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

by Shankar Vedantam

  Google Earth didn’t tell me this, but the rooftop on my computer screen was an IKEA store. Across from the IKEA was an Applebee’s restaurant with about thirty tables inside. The restaurant was family-friendly, casual, and moderately priced.

  Inside the restaurant, a waitress took orders. She was about seventeen or eighteen years old. When customers asked for beer and fries, the waitress wrote down the order and repeated it verbatim. “Bier,” she echoed, or “friet.” When other customers asked for “bier,” the waitress said “pils,” a Dutch synonym for beer. For “friet,” she said “patat,” another synonym. She wrote down every order.

  For one group of customers, the waitress mimicked the customers verbatim. For another group, she acknowledged their orders by using a synonym and saying “yes.” Tips given by the customers were counted. When the waitress mimicked customers, her tip went up. The difference was not trivial. On average, customers who were mimicked gave the waitress tips that were 140 percent larger.

  The waitress did not know the aim of the experiment, so it was not as though she treated one set of customers better than the other. I called Dutch psychologist Rick van Baaren, who conducted the study. He told me mimicry works best when it follows the natural rhythms of conversation. If you instantly repeat what someone tells you, it will be obvious and irritating, like a five-year-old repeating back to you everything you say. But when you repeat what you hear after a short delay, you communicate something important: I am listening to you. I have understood you. I agree with you.

  What is fascinating is that the waitress communicated exactly those things to the other customers, too. By using synonyms and saying yes, she told these customers that she had heard them and understood their instructions. By writing down every order, she emphasized that she would accurately communicate the orders to kitchen staff. But language is more than just verbal information. Much of what we say goes beyond the literal meaning of the words we use. Using tone, inflection, and various patterns of speech, we communicate affection, anger, and gratitude, loneliness and longing. I am not drawing your attention to the well-known difference between verbal and nonverbal communication. I am drawing your attention to the difference between conscious and unconscious communication. Without their awareness, customers who were mimicked felt they received better service.

  The next time you are in a park, a restaurant, or an office, watch any two people talking. The more in sync they are, the more likely they will be to subtly mimic each other. If you get close enough to hear what they are saying, you might hear them repeating each other’s phrases. They might even have the same rhythms of speech, the same body language—their hidden brains are prompting them to reflect concordance. When people hear something they agree with, they respond enthusiastically and quickly. When they hear something they disagree with, they are microseconds slower to respond, because the hidden brain knows that an impasse lies ahead and is girding for conflict.

  The psychologists Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh once videotaped people in conversation with a lab assistant. The assistant was instructed to rub her face or shake her foot throughout the conversation. The videotape revealed the subjects of the study rubbing their faces and shaking their feet in response. When quizzed later on, none of the people remembered adopting these tics. Nor did they report noticing the assistant’s face rubbing and foot shaking. Unlike psychologists who deliberately manipulate behavior to see what effect it has on others, most of our modulations in speech and action happen unconsciously and unintentionally in the course of everyday communication. I unconsciously respond to your unconscious signals, and you to mine. The fact that neither of us is aware of this dance does not mean it is irrelevant. Remember, even as the Applebee’s customers and the waitress were exchanging information at a deliberate and explicit level—orders and acknowledgments for beer and fries—they were also exchanging information at an unconscious and unintentional level. If you looked only at the explicit information exchanged, you would not understand why some customers gave extra generous tips.

  When we hear about the Newcastle beverage station or the volunteers who rub their faces and shake their feet in response to a lab assistant’s actions—or an eyewitness who makes an “obvious” error—we can’t help but feel we would never be susceptible to such manipulation. Of course we would notice that the person sitting before us was shaking her foot or rubbing her face. The photo obviously shows a pair of eyes one week and marigolds the next. The rapist’s teeth are straight; the suspect’s are crooked. The cues are not hidden. When Dutch psychologist Rick van Baaren came up with his Applebee’s experiment, the waitress was initially reluctant to participate because she felt the mimicry would be obvious. Customers would ask her what the hell she thought she was doing. Of course, no one did. What the restaurant experiment reveals is that your hidden brain does not work in isolation. It forms networks with other hidden brains. I unconsciously pick up the unconscious cues you send me, and I unconsciously respond to them. Without being aware of it, we are constantly adapting to different contexts and people, modulating not just our rhythms of speech, but the very content of our ideas. This effect is especially powerful in situations where people are trying to form emotional connections: When you want to create a bond with another person, your hidden brain subtly whispers, “Say this” or “Don’t say that.”

  The Selfish Brain

  Two friends of mine are prominent Alzheimer’s disease researchers. John Trojanowski and Virginia Lee co-direct the University of Pennsylvania’s research on neurodegenerative disorders. But what I want to tell you about these scientists does not have to do with neurofibrillary tangles and beta-amyloid plaques. It has to do with John and Virginia themselves.

  John speaks in full sentences. He is attentive to detail in everyday conversation. When I interviewed him some years ago for an investigative article, the picture he painted was like a John le Carré spy story—intricate, detailed, subtle. Listening to John was like watching a painter develop a canvas, only instead of brush and paint John employed a series of perfectly-thought-out sentences. He included so much detail that I found myself having to concentrate really hard to pick out the important points. Like any good le Carré novel, John’s account was not about bombs and car chases and hijacked airplanes but about the passing detail of an unlatched gate.

  At first glance, John and Virginia seem like an odd couple. He is six foot three inches tall, looks a little like Mick Jagger, and is expansively genial. She is of Asian ancestry, petite, and has the coiled restraint of a cat. At second glance, they look even more like an odd couple. Where John is verbose, Virginia is staccato. When they get angry, he exudes icy dignity and she flashes fire. John follows a simple rule in everyday conversation—why say something in one sentence when you can say it in two? Virginia strips language to its tensile outlines, eliminating subjects and objects in most sentences, and waging an unrelenting war of annihilation against all modifiers. When she says “Yes!” or “No!” her eyes bristling with impatience, you have the sense that what she really means to say would take ten minutes but she can’t spare that kind of time.

  “When Virginia’s angry with you,” one friend of theirs told me, “it’s like she’s going to take a knife and slit your throat. When John’s angry with you, he’ll make you feel so guilty that you will take a knife and slit your own throat.”

  “A friend calls us fire and ice,” John said. “You can guess which is which.”

  I once visited John and Virginia’s lab. As I was talking with an office administrator, Virginia rushed up.

  “Here,” she said, and dropped a folder before the administrator, whose name was Karen Engel. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.” She whirled and was gone.

  “John would have talked about it for ten minutes,” Engel said, nodding at the folder. “He is not one to make rash decisions. He wants consensus.”

  Perhaps you know people like John and Virginia; their clashing personalities are a cliché of television sitcoms. E
xperts in human relationships will tell you that while such clashing personalities are good for comedy, they are definitely not good in real life. People like John and Virginia who clash, disagree, and get on each other’s nerves because they have different personalities are exactly the kind of people who should never be left alone in a room together. As colleagues, experts will say, people like John and Virginia are doomed to conflict. And if a professional relationship between people like them is likely to be doomed, a personal relationship between them would be a catastrophe. Don’t think rancor and bitterness, think mushroom clouds.

  What I haven’t told you about John and Virginia is that they have been married to each other for more than thirty years. And more than most couples I know who have been married half as long, it is obvious they are very much in love. Opposites attract, you say. Research studies contradict you on that—at least in that studies show that similar people tend to get along better in the long run—but never mind. Let’s assume opposites do attract. What I find astonishing about John and Virginia is that they not only live together and love each other, but they have formed a potent professional partnership that has placed them among the ranks of the most prolific and widely respected scientists in the world. At Penn, John and Virginia collaborate to produce dozens of research papers in prestigious scientific journals. They haul in millions of dollars in grants. Everything they do is in concert, collaboration, and consultation with each other. Someday, admirers whisper, they might win the Nobel Prize in medicine—together.

  Bear in mind that this is a couple that argues about minutiae. Neither will give ground on such all-important questions as whether the forks should go in the dishwasher with their pointy ends up or their pointy ends down. When John and Virginia clash, they revert to personality. John becomes more and more precise, attending to tinier and tinier details, his emotions hidden behind layers of ice. Virginia grows more and more didactic, interrupting John and showing considerable exasperation at his verbal pyrotechnics. When they spar, I can see her mentally pick up projectiles and fling them at him while he sits, steely-faced and impassive, green peas whizzing by his nose.

  When they went on vacation recently, they argued about the right way to make breakfast cereal. When he tried to recall what the fight was about some days later, John came up short. It was so trivial he could barely remember the details—except that the fight was not only heated, but a recurring conflict every day of their vacation. If you had seen them during these breakfast cereal duels, you would not have guessed that together in their professional life John and Virginia have bucked the neuroscience community on the causes of Alzheimer’s disease. They have often been willing to stake out ground that is at odds with the conventional wisdom, the kind of position that requires them to depend on each other for intellectual and emotional support. Taking such gambles in science is not easy. It is a little like being lost at sea, menacing gray-green water from horizon to horizon, and striking off in one direction on your own, while all the other boats head off together in the opposite direction. It needs confidence and it needs each member of the couple to have complete trust in the other.

  In everyday life, however, friends and co-workers do not wonder how John and Virginia work so well together. They wonder how John and Virginia can coexist.

  I imagine a marital counselor giving advice to John and Virginia. After hearing about the breakfast cereal fights, I see him wondering about whether the two of them are really suited for each other.

  John, for example, will start to describe how his day goes: “We get up at seven o’clock—”

  “We get up at seven-thirty,” Virginia sharply interrupts. “John, you think that you wake up at seven.”

  The marital counselor raises his eyebrows imperceptibly. They argue about small things, he says to himself. Do they give each other lots of space? No. He learns that they share their professional lives, going from the same house to adjacent cubicles in the same office. Do they gingerly avoid each other in their professional life? No. They are often at each other’s throats in public.

  “I’ve never encountered the volatility I see between them,” a lab manager named Jennifer Bruce once told me. “If it happens often enough, people just say, ‘Oh, they’re at it again.’”

  Bob Dome, another colleague, told me that he was taken aback when he first met the couple. “Virginia is hyperkinetic. And John always speaks very slowly, so Virginia is always telling him to shut up or get on with it. I was shocked when I first met them. I didn’t know they were married.”

  Even their jokes have an edge. At a lab meeting with two dozen people in attendance, John once talked about the role that brain injuries might play in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. He explained that the insidious thing about these injuries is that their effects might not be visible, even to highly sophisticated brain scanners.

  “I fell off a horse when I was sixteen and I had a brief amnesia,” he said. “It went away, but that’s the kind of thing that predisposes somebody to Alzheimer’s disease. I haven’t taken an MRI [brain scan], but even if I did, I wouldn’t find anything.”

  “How do you know?” Virginia asked, deadpan. The room erupted in laughter, and John looked displeased.

  I see the marital counselor shaking his head as he learns from John that their heated criticisms of each other at work regularly bring them both “to the brink of tears.”

  “When we don’t agree, it is not really clashing,” Virginia interrupts, disagreeing with her husband about whether they disagree with each other. “If I don’t agree with him, I tell him.”

  I see our imaginary therapist leaning back in his chair with a heavy sigh when he realizes the only thing that keeps them from each other’s throats is traffic safety. “We have one very important rule—we still bicycle to work,” John told me. “Whatever we discuss, we cannot fight on our bicycles, because that is dangerous.”

  But John and Virginia also have a secret, perhaps the most important secret that extraordinarily talented type A couples can have. To understand what it is, I want to introduce you to the work of a social psychologist named Abraham Tesser.

  Some years ago, a young woman approached Tesser and told him that she had done well in a recent class but was feeling awful because a close friend of hers had done even better. Social psychologists are always on the lookout for behaviors that are not idiosyncratic to individuals but that say something about human nature in general. Tesser sympathized with the woman who confided in him, but her remark got him thinking. Would the woman have felt as bad if the person who had outperformed her had not been a close friend? Alternatively, if the friend had done well at something that the woman did not care about herself, would she have experienced jealousy? Tesser intuitively guessed the answer to both questions was no. When a stranger does well at something, we can enjoy their accomplishments. In fact, when we know something about basketball or poetry, we are better able to understand the skill involved in dunking a ball or turning a rhyme. Most of us take great pleasure in watching gifted athletes and performers do things we could never dream of doing ourselves.

  When close friends or lovers do well in activities that do not interest us, the same thing happens. The wife who would never be caught dead in a garden can take pride in her green-thumbed husband who has turned the backyard into a horticultural exhibit; the aspiring high school football star feels his chest puff with pride when his younger sister is chosen for the lead role in the school play. In fact, Tesser sensed that in these situations, people feel happy partly because they get to bask in reflected glory. There is my cousin, who is the first violinist in the symphony! a person might think. Or, There is my son, the doctor!

  But something interesting—and potentially unpleasant—happens when someone whom we are close to excels in a domain where we would like to be seen as excellent ourselves. The writer who is outshone by his writer girlfriend feels a conflict. He feels pleasure at the success of someone he loves and gets some reflected glory, but he a
lso feels taken down a peg. He doesn’t want reflected literary glory; he wants his own literary glory! This is why the twelve-year-old who gets bumped from the lead role in the school play is likely to come home bemused if she loses the starring role to a stranger, but is likely to come home in tears if she loses the part to her twin sister.

  “If the relationship is close, the jealousy gets even worse,” Tesser told me. “You have these two reactions to the other person—‘Your success pulls me up,’ but on the other hand, ‘Your success makes me feel like crapola.’”

  Tesser conducted a series of experiments that confirmed his hunches. At its core, the conflict between pride and jealousy in other people’s accomplishments hinges on a mechanism in the hidden brain designed to watch out for our narrow selfish interests. We show ourselves in a positive light when we excel at something, but we are also seen positively when we are associated with someone who excels—the brother of the beauty pageant winner is not just another guy. Some of his sister’s glory rubs off on him. Usually these two mechanisms in the hidden brain are not in conflict. Tesser’s insight was that when someone who is close to us excels at something that we want to excel at ourselves, these two drives are unconsciously put into conflict with each other. The glory of our successful friends and siblings rubs off on us. But because we hunger for their kind of glory ourselves, their success makes us feel mediocre. This is why the woman who confided in Tesser was upset at being outperformed by a close friend.

  Tesser found that people feel very powerful resentment when their partners are successful in domains that are integral to their own identity. This resentment is so powerful that volunteers in experiments sabotage their friends and lovers to keep them from doing well at things the volunteers see as their own core strengths. Wordsmiths presented with a test of verbal ability, for example, will help strangers and undermine their lovers, in order to keep partners from outperforming them. Although husbands and wives say they are unrestrainedly happy about the successes of their partners, videotaped interviews show that people’s expressions of pleasure are leavened with dismay when they find their spouses have outdone them in domains they want to claim as their own. The people Tesser studied were not bad people; they had no awareness of what they were doing. Like the woman who approached Tesser to ask why it was she felt dismayed her friend had outperformed her, these husbands and wives were not consciously aware of why they felt the way they did. Not only would they not be able to explain their behavior to others, they would not be able to explain their behavior to themselves, which is how it always is with the hidden brain.