We like to think of ourselves as conscious, rational beings.
But human behavior is largely driven by unconscious attitudes.
These attitudes reside in the deep recesses of the brain, and we ignore them at our own peril.
So says Washington Post journalist Shankar Vedantam.
Vedantam is the author of a new book, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives.
Vedantam explores how the workings of the unconscious mind explain everything from genocide and injustice to the rise of suicide bombers.
The World’s science reporter Rhitu Chatterjee spoke with Vedantam about the role of the hidden brain in our lives and actions. Listen to that interview here.
Listeners asked Vedantam their own questions on The World Science Forum. You can follow that conversation. It’s just to the right.
- Have you ever regretted a decision you made, realizing later that it was impulsive and ill-informed?
- Do you think it’s possible to change our unconscious biases by better understanding our hidden brains?
- Or does understanding our hidden brains makes us more confused, less sure of our decisions?
Shankar – Many thanks for participating in the World Science Forum. This is a fascinating and important topic.
You talk about the hidden biases that control our actions, but what about physical changes in our brains? Chemical addictions and mental illnesses can alter behavior, often in self-destructive ways. Do these physical changes affect the same parts of the brain as the cultural/psychological influences you talk about? In other words, do racism and heroin addiction look at all similar in the brain?
Thanks for the great question, David. Addictions and mental disorders do indeed affect the hidden brain, as does culture. But it’s an error to think of them as affecting some common, underlying “hidden” part of our brains. The “hidden brain” is a metaphor, not a part of the physical brain that is actually hidden, or recently unearthed. It refers to a range of mental processes that affect our judgment and decisions without our awareness. So in that sense, an addiction that produces subtle desire for a drug and a cultural stereotype that subtly causes us to think of male leaders differently than female leaders are both hidden influences, but not in the sense of affecting any one part of the physical brain.
Hello Shankar,
I was very interested in the discussion about how our unconscious brain controls political decisions. I often feel like politicians struggle to fit ideas into a commonsensical soundbite for public consumption. This has advantages of reaching people. The disadvantage I see is that some soundbites can sound good but produce bad policies or sound bad but produce good policies. Does your work provide any insight into how important political ideas that don’t fit into a soundbite can be effectively communicated?
Thanks,
DJ Brasier
Thanks for the great question. Voters do have a need for simple ideas, well communicated, and I don’t think that is going to change. The challenge for leaders is to make complex ideas accessible. Great leaders do this; they dramatize causes and use symbols – think of Mahatma Gandhi and the Salt March or Rosa Parks and the bus. They also use metaphor and other storytelling techniques, and situate ideas within historical narratives that people can relate to – think about Churchill during the Battle for Britain. The problem is not that leaders condense ideas into soundbites, but that many leaders really don’t have very much of value to say. I honestly do think that once there is vision – real vision, not just a bunch of smart ideas – the vehicle to communicate that vision will emerge.
You observe that research finds that people with unconscious racial bias tend to be conservative and hence vote Republican, which is the conservative party. I am not surprised. I have always found that conservative philosophy tends to be parochial, nationalistic and almost tribal. I think the human being is inherently tribal. In that sense a race neutral bias tends to be a nation building philosophy. The conservative approach to state building with people of other cultures is by conquest. Here I might contrast President Andrew Jackson with Woodrow Wilson.
I like your comparison to suicide bombers and the Kamikaze suicide bombers. Those bombers were selfless heroes. Should we distinguish between bombers who attack military targets and those which target civilian populations?
Thanks for the note, Jim. The research shows that both Democrats and Republicans, whites and blacks, tend to hold an anti-black or pro-white bias in the United States. Areas of the country where racial bias is highest tend to vote conservative. There are nuances to this, which are described at length in the chapter of The Hidden Brain called Disarming The Bomb. I personally prefer to stick with the empirical evidence, and avoid overly broad generalizations.
Thanks Shankar,
It is a subject of profound dimensions. But, can there ever be enough relevant empirical evidence? I’ll check out the book.
This discussion really caught my attention because I do a lot of thinking about my own unconscious and how it affects my life and decisions. My feeling about my unconscious has always been that it it a source of wisdom and possesses a level of understanding that my conscious mind can not. The reasoning behind this is that the amount of data input that we experience in our lives is so vast that our conscious mind could not possibly process it all. My unconscious self seems to be this silent intelligence that is constantly taking in all of the subtleties of my experience and from that input producing intuitive feelings. For example, if your business partner is cheating you, your conscious mind may not pick up the clues but your intuition may tell you that something is not right.
Most people feel intuitions are powerful and accurate guides, and in many domains of life, especially in the realm of personal preferences, intuition is very useful. But serious questions are raised about the accuracy of our intuitions by several warehouses filled with research experiments that show how our intuitions lead us astray. We all seek the comfort of being told our intuitions are accurate, but I believe we would be better off, as individuals and as a society, if we trusted the evidence over our intuitions. The final chapter in my book which is titled The Telescope Effect, talks about how our intuitions cause us to make serious errors when it comes to moral judgment.
In my youth, I was very data-driven and tried to make all decisions based on facts and logic. As I’ve gotten older, I have found myself operating more and more on an intuitive basis, with pretty good success. I’ve found that trying to gather all the evidence is paralyzing (there’s a name for it – “analysis paralysis”). In general I can gather 80% of the evidence and a conclusion just pops out. Spending more time on it usually doesn’t change the conclusion. I don’t know whether I’m disagreeing with you or not – I guess I can see that there’s a lot of opportunity for unconcious bias with no analysis to verify it. But maybe there are multiple right answers (especially in technical decisions) and it’s ok to go with one rather than spending more time.
Thanks for the great comment, Bill. You may be surprised to learn I agree with you. There is a stage of analysis beyond which adding additional data does not produce better results, but paralysis. But recognizing the risks of overanalysis is very different than rejecting analysis in toto in favor of gut-instinct — there is a “sweet spot” between too little and too much analysis. I think it is fair to say that, in general I believe our society does too little analysis and trusts intuition too much, but there are bound to be some individuals who analyze too much — to their detriment.
I tend to agree with Bill Walton within limitations, in that, in my areas of expertise, “80%” of the evidence is generally sufficient to draw a valid conclusion at this stage of my life. I do not know if the intuition studies referenced by Shankar Venantam controls for differing levels of experience and expertise (and age) in the areas where one applies intuition, but it makes sense that, with experience in a particular field, one’s intuition would become more accurate. One may not need to consciously draw on all of past experience- it is possible that the subconscious can assimilate the pertinent information with no conscious effort. On the other hand, in areas of limited experience (i.e., in my case, romantic relationships) intuition may be no better than random chance.
Well said, Charles, I agree with you. When an athlete spends years working on a skill and masters it and makes it “automatic,” it’s a big mistake to tell that athlete to think through every step of the activity instead of allowing motor memory to take over. The hidden brain has become superior to the conscious brain in this domain, because as I explain in the book, the rules in the domain have been mastered by the hidden brain and the hidden brain is much faster than the conscious brain. Again, that’s a very different scenario from a patient visiting a doctor or a manager interviewing someone for a position and just getting a feeling that they are “not quite right” for the job. (I wonder if people who are prone to analysis self-select themselves to post questions to forums like this?)
Hi Shankar,
Going back to our conversation about how we’re strongly influenced by the people around us. I’m wondering if that’s simply because human beings evolved in small groups/tribes? And if so, what about people who think and act differently from those around them? Do they consciously overcome the shackles of group psychology?
Rhitu,
I certainly think the fact that humans have evolved to be a social species plays a large role in the effects that groups have on us. I’m uncomfortable with the “shackles” terminology, however, because it suggests that we all ought to shake off the influences that others have on us. As I explain in The Hidden Brain, however, our ties to one another, and our ability to influence and be influenced by others is a marker of our evolution and intelligence, not a sign of weakness or slavery. There are certainly times it is more and less functional to be influenced by groups, and at various times all of us have managed to stand apart from group influences. My hope is people will try to do this consciously — embrace the group when it is appropriate to do so, and reject it when needed.
I found the effects of our unconscious thoughts quite interesting due to the fact that they create bias through a conscious medium. And because of your thorough research, I hope you can provide an elevated input on a controversial physiological dilemma. Do you feel that mental illness (not mental retardation) is directly related to an unconscious view of social ideas placed onto the victim?
Thanks for the question, Chris. It seems rather clear that there are many different types of mental illnesses. Most mental illnesses are likely caused as a result of some interaction between the biology of the brain and the environment — whether that environment refers to toxins or injuries, or experiences and traumatic events.
Thanks for all the great questions. Please join me at http://www.facebook.com/hiddenbrain — where I bring up interesting connections between news events and the hidden brain.