Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Shankar Vedantam: The Hidden Brain

Hi everyone. Are you doing. Good evening. My name is Heather gain on behalf of Harvard bookstore. I'd like to welcome you to tonight's event. Well Shankar Vedantam he's here tonight to discuss his new book The Hidden Brain how our unconscious unconscious minds elect presidents control markets wage wars and save our lives. Tonight the talk is just one of many great events in Harvard bookstores winter event series next week we look forward to welcoming a series of fiction events with the likes of debut writers Kevin Sam Sal and Justin Taylor followed by an event with and with. And the author of this year's most lauded debut novel Union Atlantic we're also gearing up for an exciting spring season of events. I encourage everyone here to follow our weekly e-mail newsletter and start following us on Twitter. You can find there that we already have scheduled appearances with the likes of John Banville Yanmar tell Jacqueline Winspear Mark Kurlansky Martha Nussbaum and many more you'll find many of these events already listed online at Harvard dotcom after the talk tonight. Mr. Vedantam will answer questions from the audience. Please note that we are we do have

WGBH forum and C-SPAN's Book TV here taping tonight. So if you do ask a question please note that your voice will be recorded and broadcast C-SPAN will be coming around with a microphone. It will not amplify her voice. Please don't attempt to hold the microphone and just ignore it entirely and ask your question and just we can pick up the question for the TV feed. One thing that we would not like to record tonight however is of course your cell phones. So if you could take a moment now to switch off our Sounds your cell phones that would be great. And I've got three empty chairs right over here if there are three people standing that would like to take a chair right here here and here. And I believe I have got one empty seat in the back there as well and another in the back of somebody like to be seated in all. And if you can't see from where you're standing we do have video monitors and the first and second room in the store so you can take a gander there and also hear the event. After the talk we'll have a book signing right here at this table. You'll find copies of the hidden brain up at the registers. Please do remember to purchase your copy for having it signed. And of course you have my thanks for buying your books from Harvard

bookstore and attending events like this one. Your participation supports not only the existence of this author of this series but of a landmark and independent bookstore. This evening I'm very pleased to welcome Shankar Vedantam who's here with us to discuss the hidden brain how our unconscious minds elect presidents control markets wage wars and save our lives. The idea for this new book grew out of a Sunday magazine cover story that Mr. Van up for the Washington Post called See no bias which focused on the impact on the effects of the unconscious prejudice and the Hidden Brain. Mr. Vedantam posits that a common belief that our behaviors and our beliefs are generally aligned is wrong. Yet the hidden brain doesn't assert that conscious intention does not exist. He argues instead that conscious intention plays a much smaller role in everyday life than we imagine. Kircus review calls the hidden brain a tour into the dark realms of the psyche by a very personable guy and other great local thinker Daniel Gilbert's Hayles the book as a smart engaging exploration of the science behind the

headlines and of the little man behind the screen. Shankar Vedantam is a national science writer at The Washington Post. Between 2006 and 2009 he authored the weekly Department of Human Behavior column in The Washington Post. He is the winner of several journalism awards and previously worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Night night writers washed him Bureau and the New York Newsday. Mr. Van den to him is a 2009 and 2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and currently moved to Cambridge Massachusetts from Washington D.C. We know our community is richer for his presence. You can learn more about Mr. Vedantam by visiting his Web site The Hidden Brain dot org where the most recent article is entirely entitled Love Lust and Harvard bookstore event is in German. Thank you very much for your patience. Please join me in welcoming Shankar Vedantam. 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 in to C-SPAN for covering this event. I'm very grateful. I want to make a special note to one person in the audience. Bob Jiles who is the curator of the Neeman program Neiman 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 White at Harvard has brought me full circle. The origins of this book really began from reporting that took place at Harvard five or six years ago. And so I have a sense of completeness and completing the circle in terms of coming back here or the time of its launch. It's also the case that Harvard University has contribution 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 try 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 the analogy that I often like to use is that the unconscious mind that has been recently

discovered is very much like the auto pilot 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 auto pilot 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 the hidden brain is the 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 and 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 Monday and the fact that the hidden brain is is a

mundane mechanical thing in many ways should not suggest in any ways that its effects are mundane. Its effects actually are extraordinary effects are actually profound. The book is organized in what I thought of as concentric circles where I started very small and simple examples of the hidden brain at work and I gradually built outward and I show the effects of unconscious bias in the criminal justice system in presidential politics and 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 on a box where people could drop their money into this box. After making their coffee and tea now on 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 and 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 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. 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 Francis Abboud 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 with racist or bigoted views because it's 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. 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 higher step up from the coffee experiment is that it shows that people can form children could form these unconscious biases without anyone intending for

them to happen not the parents of the children not the teachers the children and not the children themselves. So how do these biases form around the time I was writing this chapter of my own daughter two and three. 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 two 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 then 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 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 to 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 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

enough 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 of scientific research with the real world. And I do this for two reasons. One I wanted the book to be accessible to people who may not have a direct interest in science. But second I believe that that's where the research actually belongs. It doesn't belong in laboratories wonderful though Harvard is it belongs in the real world where where people are wrestling with these issues all the time in one of the chapters of the book I try and discuss the issue of unconscious sexism in our world. And I look at two specific examples. The case of Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary in 2008 and the case of a woman that some of you will be familiar with Lilly Ledbetter whose case went up to the Supreme Court a couple of years ago. Lilly Ledbetter worked for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber

Company and she had worked at this company for two decades. She worked the night shift. She was at the level of a floor manager and there were four other people who did similar work and all the others were men. And one evening when she got to work she found a torn piece of paper in her cubby in her mailbox and when she looked at that piece of paper she never found out who left the piece of paper in her mailbox. She found out it listed her salary and the salaries of the four other managers on the shop floor who were doing identical work. And it turned out that she was being paid substantially less than them. I won't go into the details about the case that happened and how this case found its way to the Supreme Court but I use this example in the example of what happened with Hillary Clinton who asked the question of whether we can tell where the unconscious bias in this case unconscious sexism caused the effect that we see. And I try and show how in real life it's very difficult to draw the kind of conclusions you can draw on the laboratory because on the one hand it is true that Hillary Clinton may have faced unconscious sexism but did she lose the Democratic

primary because of unconscious sexism. Or did she lose the Democratic primary because of her views on any number of issues. Did she lose the Democratic primary because of her associations with Bill Clinton. There are hundreds of other variables in everyday life which make it very difficult for us to say this cause that the same goes for Lilly Ledbetter do we know exactly what happened at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant at an intuitive level. I believe that Lilly Ledbetter and Hillary Clinton were the victims of unconscious bias. But if you want to ask me to prove this I am not able to prove this with scientific certainty. The issue of course is that real life doesn't provide us with control groups. Scientific experiments provide us with control groups. As I was working on this chapter I realized that there was one population one group of people who could provide us with a control group by themselves. When it came to the issue of sexism and that was a group of people who are transgendered because transgender people are men who were once women or women who were once men. They made the transition from male to female or female to male. And if the effects of what we are seeing in

gender are true then what we should see is that everything else being held constant. A person's education and professional background and experience and skills if they make the transition from male to female or female to male we should see a difference. And it turns out that there is research sociological research in this case that shows that that's exactly what does happen that when men make a transition to women they report losing all kinds of privileges just that they didn't know that they had. And when women make a transition to being men they gain privileges that they never knew existed. One lawyer who made the female to male transmission reported that somebody at another farm reported that he was delighted to be working with the new lawyer at the farm without realizing that the new lawyer was the same as the old lawyer in just the gender had changed. Many of the examples there are many of these examples are anecdotal. The most compelling part of the research comes from evidence that shows that when men make a transition to being women their hourly salaries drop quite precipitously as much as a third. And when

women make the transition to being men their salaries on average rise and it's an example of how impossible and implausible though it may seem. Making the transition from male to female or female to male has profound effects on how we can function in everyday life. There are several other chapters that discuss what unconscious bias tells us about the way we make moral judgment how we judge genocide. There's one chapter that looks at how what new research shows about the processes by which young men and women are recruited to become suicide bombers and sort of the unconscious biases of suicide bombers. There is another chapter that looks specifically the 2008 presidential election in the fall and talks about the results of a secret experiment that was conducted that fall that tried to ask the question Are there ways that we can disable or unconscious bias in the course of an election campaign. Some of the results of these experiments I'm happy to discuss it if it comes up in the Q&A but many of the

results of these experiments were counter-intuitive that the ways you go about disabling unconscious bias are not the ways we would conventionally assume the chapter I'm going to read from miscall the sirens call and it looks at a separate dimension of bias what happens to human beings in the context of ongoing disasters as disasters unfold. And this would have this chapter would have bearing if a fire alarm would go off right now in this room what what would we do. How would we behave. What are the unconscious factors that would affect all of us in making judgments about how to react to a warning of disaster as I did with many of the other chapters with this chapter I began with the scientific evidence. And then I tried to find an example an illustrative example from real life that could show and dramatize what the scientific evidence had found. In 1993 a bomb went off in an underground parking lot at the World Trade Center. It didn't bring the towers down but the towers were already evacuated. A sociologist called Benigno Aguiar went in and asked a very simple

question. He asked how quickly people were able to exit the towers and what factors influenced how quickly they left the towers. A girl found something very surprising. He found it didn't matter so much whether people were on the 20th floor of the 60th floor. In other words you didn't get out of the building sooner because you were on a lower floor. What mattered what was decisive was the size of the group that you belong to. If you belong to a large group it took you much longer to exit the building. If you belong to a small group you are much quicker to exit the building. Arguers research has been backed up by many other strands of research and one of the ideas that comes out of this research is that when a crisis unfolds and we're not quite sure what what happens. Human beings turn to one another but to try and figure out whether other people know what's happening but also for something else very important to develop a shared narrative about what's happening. It's very important when we are in a group not

only to know what it is to do but to try and get a shared agreement where everyone says I agree that this is what we should do I agree. This is what we have to do and the process of arriving at consensus took longer for a larger group than it did for a smaller group. The chapter begins with a fairly horrific case which I'm not going to read tonight that took place many years ago in Detroit where a woman was assaulted on a bridge that connected Detroit with an Island called the bed I'll call the isle bridge and the assault took place in full view of probably 200 people maybe more than 200 people. And like the Kitty Genovese story which I'm sure many of you are familiar with no one came to the woman's aid and hardly anyone called police. And so the woman eventually fearing that no one was going to come to our help and uncertain about what to do. Leapt off the bridge. She didn't know how to swim and she was eventually drowned in the river. I'm going to start reading a little bit from the end of that that example and then go on to

the section that I am the main section that I want to read for you. What do you think happened on the bridge that night. From the outrage that followed. You would think that the liefer had been surrounded by the only people in the world who would not help a victim in distress. Everyone else swore they would ever come to her aid children in schools told reporters they would not have sat idly by. The right course of action was obvious. Step forward do something think for yourself. This was my own view of the tragedy when I first heard about it as a reporter. It was not until I started learning about the hidden brain that I realized there was an entirely different way to think about what had happened. The more I learn the more I came to see that the bystanders I describe what happened to several bystanders during the bridge incident the bystanders did not really have insight into their own behavior. My research into the tragedy of the bridge led me unexpectedly to a beautiful September morning in New York

in 2001. Six years after delivers death a young equity trader at a financial services investment bank in New York went to work on a sunny Tuesday morning in September. BRADLEY FLETCHER had been at Keefe Bre-X and woods for less than a year but his talent had already been noticed. There was another Brad at the farm already. So the 25 year old Buchner graduate was given the moniker fetch each day his mother told me fecche took special pride as he stepped into work on the ninth floor of the south tower of the World Trade Center. It is not surprising that fecche came to think of the farm as special. The employees of Keefe Bruyette and boards prided themselves on their camaraderie. They thought of themselves as more than colleagues. The farm first lacked family new recruits in fact were often literally family. Many came to the farm by way of recommendations from relatives at the company tied together by blood outlook and social ties. The employees formed an unusually cohesive group on September 11 2001. The 7:30 morning meeting at the farm was particularly well attended as the meeting broke up about

an hour later. People drifted back to their desks chatting with one another before the start of trading at nine o'clock. That was when they heard a terrible muffled noise. It was a it was as if an earthquake struck. It was 8:46 a.m. according to an account of the event pieced together by the man who would later become the new head of the firm. The muffled explosion brought Joe Barry the chairman of the company running out of his office. Jesus Christ he shouted what the hell was that. If the architecture of the Ballylee bridge produced a situation where Aletha words options for physical escape were tragically limited the muffled explosion that fecche and the others heard created a similar situation. What mattered in this case however was not the physical structure of the tower but the architecture of time and its friends did not know this but their own lives were in deadly danger. They had just one opportunity for escape. A sliver of a window that had opened by an event hundreds of miles away. Earlier that morning United Flight 175 from Boston had

seen its takeoff delayed by 14 minutes at Logan Airport. That delay created a small opportunity for fach and his friends to survive. But of course the employees of Keefe Berea and Woods did not know that when fecche and his friends heard the explosion in the north tower that Tuesday morning. They did not know the United Airlines plane was 16 minutes away from crashing into their building. The impact of the United plane would tear a diagonal gash in the south tower that would stretch from the 77 to the Eighty fifth floor. Virtually every person who was still in the building above the zone of impact would die in the overwhelming tragedy that was enveloping the United States. Hardly anyone noticed that something strange happened that Keefe Perea out in woods that morning a puzzle the investment banking firm was actually spread over two floors in the south tower. The 88 floor and the eighty ninth floor escape routes from both floors would be severed by the impact of the United Airlines plane. But when the survivors were accounted for it turned out that nearly every employee on the 88 floor escaped and survived

fetch and nearly everyone else who walked for the same company on the eighty ninth floor stayed at their desks and died. John Duffy who became CEO of the farm after the tragedy and whose son was among the employees who died told me that 120 employees were spread over the 88 and 89 floors that morning of the 67 people at the forum who died 66 worked on the eighty ninth floor. Only one person who died worked on the 88 floor. And as we will see that death was the result of a conscious act of courage. Accounts pieced together from telephone calls made from the eighty ninth floor and accounts from a few survivors show that fetch and the others did not know that the explosion they heard was caused by a plane crash the knot tower was not directly visible from the firm's trading area in the south tower but from that porch in the sky they saw smoke and thousands of pieces of paper drifting across the sky. One employee would later say it looked like a ticker tape parade. Confusion broke out. People raced to Windows for a better look. Senior staff recalled what happened during the terrorist attack

on the world trade center in 1993. Those who tried to leave got stuck for hours in elevators. The emerging school of thought and disaster management was that rather than trying to get everyone out of a big building like the World Trade Center it made sense for people who are not affected by a problem to stay inside their workplaces rather than wander out into danger. This wisdom that filter down to every old timer in the building. Put yourself in the shoes of the people on the 89 floor. You have no idea what is happening. A muffled explosion from an adjoining tower. Smoke and drifting pieces of paper is all the information you have. The idea that 19 hijackers have taken control of four airplanes and aimed them at the nation's most prominent landmarks including the building where you work is not just beyond the realm of comprehension. It is beyond the realm of imagination. And his friends also had one nervous eye on the clock trading on the stock market was about to open in a few minutes at 9:00. Chairman Joe Barry dispatched someone to check with building officials about what to do. Meanwhile

families friends and colleagues who heard about the explosion on television started calling to make sure their loved ones were OK. The calls had the unintended effect of keeping employees at their workstations. Meanwhile United Airlines plane after initially initially going southwest through Massachusetts Connecticut Connecticut and New Jersey pulled a lazy U-turn over Pennsylvania. A subsequent recreation of its flight path showed that the plane drifted southeast at first then made a 90 degree left turn at the New Jersey border and headed northeast toward Manhattan. Some of his colleagues wandered over to Windows that offered a good view of the North Tower. Others settled into their desks to get ready for the start of trading and advised their slacker friends to do the same. Officials in the building finally announced over the public address system that people in the south tower could stay where they were rather than risk exiting the building where they could get hit by falling debris from the north tower. Fetch saw the burning north tower from a window with a good view. The site shook him up. He saw someone leaping from an upper floor and falling hundreds of feet. It was horrible.

He didn't realize that something even worse was about to happen. United Airlines United Flight 175 was plunging 10000 feet a minute and aimed at the southern tip of Manhattan. French did what anyone else might do in a situation. What most people around him were doing he picked up the phone. He called his father at work after a brief conversation. He hung up the United plane was only moments away. French dialed another number he wanted to reassure his mother that he was all right Mary Fetchit was not in. So fecche left her a message. He said I want to tell you the plane hit Tower Two and I'm in tower one and I'm alive and well. Mary Fanchette recalled in an interview he said it was pretty frightening because I saw someone fall from the 19th floor all the way down. There was a long pause. He cleared his voice and said Give me a call. I think I will be here the rest of the day. I love you. Seconds later Fentress building shuddered violently with the impact of United Flight 175. Virtually no one on the upper floors knew that one stairwell in the

building survived the crash. Nearly everyone above the zone of impact who did not escape within the 16 minute window perished. I wanted to read a little bit more about that shows gives you a little bit more sense that this is a little bit of a teaser right now because I've sort of described what happened but I haven't actually told you the phenomenon that that drove this. I'm going to read a little bit longer. It might take another five or ten minutes. There is a way for us to lay bare the working of the workings of the hidden brain and in disaster situations but it requires us to suspend our model of people as autonomous individuals. Let me show you what I mean through the example of a single employee at Keefe Bretton Woods who worked on the ill fated 89 floor. Like everyone else I interviewed at the firm. Well the Rizo was clearly above average in intelligence social skills and smarts. You don't get to work at a place like Keith Perea and boards unless you are pretty

bright with Wilt's permission. However let us stop thinking about him in the usual way for a few minutes for the purposes of illustration in fact let us exaggerate the role of his hidden brain instead of seeing Let us imagine that he has nothing but a hidden brain. Instead of seeing will as a smart and handsome young man with a smile that lights up a room imagine him as a node at the center of all web connections radiate from him in every direction. A slender cord drawn from his brain to Cold Spring Harbor New York where he grew up and his parents live. Another thread goes to South Bend Indiana where his brother the Catholic priest lives and other New Jersey where his sister lives. And still another to Long Island due to his other brother. If you'd mapped a diagram for real life in this way before the morning of September 11 2001 you would have seen cables running to his gym to the golf courses and beaches. He liked to frequent and to his high school friends wherever will went. New Cable sprang up around him. Some stretch to acquaintances others

strangers some with fake and strong others slender. Some came into existence and snapped off within moments as well past someone he did not know on his way to work. Others endured great absences and distances. The bonds of love loyalty and longing that make up a life after graduating from Cold Spring Harbor High School well attended Notre Dame. He worked for a couple of years for the Bank of America in Chicago before returning to Notre Dame to help coach the men's lacrosse team for nine months. He joined Keith Bretton Woods on July 31st 2000 when he got married six weeks before September 11 2001. He and his bride went on a honeymoon to the Caribbean island of St. Martin. Christina DeFazio and Jessica Slavin worked in the firm's backoffice group on the site of the 89 floor closest to the north tower. The cause that connected real to them was slender because he did not know them well. Cliff callant worked in the firm's insurance research group. He was a good office acquaintance Eric Tharp and Bradley vadas were close friends. They knew about Wilt's propensity

for anxiety. College friends used to call him crisis boy for blowing things out of proportion. Rick and Brad regularly played practical jokes on wheel sitting across a wheel on the eighty ninth floor was Carol Keesler an event coordinator and administrative assistant. She had a bubbly personality and changed her hair color regularly from blond to Brown and back again. Another nearby employee was Chris Hughes an arbitrage trader. Will's job forced him to speak to countless buyers countless people each day. He sold the stock. He saw the research that people such as Cliff galon produced like a scene from a science fiction movie. The hidden cables writhed and snaked about will growing and fading. On Monday September 10th 2001 will move desks in his new location. He happened to be the member of his group that was closer to a little corridor that led to a solid metal door. The door opened onto a hallway and then the stairs. Employees needed a pass to unlock that door. On Tuesday morning September

11th we all jumped onto a train from his home in Westchester around 6:15 a.m. and then caught a subway from midtown Manhattan around 7. He attended the morning meeting at the farm and then drifted back to his desk. Like everyone else he heard the explosion at 8:46. It was more of a rumble and a boom like an earthquake tremor or the sound of workmen rolling something very heavy on the floor above. As we go through the next moments remember that we are not thinking of will as an autonomous human being. We are seeing him instead at the center of a complex web of interconnections with thousands of cables tugging him in different directions. If you prefer I think of will as a cork bobbing on an ocean. Passive acted upon by every riptide and wave and drop of foam. Carol Keesler yelled What was that. After a moment Chris Hughes the arbitrage trader exclaimed. There was there was an explosion in the other building. Oh my God. Carol Kiesling voice was panicked. Oh my God. The explosion itself was just outside with its peripheral vision. But when we look through a window that

normally offered him a spectacular view of midtown Manhattan he felt his stomach churn. The Empire State Building and all of midtown Manhattan had vanished. In its place was black smoke and thousands of sheets of drifting paper. It gave way a sense of the magnitude of what had happened. The smoke and debris must have traveled 50 or 100 yards from the other tower to so thoroughly obscure the view. Chaos erupted. People were jumping up leap from one face to the next like a contagion. Calm down calm down Chris Hughes shouted. It isn't the other building like a vacuum. The windows Drew will and Brad Vaud us and Rick Thorpe the horrific spectacle of the smoke and debris was irresistible. But as the tide of people drew will toward the windows of frantic knocking came from the door through the small hallway. It was a decisive moment. I can't believe someone forgot their passkey Well thought the desperate banging escalated a connection that demanded his attention. Well didn't want to answer the door but he happened to be the one closest to it. It

placed an obligation on him. His connections with his friends pulled him toward the windows. But the plea from the door pulled him in the other direction. It broke him away from the tide. He went to the hallway and opened the door as he left the main area of the floor. The connections he had to the people he left behind weakened when he opened the door. New Connection sprang out between him and the two ashen faced women who stood outside in the hallway. Christina DeFazio and Jessica Slaven like a robot will repeated what Chris Hughes had just said. Calm down calm down. It's in the other building. DeFazio Slaven was so afraid they could not speak. And then Cliff galon came charging up the hallway from his office in another part of the eighty ninth floor. He had been sitting with his back to the window when his room filled with a terrifying bluish light. It blasted him right out of his chair. He ran out into the research department screaming Get out. The bond between will and Cliff sprang to life. There was a stairway exit right outside the door where we were standing. Cliff collapsed and the two women made

straight for it. We'll glanced back once still drawn by the weakening connections he had left behind. To his great good fortune the architecture of the hallway that separated the door from the trading floor obscured most of the room. He had left behind. He could not see his friends and then four people from his own office Bill Henningsen Jeff Hansen Andrew Cullen and Amanda Mogollon came charging right at him in a pack. When we later reflected on the moment he realized he made very little by way of a conscious decision. You do what you do he said. You're right there you see people running down the stairs. You see people running right at you. You go down the stairs. Ruth found himself running down the stairs so quickly after the after the initial explosion that he didn't see any other people besides his own group until they until they reach the 80th floor. The Keefe and Woods employees paired off and will find himself with Cliff callant. It was only when they got to the 74 floor that will stop his friend. It was partly because there were very few people in the

stairwell and the hidden brain makes us feel self-conscious when we do things that few other people are doing and some of the old connections were drawing weird back to the eighty ninth floor cliff. He said it's in the other building. The news of the explosion had occurred in the north tower came as a complete surprise to Cliff Kalani. I thought it was in our building he said. No it's in the other building will insisted two connections snaking back to the eighty ninth floor tug that will if it turned out that this was not a big deal and no one else had run. Rick Thorpe and Brad vadas would have a field day. This was the kind of episode that would ensure a full month of jokes at world's expense. Something minor had happened and crisis boy had taken off like a rabbit. Well persuaded cliff to wait and see if others came trickling down. They stood in the stairwell. United Flight 175 was probably over New Jersey by this point. The minutes ticked by. No one else from the eighty ninth floor appeared. Well and Cliff sheepishly started climbing back up the stairs drawn as ever by the cables that connected

them to their comrades. They climbed two floors. They were right at the edge of the zone of impact of the coming plane. It was yet another decisive moment. What saved the day was that people from other floors were now coming down the stairwell. They were strangers and they formed only weak connections with Wills hidden brain. But there were many of them. Besides it was getting difficult to climb against the tide of people climbing 15 stories against that kind of traffic was crazy. Well and Cliff turned around and went with the flow. They resolved to get out of the stairwell and take an elevator back up. Luckily for them every door they tried was locked. The stairwell was now a tunnel leading them out of the building. Doors could be opened by anyone inside the building but were locked against intruders trying to enter offices from the stairwell. We we're going to go back and get laughed at. So much for this were fretted and Cliff galon were in the stairwell of the fifty fourth floor when they received the ultimate confirmation that they had overreacted. Building officials made the announcement

that people in the south tower could remain in their offices. There was a lot of noise in the stairwell and the announcement was not heard clearly but after people trust one another. The announcement was repeated 30 seconds or a minute later. But by now the stairwell was so crowded it was impossible to go back up. Just as word was resigning himself to weeks of humiliation at the hands of his jokester friends the United airplane crashed into the South Tower. The stairwell shook. It actually undulated like a snake. Will recall seeing people on landings. Three or four floors above him. He clutched a cliff. This is it. He thought the North Tower had tipped over and hit the South Tower. He was going to die. There was no way he could have known at that moment that he was actually supremely lucky. The cables connecting him with friends and strangers had conspired to spring him from the trap in which he had been encased his hidden brain had extricated him from the zone of impact. The south tower would stand long enough for him to get out. Nearly everyone from the Keefe pre-vet Woods office on the eighty ninth floor who

survived escaped within the first moments after the explosion in the north tower. Those who stayed behind would have found it increasingly difficult to leave because their hidden brains were anchor to dozens of other people who were staying put. It would have required an enormous and deliberate effort for an individual to overcome the strength of those ties or for the group as a whole to reach a new consensus. Many of the victims who stayed behind that 89 floor were not wracked by the kind of self-doubt that plague will once the United Airlines plane struck at 9 or 3 a.m. they had less than an hour to live. Thank you. I'm happy to take any questions. Usually it's at this stage where another facet of the hidden brain kicks in which is that nobody puts up their hands. But the moment one person

puts up their hands many others will join in which is a small and trivial example of the phenomenon I just read to you in this chapter. I was in Washington D.C. I was just heading into work on that morning and I lived at the time in Arlington. And so the impact of it was I don't know if it was a third of the fourth plane into the Pentagon was it was felt could be felt in my home I wasn't home at the time. And then I went in and worked all day at the post. It was it was a surreal experience. Yes sure. The question was to talk a little bit about what new research has found about the hidden brain and suicide bombers.

When we think about suicide terrorism invariably we think about the individual personalities of the suicide bombers we ask What is it about these individual people that prompts them to be willing to kill themselves for a cause. Very often we pick up on religion religious fanaticism as being an explanatory factor for suicide terrorism. When you study the matter systematically and scientifically however we find that our intuitions are not supported by the evidence it turns out that religious belief is not only not a necessary cause for suicide terrorism it is not even a selfish it's not a sufficient cause either. There are many suicide bombers going back 50 or 100 years who came from entirely secular backgrounds or even atheist atheistic backgrounds and had nothing to do with religion. And a lot of the research that has looked at the phenomenon of suicide terrorism from a scientific perspective has looked less at the psychological makeup of the of the people and the specific elements

of their ideological background and look at what's common between suicide bombing across the ages. So if you look at what the Japanese did in the closing days of World War Two against the allies or if you look at what the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers did in the 1980s or if you look at the use of suicide terrorism in a variety of theaters today what we find is that the process by which people become suicide bombers is common across these different cultural and national contexts. Suicide bombers tend to be in situations where they are largely cut off from the outside world for a variety of different factors some deliberate some not deliberate and it is small group psychology. The ability of small groups to rewrite the norms of human behavior that make the phenomenon of suicide terrorism possible. So when we ask how is it people can do these abominable things what we're doing is we're examining the phenomenon from the outside from outside the tunnel. What we are often not able to understand is that within the tunnel the tunnel of the

creation of the suicide bomber the norms have been turned upside down. And so the people who are volunteering to be suicide bombers are not doing it because they are evil or depraved. They're doing it in the same way that young people who you and I know might want to be rock stars or might want to be book authors. It wins them the spotlight it wins them attention. The norms have been turned upside down in the suicide bomber's tunnel. And once you turn the norms upside down you actually have to do very little to go out and recruit people because they will come to you. Yes. Not necessarily. I think inside is an important first step in dealing with a hidden brain. It's it's a necessary condition but I don't think it's a sufficient condition. So there are people who are aware. So for example to pick on my daughter again the fact that I've mentioned this that a fact that we've talked about why nurses can be women you know

don't have to be women all can be men. Doesn't mean that the unconscious associations that she has picked up from the time that she is very young disappeared from her mind. So it's not as if the unconscious mind stops working just because the conscious mind knows something different. One of the things I'm trying to get out in the book is that the conventional way we have to approach prejudice is to preach to people to tell them that prejudice is wrong and that might be successful I'm not sure it is successful but it might be successful when prejudice is conscious because then you're having an argument with people about where the prejudice makes sense or doesn't make sense. But when prejudice is unconscious going up to someone and saying I think you're being homophobic produces nothing because when they look in their hearts they don't see prejudice. They see themselves as being prejudice and all that it produces is defensiveness in the chapter where I describe the experiments that were conducted in the 2008 election looking at how you can do biased people. One of the insights that's come out of that series of experiments is that is actually it actually shows that what the Obama campaign did in the election. I don't know whether they did

this consciously or unconsciously but they found ways to take the issue of race off the table without confronting it directly. So there were many people for example who said explicitly that they would never vote for a black man in the 2008 campaign. But whenever Barack Obama or Michelle Obama or anyone from the campaign spoke they never drew attention to the fact that people were using race as a metric in voting. The Obama campaign always said America has transcended race. We're a better people. We have we've moved past this. We have had a long and difficult history but we are better than we are. I mean you're better than we used to be and so rather than confronting bias directly what the Obama campaign did was call people to their better angels. And a lot of what the research suggests it's sort of counterintuitive is that you actually might be less successful at calling people out on their biases precisely for this issue which is that even when you're conscious or unconscious biases that might be within you it doesn't necessarily change behavior in the back.

Yes. Well the short and honest answer is I don't know. I think in some ways this becomes a little bit of a parlor game when you're trying to apply the research on unconscious bias to real life situations. And I can toss out hypotheses and give you my impressions but I should start by saying that what we're doing right now is not this is not scientific we are we are theorizing here. You know I think for many people I think many Democrats included felt that Martha Coakley didn't really care enough to run a very hard campaign and didn't really value their vote hard enough to want to campaign for it. I know a lot of people who are not Republicans who who

understand why people would have voted Republican. And so at some level I think people in some ways want to have their ego stroked want to have the sense that politicians are speaking to you. I think an interesting dimension of the hidden brain when it comes to politics is that we often seek to have personal connections with politicians. And it's a it's an odd thing because most of us will never meet Barack Obama or most of us will never meet George W. Bush. So the fact this person happens to be someone who would be fun to have a beer with is actually completely irrelevant because we're never going to have a beer with them. And yet when it comes to our decision making we often value and overvalue the personal connection that we feel with people or the personal disconnection that be filled with people. And so in some ways I think when it comes to politics one aspect of bias that cuts across not just this election but many elections is the overreliance we place on personal relationships with these people with whom we actually do not share a personal relationship at all. You had a question sir.

Well I think so. My book is sort of not a book about Freud in psychology but it's been I think informed by the central inside of Freudian psychology which is that the unconscious plays a role in our lives. So where Freud may have spoken of defensiveness you know the new research would talk about the whole phenomenon of motivated reasoning which is that when we are asked to make judgments about something we tell ourselves that we are carefully weighing the issues and making judgments when in reality what often happens is that we have preconceived opinions and we go looking for the evidence that would back up our preconceived opinions. I mentioned an interesting experiment that maybe tangentially related to what you're you're

asking about in the course of the 2008 election people conducted this experiment where they asked where they measured people's unconscious associations between Barack Obama and whether they felt that he was American and they found that an at an unconscious level. People thought Barack Obama was less American than was Tony Blair. In other words people thought Tony Blair was more American than was Barack Obama. Well what's striking about this research is that if you ask people at a conscious level whether Barack Obama or Tony Blair was American they would look at you funny because they would say well obviously you know Tony Blair is a prominent British politician and Barack Obama is an American. And the reason this research is interesting is that it found that when people who are more likely at an unconscious level not at a conscious level but an unconscious level to think of Obama as being foreign we're much less likely to support him in both the Democratic primary and the general election even if they agreed with him completely on all the policy issues. So it speaks to the idea again of motivated reason that we think of ourselves as being you know detached information

processors when in reality we have these factors that are in the back of our minds that prompt us to go out looking for evidence that essentially backs up our preexisting views. Yes. I think that is probably a fair statement and I think in some ways the reason I chose that term the hidden brain and I didn't chose choose the term the unconscious mind for example is because the unconscious has so much baggage from Freud in psychology. And as I said I don't disagree completely with Freud in psychology where Freudian psychology meshes with what the experimental and empirical evidence has found. I'm happy to call myself a Freud Freudian psychologists or you know Kundera under-14 psychology but word parts ways with the empirical evidence. My bias is to go with the empirical evidence. OK yes please. Go ahead man.

The will is quite powerful and the world plays a very strong role. One of the questions that often comes up when I went over after the book has come out is so if I'm saying the hidden brain does all these things does that mean an end to personal responsibility. You know because I can say I didn't do it. My hidden brain made me do it. And I try and make the point several at several points the book that while it is true that we don't always have control about over our unconscious mind we are still always responsible for our actions and behavior regardless of what associations positive or negative are in our minds. We are ultimately judged on what we do how we act. So in other words whatever the algorithms they may be in the auto pilot function it's finally flying the plane for which we have personal responsibility so when we pass responsibility off to the unconscious mind whether deliberately or not we are still responsible for that action. We can turn over control to the autopilot and then say I'm not responsible for crashing the plane. I try and show several techniques

and ideas in the book about ways people can become aware of their biases and what they can do once they become aware of their biases. So for example to go back to my daughter one of the things that I do when I read her stories right now is I try and pay more attention to the choices that the author of the story book may have made. And I try and say well why did the author of the story book make this choice. Why is this a man or why is this a woman. Why does this person have to be black. What does the story mean. Could the story have turned out differently. And the goal is not so much to get my daughter to agree with me as much as to try and move more of the conversation from the level of unconscious assumption to the level of conscious dialogue. So

I I bring up this issue actually in the context of the Hillary Clinton campaign because there were many things that were said about Hillary Clinton that were explicitly sexist many of them on the right wing talk radio. Well you know I can I can find the examples. I mean I think Rush Limbaugh at one point said what we really want to see Hillary Clinton growing old before our eyes as and you know if she is on television every day as president would be really want to see this woman growing old before our eyes. Tucker Carlson I think on MSNBC said every time I see Hillary Clinton on television I involuntarily cross my legs someone else equated her to everyone's first wife standing outside a probate court. So they were you know just tons of really offensive you know an overtly sexist things that were said about Hillary Clinton at the same time it's not clear to me what affects this actually has on the outcome of an election and this sort of goes to your question which is that if I'm a Democrat and I'm hearing Rush Limbaugh say these things about Hillary Clinton does that make me more likely

or less likely to want to vote for Hillary Clinton. You know if I'm a Democrat and I'm hearing this person beating up on someone whom I'm weighing I would I think be more inclined to vote for Hillary Clinton. Now that doesn't account for the fact of what my unconscious biases might be about sexism. So I think that's why I try and come back at all times to the idea of the unconscious which is that in some ways I personally have less of a problem with overt prejudice. I have less of a problem with people who say overtly prejudiced things even if they have the megaphone of talk radio because it's out there. I have much more of a problem when the conversation is unspoken when people feel they're making decisions and tightly based on policy entirely based on the merits of the candidate and then they're coming to a conclusion that is actually unconsciously biased. And the reason this is powerful is not just that it's insidious but that it's a bias that's shared among the vast majority of people. And so even though the amount of bias in each person might be small collectively it can have gigantic impacts on our national behavior. One last question at the back.

Did you did did you ask the question before. Yeah. Sure. I think you can find a number of examples actually that our brain is wired to find simple to find simplicity appealing. And one of the early chapters of the book I write about an experiment that was conducted on the New York Stock Exchange where the researchers looked at companies with easy to pronounce names and

easy to pronounce stocktake or codes. So the stocktake are code such as K.R. is easy to pronounce and a stocktake are code like Ardeo is difficult to pronounce. Now obviously the company's name is Dr. Kurkov has obviously no bearing on how what this company does and what they're going to perform but what the experiment found is that companies with easy to pronounce names vastly outperform country companies were difficult to pronounce names for the first year when these companies were new entrants onto the stock market. So at an unconscious level people use the fluency with which they were able to you know say the company's name or the stock ticker code. And in a purely unconscious level they associated this ease of pronouncer ability with the riskiness or non-risky ness of the company. There was you had a question. So I think it depends on the context. I think there are times in our lives where the autopilot serves us very well

in the blog posting that Heather mentioned on the on the blog the hidden hidden brain dot org I write about new research that was conducted that shows that people in love usually overestimate the qualities of their partners. They idolize their partners they think their partners are better than they are. They think that partners more closely match their own vision of the ideal partner and their estimate of the partner is usually much better than the partners or an estimate of himself or herself. So in other words people in love do not see reality accurately. However however it is the case that people in love who have this illusion tend to have much more stable relationships and tend to be much happier in their relationships. OK. So at a functional level this is an example of where a hidden bias is completely useful and to do away with bias would result in vastly increase in the divorce rate because we would see our partners for who they really are. There are numerous other examples of course where you know what you're saying is true where you know that

there is a nefarious effect of the hidden brain. So I think it's really contextual and what I'm arguing is not so much that we should live all our lives consciously or all our lives unconsciously but to try and make more of the decision of whether to do something consciously or unconsciously at a conscious level. I mean my personal sense is that these biases are probably beyond with human beings as long as they are being human beings. But it is true that I think that human beings today can cause more damage to other people than they might have been able to do 200 years ago or 300 years ago and so the our bias is no longer just a fact. Our cells and those in our immediate vicinity they now affect people in distant lands as I talk in the final chapter which looks at you know how we make moral judgments and the unconscious biases that affect us in moral judgment. But thank you so much.

And thanks to all of you for joining us tonight. We'll have the book signing right here at this table and you'll find copies of The Hidden Brain available at the register. Thank you again for joining us.