Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do

Financial Times: One of the Best Books of 2017
Business Insider: One of the Best Science Books of 2017

Dr. John Bargh, the world’s leading expert on the unconscious mind, presents a groundbreaking book, twenty years in the making, which gives us an entirely new understanding of the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior.

For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has been responsible for the revolutionary research into the unconscious mind, research that informed bestsellers like Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow. Now, in what Dr. John Gottman said “will be the most important and exciting book in psychology that has been written in the past twenty years,” Dr. Bargh takes us on an entertaining and enlightening tour of the forces that affect everyday behavior while transforming our understanding of ourselves in profound ways.

Telling personal anecdotes with infectious enthusiasm and disclosing startling and delightful discoveries, Dr. Bargh takes the reader into his labs at New York University and Yale where he and his colleagues have discovered how the unconscious guides our behavior, goals, and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction. He reveals what science now knows about the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind in who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more. Because the unconscious works in ways we are completely unaware of, Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as tricks to help you remember to-do items, shop smarter, and sleep better.

Destined to be a bestseller, Before You Know It is an intimate introduction to a fabulous world only recently discovered, the world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to knowing yourself and unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

John Bargh, PhD, is an award-winning social psychologist and the world’s leading expert on the unconscious mind. His research has appeared in over 190 publications. He is currently the James Rowland Angell Professor of Psychology at Yale University and director of the ACME (Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation) laboratory. Before You Know It is his first book.