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

by Shankar Vedantam

  Aberrational things done by people in a highly visible minority group stick up in our minds more dramatically than aberrational things done by members of a majority group. The technical term for this phenomenon is an illusory correlation. If you ask people in Thailand whether Thai men or white male tourists from the United States are more likely to be child molesters, they can easily tell you that there are more American pedophiles than locals. That’s because, in Thailand, white males are a highly visible minority. Aberrational things that they do will be more memorable to Thai people than aberrational things done by locals.

  There is experimental evidence to back up what I have just told you. Researchers once divided volunteers into two groups. Both were shown a fifteen-minute excerpt of a local TV news program. In the middle of the newscast, right after a commercial break, the volunteers saw a story involving a violent crime. The story featured a photograph of a suspect. Without the volunteers’ knowledge, researchers digitally altered the complexion of the suspect so that some volunteers saw a suspect who appeared white while others saw a suspect who appeared black. Every other detail of the crime story remained identical.

  As with the welfare study, the experiment showed that viewers shown the photo of a black suspect ended up more worried about crime than those shown the photograph of a white suspect. But that was not all. Volunteers shown a white suspect did not associate criminality with whites as a whole, but volunteers shown a black suspect tended to associate criminality with blacks as a whole. (Gilens similarly found that his volunteers didn’t think that black welfare recipients were lazy; they thought blacks as a whole were lazy.) This is how illusory correlations work: When two unusual events take place simultaneously, our hidden brain subtly biases us to see the events as linked, even if they have nothing to do with each other. The consequences of this bias can be gigantic, but the underlying phenomenon is mundane and shows up in innumerable everyday contexts. If you happen to have stomach upsets on two mornings because of something you ate, and you also happen to be catching flights on each of those days, your hidden brain will bias you into believing that flights bring on stomach upsets. If the error were limited to believing that those two flights brought on a bad stomach, it would be one thing. But the bias causes you to believe that all flights bring on stomach upsets.

  How can we defend against such bias in politics? The troubling thing is that most voters—and perhaps most politicians—do not understand where their attitudes and beliefs and facts come from. At an explicit level, people may talk and think only about issues. They worry about crime, illegal immigration, and drugs. There is nothing biased about this. It is perfectly legitimate to want to see less crime, to want to see immigration laws enforced, and to want to control the abuse and trafficking of narcotics. Critics of tough immigration, drug, and crime policies would be wrong to suggest that these concerns stem entirely from racial bias. In the absence of racial bias, concerns about crime and drugs and illegal immigration would hardly disappear. But race bias prompts people to think differently about these issues, and prompts a few more people in every hundred to adopt stances that they might not have adopted otherwise. It also poisons our ability to honestly debate these issues, or even agree on basic facts. And because appeals to unconscious bias do not have to be spoken about or even thought about deliberately, the manipulation is almost completely immune to refutation. How do you refute something that ostensibly does not exist?

  “When explicit claims about race are made, they can be rebutted; but when blacks are linked with crime, welfare, or drug use only implicitly, such links are less likely to be challenged,” Gilens once wrote. “Thus, a subterranean discourse on race in U.S. society emerges, based largely on misleading images and chosen to influence voters by inciting fear or indignation. Rarely does one hear public figures make the explicit claim that irresponsible black mothers are the ‘problem’ with welfare or that violence-prone black men are the reason our streets are unsafe at night. But since they are not being made, such claims are not refuted. The public is left to draw its own conclusions, based on existing stereotypes and biased media coverage, and the conclusions drawn are exactly what one would expect.”

  A few months before the 2008 presidential elections, the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, Richard L. Trumka, told colleagues about an encounter he’d had with an old friend in his hometown of Nemacolin, Pennsylvania. The Democratic primary race between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was in high gear.

  “I ran into a woman that I had known for years—she was active in Democratic politics back when I was in grade school—back when Abe Lincoln was born,” Trumka joked at a union convention. Then he grew serious. “We got to talking, and I asked her if she’d made up her mind who she was supporting, and she said, ‘Oh, absolutely. I am voting for Hillary. There’s no way I’d ever vote for Obama.’ I said, ‘Why is that?’ She said, ‘He is a Muslim.’ I said, ‘Actually he is a Christian just like you and I, but so what if he’s a Muslim?’ Then she shook her head and said, ‘Well, he won’t wear that American flag pin on his lapel.’ I looked at my lapel and said, ‘I don’t have one, and by the way you don’t have one on, either, but come on, he wears one plenty of times. Besides, it takes more than wearing a flag pin to be patriotic.’ She said, ‘Well, I don’t trust him.’ I said, ‘Why is that?’ And she dropped her voice a bit. She said, ‘Because he is black.’ And I said, ‘Look around this town. Nemacolin’s a dying town. There’s no jobs here. Our kids are moving away because there is no future here. And here is a man, Barack Obama, who is going to fight for people like us, and you want to tell me that you won’t vote for him because of the color of his skin? Are you out of your ever-loving mind, lady?’”

  Trumka’s comments were widely circulated. Polling by unions was finding that Obama’s race was playing a role in the minds of many members. “I think race bias does play a role,” Karen Ackerman, the research director of the AFL-CIO, told me about a month before the 2008 election. “We see it among union voters and in certain demographics—retirees and veterans, older voters.”

  The Democratic pollster and political consultant Celinda Lake told me she started to worry when polls taken by white pollsters and black pollsters among rank-and-file union members in battleground states started to come back with different answers. White union members told black pollsters they were going to vote for Obama, but told white pollsters that they were going to vote against Obama. Lake feared that many people were hiding their true feelings to black pollsters so as not to appear racist, and expressing their true intentions to white pollsters. Other polls showed that while nearly three quarters of voters said they would be comfortable voting for a black man, fewer than half thought their neighbors would be comfortable doing so.

  I drove to northwestern Pennsylvania about three weeks before the 2008 election. The state had emerged as one of the major battlegrounds of the election. Polls showed Republican candidate John McCain struggling, but Democrats and Republicans agreed that if McCain was to thread the needle to victory, he would have to win Pennsylvania. If the Republican was to have any chance in Pennsylvania, he would have to win big in the suburbs and small rural and blue-collar towns such as St. Marys, which sits at the edge of Appalachia in the northwest part of the state.

  St. Marys is part of Pennsylvania’s fifth congressional district, which is so sparsely populated that it occupies nearly a quarter of the land area of the entire state. (Pennsylvania has nineteen congressional districts.) The fifth congressional district is overwhelmingly white and strongly Republican. On Brian Nosek’s national race-bias map, it scores high on racial bias. People from this district who have taken the implicit association race bias test tend to show higher levels of racial bias than about 75 percent of the congressional districts in the United States.

  As I drove off the interstate and onto the local roads that led to St. Marys, I was acutely conscious, in ways I usually do not think about, that I was a person of color. It did not help that,
in the matter of a single hour, I got pulled over twice by police cruisers. In the first case, I had pulled to the side of a road to look at a map. When I glanced up, there was a cruiser behind me with lights blazing. The cop gave my car a quick once-over and sent me on my way.

  In the second case, I was following a couple of slow cars on a two-lane road. I glanced at my speedometer; the cars were going around forty-five miles an hour. The speed limit was fifty-five. On a clear stretch of road where passing was permitted, I overtook the vehicles, stepping hard on the gas to get around them as quickly as possible. The cop who pulled me over a few moments later said the cars I had overtaken had been going sixty-five miles an hour, and that he had tracked me going ten miles per hour faster than that—twenty miles above the speed limit. I felt rattled.

  When the cop returned after checking my driving record to give me a speeding ticket, I told him, defensively, that I was an extremely safe driver who had never received a moving violation in nearly two decades on the road. “Frankly,” he snapped, “that surprises me.” I thought about that afterward. The cop had known me barely a minute. In that narrow window, how had he formed a general conclusion about me that would cause him to feel surprise at the two decades of accumulated evidence in my driving record? What might have happened if the driving data had not existed and the cop had had only his intuition to guide him?

  The Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin held a rally in Pennsylvania that same day. Videos taken outside the rally by Obama supporters showed dozens of Republicans yelling comments straight into cameras: “Barrack HUSSEIN Obama,” “Go back to Kenya,” and “The only difference between Obama and Osama is the B.S.” The comments might have been isolated and amplified by selective editing, but they did seem to evoke widespread laughter among the all-white crowd. An older man carried a monkey with a headband. “This is little Hussein,” the man said, laughing. Others yelled, “Obama bin Laden,” “Go back to Africa,” and “Born in Kenya, citizen of Indonesia!”

  Then there was, “We need a Muslim president!”

  “If he gets in office, he’s not going to have a cross section of America in his Cabinet. It is going to be Al Sharpton, Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright, Jesse Jackson.”

  “This isn’t an Oprah show.”

  When McCain and Palin were pressed by journalists to address comments being made by their supporters at rallies, including occasional recommendations of violence against Obama, the candidates said the comments were restricted to a small minority that in no way spoke for the majority.

  Union members belonging to the local Communications Workers of America in St. Marys were canvassing union households the day I visited. I had arranged to walk around town with a fifty-four-year-old organizer named Rosann Barker, a heavyset white woman with a square face, short bobbed hair, and an affable attitude. Barker worked for the Northwestern Pennsylvania Area Labor Federation based in Franklin, and lived outside Erie. She had driven a couple of hours that morning to St. Marys. Barker told me she didn’t think race was a big factor in her part of the state.

  I also met Rick Zimmerman, the president of Local CWA 502 in St. Marys. He wore a T-shirt and, like nearly every other male union member I met, blue jeans. “I don’t see any Obama signs—maybe people are tearing them down at night,” he told me with a grin. “They say St. Marys is a prejudiced town. We don’t have many colored people around here.”

  Barker and I set off to one neighborhood. She had a list of union household addresses, and planned to knock on doors and give people her union’s views of the candidates. Canvassing is a tiring and generally unrewarding business; there are long stretches of locked doors and impassive faces, interspersed with threatening bulldogs and people who enthusiastically support the candidate you want to see elected. The actual targets of canvassing efforts—people who are undecided or against your candidate but still amenable to persuasion—are few and far between.

  I introduced myself as a journalist to every person I met. Linda Emerett, who was sweeping her driveway with a long broom, told us that she thought all politicians were a bunch of crooks. “I wanted Huckabee,” she said, referring to the Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, a favorite with evangelical voters. “It felt like he was more in tune with the person who goes out and sweeps the driveway. The others talk down to us. They use words that I sometimes think, ‘What the “h” are they talking about?’ I think Obama is telling people what he thinks they want to hear. They’ve got forked tongues.”

  Mark Flacinski, whom I met on the street, said, “I don’t think Obama is the answer. I don’t think McCain is the answer, either, but I think he is the best of two evils.”

  Every person I met who was younger than forty said they were for Obama. Nearly every person older than sixty said they were undecided or for McCain.

  Other groups of union members had fanned out across St. Marys. One voter told union canvasser Terry O’Connor that he thought Obama was a Muslim. Another told O’Connor he was not going to vote for Obama but was going to vote a straight Democratic ticket for all other offices.

  “We’re in Appalachia, and this is the Bible Belt,” O’Connor told me, as if this were sufficient explanation. “The problematic ones are the rural white voters, fifty to sixty and up. We’re going to win a lot of them, but open-mindedness is not something they are known for…. I don’t mind people voting for McCain because of abortion, but not because people think Obama is a Muslim.”

  Gary Bittner, a union organizer who works in twenty-eight of Pennsylvania’s western counties, told me, as he chain-smoked cigarettes, that there was a “cultural” issue related to Obama. “They are scared of what they don’t know. I tell them, ‘What’s important to you—your job, health care, pension benefits?’”

  Bittner said that Obama’s race was often an undertow in conversations. I asked him to give me an example.

  “It gets said, but not in polite conversation,” Bittner replied. “Let’s say there is a text message going around saying, ‘Barack Obama will get shot eight minutes into his presidency.’ There are people who find that funny.”

  At the American Legion later that day, I engaged an older white man in conversation. His name was Don Joatt and he was seventy-three. He was a lifelong Democrat who always voted a straight party ticket. But he said he was uncomfortable about Obama.

  I asked him what issues were of concern to him in the election. Joatt said the economy and jobs were his principal worries. He said he disliked free-trade agreements that were bringing in a flood of cheap imports. As a result of imports from China, Joatt told me, the lightbulb factory he had worked at for thirty-seven years had seen its workforce shrink from sixteen hundred employees to three hundred fifty.

  “I really don’t know which way to go,” Joatt said. “I’ve been a Democrat all my life, but I don’t know what to think about this election. Tax-wise and everything else, I don’t know what to think.”

  I asked him whether he knew which presidential candidate was more in favor of the free trade that he vehemently opposed. Joatt said he thought that McCain—who had vocally insisted that he was a much fiercer advocate of free trade than Obama—was more sympathetic to the cause of protectionism.

  “I am not sure about Obama,” Joatt said. “I am not sure if I can trust him…. If Hillary had stayed in the race, I would have voted for her.”

  Zimmerman took me to the home of a colleague, a sixty-eight-year-old white woman who had worked at his union for forty years. The woman came barefoot into her yard to talk to me. We stood below a maple tree, as her dog—a cross between a cocker spaniel and a collie—wandered about. Two large flags hung from her porch—an American flag and a Vietnam POW-MIA flag. When I talked to her, the woman agreed to be identified, but she called me urgently a day later to request I not mention her name.

  She said she was born in St. Marys and had always lived there. She was a lifelong Democrat, and despised the Republican candidates in the 2008 election. Among other thing
s, she thought the government had no business telling women what to do with their bodies—she was fiercely pro-choice. She loved everything about Hillary Clinton. But when Obama won the Democratic nomination, she said she could not bring herself to support him.

  “From what I see, the blacks get entries into college and free loans—Latinos, too,” she said. “I am opposed to affirmative action.”

  She told me she had been concerned that if Obama won the presidency, the interests of white people would be cast aside: “I was worried I would have to go to the back of the bus.” She acknowledged that Obama’s race was a concern.

  But then, she told me, she had a talk with her sister, an Obama supporter. The sister convinced her that Obama would not send white people to the back of the bus. She said she was reluctantly coming around to the idea of voting for Obama.

  I asked her what her sister had said about Obama that had changed her mind.

  “My sister said, ‘You don’t understand—he is white, too. He has a white mom and white grandparents.’ That had a lot to do with it.”

  As you can see from these conversations, race bias is never completely implicit or completely explicit. Sometimes it lies beneath the surface; you think it is there, but you can’t be certain. Other times, you don’t have to think at all.