and pessimism. Concentrate fully on a project or a piece of art, though, and ideas will come to you. The more mindless external stimuli and meaningless minutiae you absorb, the more mental clutter will block your creativity. If you want those gifts, if you want your unconscious to deliver creative and insightful outputs, you have to protect its inputs.

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The truth is, we do not have direct access to many of the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and motives that guide us. Because so much of our mental life is hidden, we often make up explanations for our behavior—stories that feel true but are often wrong.

Take envy as an example. Envy can operate unconsciously. If you find yourself feeling irritated when someone announces they have published a book, launched a business, or achieved a major milestone, that reaction might be your unconscious sending you a message: you want something similar for yourself.

The unconscious directs us even when we are not fully aware of it. But unlike other animals, humans have the ability to bring some of this hidden material into the light. We can explore our inner motives, not to erase them, but to better understand them. This understanding gives us a degree of freedom: we can act with greater clarity rather than as passive puppets of impulses we cannot explain.

Carl Jung put it this way in The Development of Personality:

"Actions are to be judged more by their results than by their conscious motives...the importance of conscious thinking for action is boundlessly overestimated...the criterion for the psychology of the act is not the conscious motive, but the result of the act."

Jung’s insight reminds us that our explanations for why we do what we do may matter less than the outcomes of our actions—and that much of what drives us lies outside conscious awareness.

The unconscious drives much of human life. It shapes our desires, our emotions, and even our moral and political views, often without our awareness. Our instincts and hidden motives were sculpted by evolution to solve problems long before conscious thought emerged. They help us survive, find mates, form alliances, and protect our status.

But the same forces that guide us can also mislead us. We deceive ourselves to appear more convincing to others. We feel emotions we do not fully understand, and we invent explanations that are often wrong. This is the paradox of being human: we are at once thinkers and instinct-followers, rational planners and unconscious strategists.

The task, then, is not to neglect the unconscious or to drag every hidden motive into the open. Instead, it is to cultivate some awareness. The more we can understand these forces, the more freedom we have to choose our actions deliberately rather than be ruled by them. What matters is not just our intentions but the results of what we do.