Many students take their first psychology class because they want to learn more about themselves and their loved ones. What better way to find out what makes people tick than to learn about psychology, probably diving into Freud and all sorts of interesting psychopathologies? But many of these same students are surprised to learn that modern psychology is not what they thought it was. An introductory-level course is about the scientific study of perception, cognition, social influence, development, and neuroscience, with nary a mention of how people come to know themselves better.

That's not to say that learning about such research is irrelevant to knowing what makes people tick. Discovering the principles of social psychology, for example, helps people understand their susceptibility to social influence, and learning the principles of cognitive psychology helps people understand the conditions under which they learn and retain new information. But there are unlikely to be units on how people come to know themselves, the value of such knowledge, and how accurate it is likely to be.

At least that's the way it used to be. If I were to point to my most important scientific contribution, it would be helping to bring the study of self-knowledge back into the mainstream of psychological research. Although there might not be specific units on self-knowledge in an introductory-level course, this topic has become a vibrant area of research in many areas of psychology.

How did this come about? The first step was showing that there is a lot that people don't know about themselves. When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, my graduate mentor, Richard Nisbett, and I published a paper arguing that a lot of what goes on in our minds happens outside of conscious awareness – not necessarily because we feel threatened by certain thoughts and feelings, as Freud argued, but because that's the way our minds are built. Human beings have a vast adaptive unconscious (as I came to call it) that allows them to process information about the world quickly and efficiently. And this is a very good thing, because it would impossible to rely solely on conscious thinking when going about our daily lives.