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

by Shankar Vedantam

  The elephant in the room ad was an example of how bias might be combated explicitly. Another ad targeted the hidden brain. It involved a blue-collar worker speaking directly into the camera. (One version featured a man, another a woman.) The speaker articulated many of the concerns about Obama that were being circulated in white working-class communities, that Obama would give preference to black people, and that he was an unpatriotic outsider. The idea, said Westen, was to openly acknowledge what people were feeling. But rather than dismiss such concerns as racist or wrong, as the union leader Richard Trumka had done with his old friend in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, the ad gave people an alternative way to think about their feelings.

  This was the text of the ad featuring a fiftyish white woman. The woman was identified as Sue Burton of Zanesville, Ohio: “A lot of people aren’t quite sure about Barack Obama. He seems steady. He talks about things that matter to me—the price of gas and groceries, and health care we can count on. But then sometimes I get that feeling, you know, uneasy? I’m not really sure who he is. Does he really love his country? Maybe if he gets elected he’s going to put the interests of black people above the interests of the rest of us. You know, I was talking with my mom about it. She and dad had the same questions about President Kennedy before he was elected. They had that same feeling. Uneasy. Maybe he’d put his Catholic faith before his country. I’m not prejudiced. I just want to know that he shares my values and cares about people like me. And I think he does. I think he loves his two little girls just like I love mine. I think he loves our country just like I do. It hasn’t been easy for me. But I’m going to give him a chance. I am an American—and so is he.”

  The conventional way to counter an untruth is to confront it. Indeed, if you subscribe to the notion that people’s conscious minds are all that matter, this is what you should do. Good information ought to drive bad information out of circulation. It’s only when you think about politics with the hidden brain in mind that you understand why innumerable fact-checking websites and media articles ahead of the 2008 presidential election did little to prevent millions of Americans from believing blatant falsehoods about Obama. The “I Am an American” ad took a different tack. It set aside the conscious mind altogether and focused entirely on the hidden brain.

  Rather than tell people that the allegations against Obama were false, the ad took the point of view of people who felt uneasy. It was an old lesson from therapy textbooks: Regardless of whether feelings were justified, they were real. You cannot eliminate feelings by denying their validity; indeed, denying them usually strengthened them. The “I Am an American” ad did not present refutations to the woman’s beliefs or try to show that her feelings were unjustified or wrong. Rather, it was the woman herself who made the emotional decision to override her fears. She wasn’t being corrected. She was being courageous.

  The message tested well in focus groups, but some funders, Westen told me, were uncomfortable about a message that did not explicitly refute untrue insinuations about Obama. The notion of setting aside the conscious mind and focusing only on the hidden brain can be difficult to swallow.

  “But if you refute it, it has a different meaning,” Westen said. “My conscious concern about the refutation is it sounds contrived. This does not sound like a person who has struggled with this. It sounds like an Obama campaign worker.”

  The experts tested a number of other approaches. One ad called “Team USA” showed a girls’ soccer match in progress with the soundtrack of “America the Beautiful” in the background. A series of adorable black and white children played together, intensely focused on the game, with smiles and camaraderie. It then showed a close-up shot of Joe Jacobi, a white Olympic gold medal winner in white-water canoeing, followed by a shot of a black woman, Teresa Edwards, a four-time Olympic gold medal winner in basketball. The ad then cut to an amateur men’s basketball game, with players of all races engaged in intense teamwork. The ball swished through the basket, and the ad zoomed in on a black hand and white palm “low-fiving” in an acknowledgment of interdependence. A message on the screen read, “We’re all on the same team. Team USA.”

  Whereas the ad with the elephant in the diner was designed to make people think, and perhaps make them feel uncomfortable, Westen told me the “Team USA” ad followed the model of the Obama campaign—to go for the lump in the throat. People wanted to feel good about themselves, and calling them to their better natures did this, just as calling them racists made them angry and defensive. The “Team USA” ad reinforced the racially inclusive impulses of voters.

  In another ad, the camera cut seamlessly between two families, one white, one black. In both cases, the families sat on a couch, in identical positions, one child on the mom’s lap while a little girl sat on her dad’s lap. Both dads read aloud from the children’s book The Little Engine That Could.

  WHITE DAD: The very little engine looked up and saw the tears in the doll’s eyes. And she thought of the good little boys and girls on the other side of the mountain

  BLACK DAD: who would not have any toys or good food unless she helped. And then she said, “I think I can,

  WHITE DAD: I think I can, I think I can.”

  BLACK DAD: And she hitched herself to the little train, and the little Blue Engine smiled

  WHITE DAD: and seemed to say, as she puffed steadily down the mountain,

  BLACK DAD: “I thought I could, I thought I could,

  WHITE DAD: I thought I could, I thought I could,

  BLACK DAD: I thought I could—”

  “It is only a different voice and a different family, but they are sitting exactly the same way and doing exactly the same thing,” Westen told me, shortly after he finished supervising the shooting of the ad with the black family. “The soundtrack to that is going to be a light piano or a female voice humming ‘Amazing Grace,’ and the only words that come up on the screen are We are all God’s children. That is calling people to their better angels, to what their faith teaches them.”

  Westen thought the ad was especially effective because research showed that whites were drawn to images of black parents reading to their children—a message counter to the idea of disintegrated black families and disinterested black fathers. “When you pair ‘hard work’ with ‘black,’ you deactivate the stereotypes that make race so toxic, and when you add paternal responsibility to black dads, you do the same thing,” Westen told me. “This is why people resonate to Cosby and Obama talking about taking responsibility for their children and father-absence being a disaster in the inner cities. You turn down the volume on one of the ways covert racism expresses itself.”

  The voters who participated in testing the ads were men older than thirty and women older than fifty who had not completed college. The results revealed how unconscious attitudes diverged from conscious attitudes.

  Take the “All God’s Children” ad with the black and white dads reading to their children. Westen shot and tested two versions of the ad—one had the black and white dads, and another featured a white family and two different black families, with one of the black dads darker than the other. In this second version of the ad, all the dads again read from The Little Engine That Could, and the cuts went seamlessly among the families. This ad, with two black families and one white family, scored very high in terms of voters’ conscious responses. People really responded—consciously—to the idea of the black dads and the white dad reading the same children’s book to their families in different homes. But Westen found that the ad had zero effect on people’s unconscious attitudes toward Obama. The ad with the white family and just one black family—featuring the lighter-skinned black dad—generated less positive approval from voters at a conscious level but was far more effective at an unconscious level in changing people’s willingness to support Obama. Without their awareness, something about the darker-skinned black dad rubbed voters the wrong way. Their conscious minds may have known we are all God’s children; their unconscious minds did not agree
.

  The “I Am an American” ads with the blue-collar workers speaking directly into the camera about concerns that Obama was an outsider who would harm the interests of white people scored moderately well at the conscious level. But they were highly effective at the level of unconscious attitudes. The ad showing the female worker articulating her doubts and reaching an internal resolution was the most successful of all the ads that Westen and his group created.

  Effectively, the group that met at the Chicago Hilton had come up with a series of tools. To be sure, the tools were crude, but they were the first real attempt made in the heat of a political campaign to turn down the volume on racial bias. As it turned out, none of the ads were aired before the 2008 election because the financial meltdown in the weeks before the election sent potential funders scurrying for cover. (Powell’s team also found that many of the attack ads planned against Obama were never aired for the same reason.)

  But the research showed that in order to combat conscious and explicit bias—people who shout racist things at rallies and put up VOTE RIGHT VOTE WHITE signs—ads of children playing together on a team, or black and white families doing identical things, are effective. To combat outright hatred, you want to call people to their better angels, and hope the lump in their throats can overcome the bile in their hearts.

  But when it comes to unconscious bias—the gray monster lurking beneath the surface in a large number of voters—you need different tools. The “I Am an American” ad acknowledged the way many voters felt about Obama. Without telling them that they were wrong, it suggested an alternative route to channel their feelings.

  “We are going back to the future to Freud,” Westen told me. “There really is this dissociation he spoke about between the conscious and the unconscious, but we now have ways of measuring it. How do you detoxify race in elections so people cannot run the ‘Call me, Harold’ ad or the Kwame Kilpatrick ad or the Willie Horton ad? If you are vulnerable to such attacks, you have to measure both conscious and unconscious attitudes and develop strategies that address both.”

  I found the ads fascinating, but also disturbing, in that they sometimes placed what made political sense at odds with what made ethical sense. Which version of the “All God’s Children” ad would you have chosen if you were a political consultant? You wouldn’t have chosen the ad showing the darker-skinned black dad, because Westen’s data demonstrated that it worked less well at persuading white voters than the ad that showed only the lighter-skinned black dad. In order to be politically effective, to get voters to support your candidate, you had to choose the ad that went along with people’s unconscious biases against darker-skinned black men.

  The same went for the “I Am an American” ad. When people spread racist lies about a black candidate, the obvious response was righteous indignation, but the more effective response was apparently to approach the problem sideways—to tell voters that the way they felt was understandable, but to ask them to “take a chance” on the candidate. Racist beliefs, in other words, were best left unchallenged if you wanted to persuade someone to vote for your candidate. I started to understand why Obama’s approach had succeeded where so many other black politicians had failed; his campaign’s conscious decision not to cry foul, not to voice the righteous indignation to which he was surely entitled, was the only way he could win.

  I asked Celinda Lake about this after the election. She acknowledged that there was a tension between fighting stereotypes and trying to get a candidate elected. But she pointed out that if getting Obama into the White House involved making some compromises, it was also the case that Obama’s election promised to reduce racism in the United States as nothing else could. The hidden brain learns through blind repetition, and Obama’s election meant the country and the world would spend the next several years being bombarded with counter-stereotypical messages about a very smart, articulate, and charismatic black man—who happened to be the most powerful person on the planet.

  “Having worked for a number of African American candidates,” Lake said, “I don’t care if I get someone elected by appealing to exceptionalism,” the idea that that particular black candidate was the exception to the rule—an approach that could reinforce stereotypes. “I would like to end racism, but I [first] want to get Barack Obama elected.”

  Lake told me that David Axelrod, the political mastermind behind the Obama campaign, had helped a number of African American candidates get elected by relentlessly not focusing on trying to change people’s underlying views about race and gender. When getting Carol Moseley Braun elected to the Senate, for example, pollsters once found that having Braun stand up and speak directly into the camera for an ad prompted voters to feel she was in their face—in a way they did not feel when a white man delivered exactly the same lines. It was clearly sexist and racist, and the path of righteous indignation might have said, “The hell with such biases—have Braun speak directly into the camera.” But Axelrod, whose job it was to get Braun elected, suggested she sit behind a table and speak her lines. Voters immediately found the message more acceptable.

  I don’t know how to resolve the imperative of righteous indignation with the imperative to get your candidate elected. If the techniques of political consultants are sometimes icky, it should also be said that righteous indignation never got a black man elected president. It was Axelrod and Obama who found a way to make King’s dream come true—by sidestepping controversy and turning down the temperature on race. Unfairness seems written into the DNA of politics, because voters consciously and unconsciously care about a host of factors that candidates cannot control. Political consultants will always try to find ways to win with the cards they are dealt—and that can mean exploiting both legitimate strengths and unfair advantages. Obama was clearly a gifted candidate. His calm, even-tempered style was a matter of natural inclination, and his adoration of his daughters was obviously sincere. Being a calm person does not automatically mean someone will make a good president, but the trait served Obama well in that a hot-tempered nature might have evoked the dreaded trope of the angry black man. Obama’s visible love for his children helped disable unconscious stereotypes that link black men with disinterested fatherhood. Obama also happened to be biracial, and he used his links to whiteness to his advantage.

  “Barack Obama had light-colored skin, and that made a big difference,” Drew Westen said quietly after the election, during a conference call that brought everyone from the Chicago meeting up to speed on what the research had found. “Had he looked like Kwame Kilpatrick, it is not at all clear to me that he could have made it.”

  CHAPTER 10

  The Telescope Effect

  Lost Dogs and Genocide

  The ideas in this book have been organized in concentric circles, where successive chapters have illustrated how the hidden brain influences our lives from very small issues to very large issues. We have examined the effects of the hidden brain among children and in intimate relationships, in disasters and in suicide terrorism, in the criminal justice system, and in politics. I decided to devote the final chapter of the book to the subject of … numbers. It sounds esoteric, but it is not. Consciously and unconsciously, the way we think about numbers influences the most important decisions we make as human beings.

  Edward Shinnick was the head of internal affairs at the police department in Jersey City. He was married with two children, a respected figure in his northern New Jersey community. Shinnick loved being a cop, but was not entirely happy at internal affairs—few cops enjoy keeping an eye on their fellow officers. But Shinnick was articulate and verbal; when he was stressed at work, he talked about it at home with his wife, Michele, and with other friends. He was a cop’s cop, a confidant to many fellow officers. He counseled colleagues through emotional upheavals and marital problems. He considered himself on police duty twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. He carried his gun wherever he went. He never drank; he felt he had no right to be under the effect of alcohol when
he was armed.

  In May 2008, Shinnick put in his papers and retired. He was fifty-two years old. On May 28, a Wednesday, Shinnick visited his mother, who was in a nursing home. When he left, he gave a nurse his new cellphone number. He had lunch with an old buddy, a retired police lieutenant.

  Shinnick did not come home that afternoon or that evening. It was not like him to be late and not call, but his wife Michele figured that he had probably gone back to the police department to meet some friends. She called around, but no one had seen Shinnick. By nine o’clock in the evening, at the urging of police, Michele filed a missing person’s report. She went online and found that Shinnick had made a cash withdrawal from an ATM machine in Wyckoff, a short distance northwest of their home.

  Shinnick had gone to Wyckoff and then had kept driving. He went all the way to Pennsylvania, to a Comfort Inn that he and Michele stayed in from time to time. Michele’s cousin stayed in the Poconos, and whenever the Shinnicks drove back from a visit, they stayed at the motel. The Comfort Inn allowed dogs, and the Shinnicks were dog people. Ed Shinnick removed his E-ZPass from his car before he went on his trip; he knew Michele and his cop buddies would try to trace the car using the pass, and he did not want to be tracked down. He checked into a room at the motel.

  Ed Shinnick had two guns with him, including his police service revolver. Inside the motel room, he aimed one weapon at his heart and the other at his head. He pulled both triggers simultaneously.

  A cleaning lady found his dead body.

  Michele Shinnick found the news incomprehensible. She pieced together the events of Ed Shinnick’s last day. Why would a man planning to kill himself leave his new cellphone number at his mother’s nursing home? The retired police lieutenant whom Shinnick had met for lunch was someone who used to teach cops about stress and the risk of suicide. Michele talked with him, and he told her that there had been no sign that Shinnick was contemplating suicide.