Psychoanalysis has known for 100 years that our conscious minds aren't in charge most of the time, and writers and grandmothers have known it forever. Indeed, we humans flatter ourselves when we imagine that they are.
For one example, Overcoming Bias discusses how social cues guide our decision making beneath our conscious awareness:
...the MIT group has identified a handful of common social signals that predict the outcomes of sales pitches, the success of bluffing in poker, even subjective judgements of trust. These signals include the `activity level', effectively the fraction of time the person speaks; their `engagement' or how much a person drives the conversation; and `mirroring', which occurs when one participant subconsciously copies another's prosody and gesture. ...
Humans lived in social groups long before language evolved, and the language function presumably exists on top of a more archaic brain system for non-linguistic social signalling. ... Apes, chimpanzees and other primates - our close evolutionary cousins - lack anything like our facility for language, yet still lead sophisticated social lives through displays of power, meaningful noises and facial expressions.
The post correctly concludes:
Our conscious minds are more PR folks than CEOs of our total minds. We are much better at explaining than predicting ourselves. So the first step to wisdom is to realize how little we know about why we do what we do, or why we think what we think.
