Strangers to Ourselves

Timothy D. Wilson questions whether introspection is the best route to self-knowledge. He describes the adaptive unconscious that empirical psychology has uncovered: not the psychoanalyst's store of primitive drives and conflicted memories, but a set of sophisticated mental processes that size up the world, set goals and start action while conscious thought is elsewhere. When people fail to know their own feelings, potential or motives, Wilson argues, it is most often because they have built a plausible story about themselves that is out of touch with this hidden mind. Citing evidence that too much introspection can do harm, he recommends watching one's own actions and heeding what others think of oneself. It has been translated into Dutch and Japanese.

Malcolm Gladwell, speaking in 2016, called it one of the loveliest and most insightful books on social psychology he had read.