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

by Shankar Vedantam

  When Will later reflected on that moment, he realized he made very little by way of a conscious decision.

  “You do what you do,” he said. “You are right there. You see people running down the stairs, you see people running right at you. You go down the stairs.”

  Will found himself running down the stairs so quickly after the initial explosion that he didn’t see any other people besides his own group until they reached the eightieth floor. The Keefe, Bruyette & Woods employees paired off, and Will found himself with Cliff Gallant.

  It was only when they got to the seventy-first floor that Will stopped his friend. It was partly because there were very few people in the stairwell, and the hidden brain makes us feel self-conscious when we do something that few other people are doing. And some of the old connections were drawing Will back to the eighty-ninth floor.

  “Cliff,” he said, “it is in the other building.”

  The news that the explosion had occurred in the North Tower came as a complete surprise to Cliff Gallant. “I thought it was in our building.”

  “No, it is in the other building,” Will insisted.

  Two connections snaking back to the eighty-ninth floor tugged at Will. If it turned out that this was not a big deal and no one else had run, Rick Thorpe and Brad Vadas would have a field day. This was the kind of episode that would ensure a full month of jokes at Will’s expense. Something minor had happened and “crisis boy” had taken off like a rabbit.

  Will persuaded Cliff to wait to see if others came trickling down. They stood in the stairwell. United Flight 175 was probably over New Jersey by this point. The minutes ticked by. No one else from the eighty-ninth floor appeared.

  Will and Cliff sheepishly started climbing back up the stairs, drawn as ever by the cables that connected them to their comrades. They climbed two floors. They were right at the edge of the zone of impact of the coming plane.

  It was yet another decisive moment. What saved the day was that people from other floors were now coming down the stairwell. They were strangers, and they formed only weak connections with Will’s hidden brain, but there were many of them. Besides, it was getting difficult to climb against the tide of people. Climbing fifteen stories against that kind of traffic was crazy.

  Will and Cliff turned around and went with the flow. They resolved to get out of the stairwell and take an elevator back up. Luckily for them, every door they tried was locked—the stairwell was now a tunnel leading them out of the building. Doors could be opened by anyone inside the building, but were locked against intruders trying to enter offices from the stairwell.

  “We’re going to go back and get laughed at so much for this,” Will fretted.

  Will and Cliff Gallant were in the stairwell on the fifty-fourth floor when they received the ultimate confirmation that they had overreacted. Building officials made the announcement that people in the South Tower could remain in their offices. There was a lot of noise in the stairwell, and the announcement was not heard clearly, but after people shushed one another, the announcement was repeated thirty seconds or a minute later. But by now the stairwell was so crowded it was impossible to go back up.

  Just as Will was resigning himself to weeks of humiliation at the hands of his jokester friends, the United airplane crashed into the South Tower. The stairwell shook. It actually undulated like a snake. Will recalled seeing people on landings three or four floors above him. He clutched at Cliff.

  This is it, he thought. The North Tower has tipped over and hit the South Tower. He was going to die.

  There was no way he could have known at that moment that he was actually supremely lucky. The cables connecting him with friends and strangers had conspired to spring him from the trap in which he had been encased. His hidden brain had extricated him from the zone of impact. The South Tower would stand long enough for him to get out. Nearly every person from the Keefe, Bruyette & Woods office on the eighty-ninth floor who survived escaped within the first moments after the explosion in the North Tower. Those who stayed behind would have found it increasingly difficult to leave, because their hidden brains were anchored to dozens of other people who were staying put. It would have required an enormous and deliberate effort for an individual to overcome the strength of those ties, or for the group as a whole to reach a new consensus.

  Many of the victims who stayed behind on the eighty-ninth floor were not racked by the kind of self-doubt that plagued Will. Once the United Airlines plane struck at 9:03 A.M., they had less than an hour to live.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Tunnel

  Terrorism, Extremism, and the Hidden Brain

  I want to return to Will DeRiso and the people trapped in the World Trade Center, and use this chapter to talk about the people at the other end of such tragedies—suicide bombers. What does our new understanding about the hidden brain tell us about religious zealotry and violence? Does unconscious bias play a role in the minds of terrorists? To answer that, I want to take you back to before September 11, 2001, to a tale that unfolded long before the term “suicide bomber” was even invented. It is a story that is not familiar to most people for the same reason that the strange patterns of death and survival on the eighty-eighth and eighty-ninth floors of the South Tower of the World Trade Center are unfamiliar to most people. Like the tragedy at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, the story of Laurence John Layton is little known because it unfolded in the shadow of a much larger event—the infamous deaths of nearly a thousand Americans in 1978 at a utopian outpost in Guyana called Jonestown.

  Laurence John Layton was still alive, but that was only because his mission went awry. His orders were to smuggle a gun aboard a passenger plane carrying a number of Americans, including a congressman. Once airborne, he was to shoot the pilot and turn the aircraft into an unguided missile. It would crash, and everyone would be killed, including himself. Layton did not think of himself as a terrorist. He felt his death was a necessary sacrifice, the only way to save his friends and family, and defend a dream he had nurtured all his adult life.

  Layton was thirty-two years old, an X-ray technician with a receding hairline and bushy sideburns. He was not a member of the global jihad, and he did not come from a country rife with anti-American sentiment. Layton was born in College Park, Maryland, right outside Washington. He was the son of a U.S. government scientist and had been raised a Quaker.

  The mission did not go as planned, but Layton did manage to smuggle a gun aboard the plane and did open fire at point-blank range. Upon his capture, he told police, “Yes, I shot the motherfuckers.” Some days later, Layton took “full responsibility” for the deaths of the U.S. congressman and four other Americans at the Port Kaituma airstrip in Guyana. In a handwritten statement full of loopy J’s, I’s, and L’s, Layton declared that no one had coerced him into the suicide mission. It was he who had “begged” for the privilege of being “allowed to bring down the plane.”

  A psychiatrist who interviewed Layton pressed him on the details of his mission: “The plane was supposed to go down? You were supposed to kill the pilot?”

  “However, whatever way,” Layton replied.

  “To kill the pilot and make the whole plane go down?”

  “Right.”

  Rebecca Moore and Fielding McGehee visited Larry Layton a few days after his capture. He was in a prison that encased two blocks in the middle of Georgetown, the capital of Guyana. The walls of the prison were twenty feet high and crowned with barbed wire. There was a low door through which the visitors entered. Moore and McGehee had come a long way from their home in Washington, D.C. They wanted to know why Layton had tried to bring down the passenger plane. They also wanted to know how his suicidal mission was linked to the deaths—a few hours later—of more than nine hundred Americans at Jonestown. Two of Moore’s sisters were among the dead at Jonestown. News reports said the women had taken their own lives, but Moore believed that Carolyn and Annie had been murdered.

  The couple from Washington stoo
d in a little breezeway and watched the prisoner being brought from his cell. The visitor area of the Georgetown prison was just a low wall that came up to the waist. Completing the crude partition were three layers of mesh, cyclone fencing, and netting. Larry Layton came up to stand on the other side. It was difficult to see much more than his outline through the layers. But once or twice, as the breeze shifted the layers, McGehee thought he spotted Layton’s eyes.

  Layton was not a stranger to Rebecca Moore and Fielding McGehee. He had formerly been married to Carolyn, one of Moore’s dead sisters at Jonestown. The Moore family and the Layton family had connections going back years. Their histories were intertwined with a church known as Peoples Temple and its charismatic leader, Jim Jones. Larry Layton’s mother, Lisa, had died of cancer at Jonestown a few days before the mass suicide. His sister Debbie had been a high-ranking member of Peoples Temple. Debbie’s defection from Jonestown had set in motion the events that led to the mass suicide of some nine hundred thirteen people in November 1978. Debbie’s testimony that Jonestown was virtually a concentration camp prompted an investigation by Representative Leo Ryan of California. The congressman visited Guyana to figure out the truth about Jonestown. It was Ryan’s party, swollen with defectors and returning to America, that Larry Layton was assigned to destroy.

  The visitors from Washington were burning with questions, but they stepped carefully. They inquired after Layton’s legal situation. The would-be suicide bomber had been arrested by Guyanese security forces after he and others had opened fire at the airstrip, killing the U.S. congressman and four others, and injuring several more. Layton said the Guyana court system was based on a defendant’s ability to bribe his way out of trouble; a poor person could go to jail for ten years for stealing eighty-five dollars, while a rich man who committed murder could get off scot-free. The visit was soon over. The couple promised to come again. A prison official, Janak Seegobin, told the visitors that Layton had seemed disturbed when he’d first arrived at the prison. Recognizing that the prisoner was an intelligent man, Seegobin had offered him books on scientific topics, “to concentrate his mind.” Layton was allowed to borrow two books at a time, then four. He devoured everything to do with psychology. He asked for a book on algebra. Seegobin confided to the visitors that he could not imagine Layton being responsible for any shootings. The prisoner seemed too gentle for that sort of thing.

  What prompts a man to agree to kill the pilot of a plane he is traveling on? To strap a bomb to his chest and explode himself? Is religion to blame? Do the young Muslim men blowing themselves up in Iraq and Pakistan and other theaters of today’s conflicts really believe that dozens of virgins will attend on them in the afterlife? For nonbelievers, followers of other faiths, and the vast majority of Muslims themselves, such beliefs seem fantastic. And if suicide bombers really seek nothing but death, it means they cannot be deterred.

  There is an alternative explanation, but this does not give us many options, either. Are suicide bombers basically suicidal? Are they depressed people out to kill themselves, whose impulses are directed by terrorist masterminds into murderous channels? Might suicide terrorism be more about suicide than about terrorism? Ariel Merari once wondered if this was so. But then the Israeli psychologist set out to do what most commentators on terrorism do not do—he began to look for evidence. He collected detailed biographical accounts of suicide terrorists. He spent hours interviewing young Arab men and women in Israeli prisons, people who had planned to kill themselves but, like Larry Layton, had seen their missions go awry. And one by one, his preconceptions fell away.

  Suicide terrorists are not crazy. If anything, Merari and other psychologists have found that these men and women seem to have fewer mental disorders than the general population. As a group, they are hardly more religious than everyone else. Large numbers of suicide terrorists do not come from religious backgrounds at all. Many are secular, even atheists. While some seek Rambo-style personal vengeance against groups that have wounded them, most have not directly experienced humiliation at the hands of their enemies. A considerable number come from wealthy and privileged backgrounds. They are college graduates and professionals, doctors, engineers, and architects. Nor do “psychological autopsies” of dead suicide bombers and psychological inventories of captured terrorists show that they are psychopathic automatons or nihilists. In fact, suicide terrorists on average seem more idealistic than their peers. They are often hypersensitive to guilt. Finally, the men and women Merari studied were not brainwashed simpletons who merely followed orders. They gave Merari thoughtful rationales for their behavior. Many of the would-be suicide bombers calmly told the psychologist that if they were released from prison, they would attempt another mission. They thought he was crazy for not seeing how their course of action was obvious.

  As the psychologist’s preconceptions fell away, he realized that we have misunderstood what motivates suicide bombers—and are therefore handicapped in our fight against them. Suicide bombers are not aberrational; large numbers of ordinary people can be turned into suicide bombers. The notion that suicide terrorists are mentally defective is also wrong. There is no clear psychological profile that predicts whether someone might become a suicide bomber. But there is a very distinct psychological profile of the process that produces suicide bombers. Merari likened it to a tunnel. Ordinary people go in at one end, and laser-focused suicide terrorists come out the other. At every stage of the tunnel process, individuals in the tunnel believe—as you and I always believe—that they have complete agency, complete autonomy. The tunnel is really a powerful system of manipulation, but the coercion is subtle. This is why suicide bombers rarely go to their deaths feeling coerced. There is no more powerful testament to the power of the hidden brain than the suicide bomber’s tunnel. And it’s a vivid example of how our false assumptions about human behavior and the brain exact a toll on our ability to make the right decisions as a society. Suicidal attacks remain a prime weapon of terror and insurgency, from Baghdad to Mumbai—and the recruitment of suicide terrorists extends deep into many societies, ensnaring children and women as well as countless young men. No matter how broad the pool of recruits turns out to be or how often our intuitions encounter disconfirming evidence, we are tempted to fall back on the notion that suicide bombers must be psychologically different from other people, and that they must be mindless automatons programmed to kill themselves and others.

  Suicide bombers themselves tell us why they become suicide bombers. In notes and videos, they often say they are motivated by religious beliefs and political causes. These reports confirm our intuitions, so we rarely question them. But, as we’ve done with numerous other examples, we ought to distinguish between what people sincerely believe and what might actually be happening at an unconscious level in their heads. Suicide bombers may tell us that religious injunctions motivate their actions, but is this a fact or a deduction on their part to explain their behavior—not just to us but to themselves? Global data on suicide bombers, including data on terrorists from predominantly Muslim countries, show that religious belief is neither a necessary nor a sufficient explanation for suicide terrorism—even when such violence is carried out in the name of religion.

  If the victims of terrorist attacks are unconsciously influenced by the psychology of large groups, the “peer pressure” of strangers, I believe the perpetrators of such attacks are unconsciously influenced by the psychology of small groups. It is small-group psychology—intense bonds of loyalty between small “bands of brothers”—that is common to suicide terrorism across the world, not religion or any particular political belief. Small-group dynamics don’t explain only how ordinary people can be turned into suicide bombers; they explain how ordinary people can be prompted to do any number of extraordinary things.

  The dastardliness of terrorist acts keeps us from seeing that the unconscious motivations of suicide terrorists are not unlike the motivations of many other groups, including those we consider heroes. Smal
l-group psychology explains the behavior of the ordinary men and women in the uniforms of the New York police department and the New York fire department who calmly walked into the Twin Towers—and to near-certain death—on the morning of September 11, 2001. Small-group dynamics explain why ordinary people in military uniforms throw their bodies over live hand grenades and why soldiers volunteer for combat missions where the odds of survival are zero. Patriotism is the name we give to such behavior, but military commanders have known for generations that people don’t give their lives for king, God, and country. That’s what they say. In reality, ordinary men and women give their lives for the sake of the small group of buddies in the trench next to them.

  Ariel Merari told me that when Japanese Vice Admiral Takijiro Onishi first sought kamikaze volunteers in the fading days of World War II, he lined up a squadron of pilots and said, “The only way we can save Japan is by sacrificing ourselves. I know it’s too much to ask, so if any one of you doesn’t want to do it, step forward.”

  “Of course,” Merari added, “nobody stepped forward. It was group pressure. The people you were standing next to were people with whom you had fought. You valued their opinion. You didn’t want them to think you were a coward.”

  Small-group dynamics have the power to overturn people’s beliefs about what is and isn’t rational behavior. To the extent that suicide bombers report being troubled by anything, they mostly report they are troubled about being held back too long. Kamikaze pilots worried that Japan was running out of fuel, and that there would not be enough gasoline for them to fly their one-way missions.

  The power that small groups wield over individuals explains why in every historical instance that has produced suicide bombers, the supply of men and women willing to volunteer to kill themselves has exceeded the demand. Far from being subpar, many of these volunteers are talented. From the point of view of the manipulative groups that train and produce suicide bombers, why would you take the dumb and the deranged when you can have the smart and the skilled?