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

by Shankar Vedantam

  From the point of view of the congresswoman, I can understand why she got angry. If you are a person of color, the sad truth is that you are much more likely to be the victim of these errors in the United States, even if you are a member of Congress. It feels unfair and is hurtful—and if the incidents happen often enough, your hidden brain comes to assume that the wounds are being inflicted intentionally. McKinney was not responding calmly, rationally, or deliberately. Her hidden brain responded automatically to an insult, just as the police officer reacted automatically to an unfamiliar person walking around a metal detector. Like Iagos manipulating unwitting Othellos, the hidden brains in both cop and congresswoman were the real villains of this story. The national commentariat missed the subconscious forces because the commentariat always assumes that words and actions reflect conscious intent—the default position in our society is that the hidden brain does not exist. To McKinney’s supporters, the cop had to be a racist. To her detractors, she was a crazy woman who shouted “Racism!” without provocation.

  A harmless—indeed, necessary—bias in early infancy thus creates problems in later life that are maddeningly difficult to control. In criminal justice settings, interracial eyewitness identifications are far more prone to error than situations where witnesses and suspects belong to the same race. Courts dismiss the idea that some eyewitnesses should be taken more seriously than others, because the scales of justice—like Capitol Hill police officers—are supposed to be colorblind. Many of the institutions in our society, as I have said, are premised on the notion that deliberate and conscious thinking are all that matter. We assume eyewitnesses who mean to be accurate are accurate. The data, however, prove that unintentional and unconscious bias regularly plays a role in eyewitness errors. Ignoring the role of race, rather than taking it into account, is what produces outcomes that are racist.

  When do automatic and “mundane” biases in the hidden brain start to influence our relationships with others? Remarkable research by a Canadian psychologist shows that these biases start to shape our social perceptions and judgment from the time we are toddlers.

  The Whiteside Taylor Daycare in Montréal is no different from hundreds of other facilities in North America that care for the very young. Infants and preschoolers play, fidget, eat, and cry. A few years ago, a psychologist named Frances Aboud visited Whiteside Taylor with an interesting proposition. She wanted to recruit some of the children at the day care for a psychological experiment.

  The day care agreed, and Aboud went about getting permission from parents of the children. When all the paperwork was squared away, Aboud gathered eighty white children from the day care and from a few local elementary schools. The youngest child she studied was three years old. Aboud, who has sharp, striking features and is of Lebanese descent, gave her young volunteers half a dozen positive adjectives such as “good,” “kind,” and “clean” and half a dozen negative adjectives such as “mean,” “cruel,” and “bad.” Aboud asked the children to match each adjective with one of two pictures. The drawings always showed a white person and a black person. She provided a short explanation of each adjective. She would say, “Some men are selfish. They don’t care about anyone but themselves. Who is selfish?” and ask the children to point to the drawing of either a black man or a white man. Or she would say, “Some women are sad. They are left alone with no one to talk to. Who is sad?” and ask them to point to the drawing of either a black woman or a white woman. Aboud also showed the children drawings of a black boy and a white boy and told them, “Some boys are cruel. When their dog comes to meet them, they kick their dog. Who is cruel?” She showed the kids drawings of a white girl and a black girl and said, “Some girls are ugly and people don’t like to look at them. Who is ugly?”

  Seventy percent of the children Aboud studied assigned nearly every positive adjective to the white faces and nearly every negative adjective to the black faces.

  As disturbing as it may seem, there is nothing unusual about the Whiteside Taylor Daycare or the biases of the young children in its care; similar studies going back many years have found identical results among a range of preschoolers and elementary school children across North America. It doesn’t make much difference, by the way, if you allow the children to assign positive adjectives to both the white and the black faces and allow them to not assign negative adjectives to either face. Young children, on average, still assign more negative adjectives exclusively to the drawings of black faces and more positive adjectives exclusively to the drawings of white faces.

  Research into the biases of young children provides us with a useful window into the hidden brain, because children are rapidly forming associations—and associations are the way the hidden brain learns many of its rules. The doings of the hidden brain, moreover, stand out more clearly among young children than among adults because small kids have not learned to consciously fight the hidden brain’s automatic conclusions.

  But Aboud’s work also forces us to think about bias and prejudice through a new lens. It is absurd to think of the toddlers at Whiteside Taylor as hostile bigots. These children were still learning to blow their noses. If we cannot blame the children, whom should we blame? Well, perhaps the fault lies with the parents or teachers of these children? Where else could they have learned such hateful stuff?

  To answer that, Aboud assessed the racial views of children at the Harold Napper Elementary School just outside Montréal. She also assessed the views of their parents and teachers. Aboud found no correlation between the views of the children and the views of their parents. Nor was there a correlation between the views of the children and the views of their teachers. The children were simply not being exposed to a regular diet of hate speech that told them that blacks were cruel and ugly and that whites were clean and good. So where did those ideas come from?

  Aboud decided to start by understanding what these children thought was going on in the minds of the adults around them. So she recruited yet another group of young white children from kindergarten and the first grade. She administered the version of the racial bias test that allowed children to assign positive and negative adjectives to the black or the white face, to both faces, or to neither.

  Unsurprisingly, Aboud found the same pattern of results as in the earlier studies—children assigned many of the negative words exclusively to black faces and many of the positive words exclusively to white faces. Aboud then showed the children photos of two research assistants. One was white and the other black. Aboud asked the children to guess how the research assistants might assign the positive and negative adjectives to the white and black faces: She challenged the kids to guess the racial views of the research assistants. The children believed that the research assistants would reach exactly the same conclusions they did. They believed that the white and black assistants would mostly assign the positive adjectives to white faces and the negative adjectives to black faces.

  Aboud had the two research assistants visit the children. She had them read stories to the kids with positive interracial themes. She wanted to test the intuitively appealing idea that stories with positive themes would reverse the children’s attitudes. The stories were about pairs of black and white friends. One was about two boys named Billy and Carl. Both loved to ride around on their bikes, and both hoped their parents would buy them new bikes for their birthdays. The boys spent time at each other’s homes, and were warmly welcomed by each other’s families. They confided their hopes about the new bikes to each other. When one of them received a new bike, they celebrated together. When the second boy was not given a new bike for his birthday, he confided his disappointment to his friend. The friends supported each other—right up to the point when the second boy’s parents got him a surprise present—a go-cart. In the final scene of the picture book, the two friends entered a race together and came in first with the go-cart. The story, as you can tell, had unambiguously positive racial themes. Both the friends were warm, caring, and attractive children.
They liked each other, and their families liked each other, too.

  Did it make a difference to the kindergartners? The children loved the stories, but to Aboud’s dismay, the stories made virtually no difference in their racial attitudes toward black people. Not only did they continue to assign negative adjectives to the black faces, they continued to believe that the research assistants, including the woman who was black, would hold identical views.

  Another story the research assistants read revealed a surprising twist in the nature of the children’s bias. The tale was a fantastic account of three young boys, Alex, Joel, and Zachariah, who were playing on a river in a rubber raft. Alex and Joel were white. Zachariah was black, a serious child who liked books and reading. As they daydreamed, their raft took them out to sea—where they encountered a crocodile. The beast attacked them and flipped Alex and Joel into the sea. It then came after Zachariah, who alertly used a bandanna to tie its snout shut. Zachariah then pulled his friends out of the water and, crocodile in tow, headed back to land. Once on the dock, Zachariah untied the crocodile’s snout, even though one of his friends thought the beast should be left to its own devices. But Zachariah knew the crocodile was endangered. As Alex and Joel slept over at Zachariah’s home that night, the little black boy stayed up until eleven P.M. writing letters to the president to urge more animal conservation efforts.

  As you can tell, the little black boy was an unusual hero. Zachariah fought off the crocodile, saved the lives of his friends, was kind to the crocodile because he knew about conservation issues, and sacrificed his own sleep in order to write to the president. But when the researchers asked the kindergartners to describe what they had learned from this and other stories, the children tended to misremember the positive actions of black characters as positive actions of the white characters in the stories. Without being aware that they were doing so, the children stripped Zachariah of his heroism and assigned the credit for his brave and clever actions to his white friends. In other words, every piece of information that Aboud was giving the kindergartners was being filtered through a lens that systematically advantaged whites and systematically disadvantaged blacks.

  “That was so distressing because it was clear the black kid had saved his friends,” Aboud said. Where were the children getting their obnoxious views?

  Some of Aboud’s colleagues suggested that the parents of these children were lying to the psychologist, that they were secretly communicating racist messages to children while pretending to be tolerant. Aboud thought this was extremely unlikely; if anything, the parents she’d encountered had been worried about discussing racial matters at all out of fear that it might prompt their children to believe that race mattered and eventually lead them to intolerant attitudes. Furthermore, even if the parents had secretly taught their children to be bigots, why would the children believe the research assistants were similarly biased? The research assistants were clearly trying their best to communicate positive things about blacks and interracial friendships. Why were the children hearing something completely different?

  Aboud decided there were two separate puzzles to solve. The first question was, Why did the kids believe that the adults in their lives shared their views—when they clearly did not? The second question was more basic: How did kids form their racial attitudes in the first place?

  Hidden in Aboud’s data was a clue to the first answer. There were differences between younger and older children when it came to how accurately they guessed the views of the research assistants before and after the children heard the positive stories. When the oldest kids heard the white research assistant read stories with extremely explicit and positive interracial themes, they later concluded the research assistant felt positively toward blacks. Their own views about blacks continued to be negative, but for the first time, these kids were able to tell that an adult did not share their views.

  Frances Aboud was an admirer of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, and she thought a Piagetian concept might explain why the youngest kids assumed adults shared their views. Very young children assume that everyone shares their views of the world. It requires a certain level of maturity for a child to realize that people can have entirely different perspectives.

  This would explain why the youngest children not only believed that the research assistants shared their biases, but why they felt that their parents and teachers had the same attitudes, when in reality all the adults were trying to teach the kids to have positive views about people from other ethnic groups. The children were projecting their own views onto the adults in an immature and egocentric manner. When the research assistants read positive stories to the kids, Aboud had assumed—erroneously—that the children would accurately figure out what the adults thought about interracial friendships. But young children find it difficult to infer what is happening in other people’s minds.

  Aboud sent the research assistants back into the classroom, but this time, instead of just reading the stories and assuming the kids would draw the right message, the research assistants were told to go out of their way to be explicit about what they took away from the stories. The assistants praised the heroics of the black characters, and explicitly pointed out the warmth of the interracial friendships. When the racial attitude of the kids toward blacks was tested again, the kindergartners now looked a lot like the older kids. They still assigned positive adjectives to whites and negative adjectives to blacks, but they were able to see how the research assistants did not share their views.

  “Parents are afraid of saying anything about race to their kids because they are afraid it will make their children prejudiced,” Aboud said. “I say, ‘Heap on the positive stuff.’”

  But this still raises the basic question: Where did the attitudes of the kids come from? We can confidently say the biased views were not coming from parents and teachers, but we still don’t know where they were coming from. Remember, the children did not hold random views on racial matters—large numbers of them, especially the youngest kids, had nearly identical views. They believed whites were good and nice and clean, and that blacks were cruel and ugly and dirty.

  The answer lay in the different ways the hidden brain and the conscious brain learn about the world. Aboud asked me to imagine that I was a young white child who suddenly found himself in an ordinary suburban neighborhood in North America. For the purposes of this thought experiment, imagine that I am friendless and parentless—no one tells me what to think, or what conclusions to draw. I am a child, so I lack the maturity to draw very sophisticated conclusions. What would my hidden brain learn as it tried to make sense of the world? It would conclude, for one thing, that most people who live in nice houses are white. Most people on television are white, especially the people who are shown in positions of authority, dignity, and power. Most of the storybook characters I see are white, and it is white children who mostly do heroic, clever, and generous things. My hidden brain—fluent in the language of associations—would conclude that there must be an unspoken rule in society that forces whites to marry other whites, because everywhere I look, most of the white husbands seem to be married to white wives. There also must be unspoken rules about who can visit whose homes, because most of the time when friends visit each other, they belong to the same race.

  In my three-year-old brain, I don’t think of black people as bad, but I think of them as different. I might even think they have chosen to be different, that they have chosen to have different skin color, that they have chosen to marry other black people, and that they have chosen to live in black neighborhoods and visit with black friends. Now imagine that I pick up this message not once or twice but thousands of times. I run into exceptions regularly, the black family that lives in the palatial mansion down the street, the interracial couple on the next block, the gay or Latino friends who drop by now and then. But to my hidden brain, which is interested only in generalities, the overall force of the cultural message is overwhelming. My beliefs are inaccurate inferences,
but they don’t feel like inferences. To my hidden brain, they feel like solid conclusions. Everywhere I look, I see evidence to back them up.

  Small children who are trying to rapidly orient themselves in the world can draw conclusions that superficially match the facts but are completely wrong. If my three-year-old brain had the verbal and conceptual ability to communicate my conclusions to grown-ups, they would quickly explain to me why I was wrong. But I don’t, and in any event, it’s no use telling the hidden brain that patterns are superficial, that there really isn’t a rule that whites can marry only whites, or that men can fall in love only with women. Remember, the hidden brain has one simple, blunt-edged priority: to quickly acculturate us to our world and give us a set of simple tools to enable us to make quick decisions.

  Many experiments in recent decades have found that black children hold views on racial matters that are more or less identical to those of white children. Black children are likely to associate positive things with white characters rather than black characters. Little black girls may feel white dolls are prettier than black dolls. Educators and parents have tried to expose kids to counter-stereotypical books, movies, and images. That is exactly the way to keep the hidden brain from forming the wrong associations, but Frances Aboud’s work shows us just how strong, persistent, and explicit the counter-stereotypical messages need to be to have any effect.

  When my own daughter turned three, to cite a personal example, her favorite game was “doctor.” Whenever she asked me to play with her, she told me to be the doctor, and she would take on the role of nurse. She was occasionally willing to assume the role of doctor, too, but she would insist we both be doctors. She was absolutely unwilling to let me play nurse. I told her there were no rules about who could be a nurse and who could be a doctor, but it was like pushing a boulder uphill. I finally asked her why nurses had to be female, and she explained, with the calm logic of a child, that she had never seen a storybook where a man was a nurse.