Book TV: Shankar Vedantam, "The Hidden Brain"

Thank you all so much for coming. It's a delight to see so many familiar faces and so many unfamiliar faces as well. Thanks to WGBH and to C-SPAN for covering this event. I'm very grateful. I want to make a special note of one person in the audience. Bob Giles, who is the curator of the Nieman Program. I'm a Nieman Fellow at Harvard this year, and I probably would not be standing here were it not for Bob's encouragement. This event is also really meaningful to me because in many ways launching the book while at Harvard has brought me full circle. The origins of this book really began from reporting that took place at Harvard 5 or 6 years ago, and so I have a sense of completeness and Completing the circle in terms of coming back here at the time of its launch. It's also the case that Harvard, the university, has contributed enormously to the intellectual content of this book. And I think it's fair to say that without this great university, this book would not exist today. I'm hoping to give you a very quick overview about the book and then maybe read a little bit from one of the chapters in the book and then take your questions. Theories about the unconscious mind go back centuries. Philosophers and theologians and scientists have studied the unconscious mind and tried to figure out why we do what we do for a very, very long time. In the last decade or two, there has been a host of new tools that have been developed that have given us new windows into the hidden brain, or what I call the hidden brain. Most of these tools are in the discipline of social psychology, but some of them are also in neuroscience and in economics and in sociology. And the picture that they paint of the unconscious mind is rather different than the conventional picture that we have about the unconscious. So in contrast to an unconscious that is filled with seething impulses and powerful forces, the unconscious mind that has been unearthed in recent studies is rather mundane. The analogy that I often like to use is that the unconscious mind that has been recently discovered is very much like the autopilot function that we have in a plane or the cruise control function that we have in a car. It plays a very useful function, but it's problematic when you're driving through a thunderstorm or you're flying through a thunderstorm on autopilot instead of on pilot. And so the analogy between pilot and autopilot is one metaphor to think about the unconscious mind, and it's a way to think differently about the unconscious mind than previous theories. Now, the hidden brain is a term that I coined. It does not refer to a secret part of the brain that is actually physically hidden. It's a metaphor, much like the selfish gene, and it's used to describe a very large range of forces that affect us in our everyday lives, from our romantic relationships to our financial decisions to the way we think in disasters, to our moral judgment, to the way we think about politics. Now, I'm using the term, I think, much like The Selfish Gene, as I said, but— and the fact that these biases are mundane, the fact that the hidden brain is a mundane mechanical thing in many ways, should not suggest in any ways that its effects are mundane. Its effects actually are extraordinary. Its effects are actually profound. The book is organized in what I thought of as concentric circles, where I start with very small and simple examples of the hidden brain at work, and I gradually build outward, and I show the effects of unconscious bias in the criminal justice system, in presidential politics, in the way we think about genocide, moral judgment, and risk. I'll start with something really simple. So in one of the opening chapters, I describe a very simple example of the hidden brain at work. There was an office in England where a psychologist decided to conduct a very simple experiment. The office had something that's common in offices the world over, a beverage station where people could make their own coffee and tea. And there was a little honor box where people could drop their money into this box after making their coffee and tea. Now, the beverage station was located in a portion of the office that was not visible to anyone else. So if people were honest and paid for their tea and coffee, nobody complimented them. And if they cheated and didn't pay for their coffee and tea, nobody punished them. There was a little notice stuck on a cupboard door at eye level which detailed the price for tea and coffee and for milk. And the psychologist who worked at this office conducted a very simple experiment. Each week she changed the notice that was pasted on the cupboard. The text of the notice remained identical with the prices of the coffee and tea and milk, but there was a small decorative image that was on the top of the sheet of paper. And she downloaded images from the internet and pasted them on this little sheet of paper that was at eye level and on this cupboard door. On some weeks, the picture displayed a series of flowers— roses and daffodils and tulips— and on other weeks, the pictures showed a pair of watching eyes. At the end of 10 weeks, the psychologist asked if anyone had noticed that the picture had changed from week to week. People hadn't even known that there was a picture on the notice, let alone that the picture was changing from week to week. And yet this very small change from week to week produced a giant effect in people's honesty in paying for their tea and coffee. On weeks when the picture showed a pair of watching eyes, honesty levels soared. On weeks when the picture showed daffodils and tulips, honesty levels plummeted. Now, it's a very simple example of the unconscious mind at work, and it's striking, you know, You know, it's amusing and it's striking because what it shows is not only that there's a part of our minds that processes things that we don't think about consciously, but there's a part of our mind that then influences us, that influences our behavior. I talk in a subsequent chapter about how these biases begin very early in life. The hidden brain is really active right from the time that we are born, and it plays a— you know, it can be measured right from the time children are 3 years old, which is about as early as researchers are able to study anyone to get meaningful results. In one set of experiments conducted at a daycare center in Montreal, a psychologist called Frances Abood showed that children as young as 3 were already categorizing the world according to race, in racial terms, and making positive and negative associations between faces that were white and faces that were black. When we hear these results, the first thing we ask ourselves, of course, is whether the parents of these children are indoctrinating the children with racist or bigoted views because it doesn't make sense to think of a 3-year-old child as a bigot when the child doesn't know how to tie her shoelaces yet. It turns out that the parents actually were not indoctrinating their children with bias and, in fact, the parents were so afraid that their children would become racially intolerant that they didn't discuss the issue of race or bias at all. They made no mention of it. And what's disturbing about this research, it's actually a step up from the coffee experiment, is that it shows that people can form, or children can form, these unconscious biases without anyone intending for them to happen. Not the parents of the children, not the teachers of the children, and not the children themselves. So how do these biases form? Around the time I was writing this chapter, my own daughter turned 3. And we were playing— we would play this game called doctor where we bought a doctor kit and she would check up on all of her stuffed animals using the stethoscope and the magnifying glass. And she would ask me to play the role of doctor and she would play the role of nurse. And we did this for a couple of days and then I suggested that we switch roles. And she was willing to play the role of doctor, but she was not willing to let me play the role of nurse. And this went on for 2 weeks, and I pushed and pushed, and she resisted and resisted, until I eventually asked her why it is I couldn't play the role of nurse. And she said— and it's surprising that she actually was able to articulate this, because I don't think most people are able to articulate where their assumptions are coming from— she said she had never seen a storybook where a nurse was played by a man. And it's true. When I thought about it, I had read her dozens of stories, dozens of children's stories, and in all these stories, invariably, the nurse was played by a woman. Now, there was no act of conscious bias on the part of the storyteller of the story. There was no act of conscious bias on my part. There's no act of conscious bias on her part. And yet by age 3, she has formed what is clearly a stereotype that nurses are supposed to be women and doctors in general are supposed to be men. Much of the book, or a good chunk of the book, talks about the nature of prejudice. But I try and argue in the book that prejudice is actually a special case of a much larger phenomenon, a phenomenon that is fundamentally psychological in nature. Much of the book talks about the problems of the hidden brain, the problems caused by unconscious bias. And one of the automatic reactions that we have is, well, if we could do away with the hidden brain, then we would all be bias-free. It turns out that it's not so easy. The hidden brain plays an enormously positive role in our lives much of the time. And in one of the chapters of the book, I talk about what happens, or what might happen, if we were actually to be deprived of the hidden brain, if we were to do all our thinking intentionally and consciously. And I show that it would result not in us becoming enlightened figures, but profoundly disabled in many ways. I tried throughout the book to try and find ways to link The research conducted in laboratories is scientific research with the real world.