by Adam Alter
The students who had seen the swastika fifteen minutes earlier were now reading the passage about Donald with a quietly humming sense of unease. Although many of them claimed not to have noticed the swastika, or that they forgot having seen it by the time they read the passage, it still shaped their impressions of Donald. Those who saw the swastika were far more critical of Donald’s decision not to open the door to the salesman, rating his behavior as 10 percent more immoral on a sliding scale. They were also happier to condemn Donald to criminal punishment for his gambling exploits, similarly suggesting that he deserved a punishment that was approximately 10 percent more severe. In short, the students who were incidentally exposed to a negative symbol found their later impressions tainted by the symbol, even though many of them could barely remember its presence. We see so many symbols throughout the course of the day—particularly in advertisements on billboards, in newspapers, and on TV—that we hardly pay attention to any one symbol floating amid the sea of hundreds of others. Our lack of awareness makes their influence even more insidious as they push us and pull us and shape our thoughts and feelings below the surface of conscious awareness.
Power from Subtlety
Symbols influence us without our consent in large part because our brains constantly process images subconsciously and automatically. While you’re concentrating on this book, your brain continues to pick up visual information from the periphery of your visual field. Even images that flash by in an instant, before you’ve had time to recognize what you’ve seen, go on to influence your thoughts. Take a look at the array of symbols below for just a few seconds.
You won’t have had time to process each one individually, and you’re unlikely to remember all of them, but within the space of several seconds they’ve set off an explosive chain reaction of mental processes inside your head. It’s rare to see this many symbols at once, so that chain of thoughts is quite confused—the heart silhouette might be conjuring thoughts of love, romance, Valentine’s Day, perhaps even “I NY” T-shirts. Meanwhile, the radiation symbol and the skull and crossbones are likely to inspire a very different set of associations, from death and poison to war and famine. Add the other nine symbols to the mix, and you can imagine the feverish propagation of electric impulses coursing through your brain.
There’s plenty of experimental evidence for this powerful chain of responses, even when the symbols are displayed so briefly that we don’t have time to recognize them. One of these symbols is the now almost universally recognized Apple company logo. The logo doesn’t depict just any apple; it’s an apple that’s come to represent innovation and thinking differently (as the advertising campaign claimed). Recognizing the symbol’s meaning, a group of researchers wondered whether people might actually think differently—or more creatively—when they were very briefly exposed to the Apple logo. In contrast, they expected people who were exposed to the IBM logo to think less creatively, since IBM is associated with intelligence and responsibility, but not particularly with creativity. More than three hundred students were briefly exposed to a series of four different Apple logos or a series of four different IBM logos. The logos were presented so briefly that they were processed subliminally, below the level of conscious awareness, so none of the students had any idea what they’d seen on the screen. To give you a sense of just how briefly the logos were illuminated, each one could have been presented seventy-seven times in the space of a single second—far too quickly for the brain to process their content consciously.
After the students were primed with the logos, they completed a task designed to measure creativity known as the unusual uses test. The test measures how many creative uses people can generate for an everyday mundane object, like a brick or a paper clip. Suggesting that a paper clip can be used to bind sheets of paper is uncreative, whereas suggesting that a paper clip can be used as an earring is evidence of creative thinking. (Suggesting that a paper clip can be used to fly you around the world, on the other hand, is both creative and nonsensical, and nonsensical responses aren’t rewarded in this test.) As the researchers expected, students who were unwittingly exposed to the Apple logo seemed to think more creatively than their IBM-primed classmates; compared with the IBM-primed students, who generated an average of approximately six uses for the items, the Apple-primed students generated an average of almost eight uses for the same items, and those uses were rated by other students as more creative. Merely exposing people to a symbol that implies creativity for less than a tenth of a second can cause them to think more creatively, even when they have no idea that they’ve seen the symbol.
While some symbols appear briefly, others appear on the outskirts of the visual field without attracting conscious attention, and even these symbols come to shape our thoughts and feelings. Like the Apple logo, an illuminated lightbulb is associated with insight, recalling Plato’s comparison of insight to light illuminating a darkened mind. The glowing lightbulb is an apt metaphor, because it moves from darkness to illumination with the same speed that insight moves the mind from confusion to understanding. In a series of elegant studies, a group of psychologists showed that the relationship between a lightbulb and insight is more than metaphorical. In those studies, university students completed different mental problems that require insight—the sorts of problems that seem impossible to solve right up to the “Eureka!” moment when the solution appears out of the blue. Just as the students were beginning the tasks, the researcher either turned on a naked lightbulb or another form of light that didn’t feature an illuminated lightbulb; sometimes the bulb was obscured by a lamp shade and sometimes the light came from an overhead fluorescent tube. The students weren’t paying conscious attention to the source of light, since every darkened room has to be illuminated somehow, and the process of illumination is too mundane to warrant special attention. Nonetheless, since the symbol of an illuminated lightbulb implies insight, the researchers expected the students to solve the insight problems more easily when primed with the illuminated lightbulb. As expected, the students completed tricky insight-based mathematical, verbal, and geometric problems more often when the experimenter began the session by turning on a visible lightbulb. Here’s one of the problems:
Connect the four dots by drawing three connected straight lines without either lifting the pencil from the page or retracing a line, and while ending the drawing at the same dot as it was begun
The solution requires a burst of insight, because the lines go beyond the illusory square created by joining the four dots.
Solution to the geometric insight problem. Forty-four percent of the students who were primed with an illuminated lightbulb solved the difficult problem, but only 22 percent solved the problem when they were primed with a fluorescent light instead.
This is a curious effect; you might imagine that people either have or don’t have the capacity for insight into a problem. The researchers argued that the lightbulb primes the concept of insight, which in turn primes past occasions that required insight, thereby putting the students in the right mind-set for a new brush with insight. Indeed, part of the trick to solving insight problems is recognizing that they require a particular style of thinking that pursues surprising lateral solutions in favor of obvious but incorrect alternatives. Part of the reason why the illuminated lightbulb primes insightful solutions is that the symbol has one very dominant meaning: the generation of an idea. Other symbols are associated with a wide range of concepts, which makes it far more difficult to predict how they’ll influence thinking and behavior. At the same time, they’re capable of producing some of the most powerful effects in human psychology.
Symbols on Steroids, Part 1: Money
In 1991, avant-garde pop duo The KLF was one of the best-selling bands in the world. In February that year, the band held the number-one spot on the U.K. singles chart with house anthem “3 a.m. Eternal.” But ultimately Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty weren’t seeking superstardom. They were
anarchists at heart, intent on subverting the decadent world they had come to represent. Wielding toy machine guns, Drummond and Cauty walked onto the stage at the 1992 BRIT music awards and fired rounds of blanks into the stunned audience. Later they left a rotting sheep’s carcass on the steps of the awards’ after-party. With that, they quit the music business.
A year passed while the duo received millions of pounds in royalties from “3 a.m. Eternal” and other best-selling tracks. They considered buying a submarine or an airship, but ultimately founded the art-focused K Foundation. When the prestigious Turner Prize was awarded to sculptor Rachel Whiteread in 1993, the K Foundation announced that Whiteread had also won the foundation’s “worst artist of the year” award. When she refused to accept the award’s £40,000 prize, Drummond and Cauty threatened to incinerate the money instead. Whiteread accepted the prize reluctantly and donated the full sum to charity.
Still focused on spending their royalties, Drummond and Cauty made a sculpture featuring £1 million in banknotes. None of the big galleries would display the work, so they decided to do the next best thing. Late at night on August 23, 1994, the duo dumped £1 million in £50 bills onto the floor of a boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura. For more than an hour, their friend Gimpo filmed as Drummond and Cauty fed twenty thousand bills into the flames. Most of the bills burned, but a small portion floated up through the boathouse chimney.
Freelance journalist Jim Reid was one of few outsiders invited to the boathouse. When the bills were first revealed, Reid described feeling guilty—as though merely being in the presence of so much money was immoral. Next he felt “the need to do something, not to let it just stand there. Because, of course, I, like anyone else with healthy appetites, wanted it.” Reid wrote about his experience in the Observer one month later, concluding his article with a list of alternative uses for £1 million. The same million could have fed 800,000 starving Rwandans, or housed sixty-eight homeless families in London for a year, or groomed then Princess Diana for six years.
Reid’s revulsion isn’t unusual. When you watch money burn, you feel the extinction of countless possibilities. Nearly two decades later, six psychologists scanned the brains of twenty adult participants as they watched a similar scenario unfold. On a small screen inside the scanner, the adults watched a pair of hands as they either folded a bundle of banknotes or destroyed them. Like Reid, they reported feelings of discomfort and agitation when the notes were destroyed, and their brains told a similar story. The brain’s temporoparietal network responds to images of tools, from screwdrivers to hammers, as though it knows they have a functional purpose. Hammers are for hammering as money is for spending and acquiring, and when the adults watched the money being misused, their brains revolted in kind. When the hands cut or tore bills that were more valuable (worth U.S. $100 rather than U.S. $20), the adults’ temporoparietal networks responded more vigorously. Money is such a powerful symbol—a means to so many coveted ends—that our brains revolt against the prospect that it might be misused.
There are many supersymbols, but one of the most powerful and pervasive is the symbol of monetary currency. There’s no particular reason why currency should take the form of bills and coins—societies have bartered with beads, rum, and gemstones—but bills and coins have become symbolic of currency across much of the world today. Poets, singers, and bohemians have romanticized the absence of money for decades, but in truth it’s hard to get by without relying on at least a moderate stash. English writer Somerset Maugham put it best, perhaps, when he suggested, “Money is like a sixth sense, and you can’t make use of the other five without it.” Indeed, it’s difficult to enjoy the best food, cologne, artwork, music, and clothing if you don’t part with money beforehand.
Noting the critical role of money in our lives, marketing professors have examined the diverse range of responses that bills, coins, and other symbolic reminders of money inspire in everyday people. One of money’s dominant functions, as Maugham implied, is freedom and independence, so the researchers expected people to behave more independently and selfishly when primed with symbols of money. In one study, students completed a difficult intellectual task that required them to manipulate twelve shapes to form a large square. The experimenter who explained the task offered to help them if they encountered difficulty, and then left the room so the students could work on the problem uninterrupted. For some of the students, a small pile of money from the board game Monopoly sat on the corner of their desk—a constant, subtle reminder of money. By the time four minutes had elapsed, almost 75 percent of the students who weren’t reminded of the money had asked for help; in contrast, only 35 percent of the students who sat peering at the Monopoly money asked for help after four minutes. According to the researchers, the money reminded the students of their independence, delaying their quest for help and prompting them to persevere unaided for just a few more minutes.
Independence and perseverance are positive traits, but like money they have a darker flip side: a reluctance to help or interact with other people. Dickens’s classic A Christmas Carol depicts Ebenezer Scrooge, a wealthy banker who thrives on accumulating wealth and avoiding social interaction. Wealth insulates Scrooge from the problems that plague other characters in the book, and it’s not until three ghosts visit him that he realizes the folly of his ways. Children vigorously decry Scrooge, a caricature of miserly nastiness, but other people also turn out to have just an ounce of Scrooge in them when they’re reminded of money. In one study students played a brief game of Monopoly. Some of the students were left with the Scrooge-worthy sum of $4,000, whereas others were left with no money at all. The students who were left with $4,000 then imagined a future of wealth, whereas those who were left with nothing merely pictured what they might do the following day, with no reference to money. A minute later, a minor disaster befell a student who happened to be walking through the lab when she dropped twenty-seven pencils on the floor. The “wealthy” students, content with their $4,000 in Monopoly money and thoughts of a bright financial future, picked up fewer pencils than did the students who weren’t primed with the concept of wealth. The “wealthy” students weren’t quite Scrooges—most collected some pencils—but they were just a bit less helpful in the wake of their brush with financial excess.
A separate study emphasized the point: in this one, students stared at either a computer screensaver of bills floating in water or fish floating in water. When asked whether they might like to donate some or all of the $2 they were given for participating in the study to a university student fund, the students who watched the money floating across the screen donated only 77 cents on average, compared with the heftier average sum of $1.34 donated by students who watched the fish floating across the screen. It’s unfair to label the students “Scrooges,” but symbolic reminders of money and wealth certainly nudged them toward selfishness.
Beyond self-sufficiency and independence, money is also symbolically capable of anesthetizing pain. The Chicago Tribune coined the term retail therapy on Christmas Eve in 1986 to describe the act of trading money for mood-improving purchases, and comfort buying drives the consumption of diverse products from single-serve ice cream to romantic comedies on DVD. One innovative company, Bummer Baskets, sells a range of care packages, each designed to assuage a particular variety of pain, dominated by the chocolate-laden Break-Up Basket. Given money’s symbolic role in dampening pain, the same marketing researchers wondered whether students might be numbed to physical pain and social exclusion when exposed to images of money. Electric shocks are a rarity in modern psychological experiments, so the students in the physical pain experiment immersed their hands in a bucket of very hot water for thirty seconds and rated the pain of the experience on a nine-point scale. Those in the social pain experiment played a computer game with two other students who quickly began ignoring them, a potent form of social pain. Before engaging in the two painful tasks, the students completed a cleverly designed “f
inger-dexterity task.” Some of them counted eighty $100 bills, while others counted eighty sheets of blank paper. The students who counted the blank paper found the hot water quite painful—around six on the nine-point scale—whereas those who counted the bills rated their pain at the less severe score of four. Those in the social pain task also felt the sting of ostracism less acutely when they counted money, rating their distress 50 percent less highly on a similar scale. Both physical and social pain seem less painful when we’re cushioned by symbolic reminders of money, even when the money isn’t real or doesn’t belong to us.
Symbols on Steroids, Part 2: Nationalism and Religion
Apart from money, very few symbols have the power to start wars and terminate friendships.
Two exceptions to that rule are symbols of nationalism and icons of religion. Nationalism is embodied in a nation’s flag, and flag desecrations feature heavily in antinationalist protests. In 2002, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez narrowly escaped a coup d’état. Chávez had passed dozens of controversial laws in 2001, and a vocal crowd of 200,000 protesters demanded his replacement. The military detained Chávez, while Pedro Carmona, president of the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce, assumed the presidency for forty-seven hours, until Chávez’s rule was restored. During the attempted coup, Chávez made a number of speeches that local television channels were required to broadcast. Instead of broadcasting the speeches so they occupied the entire screen, several privately held channels broadcast split pictures that showed opposition protests while Chávez was speaking. One of those channels was Radio Caracas Television International (RCTV). In 2006, RCTV’s broadcasting license expired, and it had to apply to the government for a renewal. The channel had been on the air since the early 1950s, but Chávez decided to punish the network for its role in “supporting” the 2002 coup attempt. RCTV’s license was never renewed, and it was forced to broadcast as a guerrilla network, without the government’s approval.