Incognito (11 page)

Another method for teasing out implicit biases simply measures the way a participant moves a computer cursor.
¹⁰
Imagine that you start with your cursor positioned at the bottom of the screen, and in the upper corners of the screen you have buttons labeled “like” and “dislike”. Then a word appears in the middle (say, the name of a religion), and you are instructed to move the mouse as quickly as you can to your answer about whether you like or dislike people of that creed. What you don’t realize is that the
exact
trajectory
of your mouse movement is being recorded—every position at every moment. By analyzing the path your mouse traveled, researchers can detect whether your motor system started moving toward one button before other cognitive systems kicked into gear and drove it toward the other response. So, for example, even if you answered “like” for a particular religion, it may be that your trajectory drifted slightly toward the “dislike” button before it got back on track for the more socially appropriate response.

Even people with certainty about their attitudes toward different races, genders, and religions can find themselves surprised—and appalled—by what’s lurking in their brains. And like other forms of implicit association, these biases are impenetrable to conscious
introspection.
^*

Let’s consider what happens when two people fall in love. Common sense tells us that their ardor grows from any number of seeds, including life circumstances, a sense of understanding, sexual attraction, and mutual admiration. Surely the covert machinery of the unconscious is not implicated in who you choose as a mate. Or isn’t it?

Imagine you run into your friend Joel, and he tells you that he has found the love of his life, a woman named Jenny. That’s funny, you consider, because your friend Alex just married Amy, and Donny is crazy for Daisy. Is there something going on with
these letter pairings? Is like attracted to like? That’s crazy, you conclude: important life decisions—such as who to spend your life with—can’t be influenced by something as capricious as the first letter of a name. Perhaps all these alliterative alliances are just an accident.

But they’re not an accident. In 2004, psychologist
John Jones and his colleagues examined fifteen thousand public marriage records from Walker County, Georgia, and Liberty County, Florida. They found that, indeed, people more often get married to others with the same first letter of their first name than would be expected by chance.
¹¹

But why? It’s not about the letters, exactly—instead it’s about the fact that those mates somehow remind their spouses of themselves. People tend to love reflections of themselves in others. Psychologists interpret this as an unconscious self-love, or perhaps a comfort level with things that are familiar —and they term this
implicit egotism
.

Implicit egotism is not just about life partners—it also influences the products you prefer and purchase. In one study, subjects were presented with two (fictional) brands of tea to taste-test. One of the brand names of the teas happened to share its first three letters with the subject’s name; that is, Tommy might be sampling teas named Tomeva and Lauler. Subjects would taste the teas, smack their lips, consider both carefully, and almost always decide that they preferred the tea whose name happened to match the first letters of their name. Not surprisingly, a subject named Laura would choose the tea named Lauler. They weren’t explicitly
aware
of the connection with the letters; they simply believed the tea tasted better. As it turns out, both cups of tea had been poured from the same teapot.

The power of implicit egotism goes beyond your name to other arbitrary features of yourself, such as your birthday. In a university study, students were given an essay to read about the Russian monk Rasputin. For half the students, Rasputin’s birthday was mentioned in the essay—and it was gimmicked so that it “happened” to be the same as the reader’s own birthday. For the
other half of the students, a birthday different from their own was used; otherwise the essays were identical. At the end of the reading, the students were asked to answer several questions covering what they thought of Rasputin as a person. Those who believed they shared a birthday with Rasputin gave him more generous ratings.
¹²
They simply liked him more, without having any conscious access as to why.

The magnetic power of unconscious self-love goes beyond what and whom you prefer. Incredibly, it can subtly influence where you live and what you do, as well. Psychologist
Brett Pelham and his colleagues plumbed public records and found that people with birthdays on February 2 (2/2) are disproportionately likely to move to cities with a reference to the number two in their names, such as Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. People born on 3/3 are statistically overrepresented in places like Three Forks, Montana, as are people born on 6/6 in places like Six Mile, South Carolina, and so on for all the birthdays and cities the authors could find. Consider how amazing that is: associations with the numbers in people’s arbitrary birth dates can be influential enough to sway their residential choices, however slightly. Again, it’s unconscious.

Implicit egotism can also influence what you chose to do with your life. By analyzing professional membership directories, Pelham and his colleagues found that people named Denise or Dennis are disproportionately likely to become dentists, while people named Laura or Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers, and people with names like George or Georgina to become geologists. They also found that owners of roofing companies are more likely to have a first initial of R instead of H, while hardware store owners are more likely to have names beginning with H instead of R.
¹³
A different study mined freely available online professional databases to find that physicians have disproportionately more surnames that include
doc
,
dok
, or
med
, while lawyers are more likely to have
law
,
lau
, or
att
in their surnames.
¹⁴

As crazy as it sounds, all these findings passed the statistical thresholds for significance. The effects are not large, but they’re verifiable. We are influenced by drives to which we have little access, and which we never would have believed had not the statistics laid them bare.

Your brain can be subtly manipulated in ways that change your future behavior. Imagine I ask you to read some pages of text. Later, I ask you to fill in the blanks of some partial terms, such as
chi___ se___
. You’re more likely to choose terms that you’ve recently seen—say,
chicken sexer
rather than
china set
—whether or not you have any
explicit
memory of having recently seen those words.
¹⁵
Similarly, if I ask you to fill in the blanks in some word, such as
s_bl_m_na_
, you are better able to do so if you’ve previously seen the word on a list, whether or not you remember having seen it.
¹⁶
Some part of your brain has been touched and changed by the words on the list. This effect is called
priming: your brain has been primed like a pump.
¹⁷

Priming underscores the point that
implicit memory systems are fundamentally separate from explicit memory systems: even when the second one has lost the data, the former one has a lock on it. The separability between the systems is again illustrated by patients with anterograde amnesia resulting from brain damage. Severely amnesic patients can be primed to fill in partial words even though they have no conscious recollection of having been presented with any text in the first place.
¹⁸

Beyond a temporary tickling of the brain, the effects of previous exposure can be long lasting. If you have seen a picture of someone’s face before, you will judge them to be more attractive upon a later viewing. This is true even when you have no recollection of ever having seen them previously.
¹⁹
This is known
as the
mere exposure effect
, and it illustrates the worrisome fact that your implicit memory influences your interpretation of the world—which things you like, don’t like, and so on. It will come as no surprise to you that the mere exposure effect is part of the magic behind product branding, celebrity building, and political campaigning: with repeated exposure to a product or face, you come to prefer it more. The mere exposure effect is why people in the public spotlight are not always as disturbed as one might expect by negative press. As famous personalities often quip, “The only bad publicity is no publicity,” or “I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.”
²⁰

Another real-world manifestation of implicit memory is known as the
illusion-of-truth effect
: you are more likely to believe that a statement is true if you have heard it before—whether or not it is actually true. In one study, subjects rated the validity of plausible sentences every two weeks. Without letting on, the experimenters snuck in some repeat sentences (both true and false ones) across the testing sessions. And they found a clear result: if subjects had heard a sentence in previous weeks, they were more likely to now rate it as true, even if they swore they had never heard it before.
²¹
This is the case even when the experimenter
tells
the subjects that the sentences they are about to hear are false: despite this, mere exposure to an idea is enough to boost its believability upon later contact.
²²
The illusion-of-truth effect highlights the potential danger for people who are repeatedly exposed to the same religious edicts or political slogans.

A simple pairing of concepts can be enough to induce an unconscious association and, eventually, the sense that there is something familiar and true about the pairing. This is the basis of every ad we’ve ever seen that pairs a product with attractive, cheery, and sexually charged people. And it’s also the basis of a move made by
George W. Bush’s advertising team during his 2000 campaign against
Al Gore. In Bush’s $2.5 million dollar television commercial,
a frame with the word RATS flashes on the screen in conjunction with “The Gore prescription plan.” In the next moment it becomes clear that the word is actually the end of the word BUREAUCRATS, but the effect the ad makers were going for was obvious—and, they hoped, memorable.

Imagine that you arrange all your fingers over ten buttons, and each button corresponds to a colored light. Your task is simple: each time a light blinks on, you hit the corresponding button as quickly as you can. If the sequence of lights is random, your reaction times will generally not be very fast; however, investigators discovered that if there is a hidden pattern to the lights, your reaction times will eventually speed up, indicating that you have picked up on the sequence and can make some sort of predictions about which light will flash next. If an unexpected light then comes on, your reaction time will be slow again. The surprise is that this speed up works even when you are completely unaware of the sequence; the conscious mind does not need to be involved at all for this type of learning to occur.
²³
Your ability to name what is going to occur next is limited or non-existent. And yet you might have a
hunch
.

Sometimes these things can reach conscious awareness, but not always—and when they do, they do so slowly. In 1997, neuroscientist
Antoine Bechara and his colleagues laid out four decks of cards in front of subjects and asked them to choose one card at a time. Each card revealed a gain or loss of money. With time, the subjects began to realize that each deck had a character to it: two of the decks were “good,” meaning that the subjects would make money, while the other two were “bad,” meaning they would end up with a net loss.

As subjects pondered which deck to draw from, they were stopped at various points by the investigators and asked for their
opinion: Which decks were good? Which were bad? In this way, the investigators found that it typically required about twenty-five draws from the decks for subjects to be able to say which ones they thought were good and bad. Not terribly interesting, right? Well, not yet.

The investigators also measured the subject’s skin conductance response, which reflects the activity of the autonomic (fight-or-flight) nervous system. And here they noticed something amazing: the
autonomic nervous system picked up on the statistics of the deck well before a subject’s consciousness did. That is, when subjects reached for the bad decks, there was an anticipatory spike of activity—essentially, a warning sign.
²⁴
This spike was detectable by about the thirteenth card draw. So
some
part of the subjects’ brains was picking up on the expected return from the decks well before the subjects’ conscious minds could access that information. And the information was being delivered in the form of a “hunch”: subjects began to choose the good decks even before they could consciously say why. This means that conscious knowledge of the situation was not required for making advantageous decisions.

Even better, it turned out that people
needed
the gut feeling: without it their decision making would never be very good. Damasio and his colleagues ran the card-choice task using patients with damage to a frontal part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area involved in making decisions. The team discovered that these patients were unable to form the anticipatory warning signal of the galvanic skin response. The patients’ brains simply weren’t picking up on the statistics and giving them an admonition. Amazingly, even after these patients consciously realized which decks were bad, they
still
continued to make the wrong choices. In other words, the gut feeling was essential for advantageous decision making.