The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives

by Shankar Vedantam

  I might as well admit something: You will never see the working of your hidden brain this way. The disbelief you may feel when you hear that your everyday actions are routinely influenced by things outside your conscious awareness cannot be erased by any amount of evidence. No matter how much you learn about the hidden brain, you will never feel it manipulating you. No Keanu Reeves can help you. You are permanently stuck inside this matrix, because that is the way your brain is designed. To become otherwise does not mean liberation. It is to become something other than fully human.

  Like you, I am stuck inside the matrix. I feel I have reasons for the things I do. I am certain about the conclusions I reach. Like you, I am offended if anyone tells me that I do not know my own mind. And like you, I dismiss as absurd the idea that even my perceptions—my basic abilities to see and hear—are regularly swayed by the machinations of my hidden brain. In the course of reporting and of writing this book, I have learned that all those things are true. But they still don’t feel true.

  When a magician performs an illusion, people strain to see through the deception. Implicit in this effort is the belief that illusions are always out there. You enjoy a magic show because illusions are supposed to be different from the stuff of reality. But what if they aren’t? What if we are being constantly fooled, tricked, and hoodwinked—not by some actor dressed in a cape but by our own brain? And which is the more successful illusion, the one that ends with a bow and applause, or the one that feels so real we never stop to think about it?

  The shift in understanding about human behavior has been quiet, but its implications are seismic. Nearly all our social, political, and economic institutions are based on an assumption of how human beings behave that is at best incomplete and at worst fundamentally wrong. We see evidence for this all the time in the ways our institutions, governments, and economic systems fail us; in the endlessly recursive conflicts that nations and peoples have with one another; in the most dreadful moral disasters that humans have perpetrated on one another—or that humans have ignored. Our incomplete understanding of human behavior causes us to make errors in our personal lives, in the way we choose partners and the way we behave as consumers, and in the way we respond to politicians and to warnings of disaster. These errors pervade the criminal justice system and they poison the workplace. The mistakes are so fundamental to the way we think about the world that we have enshrined them in international treaties and in constitutions.

  Our vulnerability to unconscious manipulation explains how a few schemers can hold entire political systems hostage. It explains failures of national and global resolve in dealing with challenges as serious as climate change. It explains tragedies such as genocide that seem aberrational each time they occur but that repeat themselves with monotonous regularity. Evidence for the hidden brain is really all around us, hidden in plain sight. The clues pervade our lives, the choices we make, our moral judgments. Our blindness to bias seems willful—until you remember that the central feature of unconscious bias is that it is unconscious.

  The new understanding of human behavior constitutes a revolution no less intriguing—and perhaps more powerful—than the discovery that Newton’s laws of motion collapse at the level of quantum mechanics, or that the sun really does not revolve around the earth, or that human beings appeared on earth as the result of a logical but impersonal force called natural selection. Just as it once seemed inconceivable that an object can be in two places at the same time, or that the movement of the sun across the sky is an illusion caused by the earth rotating in the opposite direction, or that whales and cows are distant cousins, so also it seems inconceivable that much of our lives takes place outside the boundaries of our own awareness. The extraordinary new discoveries about the hidden world in our heads feel personal, moreover, in a way those other fantastic conclusions do not. If you now feel as I once did when I first began learning about these ideas, you might even be a little offended that anyone would say you have a very limited understanding of what is happening in your own head, that the feeling of “common sense” we all experience is an illusion no less fake—and far more spectacular—than the sun’s daily journey across the sky.

  The ideas in this book are organized into concentric circles, with the early chapters detailing small and sometimes humorous examples of the hidden brain at work, and later chapters tackling bigger issues. Chapter 2 shows the hidden brain at work in four diverse settings—at an office beverage station in England, on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, at a restaurant in the Netherlands, and in a scientific laboratory in Philadelphia. Chapter 3 demonstrates how the hidden brain influences everything from table manners to the unwritten rules of flirting—and the extraordinary consequences that breakdowns in the hidden brain can have on our lives. Chapter 4 explores how the hidden brain produces stereotypes in the minds of small children, and the continuing effects such stereotypes have on adult behavior and relationships. Chapter 5 explores the world of unconscious sexism. Chapters 6 and 7 explore the unconscious influence that groups wield in highly charged situations. Chapter 6 is about the effects that large groups wield over people during disasters, and Chapter 7 is about the power that small groups have in shaping extreme behavior such as suicide terrorism. Chapter 8 looks at the effects of unconscious prejudice in the criminal justice system, and Chapter 9 examines the role of the hidden brain in politics. Chapter 10 explores how unconscious factors influence our perceptions of risk and our moral judgment, and affect policies that touch the lives of millions.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Ubiquitous Shadow

  The Hidden Brain at Work and Play

  Unconscious bias reaches into every corner of your life. At any given time, many dimensions of your hidden brain are at work. Some cooperate with one another; others clash. What is common to all the actions of the hidden brain is the modesty with which it works. Like an attentive assistant that knows you better than you know yourself, the hidden brain anticipates your needs but claims no credit for laying out your shirt, choosing your tie, or making your coffee. That is a wonderful convenience when tasks are mundane and heuristics are applied appropriately. It’s when things go wrong, when heuristics are applied in error, or when the hidden brain makes an association that doesn’t quite work, that we find ourselves asking, “What was I doing?” or “What was I thinking?” It happens to all of us—there are times when our actions are so at odds with our conscious beliefs and intentions that we don’t quite know why we laughed aloud when someone made a mean-spirited joke, or why we lashed out in anger at someone we love. We can’t explain why we set the alarm to go off at six P.M. instead of six A.M., or why we hit the gas pedal when we meant to hit the brake. We don’t know why we choked during a big test or were tongue-tied when it came to standing up for ourselves in a dispute. Why didn’t I say something? we wonder afterward. Why did I do that? How could I have been so foolish?

  This chapter aims to show how widely the effects of unconscious bias touch our everyday lives. The examples that follow are drawn from disparate domains, and show the hidden brain at work in a private setting, a professional setting, a social setting, and an intimate setting.

  The Spotlight Effect

  The beverage station was located in a nondescript office in Newcastle in northeastern England. It was no different from thousands of other office stations where tea, coffee, and milk were dispensed using an honor system. A sheet of paper was posted on a cupboard door at eye level. Under the banner of a small photograph, the notice specified the cost of tea (thirty pence), coffee (fifty pence), and milk (ten pence). People assembled their beverages and dropped money in an honor box. An office maven sent out emails every six months or so, reminding people to pay for their beverages. But like many other office stations, this one was located in a spot where people could not be observed. If they were honest and paid for their tea and coffee, no one gave them a pat on the back. If they did not pay, no one caught them.

  The setup had been in place
for several years. Recently, without the knowledge of the several dozen people who used the beverage station, a researcher named Melissa Bateson started tracking how much milk was dispensed each week. She also counted the money in the honor box. She did both things for ten weeks.

  You would think the money collected would be roughly the same from week to week, especially if the office workers drank the same amount of tea and coffee. In the first and eighth week, in late January and mid-March, people drank the same amount of milk. But the honor box in the first week held £8.25. In the eighth week, it held £1.17—seven times less. Did people decide to be more honest at the start? No, employees did not know Bateson was studying their honesty. Besides, the money collected in the ninth week, in late March, was more than double the amount collected in the second week of the experiment, in early February. During half the study—weeks one, three, five, seven, and nine—Bateson collected three times as much as she did during weeks two, four, six, eight, and ten. What was different about the odd-numbered weeks?

  Each week, Bateson replaced the notice on the cupboard that reminded people to pay for their drinks. The text detailing the prices of coffee, tea, and milk was identical, but she changed the small decorative picture at the top of the notice. For the five odd-numbered weeks, Bateson downloaded photos from the Internet showing different pairs of watching eyes. Honesty levels soared. During even-numbered weeks, she printed pictures of different flowers—daisies, marigolds, roses. Honesty plummeted.

  Office workers were later quizzed about the notice. People shook their heads, mystified. No one had noticed the photo was different from week to week. Yet this subtle change produced a giant effect on honesty. When Bateson subtly communicated that people were being watched—even if the eyes were only a grainy image downloaded from the Internet—people were far more honest than when they poured their coffee in the company of marigolds.

  You could draw a small lesson and a large lesson from this experiment. The small lesson is that a picture showing a pair of eyes with a penetrating gaze seems to make people more honest in their private actions than a picture showing daisies. The big lesson is that people are powerfully influenced by things that they never consciously register. The workers did not notice the photographs, yet they were influenced by them. (See Figure 1.)

  Why did people fail to notice that marigolds had been replaced by a photo showing a pair of eyes? Think about it this way: Your attention is like a spotlight that can illuminate anything you choose to focus on. But the spotlight can’t illuminate everything at the same time. If you are thinking about work or an office conversation, you might not notice that the photograph on the wall shows a pair of eyes or a flower. If you remember to pay attention to the decor, you don’t notice it is bright outside—and people have been shown to give larger tips, make more aggressive investments, and generally report more optimism about their lives and romantic relationships when it is bright and sunny, compared to when it is overcast.

  In fact, if you were to make a detailed inventory of everything you could possibly focus on at any given moment, the list would run to dozens of pages. There are smells and tastes; ideas, moods, and tones of voice. Focusing on any one thing is trivial; focusing on everything at the same time is impossible. If you really did sit down to make that inventory, you would see that at any given moment, you are not aware of most of the cues around you. Right now, for example, you are reading and thinking about the words on this page. But until I remind you about it, you are not paying attention to the texture of the book jacket, or whether the temperature is right. You can, of course, refocus the beam of your attention on anything, but doing so means something else will disappear from the spotlight. So as the spotlight of your conscious attention moves to other things, your hidden brain remains vigilant to your peripheral vision. In situations that do not require conscious intervention, the hidden brain simply responds to what it sees without informing you about what it has done. When it comes to a notice posted on a cupboard, the hidden brain notices the small picture on the notice has changed from week to week. Since the hidden brain specializes in rapid analyses and lacks the sophistication to distinguish between a photograph and an actual pair of eyes, it subtly prompts you to behave as if you were really being watched.

  Figure 1. Pounds paid per liter of milk consumed as a function of week and image type.

  What happens to things that are outside the spotlight of our conscious attention? They don’t vanish altogether, because this would be dangerous. It would be irritating to be reminded about your peripheral vision all the time, because much of the time nothing important is happening there, but you want to be notified about important things.

  The Irresistible Heuristic

  A few thousand miles from Newcastle, another experiment was under way at the same time Melissa Bateson was tracking her beverage station. Economists have long puzzled over how investors deal with new entrants to the stock market. There is no mystery when it comes to a well-known company such as Google going public; investors know a lot about such companies. But in many cases, new stocks are volatile because investors are still learning about companies. Rumors about internal company developments and earnings can send prices spiraling upward or can trigger a rush for the exit. Mathematicians have come up with complicated formulas to track changes, and have developed algorithms to predict minute decimal shifts in share prices. When billions of dollars of stock are traded each day, small differences mean enormous profits and losses.

  Psychologists Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer recently decided to try their hand at this game. Did they study the complexities of the stock exchange, the underlying strength of companies, and oil futures? No, no, and no. Did they have vast encyclopedic knowledge of where the economy was headed? Nope. Did they have insider information? Decidedly not. The psychologists looked at whether companies had names that were pronounceable or names that were unpronounceable. They presented a group of volunteers with a series of made-up company names that would wrap your tongue in knots—Aegeadux and Xagibdan, Mextskry and Beaulieaux—as well as a set of company names that were easy to pronounce, such as Jillman and Clearman, Barnings and Tanley. If the companies Queown and Ulymnius were like complex paintings from Vincent van Gogh’s dark period, full of dark skies and menacing colors, the companies Adderley and Deerbond were like paintings brought home from school by happy five-year-olds, a yellow sun with a smiley face peering down on a house with a puff of smoke coming out the chimney. Alter and Oppenheimer found that without their awareness, volunteers were influenced by the names of companies they studied. They tended to overvalue companies with easy names and undervalue companies with difficult names.

  But surely names would not affect how companies fared on the real stock market? What sane investor would base investment decisions on names? Alter and Oppenheimer tracked ten stocks with easy-to-pronounce names and ten stocks with hard-to-pronounce names on the New York Stock Exchange. They found that companies with easy-to-pronounce names outperformed companies with hard-to-pronounce names by 11.2 percent on their very first day of trading. After six months, the difference was more than 27 percent. After a year, it was more than 33 percent. If you’d put a million dollars into the stocks with easy names and a million dollars into the stocks with hard names, the group with easy names would have outperformed the group with difficult names by $330,000.

  It got better (or worse, depending on your point of view). Instead of looking at names, Alter and Oppenheimer looked at companies’ ticker symbols. A review of share prices on the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange showed that companies with easy-to-pronounce stock ticker codes (such as KAR) outperformed companies with hard-to-pronounce ticker codes (such as RDO) by 8.5 percent on their first day of trading and by more than 2 percent after one year of trading. Remember the mathematicians who track the market? They get excited by differences in decimal points. Two percentage points is big money.

  Alter and Oppenheimer found the pronounceabili
ty effect went away with time. Once investors learn about the companies, they start basing decisions on more important things than names. Pronounceability matters only until investors develop proficiency in the skills that really matter. But why would investors base their initial decisions on something as trivial as a name? Unlike with the office workers in Newcastle, you don’t have to ask whether investors were aware that they were being influenced by the names of companies. They were not. If they’d known about the bias, they would have compensated for it, and the difference in stock performance would have vanished. Like the beverage drinkers in Newcastle, the investors that Alter and Oppenheimer studied felt they were making deliberate choices. Without their awareness, however, their decisions were swayed. Their hidden brains associated the names of companies that were easy to pronounce with a sense of comfort, and the names of companies that were difficult to pronounce with a sense of discomfort. Comfort is linked to familiarity and safety, which is why investors chose some stocks and drove up the prices. Discomfort is associated with risk and unfamiliarity, which is why investors avoided those stocks and undervalued them. Applying heuristics—shortcuts linking comfort with safety and discomfort with risk—to situations for which they have not been designed is a recipe for trouble.

  The Three-Legged Race

  I recently typed “In de Cramer 142 Heerlen, 6412PM” into Google Earth. I saw the planet on my screen slowly spin. The Atlantic Ocean passed by in half a second, England was a blip, the English Channel a droplet of water on the side of my glass. Cities and local landmarks emerged, and I zoomed in on trees, roads, and cars in the town of Heerlen in the Netherlands.