Bruce Hood - The Domesticated Brain - A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

We are compliant because saying ‘no’ is uncomfortable. Of course, there are some individuals who seem perfectly happy to barge to the front of the queue and are indifferent to others, but many of us would squirm with embarrassment. Unless, of course, we apply our own cognitive dissonance by justifying our actions, for instance by convincing ourselves that ‘My needs are greater than others’. This allows us to realign our self-concept so that we do not have to entertain a contradiction that we have jumped the queue but are still really a nice person. With cognitive dissonance, we can be comfortably rude in the belief that our needs really do outweigh those of others. It is the self-deception that we discussed in the last chapter but one that applies to our whole concept of what we think we are like. Cognitive dissonance is dangerous because we can convince ourselves that we are doing the right thing even when we are not aware that we are distorting the truth. It enables us to live with our selfish behaviour and all the contradictions that entails.

Undercover racists

Most of us do not think we are hypocrites. As Aldous Huxley once wrote, ‘There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite.’ 49We like to think of ourselves in a positive light and very few of us would want to have all our attitudes exposed as racist, sexist or generally bigoted. And yet, despite the balanced, reasonable persona that we would like to present to the rest of the world, most of us may hold implicit ugly attitudes that are not acceptable in decent society. We know this because you can measure the level of implicit attitudes by asking participants to undertake a speeded response test where they have to match negative and positive words with different pictures. 50It could be different races, men and women, young and old, liberals and conservatives – any of the various groups that generate stereotypes. Although most of us do not consider ourselves bigoted, the implicit attitude test reveals that we are faster to associate negative words with members of other races and positive words to members of our own group. Deep down in our unconsciousness, we have stored vast amounts of associated thoughts that reflect all the experiences and exposure to attitudes that we have encountered over our lives.

Even if we do not hold deep-seated racist attitudes, then we can still be prone to stereotypes. This has been shown in a study where white and black US adults were presented with faces of their own in-group (same race) or out-group (other race) on a computer screen. 51When the face presented on the screen changed, they were given a painful electric shock. Eventually participants learned to associate all face changes with pain. Then the experimenters turned off the shocks to see how long it took participants to unlearn the painful association. Participants were much quicker to return to normal when the face changes were from their own race compared to faces from the other race. They took longer to become more trusting and less fearful of the other race even though they were not racist on measures taken before the test.

Does that mean that we are hard-wired to be racist irrespective of our wishes and desires? Not necessarily, because the effect was restricted to male faces and the race bias was not found in participants who had dated a member of the other race. 52Male faces are more characteristic of threatening individuals because males are more often portrayed as aggressive. However, the racial effect can be counteracted by exposure and experience of other races. What is clear is that despite our good intentions and choices that we know we should make, biases lurk deep down in most of us that influence our decisions. These findings do not mean that we behave like this in real life, but they do reveal the problem of undercover attitudes that might surface under the right circumstances.

Judging a book by its cover

One inevitable problem of joining and identifying with groups is that we generate stereotypes that influence our judgements about and attitudes towards others. Stereotypes are assumptions that we make about all members of the same group. The problem is that stereotypes lead us to jump to conclusions that are unfair. Consider the following story about a surgeon and the unexpected shock they get one day at work:

A father and his son were involved in a car accident in which the father was killed and the son was seriously injured. The father was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident and his body was taken to a local morgue. The son was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital and was immediately wheeled into an emergency operating theatre. A surgeon was called. Upon arrival, and seeing the patient, the attending surgeon exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, it’s my son!’

How can that possibly be? If the father is dead, then how can he be the surgeon? Is there some subplot or paternity mix-up? Maybe it was the stepfather who was killed. Around half of us who read this are at a loss to explain the scenario. 53Why are most of us so slow to realize that the surgeon is actually a woman – the boy’s mother?

As Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman addressed in his bestseller, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, we have two modes of thinking. 54One is fast and automatic that occurs without intention or effort. When we make these rapid decisions about people, we quickly pigeonhole them based on the stereotypes we hold. The other type of thinking is more slow, controlled and reflective. This allows for us to consider exceptions to the rules. However, we tend to rely on the rapid process of judging people rather than defer to the more considered evaluation of others, especially when we are put on the spot. For most of us, the stereotype of a surgeon is of a white male and, having reached that decision about his identity, we find it really hard to consider that the surgeon might be female.

Rapid pigeonholing does not bode well for racial prejudice. In one speeded response task 55adult participants earned money by ‘shooting’ an assailant on the screen if they were perceived to be holding a gun but punished if they were holding a camera. Of course, they made some mistakes but these were revealing. Participants were more likely to judge that a picture of a black male holding a camera showed him holding a gun instead, whereas a white male holding a gun was typically judged to be holding a camera. This was true irrespective of whether the person making the decision was white or black. Our society has become contaminated with stereotypes that we promiscuously apply out of context. This kind of stereotyped thinking is not trivial and can have fatal consequences if the one making the decision is an armed police officer.

A brain that seeks patterns in the world generates stereotypes. Our brains do this for good reasons. We build models of the world that enable us to interpret it more quickly and more efficiently. The world is also complex and confusing, so the models we build help to make sense of it. Speed, effort and efficiency mean that a stereotyping brain is going to be better adapted to deal with situations that require important decisions without the luxury of contemplative thought. Not that we have a choice. We cannot avoid building these models of the world because all experiences are filtered through the mental machinery that generates categories – summaries of our experience that chop the world up into meaningful chunks. Categorical processing is found throughout the animal kingdom, indicating that brains have evolved to seek out patterns and group them together. This happens in the brain all the way up the nervous system, from simple sensations to complex thoughts. Depending on the ecological niche a species occupies, it may only be sound and vision, but for contemplating humans it also includes judging the social groups we think others belong to and all the stereotyping that grouping entails.