Reclaim control of your unconscious brain.

Most of us believe that we behave according to knowledge and conscious intention. Not only does this belief inform our individual experiences, but it’s also the bedrock of our social, economic, and political institutions.

But how accurate is it? If you look at the science, the answer to this question becomes unsettlingly clear: not very. 

According to numerous studies, we spend much of our time on autopilot. In many ways, this is a good thing. Unconscious cognitive mechanisms enable us to navigate the world smoothly from the moment we are born. But this comes with some less-positive side effects. Inevitably, unconscious forces influence our memories, judgments, and perceptions. In this content, you’ll learn about the unconscious biases and errors that the we call the hidden brain.

Let's learn

why shoplifters aren’t necessarily bad people;

how to teach young children to be anti-racist; and

why criminal-justice systems should consider the effects of unconscious bias.

Evidence of the hidden brain is all around us.

Have you seen the movie The Matrix? In the film, Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, discovers that the world is a simulated reality designed and controlled by robots. This simulation is called the Matrix. Unlike other humans, Neo gains the ability to see and manipulate the Matrix’s code, which gives him the power to emancipate humanity from the simulation.

The Matrix is an improbable sci-fi action flick – and yet it does shed some light on reality. No, we aren’t controlled by robots. But we are controlled by invisible forces. Though we’re oblivious to it, our unconscious mind constantly influences our most basic perceptions.

Our brains are designed to hide these invisible forces. But even if we never feel ourselves being manipulated, studies show that the processes of the hidden brain are always at play.

Melissa Bateson is a researcher who tracked a beverage station at an office in Newcastle for ten weeks. The beverage station dispensed coffee, tea, and milk using an honor system. Posted at eye level was a sheet of paper listing the cost of each beverage. Users put money into an honor box to make their payment.

This particular station was in a secluded location, far from the eyes of onlookers who might keep people accountable for their payment. Users did not know that someone was tracking the box. Nor did they consciously register a small image at the top of the notice sheet – an image that Bateson changed every week.

During the five odd-numbered weeks, the image featured various pictures of eyes downloaded from the internet. During the even weeks, it showed nothing but flowers.

Bateson discovered something surprising. When the notice depicted images of eyes, users contributed three times more than they did when the image featured flowers. Even an image in one’s peripheral vision had the power to influence people’s contributions.

But it’s not just images that influence our behavior. A study by psychologist Rick van Baaran conducted at an Applebee’s restaurant in the Dutch town of Heerlen found that when a waitress repeated a customer's order verbatim, the customer gave, on average, a 140 percent larger tip than when she paraphrased the order. 

Baaran’s research showed how people respond positively when they feel in sync with each other. The customers may not have been aware of it, but their choice to give a higher tip was determined by their hidden brain.

The hidden brain is the foundation of our social behavior.

As we’ve learned, we remain largely unaware of the hidden brain in our daily lives. But the hidden brain is more than just a glitch in our cognitive function. In fact, our unconscious guides us through the world and regulates our social interactions.

Neuroscientists don’t have a precise understanding of how unconscious cognitive mechanisms function. But they have observed what occurs in patients with conditions that affect parts of the brain thought to control these mechanisms.

In 2005, Brian McNamara observed that his wife, Wendy, was losing her drive for life. At first, Wendy’s family assumed that her detachment was a sign of depression. But then Wendy’s condition deteriorated. She began engaging with people in ways that weren’t entirely socially acceptable. On one occasion, she followed a stranger to ask if she could look at his tattoos. 

Wendy was ultimately diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a disorder that impairs the brain's frontal and temporal lobes. 

Patients with frontotemporal dementia lose many unconscious cognitive mechanisms that regulate their social behavior and ability to form judgments. They often end up in police custody for crimes such as shoplifting since they no longer care about social norms such as shame or criticism – norms that, on an unconscious level, guide many of our actions. One study found that frontotemporal-dementia patients who had broken the law felt no remorse even though they agreed that their actions were wrong.

Another condition that reveals how our unconscious minds regulate our behavior is schizophrenia. Scientists believe that people with schizophrenia lose the ability to read people’s facial expressions due to changes in their brains’ amygdala and prefrontal cortices. When people lose the ability to read facial expressions, they also lose the ability to make quick, unconscious judgments about people and scenarios. This explains why some people with schizophrenia experience paranoia.

It was observed when i was having lunch with a friend who had developed schizophrenia. Unable to read facial expressions, my friend interpreted the waiter’s unfriendly manner as hostility.

When the I tried to assure him that he didn’t need to be suspicious of the waiter, my friend demanded that they exchange plates. The absence of his unconscious mind made him unable to rule out the possibility that me and the waiter were conspiring to poison him.

The hidden brain leads children to form unconscious racial biases.

Humans are wired to recognize faces. It makes sense. Recognizing Mom provides us with food and security, and so her face becomes a symbol of safety. Soon enough, our ability to recognize faces in our own ethnic group helps us orient ourselves within a particular culture.

Unfortunately, this unconscious evolutionary trait means that we are less able to discern faces from unfamiliar ethnic groups. Today, the pervasiveness of American popular culture around the world has created a disparity in global representation. And when it comes to how white people perceive Black people in North America, the unconscious biases of the hidden brain have taken a toll.

In a study of preschool children conducted in Montreal, the Canadian psychologist Frances Aboud found that racial bias begins at a surprisingly young age. Aboud asked 80 white children to assign adjectives such as “mean,” “dirty,” “good,” or “kind” to either a picture of a white person or a picture of a Black person. The study found that 70 percent of the children associated almost every positive descriptor with white faces while associating negative adjectives with Black faces.

As disturbing as this might sound, it reveals a lot about unconscious racial bias, since young children have yet to develop conscious ideas about racism.

It’s important to note that the parents of these children weren’t consciously racist. So why did their children have racial prejudices? 

Aboud found that it came down to the fact that the children lived in an overwhelmingly white world. Even if a child had a few Black friends, white people dominated television shows and storybooks as well as the world around them.

Based on associative patterns, their hidden brain concluded that white people are good and Black people are different, even if their parents didn’t share those views.

In fact, the racial bias of these children was so strong that when Aboud’s research assistants read a story featuring a heroic little Black boy, the children continued to hold their prejudices. They even believed that the research assistants – including one Black person – shared their views. Only when the research assistants underlined the affection of the interracial friendships in the story did the children concede that the researchers did not share their prejudices against Black people.

Based on her research, Aboud concluded that white parents who are afraid of their children developing prejudices shouldn’t avoid discussing race. Instead, they should explicitly encourage racial tolerance through storytelling and discussion.

Unconscious bias influences political elections.

Few people consider themselves racists. But, just like children, adults form unconscious racial biases based on associative patterns in the world around them.

While there are certainly people who are consciously racist, these people belong to a minority. The real problem is unconscious racial bias.

Millions of people have taken the Implicit Association Test. Created by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald at the University of Washington, the test measures unconscious biases. And its results have revolutionized research on such bias.

Using data from the test, the American psychologist Brian Nosek created a map of the United States comparing unconscious biases with political affiliations. Nosek found that, on average, areas with a higher degree of racial biases tended to vote for Republican candidates.

Part of the reason for this is that Black-majority populations tend to vote for Democrats. But a closer look at top conservative issues since the 1970s, such as defunding welfare programs, reveals that many of these issues are underscored by unconscious biases.

Martin Gilens at Princeton University found that white Americans were more likely to have hostile views toward welfare if they knew that the benefits of welfare were being enjoyed by a Black woman. Gilens also found that volunteers were more likely to associate welfare benefits with the Black population, even though white people are the system’s primary beneficiaries.

Unsurprisingly, politicians often use unconscious bias to their advantage. In the 1988 presidential election, the Republican candidate George H. W. Bush’s campaign circulated an ad featuring Willie Horton, a man convicted of rape and murder. Bush was accused of exploiting racial bias since the ad focused on Horton’s face, playing to the unconscious racism of voters who associated Black people with crime.

Republican politicians aren’t alone in playing to unconscious bias. When Barack Obama’s former pastor came forward with radical views about Black rights during the 2008 presidential elections, Obama addressed his position on the topic by acknowledging the anger that Black people and white people felt toward each other. Obama made sure to mention his own white heritage in the speech, and he avoided talking about racial injustice afterward. He knew he was playing to a white audience.

Experts such as the psychologist Drew Westen agree that if Obama had darker skin or had addressed race more explicitly, he likely would not have been elected as the first Black president of the United States.

The hidden brain creates racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

The fact that racial biases influence the criminal justice system in the United States may sound obvious to some Black Americans. Yet, for many white people, admitting this would mean redesigning the criminal justice system altogether.

In order to study the effects of bias in the criminal justice system, Jennifer Eberhardt and other researchers at Stanford University analyzed over six hundred criminal cases serious enough to sanction the death penalty. From these cases, the researchers selected photographs of Black people who had been convicted for murdering white people.

Without knowing that the photographs were of convicts, volunteers were asked to rate each picture by how “stereotypically African” the person in the picture appeared. The study found that defendants who were perceived as possessing stereotypically Black features were over twice as likely to receive the death sentence as Black defendants with more stereotypically Caucasian features.

Among the photographs shown to Eberhardt’s volunteers was a picture of Ernest Porter, who was accused of murdering a man named Raymond Fiss. Police arrested Porter six days after Fiss’s murder during a chase that occurred following a jewelry store robbery. In a trial that lasted less than an hour, Porter was found guilty and sentenced to death.

But Porter maintained that he had been sitting on a step when the police arrested him and that he knew nothing of either the robbery or of Fiss’s murder. And if you look at his case, there’s ample evidence to back up his claims.

First, the officer who arrested Porter acknowledged that he had lost sight of the man he was following after the robbery. Second, the jewelry store owner who initially identified Porter later retracted his statement and said he knew that Porter hadn’t robbed his store. Third, Porter had been with his girlfriend and her mother during the morning when Fiss was murdered. But neither of them were asked to appear as witnesses. And fourth, the judge who presided over the trial, Albert Sabo, was notorious for issuing the death sentence. 

It’s possible that Porter was guilty. But based on these revelations, it’s clear that every link in the chain of prosecution – the police officer who arrested him, the jury who convicted him, and the judge who sentenced him – was influenced by Ernest Porter’s appearance.

In the eyes of the criminal justice system, Blackness itself is a sort of crime.

Unconscious bias undermines women in the professional world.

While vacationing on the Mexican island of Isla Mujeres, the person swam to a desolate spot away from the main snorkeling area. Just as he turned around, he was hit with a terrible realization. His journey around the bay had been aided by the ocean’s current. Without flippers or a life jacket, swimming back was going to be a battle. In the end, he made it, but just barely, and his struggle was utterly exhausting.

Reflecting on the incident, he had another realization: his experience swimming with the current was like the unconscious gender bias aiding most men in their professional lives.

Many women navigate their careers feeling less valued than their male colleagues. And according to science, they are. Research shows that full-time female workers earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts.

Yet since salaries usually aren’t transparent, individual experiences are often too abstract to make a case against gender discrimination. This was true for Lilly Ledbetter until one day in 1998 when she found a mysterious note in her mailbox at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. The note listed Lilly’s base salary as well as those of four other managers at the plant she worked at in Gadsden, Alabama. Lilly did not know why she received the note. But the numbers confirmed that her monthly wage, which was less than $4,000, was lower than all three of her male colleagues.

Lilly had been an employee for 19 years, and so she filed a complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The lawsuit even made it up to the Supreme Court but was dismissed since her complaint was filed decades after the discrimination had occurred.

The fact that Lilly’s case was dismissed based on technicalities led to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009. Signed by President Barack Obama, the bill aimed to give victims of pay discrimination a fair hearing.

Of course, even if women receive a hearing, there will always be people who believe that unconscious biases don’t exist. Madeline Heilman at New York University found that four in five volunteers unconsciously preferred a male boss to a female boss. This may be because the strength and manliness we unconsciously associate with leadership conflicts with the caring, maternal stereotypes of femininity. 

The bottom line is this: if we want to change the way women are perceived in the workplace, we’ll need to talk about unconscious bias.

Suicide terrorists are motivated by group norms.

The hidden brain’s proclivity for conformity isn’t limited to our response to disaster. On the other side of the spectrum, it also reveals the psychology of terrorists. 

Most people assume that suicide terrorists are motivated by one thing and one thing only: religious fanaticism. Al-Qaeda suicide bombers are willing to die because they believe their sacrifice will be rewarded in the afterlife. Or so the theory goes.

But terrorist researchers have found that when it comes to understanding suicide terrorism, religious fanaticism isn’t a sufficient explanation. In fact, two-thirds of suicide attacks in Lebanon were organized by secular organizations.

So what does motivate terrorists?

It turns out that, rather than religious fanaticism, suicide terrorists are motivated by a desire to see themselves as an important part of their social group. In the case of the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the American anthropologist Scott Atran found that al-Qaeda hadn’t actively recruited the bombers. Instead, the bombers themselves had sought out al-Qaeda.

Atran visited communities near the Spanish border in Morocco, a place many al-Qaeda terrorists had once called home. There he found young men hanging around cafés bonding over storytelling and the negative portrayal of Islam. One man even swore in front of his six-year-old son that he would become a martyr if given the chance.

But joining a terrorist organization isn’t as easy as you might think. Terrorist groups function similarly to exclusive clubs in that they set a high bar for their members. And when it comes to the act of terrorism itself, the groups have rituals that cement the terrorist’s chances of completing his or her mission.

For example, al-Qaeda makes videos of suicide bombers boasting about their actions before departing for a mission. These videos have the dual function of creating propaganda and blackmailing terrorists into carrying out their missions.

This blackmailing works effectively since suicide bombers belong to a community in which others have become terrorists. They know their families will be cared for in honor of their actions. So when it comes to pulling the trigger, their mission for the group’s survival is elevated over the value of their own lives.

In short, terrorists are influenced by the unconscious forces of the hidden brain – just like the rest of us.

Our unconscious lives help us navigate the world, fostering our relationships, and regulating our social behavior. Yet many of us aren’t aware of our susceptibility to biases and errors. By learning about the hidden brain, we can use our knowledge of unconscious bias to design more effective social and economic institutions. 

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