This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
From high school football coaches to career counselors, professional advice givers often have a simple mantra.
Look within.
You have the answers you've been searching for, ask yourself the important questions, and then listen to your inner voice.
Such advice is especially common in countries with individualistic cultures such as the United States.
We believe our answers have to come from within because each of us is a unique individual on our own special journey, we celebrate the idea of marching to our own drummer.
We disparage people who follow the herd.
In recent years, however, a variety of psychological research experiments have raised serious questions about how well we know ourselves.
Some of these experiments raise profound questions about how well we can know ourselves.
This is the second installment of our annual series, U 2.0, where we try to answer some of life's most profound questions with wisdom and compassion.
Last week, we considered how we can take advantage of our capacity for rumination.
This week on hidden brain, we ask, is the best path forward to look within or without?
Every day throughout our lives, we have.
To make decisions, big and small.
We have to decide what to eat, whom to hang out with, when to call it quits on a job that's gone sour.
We have a simple way to confront these choices.
We ask ourselves what we should do.
This process is so routine and automatic that most of us never stop to ask, is there a better way?
At the University of Virginia, psychologist Tim Wilson thinks long and hard about stuff most of us don't think much about.