Imagine that you sit down in front of two buttons, and you’re asked to hit the right button whenever a positive word flashes on the screen (joy, love, happy, and so on), and the left button whenever you see a negative word (terrible, nasty, failure). Pretty straightforward. Now the task changes a bit: hit the right button whenever you see a photo of an overweight person, and the left button whenever you see a photo of a thin person. Again, pretty easy. But for the next task, things are paired up: you’re asked to hit the right button when you see either a positive word or an overweight person, and the left button whenever you see a negative word or a thin person. In another group of trials, you do the same thing but with the pairings switched—so you now press the right button for a negative word or a thin person.
The results can be troubling. The reaction times of subjects are faster when the pairings have a strong association unconsciously.8 For example, if overweight people are linked with a negative association in the subject’s unconscious, then the subject reacts faster to a photo of an overweight person when the response is linked to the same button as a negative word. During trials in which the opposite concepts are linked (thin with bad), subjects will take a longer time to respond, presumably because the pairing is more difficult. This experiment has been modified to measure implicit attitudes toward races, religions, homosexuality, skin tone, age, disabilities, and presidential candidates.9
Another method for teasing out implicit biases simply measures the way a participant moves a computer cursor.10 Imagine that you start with your cursor positioned at the bottom of the screen, and in the upper corners of the screen you have buttons labeled “like” and “dislike”. Then a word appears in the middle (say, the name of a religion), and you are instructed to move the mouse as quickly as you can to your answer about whether you like or dislike people of that creed. What you don’t realize is that the exact trajectory of your mouse movement is being recorded—every position at every moment. By analyzing the path your mouse traveled, researchers can detect whether your motor system started moving toward one button before other cognitive systems kicked into gear and drove it toward the other response. So, for example, even if you answered “like” for a particular religion, it may be that your trajectory drifted slightly toward the “dislike” button before it got back on track for the more socially appropriate response.
Even people with certainty about their attitudes toward different races, genders, and religions can find themselves surprised—and appalled—by what’s lurking in their brains. And like other forms of implicit association, these biases are impenetrable to conscious introspection.*
HOW DO I LOVE THEE? LET ME COUNT THE J’S
Let’s consider what happens when two people fall in love. Common sense tells us that their ardor grows from any number of seeds, including life circumstances, a sense of understanding, sexual attraction, and mutual admiration. Surely the covert machinery of the unconscious is not implicated in who you choose as a mate. Or isn’t it?
Imagine you run into your friend Joel, and he tells you that he has found the love of his life, a woman named Jenny. That’s funny, you consider, because your friend Alex just married Amy, and Donny is crazy for Daisy. Is there something going on with these letter pairings? Is like attracted to like? That’s crazy, you conclude: important life decisions—such as who to spend your life with—can’t be influenced by something as capricious as the first letter of a name. Perhaps all these alliterative alliances are just an accident.
But they’re not an accident. In 2004, psychologist John Jones and his colleagues examined fifteen thousand public marriage records from Walker County, Georgia, and Liberty County, Florida. They found that, indeed, people more often get married to others with the same first letter of their first name than would be expected by chance.11
But why? It’s not about the letters, exactly—instead it’s about the fact that those mates somehow remind their spouses of themselves. People tend to love reflections of themselves in others. Psychologists interpret this as an unconscious self-love, or perhaps a comfort level with things that are familiar —and they term this implicit egotism.
Implicit egotism is not just about life partners—it also influences the products you prefer and purchase. In one study, subjects were presented with two (fictional) brands of tea to taste-test. One of the brand names of the teas happened to share its first three letters with the subject’s name; that is, Tommy might be sampling teas named Tomeva and Lauler. Subjects would taste the teas, smack their lips, consider both carefully, and almost always decide that they preferred the tea whose name happened to match the first letters of their name. Not surprisingly, a subject named Laura would choose the tea named Lauler. They weren’t explicitly aware of the connection with the letters; they simply believed the tea tasted better. As it turns out, both cups of tea had been poured from the same teapot.
The power of implicit egotism goes beyond your name to other arbitrary features of yourself, such as your birthday. In a university study, students were given an essay to read about the Russian monk Rasputin. For half the students, Rasputin’s birthday was mentioned in the essay—and it was gimmicked so that it “happened” to be the same as the reader’s own birthday. For the other half of the students, a birthday different from their own was used; otherwise the essays were identical. At the end of the reading, the students were asked to answer several questions covering what they thought of Rasputin as a person. Those who believed they shared a birthday with Rasputin gave him more generous ratings.12 They simply liked him more, without having any conscious access as to why.
The magnetic power of unconscious self-love goes beyond what and whom you prefer. Incredibly, it can subtly influence where you live and what you do, as well. Psychologist Brett Pelham and his colleagues plumbed public records and found that people with birthdays on February 2 (2/2) are disproportionately likely to move to cities with a reference to the number two in their names, such as Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. People born on 3/3 are statistically overrepresented in places like Three Forks, Montana, as are people born on 6/6 in places like Six Mile, South Carolina, and so on for all the birthdays and cities the authors could find. Consider how amazing that is: associations with the numbers in people’s arbitrary birth dates can be influential enough to sway their residential choices, however slightly. Again, it’s unconscious.
Implicit egotism can also influence what you chose to do with your life. By analyzing professional membership directories, Pelham and his colleagues found that people named Denise or Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, while people named Laura or Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers, and people with names like George or Georgina to become geologists. They also found that owners of roofing companies are more likely to have a first initial of R instead of H, while hardware store owners are more likely to have names beginning with H instead of R.13 A different study mined freely available online professional databases to find that physicians have disproportionately more surnames that include doc, dok, or med, while lawyers are more likely to have law, lau, or att in their surnames.14
As crazy as it sounds, all these findings passed the statistical thresholds for significance. The effects are not large, but they’re verifiable. We are influenced by drives to which we have little access, and which we never would have believed had not the statistics laid them bare.
TICKLING THE BRAIN BELOW THE SURFACE OF AWARENESS
Your brain can be subtly manipulated in ways that change your future behavior. Imagine I ask you to read some pages of text. Later, I ask you to fill in the blanks of some partial terms, such as chi___ se___. You’re more likely to choose terms that you’ve recently seen—say, chicken sexer rather than china set—whether or not you have any explicit memory of having recently seen those words.15 Similarly, if I ask you to fill in the blanks in some word, such as s_bl_m_na_, you are better able to do so if you’ve previously seen the word on a list, whether or not you remember having seen it.16 Some par
t of your brain has been touched and changed by the words on the list. This effect is called priming: your brain has been primed like a pump.17
Priming underscores the point that implicit memory systems are fundamentally separate from explicit memory systems: even when the second one has lost the data, the former one has a lock on it. The separability between the systems is again illustrated by patients with anterograde amnesia resulting from brain damage. Severely amnesic patients can be primed to fill in partial words even though they have no conscious recollection of having been presented with any text in the first place.18
Beyond a temporary tickling of the brain, the effects of previous exposure can be long lasting. If you have seen a picture of someone’s face before, you will judge them to be more attractive upon a later viewing. This is true even when you have no recollection of ever having seen them previously.19 This is known as the mere exposure effect, and it illustrates the worrisome fact that your implicit memory influences your interpretation of the world—which things you like, don’t like, and so on. It will come as no surprise to you that the mere exposure effect is part of the magic behind product branding, celebrity building, and political campaigning: with repeated exposure to a product or face, you come to prefer it more. The mere exposure effect is why people in the public spotlight are not always as disturbed as one might expect by negative press. As famous personalities often quip, “The only bad publicity is no publicity,” or “I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.”20
Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the illusion-of-truth effect: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before—whether or not it is actually true. In one study, subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in previous weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as true, even if they swore they had never heard it before.21 This is the case even when the experimenter tells the subjects that the sentences they are about to hear are false: despite this, mere exposure to an idea is enough to boost its believability upon later contact.22 The illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.
A simple pairing of concepts can be enough to induce an unconscious association and, eventually, the sense that there is something familiar and true about the pairing. This is the basis of every ad we’ve ever seen that pairs a product with attractive, cheery, and sexually charged people. And it’s also the basis of a move made by George W. Bush’s advertising team during his 2000 campaign against Al Gore. In Bush’s $2.5 million dollar television commercial, a frame with the word RATS flashes on the screen in conjunction with “The Gore prescription plan.” In the next moment it becomes clear that the word is actually the end of the word BUREAUCRATS, but the effect the ad makers were going for was obvious—and, they hoped, memorable.
THE HUNCH
Imagine that you arrange all your fingers over ten buttons, and each button corresponds to a colored light. Your task is simple: each time a light blinks on, you hit the corresponding button as quickly as you can. If the sequence of lights is random, your reaction times will generally not be very fast; however, investigators discovered that if there is a hidden pattern to the lights, your reaction times will eventually speed up, indicating that you have picked up on the sequence and can make some sort of predictions about which light will flash next. If an unexpected light then comes on, your reaction time will be slow again. The surprise is that this speed up works even when you are completely unaware of the sequence; the conscious mind does not need to be involved at all for this type of learning to occur.23 Your ability to name what is going to occur next is limited or non-existent. And yet you might have a hunch.
Sometimes these things can reach conscious awareness, but not always—and when they do, they do so slowly. In 1997, neuroscientist Antoine Bechara and his colleagues laid out four decks of cards in front of subjects and asked them to choose one card at a time. Each card revealed a gain or loss of money. With time, the subjects began to realize that each deck had a character to it: two of the decks were “good,” meaning that the subjects would make money, while the other two were “bad,” meaning they would end up with a net loss.
As subjects pondered which deck to draw from, they were stopped at various points by the investigators and asked for their opinion: Which decks were good? Which were bad? In this way, the investigators found that it typically required about twenty-five draws from the decks for subjects to be able to say which ones they thought were good and bad. Not terribly interesting, right? Well, not yet.
The investigators also measured the subject’s skin conductance response, which reflects the activity of the autonomic (fight-or-flight) nervous system. And here they noticed something amazing: the autonomic nervous system picked up on the statistics of the deck well before a subject’s consciousness did. That is, when subjects reached for the bad decks, there was an anticipatory spike of activity—essentially, a warning sign.24 This spike was detectable by about the thirteenth card draw. So some part of the subjects’ brains was picking up on the expected return from the decks well before the subjects’ conscious minds could access that information. And the information was being delivered in the form of a “hunch”: subjects began to choose the good decks even before they could consciously say why. This means that conscious knowledge of the situation was not required for making advantageous decisions.
Even better, it turned out that people needed the gut feeling: without it their decision making would never be very good. Damasio and his colleagues ran the card-choice task using patients with damage to a frontal part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area involved in making decisions. The team discovered that these patients were unable to form the anticipatory warning signal of the galvanic skin response. The patients’ brains simply weren’t picking up on the statistics and giving them an admonition. Amazingly, even after these patients consciously realized which decks were bad, they still continued to make the wrong choices. In other words, the gut feeling was essential for advantageous decision making.
This led Damasio to propose that the feelings produced by physical states of the body come to guide behavior and decision making.25 Body states become linked to outcomes of events in the world. When something bad happens, the brain leverages the entire body (heart rate, contraction of the gut, weakness of the muscles, and so on) to register that feeling, and that feeling becomes associated with the event. When the event is next pondered, the brain essentially runs a simulation, reliving the physical feelings of the event. Those feelings then serve to navigate, or at least bias, subsequent decision making. If the feelings from a given event are bad, they dissuade the action; if they are good, they encourage it.
In this view, physical states of the body provide the hunches that can steer behavior. These hunches turn out to be correct more often than chance would predict, mostly because your unconscious brain is picking up on things first, and your consciousness lags behind.
In fact, conscious systems can break entirely, with no effect on the unconscious systems. People with a condition called prosopagnosia cannot distinguish between familiar and unfamiliar faces. They rely entirely on cues such as hairlines, gait, and voices to recognize people they know. Pondering this condition led researchers Daniel Tranel and Antonio Damasio to try something clever: even though prosopagnosics cannot consciously recognize faces, would they have a measurable skin conductance response to faces that were familiar? Indeed, they did. Even though the prosopagnosic truly insists on being unable to recognize faces, some part of his brain can (and does) distinguish familiar faces from unfamiliar ones.
If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can yo
u access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being “told” what to do by the coin, that’s the right choice for her. If, instead, she concludes that it’s ludicrous for her to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option.
* * *
So far we’ve been looking at the vast and sophisticated knowledge that lives under the surface of awareness. We’ve seen that you don’t have access to the details of how your brain does things, from reading letters to changing lanes. So what role does the conscious mind play, if any, in all your know-how? A big one, it turns out—because much of the knowledge stored in the depths of the unconscious brain began life in the form of conscious plans. We turn to this now.
THE ROBOT THAT WON WIMBLEDON
Imagine that you have risen through the ranks to the top tennis tournament in the world and you are now poised on a green court facing the planet’s greatest tennis robot. This robot has incredibly miniaturized components and self-repairing parts, and it runs on such optimized energy principles that it can consume three hundred grams of hydrocarbons and then leap all over the court like a mountain goat. Sounds like a formidable opponent, right? Welcome to Wimbledon—you’re playing against a human being.
The competitors at Wimbledon are rapid, efficient machines that play tennis shockingly well. They can track a ball traveling ninety miles per hour, move toward it rapidly, and orient a small surface to intersect its trajectory. And these professional tennis players do almost none of this consciously. In exactly the same way that you read letters on a page or change lanes, they rely entirely on their unconscious machinery. They are, for all practical purposes, robots. Indeed, when Ilie Nastase lost the Wimbledon final in 1976, he sullenly said of his winning opponent, Björn Borg, “He’s a robot from outer space.”