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One of Gladwell’s most challenging and provocative arguments concerns the role of free will in decision-making. Most people believe that human beings are free to choose what to do: they use their reason, experience, and emotion to reach a conscious choice. The only times when a human wouldn’t be acting freely would be if they were being physically forced or threatened, or if their mind were brainwashed. Blink challenges this common-sense belief by introducing the concept of the adaptive unconscious.

The adaptive unconscious undermines our traditional understanding of free will by showing that human behavior is often the product of unconscious urges and unpredictable mental associations. According to Blink, it is possible for a human to act a certain way without knowing why. For instance, subjects in one psychological experiment read a paragraph that contained numerous “trigger words”—i.e., words that evoked strong mental associations and inspired specific forms of behavior. Afterwards, the subjects walked out of the experiment more slowly than they’d walked into it: the trigger words influenced them to slow down their movements unconsciously.
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Similarly, Blink shows that it’s possible for humans to consciously choose to act a certain way, and yet behave differently due to the interference of the adaptive unconscious. During a series of psychological experiments, subjects exhibited racist behavior after being exposed to racist images and signs. Although the subjects weren’t overtly racist people, and even condemned racism, they were triggered to exhibit racist behavior: the images influenced their unconscious minds. In these psychological experiments, the subjects did not, in an ordinary sense, choose to walk more slowly or exhibit racist behavior—indeed, some of the subjects consciously chose to do the opposite. Instead, their unconscious minds influenced their behavior. The subjects’ actions suggest that the common understanding of free will is too simplistic—humans do not simply decide what to do; the adaptive unconscious “nudges” them in different directions.

Gladwell’s interpretation of free will might strike some people as frightening or disconcerting, since it suggests that humans are, in some ways, slaves to their own unconscious minds.