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

by Shankar Vedantam

  Days before the election, the canvasser Rosann Barker and I had another conversation. She sounded distressed—a large number of signs had appeared overnight in her residential community. The signs consisted of just four words printed on a small sheet of paper: VOTE RIGHT VOTE WHITE. Elsewhere, she told me, in a riposte to Obama’s “Change You Can Believe In” slogan, signs said, CHANGE MEANS: COME HELP ANOTHER NIGGER GET ELECTED. Barker’s voice choked. She said she had raced around the neighborhood taking down the signs.

  “I didn’t think it was so prevalent, but boy, the billboard signs and these laminated pages—it shows that in the rural community I live in, there is a race problem,” she said. “It is my community, the place where I live. More than a hundred of these signs had to be taken down. I never dreamed someone would go to that extent. I knew there was prejudice but didn’t think it was to that extent.”

  The Chicago O’Hare Hilton hotel is located within the complex of the busiest airport in the United States. From airport terminals, short walkways put you under the ten-story hotel, which has a façade of black metal and tinted glass. On September 27, 2008—one day after the first 2008 presidential debate between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama—a small group of people from all over the United States flew into Chicago for a secret meeting at the airport Hilton.

  Room 2020 in the west wing of the Hilton had been reserved for the day. On a small plaque affixed outside the room were printed the words “Center for Social Inclusion.” The room’s interior was occupied by a large rectangular conference table and a dozen black leather chairs. Through the window, you could see shuttles from the Marriott hotel and National Car Rental company sweeping by the passenger arrival areas at the airport. From time to time, red and white trains going between terminals rumbled by in opposite directions on an elevated track.

  The meeting had been organized on short notice—barely a week and a half had gone by since the group had informally coalesced through emails and conference calls. The people at the meeting were among the country’s foremost thinkers on issues related to bias and politics. When Obama became the first African American candidate to be nominated by a major political party, these experts decided they wanted to apply what scholars had learned about prejudice to combat bias in the election. From Washington, D.C., came Todd Rogers and Celinda Lake, Democratic party pollsters and consultants. From Los Angeles came Jerry Kang from the University of California. From New Jersey, Rachel Godsil of Seton Hall law school. From Atlanta, Drew Westen, a political psychologist and Democratic party consultant. From Philadelphia, Camille Charles, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania. There were several other community activists, political organizers, and academic researchers. Other experts who could not make it to Chicago called in and participated through a speakerphone.

  The group had been summoned by John Powell, a legal scholar at Ohio State University. If talk about welfare, illegal immigration, and crime were coded ways to talk about race, Powell wanted to come up with ways to deactivate such bias. The first way—the traditional way—was to uncover the bias. You combat subterranean bias, in other words, by bringing it to the surface. The Obama campaign had chosen a different route: Race was rarely to be made explicit, and the campaign never made a fuss about racism. Even in the face of explicit racism—thousands of people openly said that they would never vote for a black man—Obama stayed relentlessly positive. When people hurled racially tinged epithets at Obama at rallies; when some Republican party leaders openly questioned the biracial candidate’s religion, background, and patriotism; when Hillary Clinton publicly declared that “Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening…,” the campaign responded with the same uplifting messages of unity that Obama had honed since his famous speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Rather than accuse anyone of racial bias, the campaign preferred to call people to their better angels, to remind Americans that they were above racism.

  Obama’s strategy had been successful. He had won the Democratic nomination. But Powell feared there would come a time when the strategy would no longer work. Powell’s team had heard that Republicans were planning a major attack in the late fall drawing on excerpts from Obama’s books where he talked about using drugs as a young man and having devoured Marxist and feminist literature, and the speeches of Malcolm X. Powell reached out to the Obama campaign but was met with resistance. “Initially I tried to get the campaign to do it, and they were of the opinion that it wasn’t necessary,” Powell told me. “My response is, ‘If you are right, great, but what if you are wrong? You should have something ready. If you don’t need it, no sweat, but if you want something and don’t have it, you are in trouble.’ … They are not taking advantage of the research in the last thirty years. They think [talking about race] is necessarily divisive. They don’t realize people are very conflicted.”

  Mahzarin Banaji called in to the Chicago meeting from Harvard. The psychologist had long been a proponent of fighting unconscious bias by dragging it into the open, by making implicit biases visible. But in this situation, she felt Obama was doing the right thing. All politicians, she told me, had to emphasize the bond they had with voters, and it made sense that Obama should stay clear of the subject of race. The bond that a member of a minority group has with most voters cannot be the thing that marks him as a minority.

  The group discussed different ways in which campaign advertisements have exploited race bias. In the 2006 Senate election in Tennessee, African American candidate Harold Ford was the target of an ad that played on miscegenation fears. The ad featured a young white woman who claimed to have met Ford at a Playboy party, and ended with her seductively whispering, “Harold, call me.” One anti-Obama ad showed the candidate’s grinning face morph into the face of a wolf. A conservative group linked Obama with Kwame Kilpatrick, the disgraced black mayor of Detroit, who had recently been ejected from office on criminal charges. As the ad listed the various charges against Kilpatrick, it showed footage of Obama standing with Kilpatrick and praising him. The ad advised voters to learn who Obama’s friends were. (Kilpatrick’s skin is much darker than Obama’s, and the ad deliberately darkened Kilpatrick’s complexion even further to play on the unconscious biases of white voters against dark-skinned black men, according to sociologist Camille Charles at the University of Pennsylvania.)

  Toward the end of the day, I asked the group around the table how Obama might be vulnerable to unconscious bias. Powell, who wore a beard speckled with gray, said that Obama was not vulnerable in the way African American leaders usually are. Obama could not be depicted as threatening. But he was vulnerable to suggestions that he was an outsider and foreign; his middle name was Hussein, and he had spent long stretches of his childhood in other countries. It was the “He’s not one of us” message that Powell was worried about.

  “The primary target is the Reagan Democrats,” Powell told me. “People who belong to unions, who in Ohio voted for [Democratic Governor Ted] Strickland. Strickland won by a huge margin. It helped [that] his opponent was a black Republican. You don’t have to convince them that unions are good, or governments have a role, and wouldn’t it be great to have health care.”

  If he lost, Powell concluded about Obama, it would be because people who agreed with Obama on the issues did not want to vote for a black man. “It will be because of Democrats.”

  The pollsters, consultants, and psychologists around the table in Chicago decided to devise a series of anti-bias messages and get them out to voters in battleground states. The group wanted to “inoculate” voters against divisive appeals. They planned to come up with a series of ads to get people to think about the role of race in the election. One would involve shoving an actual elephant into a diner as patrons chewed their food and took nervous glances at the behemoth. As the elephant flapped its ears, a message would say, “Let’s talk about the elephant in the room.”

  There was only one time in the 2008 election when the Oba
ma campaign’s strategy to neutralize the subject of race came completely undone. It was during the Democratic primary, when comments by Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, surfaced in the national media. Wright had often lashed out at white America in sermons about racial injustice, and Obama’s opponents seized on the pastor saying such things as, “Not God bless America. God damn America!” The instant Obama found himself linked to Wright’s inflammatory comments, his campaign stalled.

  Reporters later dug up comments made by John C. Hagee, a pastor whom John McCain had embraced, who once said the Holocaust was God’s plan to drive Jews to Palestine. And Larry Kroon, a pastor of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, had said that God would “strike … the United States of America.” On the same day as that first presidential debate, The Washington Post noted that “In the fine, new American tradition of presidential campaign ‘pastor disasters,’ Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin might have one.” It made intuitive sense that if Obama got into a heap of trouble because of his pastor’s views, the same thing would happen to McCain and Palin. But that did not happen, and the people in Room 2020 of the O’Hare Hilton could have told you why. The real issue with Wright was not his militant and overheated comments but that contact with Wright unconsciously linked Obama to a notion toxic to many white voters—the angry black man who sought to make whites feel guilty about racism. There was no analogous identity archetype that Hagee and Kroon evoked—certainly nothing to rival the deep fears and anxieties that the angry black man conjured. It made sense that the McCain and Palin pastor controversies would sink like stones.

  I found it interesting that even as the national media wrapped itself into pretzels about Wright’s comments, many people of color found Wright utterly unremarkable. Before he parted ways with Wright, Obama himself said he felt his church was not particularly controversial. Wright was certainly inflammatory and given to rhetorical excess, but this partly had to do with the theatricality of sermons in general and the style of the black church in particular. Obama once said Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with.”

  But if Wright had a tendency toward overblown rhetoric, most blacks had little problem with the emotional truth of his message: African Americans are 447 percent more likely than white Americans to be imprisoned and 521 percent more likely to be murdered. There is a five-to-one wealth gap between whites and blacks at birth, blacks live five years fewer on average than whites, and the black infant mortality rate is nearly one and a half times the white infant mortality rate. Wouldn’t it be odd not to be angry? But once Wright’s comments surfaced in the national media, and excerpts from his sermons were replayed endlessly on cable television, it was no longer possible for the Obama campaign to sell its “we are all Americans first” message. The America that Wright described felt like a cruel caricature to many whites. Which version of reality, Obama’s opponents asked, did the candidate endorse? Hillary Clinton sat down for a lengthy interview with Bill O’Reilly of FOX News, and agreed with the conservative commentator that Obama had some explaining to do. Where the country had seen in Obama only a quiet, well-spoken Harvard-educated lawyer, the Wright episode raised questions about whether Obama was secretly the kind of militant black activist that many whites abhorred.

  Obama’s first instinct was to let things blow over, but Wright—who could be described as Obama’s friend in only the loosest sense of the term—held a televised meeting at the National Press Club in Washington, where he fought back against his critics, argued that they were motivated by racism, and charged that the attacks on him were attacks on the entire black community. Wright addressed his comments to a crowd of supporters, and they gave him a standing ovation. The press conference put Obama in an even more difficult bind; shortly afterward, Obama renounced his ties with Wright and then did something he almost never did before or after in the 2008 campaign: He explicitly talked about race.

  In a now famous speech in Philadelphia, Obama presented a picture of race relations very different from that presented by his former pastor. He played conciliator, and explained to white people why black people were often angry, and explained to black people why white people were resentful of being reminded endlessly about the legacy of slavery. The country had come a long way since the days of Jim Crow, Obama reminded his black audience, but the country also had a long way still to go.

  The speech was psychologically astute—and precisely what a psychologist who studies the hidden brain would have recommended. The researchers Richard P. Eibach and Joyce Ehrlinger have shown that a central reason whites and blacks in America have very different impressions about the state of racial progress is that whites unconsciously compare the state of race relations with the past. Compared to the days of slavery, the country has made enormous strides in race relations, and many whites find it incomprehensible that blacks do not regularly acknowledge the progress that has been made. Eibach and Ehrlinger found that blacks, on the other hand, unconsciously compare the status quo with an idealized future where discrimination does not exist; for the young black man or woman who suffers subtle forms of discrimination in the workplace, it isn’t much consolation to say things were worse two hundred years ago. From this perspective, many blacks cannot understand why whites would downplay the reality of their everyday experience. Each side had a point, Obama effectively told his audience, and each side had more in common with the other than either believed.

  Without overtly looking like he was doing so, Obama also reminded white voters that he was half-white. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother,” Obama said about his former pastor. The speech was made at the National Constitution Center, and Obama used the occasion to draw the country’s attention to the document that bound the nation together. Rather than speak on behalf of any group, Obama spoke on behalf of everyone.

  The Philadelphia speech was a huge political success, and it revived the Obama campaign. Obama never seriously addressed the subject of race again, and in fact took great pains to avoid the subject altogether. For all the historic significance of an African American man reaching for the presidency, one of the ironies of the Obama campaign is that it was largely mute when it came to the subject of race. At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, which was held on the forty-fifth anniversary of the famous 1963 March on Washington, with an African American man on the presidential ticket of a major party for the first time in history, John Powell pointed out to me, with some bitterness, that Obama never mentioned the words “race,” “Martin Luther King,” or “civil rights” in his acceptance speech. The documentary shown about his life, Powell added, was “heavy on white people.” It emphasized his mother’s side of the family—his white side—far more than it did his father’s side, even though in his book Dreams from My Father Obama emphasized how important it was for him to find his identity as a black man in order to become a leader.

  Powell told me—and remember, this was a man who was working eighteen to nineteen hours a day to get Obama elected—that he found the Philadelphia speech politically brilliant but historically problematic. Rather than talk about the problem of race in America, Obama had talked about the problem of anger in America. Whites were angry with blacks, blacks were angry with whites. If everyone renounced their anger, we would all be better off. But Powell could not abide the idea that black anger and white anger were equivalent and somehow canceled each other out. If blacks were angry about slavery and segregation, discrimination and a lack of opportunities, whites were angry because they felt undeserving blacks were taking advantage of the system.

  “Dr. King, in his most important speeches, talked about the importance of righteous indignation,” Powell told me. “Obama understands that he is playing to a white audience. If he can be Tiger Woods and a nonthreatening black, he thinks he can get the support of white people.”

  ——

  Two undercurrents of disc
omfort ran beneath the table at the secret Chicago meeting. One had to do with the conflicting challenges of fighting bias and fighting to win an election. The people around the table knew that if they were against bias, they also had to be against the ageism and sexism that prompted voters to feel McCain was “too old” and that Sarah Palin was “yet another incompetent woman.” By the end of the meeting, Powell said the goal was less about getting Obama elected and more about removing bias from the equation. As long as voters did not reject a candidate because of bias, it was perfectly legitimate to vote for or against anyone.

  But there was another undercurrent that ran still deeper. When you found unconscious bias, there were two things you could do about it. You could fight it at an implicit level, as the Obama campaign was doing. Without ever making a fuss about racism, you could project counter-stereotypical messages that radiated calm and reassurance. The other approach was explicit—you called out voters who agreed with your candidate on the issues but were reluctant to vote for him because of racism. This would be the Martin Luther King, Jr., way, the path of “righteous indignation.” The trouble was, calling people out on racism made them defensive. Even if you won the argument, you could lose their vote. The Obama approach was much more astute politically, but there was something disturbing about it. If the only way for a black politician to be acceptable to whites was to project an image of a nonthreatening black man—“the exception to the rule”—wasn’t that implicitly an endorsement of the stereotype?

  These concerns would be amplified as the group designed a series of ads and tested them among a large number of undecided white voters in battleground states. Celinda Lake ran the ads by five hundred men and five hundred women with blue-collar backgrounds, the people who told white pollsters one thing and black pollsters something else. Lake asked the voters what they made of each ad and how it made them feel. The psychologist Drew Westen measured how the ads changed unconscious attitudes toward Obama.