Know Thyself - The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge - The Unconscious

Overview

A challenging but fascinating topic on the way to achieving self-knowledge is the unconscious. For well over a century, psychologists, philosophers, and many others have posited a level of mentality that is not immediately open to introspection; some would even say that certain unconscious elements cannot be known through introspection.

This Know Thyself - The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge - The Unconscious offered by Coursera was created by a partnership between The University of Edinburgh and Humility & Conviction and Public Life Project, an engaged research project  based at the University of Connecticut and funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

What you will learn

• Gain an appreciation of the relation of methods of learning about oneself that do not depend on introspection.

• Become familiar with contemporary research in experimental social psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience into the emotions and the unconscious.

• Understand the role of affect in decision making, and self-deception.

• Be able to identify and analyse unconscious mechanisms motivating own and other people's actions.