The modern unconscious

Psychology, as a scientific enterprise, began by using the simplest method of all: self‐reports. To study the nature of conscious experiences, just ask people about those experiences. But this soon ran into a problem. The methods used to study conscious thought were unreliable: one subject's introspection about a sensory experience was not the same as another subject's. Fed up with this lack of replicability, the scientific establishment in the form of J. Watson1 threw out the study of the conscious mind as unscientific. Instead, he said, the task of psychology should be to manipulate the external stimulus environment and objectively measure the subject's responses, without recourse to any internal “black box” of mental activity