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Ever hear of the phenomenon called an “illusory correlation”? It explains why commentator Williams, who was recently fired from NPR, associates Muslims at airports with terrorists.

I am going to be writing my next column for Slate about this issue. To whet your appetite, here’s a radio interview about illusory correlations and other biases with Steve Fast of WJBC. 

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics has been awarded to Peter Diamond, a champion of the field of behavioral economics. As I am sure you know, behavioral economics is a discipline which shows how people regularly depart from the rational, self-interested behavior that conventional economics suggests is the universal norm. The reason people regularly fail to behave as the economic models suggest they should, of course, is because of their hidden brains — the myriad biases, heuristics, prejudices and errors that cause us to deviate from the usual rules of predictable rationality and self-interest. While many of these biases produce errors and problems in our daily lives, others can be harmless, funny and even helpful.

In this book edited by Diamond, researchers talk about how adding a photograph of an attractive woman to a loan offer has about the same effect in getting heterosexual men to sign up for the loan as lowering interest rates by a whopping 4.5 percentage points.

Whether you think that is wonderful, dangerous or hilarious depends on whether you are the bank offering the loan, the guy paying more interest than he should, or the woman in the photograph!

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A variety of research studies show that attractiveness helps people in a variety of professional settings. Defendents in the criminal justice system and children in daycare get away with more lenient punishments when they are attractive, compared to when they are not.

But new research shows that there is a downside to being attractive — when people evaluating you are peers, but are not attractive themselves. Subordinates who are attractive are penalized by managers who are unattractive, according to new research by Maria Agthe, Matthias Spörrle and Jon K. Maner.

In many ways, the research confirms an intuition most of us have — while attractive people are, well, attractive, our hidden brain can also perceive them as potential threats. Interestingly, the bias was only observed among same-sex participants — meaning unattractive male managers discriminated against attractive male subordinates and unattractive female managers discriminated against attractive female subordinates.

A recent puzzle I posted on the Hidden Brain’s Facebook fan page (where all puzzles get aired first) read:

When a manager evaluates a subordinate belonging to the same sex, the manager is most likely to give a negative review when
A) The manager is attractive and the subordinate is not
B) The subordinate is attractive and the manager is not
C) Both the manager and subordinate are attractive
D) Neither the manager nor the subordinate are attractive

The correct answer is B.

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In any class of children, you’ll see the usual bunch of outgoing kids and those who like to play by themselves or in smaller groups. But being gregarious in itself is not the only predictor of developing friendships – new research suggests that children who are drawn to others who are like themselves (as opposed to children who are drawn to others different from themselves) are more likely to have best friends — and to acquire best friends if they don’t have them already.

That’s the conclusion of research by Julie C. Bowker, Bridget K. Fredstrom, Kenneth H. Rubin, Linda Rose-Krasnor, Cathryn Booth-LaForce and Brett Laursen. The researchers observed fifth and sixth grade children as they made, lost and sought friendships over the period of a little more than a year. One group of children had best friends at the start and best friends at the end of the study period, a second group had no best friend at the start but a best friend at the end. A third group, for whom we may now shed a silent tear, had no best friends at either the beginning nor the end of the study period.

The researchers found that compared to the kids who never had a best friend, the children who always had best friends and those who acquired best friends when they didn’t have one tended to be those who were drawn to others just like themselves – or to use the lingo of the academics, these children were drawn to “similar others.”

I speak at length in The Hidden Brain about how the friendship-formations of children are one of the earliest examples of the hidden brain at work and how, without anyone intending it, friendships are shaped by unconscious biases. Having a close friend from another race, researchers have found, is one of the best predictors of a sympathetic worldview toward the other race in general, whereas not having close friends from another race tends to close the door to a generous view.

The fact that children who make friends easily are drawn to others like themselves is an example of how something that has clearly positive benefits – the ability to make friends – also has a side to it that is less attractive. It also shows why we are stuck with many of the biases that dog us everyday. The same thing that helps us make friends (being drawn to others like ourselves) can also prompt us to close our minds to those from other groups.

No one would recommend that children stop making friends, or stop enjoying the company of those who share the same interests (or race or sports team or socioeconomic background.) The only way to eliminate the bad without eliminating the good is to supplement our unconscious bias to be drawn to others who are like ourselves by consciously encouraging ourselves and our children to form friendships with those who are different in all kinds of ways.

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The Southern Legal Resource Center wants people to list their race as “Confederate Southern American” on their U.S. Census form. I think all Americans should list their race as BLACK — because humans are all descended from African ancestors.

If you agree, TELL YOUR FRIENDS about this idea. Census workers are currently visiting the homes of millions of people who have not yet completed their census forms.

There is strong scientific evidence that all humans have African ancestors. See, for example, this article in Science. Some of the best evidence comes from research biologists, who study how genes spread through the human population. Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking and Allan Wilson studied the DNA of people from five disparate geographical regions in the world. The researchers found that all the people had mitochondrial DNA that could be traced back to a single woman in Africa who lived 200,000 years ago.

The Southern Legal Resource Center wants you to list your race as Confederate Southern American. Wouldn’t you rather trust the science?

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More than twice as many members of the Tea Party Movement (compared to the general public) believe President Obama favors blacks over whites. The stats: 25 percent of tea Partiers versus 11 percent of the general public believe the Obama White House disproportionately favors blacks over whites. This according to a New York Times poll.

The link between political outlook and racial views is a correlation — we cannot say for sure whether concerns about benefits accruing disproportionately to blacks drives the Tea Partiers’ opposition to President Obama, or whether opposition to President Obama drives concerns about benefits accruing disproportionately to blacks. It is also possible that some other factor drives both phenomena. (When it rains, people wear rainboots and carry umbrellas. It would be absurd to conclude that wearing rainboots causes people to hold umbrellas. Both rainboots and umbrellas are triggered by a third factor — the rain.)

The striking size of the correlation, however, reminds me about the disparate threads that have been shown to link racial outlook and political orientation in the United States. I describe these at length in Chapter 9 of The Hidden Brain — Disarming The Bomb — and also talk about ways conscious and unconscious racial bias can be neutralized in politics.

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Hidden Brain Puzzle # 9: You are buying a new home, and dealing with an unethical realtor. At the last minute, the realtor tells you about a hefty fee he had not mentioned earlier. This is very unfair. You notice the TV is on. You are most likely to walk away from the unfair deal if
a) The TV show is violent
b) The TV show is sad
c) The TV show is a sports program
d) The TV show is disgusting

The correct answer is D — disgust, not anger or sadness, prompts people to walk away from unfair deals.

I based this puzzle on research by Laura Moretti and Giuseppe di Pellegrino, who found that when they activated different emotions among volunteers asked to accept or reject an unfair deal, disgust prompted many more people to walk away from the deal. The experiment clearly shows the hidden brain at work, because the volunteers were all offered the same scenario, except that different volunteers were prompted to feel sad, disgusted etc.

A particularly interesting facet of the experiment, which was published in the journal Emotion, was that the reaction was limited to situations where volunteers believed they were interacting with another person. When the volunteers felt that they were dealing with a computer which handed them an unfair deal (presumably because of random choice), prompting the volunteers to feel disgusted had no effect on their walking away from the deal.

At a certain level, the experiment confirms what many of us understand intuitively: Disgust prompts people to move away from something that offends their sensibilities — we may seek to fight with the driver who makes us angry by rear-ending our car, but when we are confronted by someone who does something we perceive as disgusting, we want to put distance between that person and ourselves.

They wrote, “disgust is associated with … being too close to something revolting, or to an indigestible object or idea, and it is characterized by the desire to expel current objects and refuse contact with the offending agent. Sadness, on the other hand, revolves around the theme of irrevocable loss and helplessness, and the action tendency typically linked with it is passivity, inertia, and withdrawal, or preference for options that provide greater reward, comfort, or indulgence.”

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Gays & lesbians in 16 U.S. states suffered steep increases in depression, anxiety & addictions between 2001-05. The states were Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Utah.

What happened in those states in that time period that may have caused such distress? Those states all passed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in that time period, according to new research by Mark L. Hatzenbuehler, Katie A. McLaughlin, Katherine M. Keyes and Deborah S. Hasin. Heterosexuals in those states did not show the same increase in mental disorders/distress, and gays and lesbians living in the other 34 U.S. states (that did not pass such constitutional bans) also did not see such increases in distress and disorder.

The increases were striking: Generalized anxiety disorders among gays and lesbians in those 16 states rose 248.2%, alcoholism increased by 41.9 percent and mood disorders (including depression) increased by 36.6% according to a paper published in the American Journal of Public Health.

The researchers themselves note the appropriate caveats that their data could not address: It’s possible, for example, that gays and lesbians who were healthier to begin with (or privileged in other ways) moved to states with more liberal attitudes toward homosexuality, leaving behind those who were sicker to begin with. It’s unclear whether the new laws were themselves responsible for the change, or if the general climate surrounding these laws were to blame. It’s also unclear whether liberal policies toward gays and lesbians would result in decreases in disorders. Such questions cannot be addressed without conducting randomized experiments, and such experiments (which would involve randomly assigning gays and lesbians to different states, for example) would be both impractical and unethical.

It’s good to keep the caveats in mind, but I think this study raises profoundly important questions about the effects that our national conversation about homosexuality has on the mental health of gays and lesbians. It’s never been a secret or surprise that there are human beings at the receiving end of these policies and debates, but this research brings home clearly the effects that laws and institutional actions can have on the personal well being of individuals.

In making what is essentially a civil rights argument against constitutional bans on same-sex marriage, the researchers write, “although the constitutional amendments largely codified policies that existed de facto, the sociocultural environment surrounding the approval of these amendments made them no less psychologically harmful. Creating constitutional amendments banning gay marriage reinforced the marginalized and socially devalued status of lesbian, gay and transgendered individuals. Moreover, the negative political campaigns against gays and lesbians by proponents of these amendments, which were well-circulated in the media, further promulgated the stigma associated with homosexuality.”

Since the time the study was completed other states, including California, have passed similar bans. Research is ongoing about whether the same changes in mental health among gays and lesbians is occurring in those states.

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American Indian mascots are a popular choice for sports teams. Controversy has raged, however, about whether such mascots encourage stereotypes about native Americans. New research suggests that there may be a problem of another sort entirely — the use of these mascots seems to increase stereotyping of other groups. The implications of the research are still not clear, but it is almost as though once your hidden brain is encouraged to use mental shortcuts such as “American Indian chief = sports warrior” it more easily comes up with other kinds of mental shortcuts that have nothing to do with American Indians. Sloppy thinking begets sloppy thinking.

Boosters point out the mascots are much loved and used respectfully. Recently, however, Chu Kim-Prieto, Lizabeth A. Goldstein, Sumie Okazaki and Blake Kirschner tested how the use of a University of Illinois mascot, Chief Illiniwek, affected the tendency of volunteers to stereotype an unrelated group — Asians. They randomized volunteers into groups — one read about or was shown materials depicting the athletics program and Chief Illiniwek and the other was given materials about a university arts center. All the depictions about Chief Illiniwek were exactly as boosters of American Indian sports mascots described — respectful and admiring. The researchers found that volunteers shown the American Indian mascot were quicker to come up with stereotypes about Asians that suggested Asians were socially inept, overly competitive, and not fun-loving.

The University of Illinois retired the mascot after reviewing these findings. Read more about the controversy here.

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PS: What do you think these data mean for the famous logos of these professional sports teams?