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What makes people happier — lots of quick conversations with lots of friends each day OR a few long conversations with a few friends?

Researchers recently fitted volunteers with a little device that recorded 30 seconds of sound every twelve minutes for four days. They collected about 20,000 recordings, and then analyzed the recordings to see if they were brief interactions or parts of substantive conversations. Matthias R. Mehl, Shannon E. Holleran, C. Shelby Clark and Simine Vazire found that the happiest volunteers spent little time alone and lots of time talking compared to the unhappiest volunteers. They also found the happiest volunteers had twice as many deep conversations as the unhappiest people. The research was published in Psychological Science.

The real answer to the puzzle — do a few deep conversations make people happier than lots of fleeting conversations — is … we don’t really know. The study found a correlation between happiness and deeper conversations, but that does not automatically tell us that deep conversations make people happy. (I can think of several deep conversations that would make me extremely unhappy.) It certainly is possible that people who feel happier have deeper conversations than those who feel unhappier — happiness may be the horse and deep conversations the carriage, rather than the other way around. It is also possible that some other variable is causing both deeper conversations as well as increased happiness (increased leisure time, for example). Telling people who are stressed from overwork and dealing with the kids to also make time for long, deep conversations could exacerbate their stress!

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You are a woman worried about sexism who has applied for a job. When you enter your interviewer’s office, you see (a) an office with newspapers, stationery & dictionaries (b) an office with Playboy posters, motorcycle mags & hunting awards (c) an office with rainbow flags and plaques about diversity. Which prospective interviewer is likely to elicit the WORST interview performance from you and why?

The obvious answer, of course, is B. Equally obviously, of course, there is a catch. It turns out that the correct answer is A. It’s the office that contains no clues about the prospective interviewer’s views about gender/sexism/diversity etc that poses the greatest threat to the self-confidence of our prospective interviewee. Remember the puzzle said this was an interviewee who was concerned about sexism. It turns out that ambiguous information (or no information) creates more of a concern to people worried about something (as they spend time trying to figure out who they are dealing with) than a person with explicitly threatening views.

I constructed this puzzle from an experiment conducted last year by Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, Lindsay Shaw-Taylor, Serena Chen and Eunice Chang. The researchers asked female volunteers who were worried about sexism to take a test, and provided them with information ahead of time about the office of the person who would be evaluating them. The offices were broadly similar to what I described in the puzzle. The women given the ambiguous information performed much worse on the test than women given more explicit cues that their evaluator was likely to hold sexist views. The researchers published their work in a paper called “Ironic effects of explicit gender prejudice on women’s test performance” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The wrong lesson to draw from this experiment is that interviewers should display Playboy pinups in their offices ahead of interviews with female job candidates. The right lesson to draw is that if you want people to perform at their best — and managers, companies and institutions pay a clear price when talented job-seekers underperform during interviews — you have to make it explicit that you don’t count yourself among the knuckleheads.

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Joseph Stack, the Texas man who burned his house down and then recently flew a plane into an IRS building, killing one person, has some stark similarities to the the suicide bomber I write about in The Hidden Brain. Like Stack, Larry Layton was white and American — which apparently makes it difficult for some commentators to think of his action as an act of terrorism. In an ongoing Newsweek debate, senior editors are asking whether the label terrorist should be applied only to foreign actors. It’s intellectually muddled — what happens the next time Al Qaeda recruits an American to carry out a terrorist attack in the United States? Would that be terrorism — foreign actors were behind the mission — or not an act of terrorism, since it was an American who actually carried out the attack? The debate over whether Stack should be called a terrorist shows how problematic the definition of terrorism continues to be. I’ve long been in favor of using the consistent definition that terrorism expert Brian Jenkins utilizes: Terrorism is theater. The central difference between terrorist violence and other kinds of violence is that terrorists uses violence symbolically — the real target is not the person/building/institution being attacked but everyone who is watching. When you are angry at some group of people and you pick someone from that group at random to attack, you are engaging in terrorism, because the point of the attack is to send a message to everyone else in the group. Terrorists devalue their victims by turning them into props, and that is exactly what Joseph Stack did when he flew a plane into an IRS building. It did not matter to Stack which IRS worker he killed, just as it did not matter to Al Qaeda which Americans were in the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11, because the real targets of these attacks were not the victims directly affected but everyone else who was watching.

For a video introduction to the chapter in The Hidden Brain that talks about how tunnel vision shapes people into suicide bombers and terrorists, please click on the link titled The Tunnel here. Contrary to popular belief, I show that terrorists are not distinguished by their personalities, religious beliefs or internal make-up, but rather by their environments. The process by which people become suicide bombers is remarkably similar whether you are talking about Japanese kamikaze pilots, suicide bombers in Sri Lanka in the 1980s or Joseph Stack.

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I recently came by some remarkable research by Christine Alksnis at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario that offers an intriguing way to think about the wage gap — men and women are typically paid different wages for doing the same work in the United States, with women’s income ranging from 77 cents to 89 cents for every dollar earned by men. One reason offered by apologists for the wage gap is that men and women choose different kinds of professions. If you choose to become a high school teacher you can’t expect to make as much money as a software engineer, right? If only more women would go into traditionally masculine professions, the apologists say, the wage gap would vanish.

If it were only that easy. As I describe in The Invisible Current chapter in The Hidden Brain, unconscious sexism is ubiquitous and works in subtle ways. (Watch a video introduction to the chapter here). The problem is not just that the labor of women is undervalued relative to the labor of men in the same profession, but that professions that employ lots of women are undervalued compared to professions that tend to employ men.

The question, in other words, may not be why women don’t become software engineers as often as they become high school teachers, but why software engineers are paid so much more than high school teachers? It’s the marketplace, you say? The market decides on the value of each profession and the market is neutral?

Alksnis and a colleague, Serge Desmarais, conducted an experiment that provides hard evidence to back up the intuitions of many feminist scholars who have long argued that we undervalue professions that employ women for little more reason than that these professions employ lots of women. They asked volunteers to estimate the salaries of store clerks and magazine editors. The catch was that volunteers were asked to estimate the salaries of two kinds of store clerks and two kinds of magazine editors. One store clerk was said to sell china and crystal, the other store clerk was said to sell hardware. One magazine editor was in charge of an automotive magazine and the other was the editor of a gourmet food magazine. Can you see what the researchers are upto? The skills, experience and educational qualifications required to be a store clerk in either case, or to be an editor in either case, are identical, but we tend to think of these positions in gendered terms. We think of the editor of the automotive magazine as being a man, and the gourmet magazine as being a woman, the china store clerk as being female, and the hardware clerk as being male.

Alksnis found that both male and female volunteers picked lower salaries when asked to guesstimate the salary of the store clerk who sold china compared to the salary of the hardware store clerk, and a lower salary for the gourmet food magazine editor compared to the automotive magazine editor. Ironically, the volunteers said the skills required for the different store clerks, and the different magazine editors, were identical.

In a paper published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Alksnis and Desmarais wrote, that “when participants assigned salaries to what they perceived as “male” and “female” jobs, the jobs that they identified as female-typed were assigned less pay than were the jobs they identified as male-type.”

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One of the more pernicious dimensions of the hidden brain is the way in which it prompts many people to fulfill self-defeating stereotypes about their groups. If you tell a classroom of students that men tend to outperform women in math tests — right before you administer a math test — the women in the class are likely to perform more poorly on the math test than they would if you had not said anything. You don’t even have to remind people explicitly about the stereotype: Merely drawing attention to whether students are male or female before administering a math test can impair the ability of women to do their best.

You can show the same phenomenon in a variety of domains — you threaten the ability of white men to play basketball by telling them that on average blacks are better at basketball than whites (or just by making race salient in their minds before they compete in a basketball game.) It matters little whether the stereotypes are “accurate” or not — just that they are widely shared. The phenomenon is sometimes called “stereotype threat” — a clunky phrase, in my opinion, that does not do justice to this pernicious form of prejudice.

New research by the talented Adam Alter at New York University (whom I cite in The Hidden Brain for other research) and his colleagues suggests there may be a clever way to disable stereotype threats among high school and college students. If threats can be rephrased as challenges, Alter and his colleagues found, they no longer impair the ability of people to perform their best. The research was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

 When experimenters told black students between the ages of 9 and 13 that a standardized math test they were about to take would reveal how good they were at solving math problems, the performance of the students dropped compared to when they were told that the test would help them learn new things, or that “working on these problems might be a big help in school because it sharpens the mind.”

Alter and his colleagues found a similar phenomenon when it came to college students at Princeton University.

One way to think about these interventions is to think about how they changed what the students were paying attention to. Threats draw attention to our flaws, weaknesses and inadequacies. Challenges, on the other hand, remind us about our potential. It’s a useful lesson for educators to keep in mind.

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A new interview explores what happens to people when they are deprived of their hidden brains.

Much of The Hidden Brain is about the problems that unconscious factors create in our lives — from the vagaries in our moral judgment to the ways in which suicide bombers are indoctrinated. A natural conclusion from these examples is that we would be much better off without the hidden brain. This idea turns out to be impractical, and also fails to account for the many positive things the hidden brain does for us each day.

In a chapter called Tracking the Hidden Brain (watch a video introduction to it here) I show what happens to a middle-aged woman in Canada who loses a part of her hidden brain — a disorder robs her of subtle mental skills that she needs to function in social settings. She not only loses the ability to relate in appropriate ways to her family and to her friends, but also develops a host of unusual behaviors that puzzle the people who know and love her best.

You can listen to the interview here.

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Psychologists in the Netherlands and Germany have recently found that thinking about situations involving love and lust produce very different mindframes when it comes to thinking in general. In a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Jens Förster, Amina Özelsel and Kai Epstude found that when volunteers were asked to imagine being in love or being in lust — or when they were subliminally prompted to think about love or lust — their states of mind shifted. Love seemed to elicit global and long-range thinking, lust seemed to elicit local or short-term thinking.

There is nothing inherently surprising about this, given that love and lust (to the extent they are different things) differ on the question of temporality. We can imagine ourselves as being in love with someone for a long time, but can think of lust in a short-sighted way. More interestingly, however, the researchers found that getting people to think about love and lust — even when this was done subliminally ie. without the volunteers being aware that were being made to do so — prompted people to evaluate others differently.

The “love” volunteers were more likely to display a kind of blindness that the lust volunteers did not. We use the phrase “blind lust,” but in reality, it is love that tends to be blind. Being made to think about lust prompted the volunteers to pay greater attention to detail and see reality quite clearly. Being made to think about love, on the other hand, prompted the volunteers to slip into a more hazy state. Prior research has shown that people who are in love romanticize their partners, and often see them as being better than they really are, and fail to notice flaws that are actually glaringly obvious. Lovers often report that their partners closely match their own picture of what an ideal partner would be like — even when those descriptions clash with the way the partners describe themselves. Lovers who have inaccurately positive perceptions of their mates report being happier than those who see their partners more clearly.

It’s an example, I suppose, of the hidden brain providing us with a useful bias (which it does quite regularly). Our ability to misperceive reality, to see our partners as better than they really are, helps us build long term relationships that are positive, and end up making us happier. It’s not as if too much more proof were needed on this, but this experiment shows that our minds are designed first and foremost to be adaptive, rather than to be accurate. If it is adaptive for us to misperceive reality, then our minds are only too happy to oblige.

If you are in the Cambridge area tonight — Feb 9 — please come by the Harvard Bookstore at 7 PM to listen to me read from The Hidden Brain, and to discuss the wonderful world that is the human mind.

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I spent some time in the interview talking about an unconscious bias I discovered in my own three year-old daughter. Before she could tie her own shoelaces, she had already come to the conclusion that nurses always have to be women, and that doctors usually have to be men. Where do you think this bias came from? You can listen to the interview here or download an MP3 file, and learn what I think parents ought to be doing to confront the unconscious biases that can be observed in children right from the time they are toddlers — biases that stay with us well into adolescence and adulthood.

Much of the research into the biases of small children is described in Chapter 4 of The Hidden Brain, which is titled “The Infant’s Stare, Macaca, and Racist Seniors.” You can watch a short video introduction to the chapter here — scroll down to the section titled Table of Contents and Video Summaries.

Many people are familiar with the famous experiments conducted in the 1940s that showed the strong preferences that small black children had for white dolls over black dolls. A remarkable replication of the experiment was conducted recently, and you can watch a short video of the new experiment here.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about what you think parents can do to confront the unconscious biases of their children.

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There have been a couple of reviews/accounts about The Hidden Brain that mention my thoughts about George Allen’s infamous “macaca” moment — Allen repeatedly referred to a young Indian-American as “macaca”  — comments which contributed to Allen’s losing his Senate race, and the Republicans losing control of the U.S. Senate in 2006. The section of the book where I discuss the Allen case also mentions another incident where the entertainer Michael Richards (who played Kramer on the show Seinfeld) used racist language to silence a black heckler at a comedy club.

In the book, I write, “Most Americans think of Allen’s comments and Richards’s views as abhorrent—and they are. But unpleasant and inaccurate associations lie within all of us, which is why when we see someone slip, our reaction should not be “We finally caught that racist bastard!” but, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” When we focus mountains of newsprint and television time on these incidents, we implicitly set ourselves off as different from the George Allens and the Michael Richardses. We convince ourselves that biased attitudes are the exception, when dozens of research studies have shown that they are really the norm—among blacks and whites. I am not saying everyone associates brown people with “macaca”—I had to run to a dictionary myself to find out what the word meant. What I am saying is that we all have mindless associations in our hidden brain that surface when we are not on guard.”

In his Washington Post review, Peter D Kramer (author of Listening to Prozac and other books) said he was skeptical that Allen’s comments stemmed from his unconscious. He pointed out that I also castigate politicians for deliberately injecting race into campaigns. Isn’t it possible that Allen used the term “macaca” deliberately? Shouldn’t he receive our censure rather than our compassion?

There are multiple issues, and multiple (unexamined) assumptions here. First, as Kramer notes in his review, I hold George Allen entirely responsible for his comments, even if they stemmed from his unconscious mind, because regardless of whether our impulses are conscious or unconscious, we are always responsible for our actions. Second, no one other than George Allen really knows what was happening in his mind and, if you buy my assertions about the hidden brain, it is also possible George Allen didn’t really know what was happening in his mind. Third, as I note in the book, there are certainly plenty of people who have consciously prejudiced views.

But I think there is a strong case to be made that Allen was not thinking consciously when he made his comment. As I say in the book, “Let’s turn the question around. Let us assume that Allen and Richards did not have a hidden brain, that their comments were the product of conscious intent. George Allen’s crack now seems even more peculiar than it already did. (Who calls someone a “macaca,” anyway?) If Allen had been consciously trying to slur the Indian American at his rally, he was engaging in intentional political suicide. The young man Allen addressed was taping him on a video camera—and he was working for Allen’s opponent in the Senate race. Sure enough, Allen denied being suicidal. In his flustered attempt to explain his comments, he said, “It’s contrary to what I believe and who I am.”

There is a deeper issue here that is very important. The conventional way we think about prejudice is to automatically associate it with hatred and animosity. In other words, our conception of prejudice is limited to conscious prejudice. One of the central ideas in my book is that prejudice can also be unconscious. That does not make it acceptable, and that does not allow those who express racist sentiments or act in racist ways off the hook. We are always responsible for our actions, regardless of whether they spring from conscious or unconscious motives.

But it does suggest that our conventional approach to prejudice — which is to castigate the person who said the racist thing or fire the manager who said the racist thing — is not very effective at combating racism. When we tell someone they said something racist, their invariable reaction is that they did not mean to be offensive. And because we generally don’t believe the unconscious really exists, the conversation stops there. In many ways, this limited understanding of our minds is the reason people do not take responsibility for their own actions. George Allen, for example, can ask himself if he has conscious animosity toward Indian-Americans, his conscious mind responds “no,” and he then internally dismisses all criticism. But if he were to accept that his comments sprang from unconscious associations in his hidden brain — and that those unconscious associations still persist and could influence him again in other settings — he would have to have an entirely different conversation with himself, because it would no longer be sufficient to say, “but I didn’t mean it.”

A central message in my book is that it doesn’t really matter whether we mean it. It doesn’t really matter whether we intend to be fair. It doesn’t really matter whether we think of ourselves as good and kind people. Taking personal responsibility does not stop at merely checking the contents of our conscious minds. It must extend to examining our unconscious minds as well.

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Listen to an interview about The Hidden Brain conducted by the Diane Rehm show. The show was guest-hosted by the immensely talented Susan Page of USA Today, and featured a discussion that ranged from how to reform our criminal justice system to same-sex attraction among Visigoths. Sorry, I can’t say more. You’ll just have to listen to it.