The Hidden Brain

Evidence of the hidden brain is all around us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The hidden brain leads children to form unconscious racial biases.

As disturbing as this might sound, it reveals a lot about unconscious racial bias in chidren when associating negative adjectives with Black faces, 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.

Unconscious bias influences political elections.

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.

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

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

Unconscious bias undermines women in the professional world.

Research shows that full-time female workers earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts.

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.

Disaster victims conform to group tendencies.

Sticking to the group has provided us with safety and comfort. So it’s not surprising that, in times of disaster, the hidden brain tells us to conform to group mentality.

People during emergencies maintain conformity with the people around them.

With that in mind, how can we improve our emergency action plans? One way might be for companies to train elected employees to understand the danger of group mentality in times of crisis. That way, at least one person will urge a group frozen in conformity to exit a building when a fire alarm goes off.

Suicide terrorists are motivated by group norms.

Suicide terrorists are motivated by a desire to see themselves as an important part of their social group.

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.