If I were to show you a photo of a white man and ask you to imagine what the man’s spouse looks like, your conscious brain would tell you the man could be married to a white woman or a black woman, a Latina or an Asian. He might be married to another man; he might be single. Your hidden brain, on the other hand, doesn’t care about the full range of possibilities. When you ask the question, the answer pops right out: The white man is going to be married to a white woman. It doesn’t matter to the hidden brain that the rule of thumb is sometimes wrong. The point is that it is usually right, and the answer can be produced at lightning speed. This is why interracial couples in the United States—even in this late day and age—attract second glances.
When we see a man kissing another man, the preconceived associations in the hidden brain tell most Americans that this is not what men do. Of course, we can quickly shush our hidden brain and act blasé. But when we are juggling many things, when we are under pressure, or when we are simply busy doing something else, it becomes difficult to suppress the automatic associations of the hidden brain. At such times, the hidden brain’s rapid conclusions about the world become especially powerful. If we are asked to make a judgment about these men in some other context—their job performance, for example—we may get the feeling they are not quite right for the job without knowing how we leaped to that conclusion.
When I say “we” have automatic biases about gay people, I really do mean everyone—straight people and gay people. Just as black children tend to have positive associations with white faces rather than with black faces, gay people can unconsciously harbor the same associations as straight people. This should not be cause for surprise: Gays usually see many more straight families than gay families in real life, on TV, and in books. If the hidden brain learns through repetition, why would the unconscious associations of gay people be much different from the unconscious associations of straight people?
The picture painted by this work stands in sharp contrast to the conventional way many people think about prejudice. Bias among toddlers is not triggered by a steady diet of hostile messages, or indoctrination by bigoted parents and teachers. It reflects instead that we really have two systems of learning within our heads, that these two systems develop more or less independently, and that we pay almost no attention to one of them. Our society resolutely believes the conscious mind is all that matters, and so all our educational and legal efforts focus on it. We have schools with multicultural messages and rainbow flags. We have organizational experts who preach the importance of sensitivity and understanding. We have laws to punish hate crimes. Many of our interventions are based on the belief that prejudice involves conscious intention or hostility, that it is largely the result of ignorance, and that education is the best way to overcome it. As you can see from Frances Aboud’s work, each of these beliefs is wrong in a fundamental way. The children at Harold Napper Elementary were not being taught by their teachers that whites were superior to blacks; all the efforts at the school were trying to communicate tolerance, not prejudice. Separate from what the children were learning consciously, however, they were unconsciously learning something else altogether.
What is disturbing to me about Aboud’s work among the very young is not that children are biased. It is that pervasive bias can occur without anyone—parents, teachers, or the children themselves—wanting it to happen. Everyone involved, in fact, can desperately want the children to reach the opposite beliefs, and the children will still associate positive adjectives with white faces and negative adjectives with black faces. They will misremember the heroics of a little black boy called Zachariah as the heroics of his white friends. And in time, as I will show, children carry these hidden beliefs into adulthood.
Some sixty-five million years ago a giant asteroid hurtled into Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The geological record suggests that the impact triggered dust storms and tsunamis that wiped out many species, including the dinosaurs. The rate of extinction was so dramatic that scientists today call the asteroid impact an extinction event.
Interracial friendships between schoolchildren in America suffer an extinction event sometime in middle school. Studies show that by the time kids are in the seventh grade, they have far fewer interracial friendships than they did in the fourth grade. Declines in interracial friendships have also been found in many other countries. This isn’t just something that happens to white and black children in the United States—the same phenomenon has been documented among Dutch, South Asian, and Turkish children in countries as varied as Britain, the Netherlands, and Canada. Like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, something seems to happen in middle school that causes children to form in-groups and become less likely to form close friendships with children from other backgrounds. This sets the stage for friendships that teenagers develop in high school and beyond.
The research findings about childhood friendships is especially depressing because friendship is a magic key to understanding people from other backgrounds. Frances Aboud has found that children who have a close friend from another race—where the children offer each other emotional security, trust, and loyalty—have more positive attitudes toward the other race in general. And children who lack such close friendships have more negative attitudes toward the other race.
One of the puzzling things about the extinction event in interracial friendships is that it occurs at precisely the time when children are getting beyond simplistic biases. Aboud and others have found that by the time children are seven or eight or nine, they are able to assign both positive and negative adjectives to people of all races. When the hidden brains of these children come up with simplistic and stereotypical conclusions, their conscious brains are now mature enough to overrule those conclusions. In fact, when Aboud had children who were at different stages of emotional maturity discuss racial issues with each other, she found that more mature children invariably debunked the views of children who were still thinking at a preschool level. When a prejudiced child was placed in conversation with someone more mature, the more mature child, with the more tolerant views, invariably changed the views of his partner—because mindless heuristics invariably yield to conscious reasoning. Here is one illustrative exchange between two children that Aboud studied:
GA: Lots of black people, you can’t trust them. Like, I had a black friend and he was nice to me, but he’s not really nice because he—
MP: Does that mean, though, that black people are always gonna be bad?
GA: No, not always.
MP: Right.
GA: But some—
MP: Only some. Same for whites, same for Chinese.
If racism among very small children is largely the result of the conscious brain not being mature enough to overrule the broad generalizations of the hidden brain, why would interracial friendships suffer an extinction event at precisely the point when most children develop the maturity to see that people from all groups have positive and negative qualities? Aboud decided to study the question among two hundred forty black and white students at Montréal’s Westmount Park elementary school, a multiracial school featuring large numbers of white, Caribbean black, Southeast Asian, and South Asian students. Her plan was simple: She interviewed students in the fall and again in the spring of a single academic school year and asked the children about their friends. If John reported Dick was his best friend, Aboud checked with Dick to make sure he said John was his best friend, too. Aboud and her colleagues also asked other students to describe whether John and Dick spent time together, and by comparing these responses, she definitively established which pairs of students were mutual friends and mutual best friends. In the spring, Aboud and her colleagues repeated the process. By comparing the results, Aboud minutely documented the evolution of same-race and interracial friendships over a six-month period.
The changing nature of these friendships was revealing. Nine- and ten-year-old children, as you might imagine, add, drop, and change friends quite often. If you were t
o look at one set of twenty fifth graders, for example, Aboud found about half had a friend belonging to another race. By the second set of interviews, only two of these friendships were still intact. But the same thing was happening with friends belonging to the same race. Perhaps eighteen of twenty students had a best friend belonging to the same race during the first set of interviews, and only ten of these friendships endured over the six-month period. Children were adding new friends at a furious clip, too. But there was a subtle difference in the way they added and dropped friends—different-race friends were slightly more likely than same-race friends to get dropped, and new interracial friendships were slightly less likely to be formed. The difference would not have been obvious to a casual observer. It might not have been obvious even to parents, because the underlying pattern was hidden in a lot of “noise”—a cycle of rapidly changing friendships. But the results were hardly subtle. Whereas the youngest children in Aboud’s group had roughly the same number of same-race and different-race friends, the oldest children in her group had one and a half times as many same-race friends as different-race friends. A parent who saw an encouraging racial variety at their child’s seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-year birthday party might notice a monochromatic racial makeup at their twelfth or thirteenth birthday party and wonder how that happened.
When the asteroid hit the Yucatán Peninsula sixty-five million years ago, it would have instantly killed most terrestrial creatures in the immediate area. But much of the damage to life would have come in the weeks and months that followed. As plant life was choked off by hovering dust clouds, the devastation would have traveled rapidly up the food chain. If you were a dinosaur in what is now Montana, life around you might have declined over several years, not in a Hollywood-style explosion.
But slow, steady declines in habitat and ecosystems can be just as deadly as sudden cataclysms. Many of the hidden brain’s most powerful effects similarly involve subtle changes that assume gigantic proportions because they influence us steadily over time.
If you were to intercede in a child’s life, for example, in order to encourage the child to form more interracial friendships, you would hardly know where to begin. Clearly no individual friendship tells you anything very meaningful; if the vast majority of interracial friendships are lost within a short period of time, so also are the vast majority of same-race friendships. The apartheid model simply does not apply—it is not as if children are being forced apart and taught to hate one another. The hidden brain is insidious not because it whacks us on the back of the head but because it places the tiniest of fingers on our inner scales. By the time children are in the seventh grade, those tiny differences leave them with far fewer different-race friends than they had in grade four.
This phenomenon tells me that the way we usually think about prejudice is deeply problematic. In 2007, for example, the international news media was drawn like honeybees to the story of the Jena Six—a racial conflict in a Louisiana town that inflamed national passions when white students hung nooses from trees to send a threatening message to black kids. Commentators saw this as a disturbing sign of toxic racial polarization among kids in small-town Jena. The events in Jena were troubling, but they pale in comparison with the tectonic shifts that happen every day in America’s middle schools—earthquakes that go unnoticed. By the time American children are in high school, most are firmly entrenched within their own racial groups; many have forever lost the magic keys of friendship that might have allowed them to understand what it is like to be a person from another race. Nooses hung from trees make for sensational coverage, but they are merely the end product of a process more subtle and more sinister.
Our fascination with cases such as the Jena Six reflects our bias for stories with easy villains and heroes. When we look for villains in the larger story of prejudice among children, we come up short. What is disturbing to me about the extinction event in interracial friendships among children is that, as with the preschoolers Aboud studied, it can occur without anyone explicitly wanting it to happen.
The extinction event in childhood friendships turns out to be a natural outgrowth of children’s development. Around the time kids are seven or eight, they start to seek out memberships in groups as a way to cement a sense of their own identity. Developing these identities is both normal and important. Racial identity is only one of the many dimensions children gravitate toward. They also start to identify with sports teams, with cultures, and with nations. Researchers in England once had a group of six- to seven-year-old children and a group of ten- to eleven-year-old children think about English people who said nice things about the German soccer team ahead of the 2002 World Cup soccer championship. It will not surprise you to learn that the English children generally disliked people who said nice things about the German team. What is interesting and instructive, however, is that the older children were far more likely than the younger children to say that they would exclude “traitors” from their groups. For the youngest kids, people with contrarian ideas were not defined by their views; for the oldest kids, views about soccer defined who could be in the in-group and who had to be excluded. The extinction event that Aboud has studied among middle school children was not triggered by hostility and animosity but by the simple fact that race is one of many categories that define people, and ten- or eleven-year-olds are eager to start defining themselves.
It might be easier to understand this phenomenon if we remove the element of race from the equation. If the work by Aboud and others is correct, the same biases that children demonstrate on racial issues should show up for other dimensions of identity.
Aboud conducted another study on friendships at Montréal’s Courtland Park International School. Unlike the school with a large number of students from different races, this school had mostly white children. But it was unique in that it had a large number of children from English-speaking households and a large number of children from French-speaking households. Instruction at the school was in both English and French—at lunchtime on Wednesdays, the school switched all conversation and classroom instruction from one language to the other. The idea was to offer the children an immersive experience in two languages and two cultures.
Aboud found the same decline in friendships among English- and French-speaking children as she had with black and white children at the other school. Cross-cultural friends were more likely to get dropped and less likely to be added, leaving children from the two cultures gradually segregated, in psychological terms, even as their school did its best to physically integrate them. When Aboud asked some of the children why they dropped friends who belonged to the other culture, the children said that while they had no personal problem with cross-language friends, it made group activities difficult because there were usually other children from their own linguistic group who had a problem with an interloper. Sometimes no one would actually say anything. But conversation would come to a halt when a child from the other culture joined the group. Children would stop telling secrets midsentence. It did not take long for “interlopers” to get the message.
The fact that racial biases occur “naturally” does not mean they are inevitable. What is inevitable is that children will gravitate toward in-groups, but there is nothing to suggest that race has to be one of the dimensions children use to define themselves. If children can be encouraged to form loyalties to groups that transcend race—to a nation or a school or even a sports team—parents and educators can harness the automatic biases of the mind to drive children from different races together, rather than apart. It is fruitless to try to fight bias by telling kids that unconscious attitudes are wrong. What works is to co-opt the hidden brain in the service of tolerance.
Prejudices among children are disturbing, but it is easy to think that cognitive errors in early childhood have nothing to do with our judgments, decisions, and attitudes in later life. Thinking about bias in terms of the hidden brain, however, can provide us with what scientists call a “parsimoni
ous” explanation—a single explanatory framework that describes the nature of prejudice across the life span, from the very young to the very old. Most of us agree it would be absurd to punish five-year-old children for their biases, particularly when, as we’ve just discovered, they arrive at those biases innocently, but most of us have no problem blaming adults who display racial prejudice. Small children may not know better, but adults should. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.
So when former senator George Allen of Virginia called an Indian American “macaca” and offered him a “welcome to America” before the 2006 U.S. midterm elections, those gaffes cost Allen his seat and cost the Republicans control of the Senate—the first pebble in an avalanche that ended in the 2008 elections, where the GOP lost both houses of Congress and the White House. And when Michael Richards—the much-beloved Kramer from the television show Seinfeld—reminded a black heckler at a comedy club that uppity blacks used to be strung up with nooses, he was quickly and publicly censured for his egregious violation of social norms. The subtext of all the ritualistic breast-beating and finger-pointing on talk shows and in op-ed pages boiled down to one simple question: Shouldn’t these people have known better?
The answer to that question is yes—and no. When it comes to prejudice, there are some surprising similarities between the preschoolers that Aboud studied and the likes of George Allen. What mostly changes between the ages of five and fifty-four are not the associations of the hidden brain but the ability of the conscious mind to restrain those associations.
Researchers once conducted tests that measured the conscious and unconscious racial attitudes of six-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults. They found all three groups had similar unconscious attitudes—they were pro-white. But when the six-year-olds, ten-year-olds, and adults were asked to explicitly state their views, the ten-year-olds reported feeling less prejudiced than the six-year-olds, and the adults denied being prejudiced altogether.
The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives Page 9