the analogy 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 plan or the cruise control that we have in a car. it was a very useful function but it's problematic when you are driving through a thunderstorm or flying through a thunderstorm on autopilot instead of on pilot said the analogy between poly licht and although piatt is a metaphor tos ℠b

way we think about genocide, moral judgment and risk. i will start with something really simple so in one of the opening chapters i describe a simple example of the head and brain at work. there was an office in england where a psychologist decided to conduct a simple experiment. the office have something common in office is in the world over,

a beverage station where people could make their own coffee and tea and there was a little on our box people could drop their money into this box after making their coffee and tea. the beverage station was located in a portion that was not visible to anyone else so if people were honest and paid for their tea and coffee will be complemented them and they cheated and didn't pay nobody punished them. there was a little notice stood on the door that the tilt the price for the tea and coffee and milk and the psychologist who worked at this office conduct a simple experiment. each week she changed the notice based on on the culbert. the text remained and tickle where the prices of the coffee and tea and milk but there was a small decorative image on the top of the sheet of paper and she down loaded images from the internet and pasted them on this sheet of paper that was set on a level on the covered door. of some weeks the picture displayed a series of the flowers, roses and daffodils and

tulips and other weeks the picture showed a pair of watching eyes. laughter committee and ten weeks the psychologist asked if anybody noticed the picture changed from week to week. people didn't even know there was a picture of alone the picture was changing from week to begin to get this very small change produced a giant affect in people's honesty and paying for their tea and coffee. on the week's the picture showed a pair of watching all eyes honesty levels soared. [laughter] on the week's the picture showed daffodils and tulips honesty levels plummeted. now it's as simple books and with the unconscious mind at work and its striking, it's amusing and striking because what it shows is not only that there is a part of our mind that process sees things we don't think about consciously but a part of our mind that the influences us and our behavior. i taught in a subsequent chapter

how they began very early in life. the head and brain is active right from the time that we are born and did please -- it can be measured from the time children are 3-years-old which is about as early as researchers are able to study anyone to get meaningful results. a set of experiments conducted a day care in montreal a psychologist showed children as young as three we're all ready categorizing of the world according to 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 is whether the parents of these children are indoctrinating the children with racist or bigoted views because it doesn't make sense to think of a three-year-old child as a bigot and the child doesn't know how to tie her shoelaces yet. it turns out the parents actually were not indoctrinating their children with bias and in fact parents were so afraid their children would become

racially intolerant that they didn't discuss the issue of race or body is at all. they made no mention of it and what is disturbing about this research -- it's actually a step up from the kafeel experiment -- it shows people conform -- children can form on conscious diocese without anyone intending for them to happen. not the parents of the children are the teachers of the children were the children themselves. so how do they form cracks around the time i was reading the chapter my own daughter turned three and we would play this game called dr. where we bought a kit and she would check up on her stuffed animals using a stethoscope and magnifying glass and she would ask me to play the role of the doctor and she would play the role of the nurse and we did this for a couple of days and then i suggested we switched roles and she was willing to play the role of the doctor but wasn't willing to let me play the role of the nurse and this went on for two weeks and i pushed and pushed and she resisted and resisted until i asked her why it did was i couldn't play the role of the

nurse and it's surprising she was able to articulate this because i don't think most people were able to articulate where the assumptions are coming from him if she said she had never seen a story book where a nurse was played by a man and it's true when i thought about it i had read her dozens of children's stories and all of the stories invariably the nurse was played by a woman. now there was no act of conscience bias on the part of the storyteller of the story, there was no act of conscience bias on my part or on her part and hit by age three she formed what is a stereotype that nurses are supposed to be women and doctors in general are supposed to be men. much of the book or a big chunk of the book talks about the nature of prejudice. but i try and argue in the would prejudice is actually a special case of a much larger phenomenon that is fundamentally cyclical in nature. much of the book talks about the problems of the head and brain, the problems caused by on conscious bias and one of the

automatic reactions we have is if we could do away with a head injury and we would all be bias-free. it turns out it's not that easy. the human brain plays a positive role in our lives much of the time, and one of the chapters in the book i talk about what happens or what might happen if we were actually to be deprived of the hidden price and if we were to do all of our thinking intentionally and consciously, and i shook that would result in us not becoming enlightened figures but profoundly disabled in many ways. i tried throughout the book to try to find ways to link the research conducted, the scientific research with the real world and i do this for two reasons. one by one the book to be accessible to people who may not have a direct interest in science but sick and that is where the research belongs. it doesn't belong in laboratories, a wonderful fellow harvard is it belongs in the real world where people are

wrestling with issues of the time. one of the chapters of the book i try to discuss the issue of unconscious sexism in the world and i will get too specific examples. the case of hillary clinton during the democratic primary in 2008 and of a woman some of you will be familiar with, lilly ledbetter whose case went to the supreme court a couple of years ago. lilly ledbetter worked for the goodyear tire and rubber company and she worked here for two decades. she worked the night shift and was that the level of four manager and there were four of the 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 mailbox and when she looked at his of paper she never found out who left the piece of paper in her mailbox she found out if listed her salary and the salaries of the managers of the shop floor doing identical work and it turned out she was being paid substantially less than them. i won't go into the details about the case that happened and

how the case found its way to the supreme court. but i use this example and the example of what happened to hillary clinton to ask the question of whether we can tell whether unconscious bias, in this case on conscious sexism, caused the effect that we see. and i try to show how and real life it is difficult to draw the kind of conclusions you control in the laboratory because of the one hand, it is true that hillary clinton may have seized on conscious sexism but did she lose the democratic primary because of her on conscious sexism or did she lose the democratic primary because of her views on any number of issues? did she lose the primary because her associations with bill clinton? there are hundreds of variables and everyday life that make it difficult to say this caused that. the same goes for lilly ledbetter. dewey no xm ackley what happened at the goodyear tire and rubber plant? had an intuitive level i believe that lilly ledbetter and hillary clinton were the victims of the unconscious bias but if you were to ask me to prove this, it

cannot prove it with scientific certainty. the issue of course israelite doesn't provide us with control groups. scientific experiments provide us with control groups. as i was working on the chapter though i realized 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 the group of people who are transgendered because transgendered 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 the effects of what we're seeing in gender are true and what we should see is 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 male to female we should see a difference and it turns out that there is research, sociological research in this case, that shows that is exactly what happens. that when a man in and make a transition to win in a report losing all kind of privileges they didn't know they had and

when women make the transition to them and they gained privileges that they never knew the existed. pond lawyer who made the female to male jensen reported somebody had another firm reported that he was delighted to be working with the new lawyer without realizing of a new lawyer was the same as the old lawyer and the gender had changed. many of these examples are anecdotal. the most compelling part of the research comes from evidence that shows win minn vacca transition to women that hourly salaries drop quite precipitously as much as one-third and when women make the transition to being an their salaries on average rise and it's an example of how impossible it impossible as it may seem making the transition from male to female or from a female to male has a profound effect on how we can function in everyday life. there are several other chapters to discuss what unconscious bias tells us about the way we make

moral judgment and judge genocide. there's one chapter that looks at how would new research shows about the process by which young men and women are recruited to become suicide bombers and the sort of unconscious biases of suicide bombers. there is another chapter their looks specifically at the 2008 presidential election in the fall and talks about the result of the secret experiment conducted that fall that try to ask the question are there ways we can disable unconscious bias in the course of an election campaign. some of the results of the experiments i am happy to discuss it if it comes up in q&a but many are these experiments that are counter intuitive the ways you go of a disabling unconscious bias on all the ways we would conventionally assumed to read the chapter i'm going to read from is called the siren's call and it looks at a separate dimension of bias. what happens to human beings in the context of ongoing disaster has disasters on fold. and this chapter would have

bearing in the fire alarm were to go off right now in this room. what we do? how would we be if? or the unconscious factors the would affect us in making judgments about how to react to a warning of disaster? has sided with many of the other chapters, with this chapter i began with scientific evidence and then i try to find a nellis to the fixable from real life that could show and dot i's with the scientific evidence had found. in 1993, a bomb went off in the underground parking lot at the world trade center. it didn't bring down the tower is the they were ordered evacuated. a sociologist went in and announced a simple question. he asked how quickly people were able to exit the covers and what factors influenced how quickly they left the towers. he found something very surprising. he found it did this a matter what the people were on the 20th floor or the 16th floor. in other words you did in to get

out of the building sooner because you're on the 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 to que much longer to fix the building. if you belong to a small group you were quicker to exit the building. it 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 are not sure what happens, human beings turn to one another both to try to figure out whether other people know what's happening but also something else very important to develop a shared meredith about what is happening. it's important when we are in a group not only to know what it is to do but to try to get a shared agreement where everyone says i agree this is what we should do and this is what we have to do and the process of arriving at consensus took longer for a larger group than a smaller group. the chapter begins with a terrific case which i am not

going to read tonight that took place years ago in detroit where a woman was assaulted on a bridge that connected the trip with an island called the ballan elbridge and the assault took place in full view of probably 200 people, maybe more than 200 people. and like the story i'm sure many of you are%@ @ @ @ rb@ @ @ @ @ l river. i'm going to start reading a little bit from the end of that example and then go on to the section of one to read for you. what you think happened on the bridge that might? from the outrage that followed you would think that she had been surrounded by the only

people in the world who would not help a victim in distress. everyone else for they would have 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 by first heard about it as a reporter. it wasn't until i started learning about the handling and but i realized there was an entirely different way to think about what had happened. the more i learned the more i can to see that the bye standards i describe what happened to several by standards to and the bridge incident, the bystanders did not really have insight into their own behavior. my research to the tragedy of the bridge let me unexpectedly to a beautiful september morning in new york in 2001. six years after her death, a young equity trader at a financial service investment banking york went to work on a sunny tuesday morning in september.

he had been here for less than a year but his talent had been noticed. there was another way and that the firm already said the 25-year-old bochner graduate was given the fenech. each day his mother told me he took special pride as he stepped in to work on the 89th floor of the south tower of the world trade center. it is not surprising that he can to think of the firm as special. the employees prided themselves on their come artery. they thought of themselves as more than colleagues. they felt like family to get new recruits in fact was often literally family. many came to the firm by way of recommendations from the but it said the company. tied together by blood come out looking and social ties, the employees formed an unusually cohesive group. september 11th, 2001, the 7:30 meeting at the firm was well attended. as the meeting broke up about one hour later people drifted back to their desks chatting with one another before the start of the trading at 9:00. that is when they heard a

terrible modeled malaise. it was as if an earthquake that struck. it was 8:46 a.m.. according to an account pieced together by the man who would later become the head of the firm, the muffled explosion brought the chairman of the company running out of his office. jesus christ, he shouted, what the hell was that? is the architecture of the bridge produced a situation where her options or physically state were tragically limited, the muffled explosion that fetch and the others heard created a similar situation. what mattered in this case however was not the physical structure of the town were but the architect of time. fetch and his friends didn't know this but their own lives were in deadly danger. they had one opportunity for a skate, a sliver of a window that had opened by an event hundreds of miles away. earlier that morning the united flight 175 from boston had seen its takeoff to lead by 14 minutes at logan airport.

that delay created a small opportunity for fetch and his friends to survive, but of course the employees here did not know that. when fetch and his friends heard the explosion in the north tower that tuesday morning they did not know the united airlines plan was 16 minutes away from crashing into their building. the impact of the united plan would tear a diagonal negative in the south tower that would stretch from the 77 to the 85th floor. virtually every person still in the building above the zone of impact would die. the overwhelming tragedy that was unfolding in the united states hardly anyone noticed something strange happened that morning, a puzzle. the investment banking firm was actually spread over two floors in the south tower, the 80th floor and 89th floor. the 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 of the '84 escaped and survived. fetch and nearly everyone else

who worked for the same company on the 89th floor stayed at their desks and died. john duffield became the ceo after the tragedy and her son was among the employees who died told me that 120 employees were spread over the 88th and 94 that morning. of the 67 people at the firm who died 66 worked on the 89th floor. only one person who died worked on the 88th 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 89th floor and accounts from a few survivors sure that fetch and the others did not know the explosion they heard was caused by a plane crash. the tower was not directly visible from the trading area in the south tower but from the scott base all smoke and thousands of paper to across the sky. one employee would say that it looked like a parade, confusion broke out. people raced to windows for a

better look. senior staffer called what happened during the terrorist attack of the world trade center in 1993. those who tried to leave got stuck for hours and elevators. the emerging school of thought in disaster management was that rather than try to get everyone out of a big building like the world trade center, it made sense for people not affected by the problem to stay inside of their workplaces rather than wonder out into danger. this wisdom filtered down to every old timer in the building. put yourself in the shoes of the people on the 89th floor you have no idea what is happening. a muffled explosion from an adjoining town work, smoke and drifting pieces of paper is all the information you have. the idea that 19 hijackers have taken control of four airplanes and and then at the nation's prominent landmarks including the building you work is not just beyond the realm of comprehension, it is beyond the realm of imagination. fetch and his friends also had won a nervous eye on the clock, trading on the stock market was about to open in a few minutes

at 9:00. the chairman dispatched someone to check with building officials about what to do. meanwhile, family, friends and colleagues who heard about the explosion on television started calling to make sure their loved ones were okay. the calls had the unintended effect of keeping employees at their workstations. meanwhile the united airlines plane after initially going southwest from massachusetts connecticut and the jersey please see you turnover pennsylvania. a subsequent recrimination of its flight path showed the plane drifted southeast at first than the 90-degree left turn at the new jersey border and headed northeast toward manhattan. some of speaker of's colleagues wandered over to the windows that offered a few 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 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 tower from

the window with a good view, the site shook him up when he saw someone leaping from an upper floor and falling hundreds of feet. it was horrible. he didn't realize something even worse was about to happen. united flight 175 was plunging 10,000 feet per minute and aimed at the southern tip of manhattan. fetch 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. fetch donald another member. he wanted to reassure his mother he was all right. very pleasant and so fetch left her a message. he said a lot to tell you the plane hit tower to a and i am in tower one and i am alive and well. she recalled in an interview. he said 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 fetch's building shattered with the impact of flight 175. no one on the upper floor knew that once the building survived the crash nearly every one of the zone at impact to dentes date within the 16 minute window perished. i wanted to read a little bit more that shows, gives a little bit more since -- this is a teaser right now because i've described what's happened but i haven't actually told you phenomenon that drove this. so i'm going to read a little bit longer. it might take another five or ten minutes. there is a way for us to labour the workings of the hit in the brain and disaster situations but it requires us to suspend our model of people as autonomous individuals. let me show you what i mean through to get samples of a single employee who worked for

the ill-fated 89th floor. like everyone else interviewed at the firm, he was a clearly above average and social skills and smarts. you don't get to work a place like this unless you are pretty bright. with will's permission however, let us stop thinking about him in the usual way for a few months. for the purpose of illustration in fact let us exaggerate of rolled his head and brain. instead of seeing -- let us imagine he has nothing but a hit in the brain and sort of seeing him as a smart and handsome young man with a smile that lights up the room imagine him as a note at the center of a web connections rigi from him in every direction. a slender cord runs from his brain to new york where he grew up and his parents live and another goes to south bend indiana where his brother, the catholic priest lives. and another to new jersey where his sister lives and still another to long island to his other brother. if you have to the diagram of his life in this way before the

morning of september 11th, 2001 you would see cables running to his jim, the golf courses and beaches he liked to frequent and his high school friends. wherever will went, new cables sprang up around him. a stretch to acquaintances, others to strangers. summit with thick and strong and others slender. some came into existence and snapped off in moments as he passed someone he didn't know what his way to work. others endured a great edisons and distances. the bond of love, loyalty of longing that make up life. after graduating from cold spring harvard law school he attended motor dan and worked a couple of years for the bank of america in chicago before returning to know dirtying to help coach the men's lacrosse team. he joined july 31st 2000. he got married six weeks before september 11th, 2001. he and his bride went on the honeymoon to the caribbean island of st. martin. christina defazio and jessica worked on the firm's back-office

grip on the site of the ninth floor closest to the north tower. the course that connected will to the more slender because he didn't know them well. cliff worked in the firm's insurance group. he was a good office acquaintance. eric fourth and bradley were close friends. they knew about biases's propensity frank sidey. college friends used to call him crisis the way for blowing things out of proportion. rick and maddock regularly played practical jokes on will. sitting across on the 89th floor was carroll, an event coordinator and administrative assistant. she had a bubbling personality and changed her hair color regularly from blond to brown and back again. another nearby employees was chris hughes and arbitrage trader. will's jalabert forced him to speak to countless people each day. he sold stock, research people let the cliff produced. like a scene from a science-fiction movie, the

hidden cables snake about will growing and feeding. on monday september 10th, 2001, will moved desks to in his new location he happened to be the member of the group closest to a little corner door that led to a solid metal door. the door opened into a hallway and then the stairs. employees need a pass to unlock the door. on tuesday morning september 11, biases jumped on a train from his home in westchester on 6:15 a.m. and a subway from and manhattan. he attended the meeting at the firm and then drifted back to his desk. like everyone else, and he heard the explosion at 8:46. it was more of a rumble than a bill, like an earthquake tremor or the sound of work and 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 see him instead the center of a complex web of inter connections with thousands of cables tugging him in different directions. if you prefer, think of will as

a cork bobbing in the ocean passive, acted upon by every riptide and wave and a drop of film. carroll yelled was that? after a moment, chris hughes the arbitrage trader exclaimed there was an explosion and the other building. oh my god, carol's voice was panicked. oh my god! the explosion itself was just a side of will's peripherals division but when he looked through a window that normally offered a spectacular view of manhattan, he felt his stomach turn. 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 will the sense of the magnitude of what happened. the smoke and debris was to travel 50 or 100 yards from the other tower to so thoroughly obscure the view. people were jumping up, sere leaped like a contagion. calmed down, calm down, chris

shouted, it is in the other building. like a vacuum, the windows drew will and brad and frick. the harvick spectacle of the smoke and the breach was irresistible. but as the tide of people drew well to the window and knocking came to the door through the small hallway. it was a decisive moment. i can't believe someone forgot their past, he thought. the desperate binging escalated. the connection demanded his attention. will didn't want to answer the door but he happened to be the one closest. it placed the obligation on him. his connections with his friends called him towards 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 for the connection he had to the people he left behind weekend. when he opened the door new connections spring up between him and the two women who stood outside in the hallway. christina defazio and jessica. like a robot, will repeated what

chris just said, calmed down, calm down. it's in the other building. defazio and slaven were so afraid they couldn't speak and then quit can charge of the hallway on another part of the ninth floor. he had been sitting with his back to the window when his room filled with a terrifying blue light and blasted him right out of his chair. he ran out into the research departments screening get out. the bond between a will and cliff sprang to life. there was a stairway exit outside of the door where he was standing. nicklaus and the two women made straight for it. will glanced back once installed on by the weakening connections he left behind. to his good fortune, the architecture of the hallway that submitted the door from the trading floor obscured most of the room he left behind. he couldn't see his friends. and for people from his own office, bill, jeff, andrew and amanda came charging at him in a

pack. when will leader reflect on the moment he realized he made very little by way of a conscious decision. you do what you do, he said. you are right there. you see people running down the stairs, you see people running at you, you go down the stairs. wilfong himself running down the stairs so quickly after the initial explosion that he didn't see any other people besides his own group until they reached the 80th floor. the employees pair off and will found himself with cliff. it was only when they got to the 71st floor that will stop his friend. it was partly because there were few people in the stairwell and the hidden brain makes us feel self-conscious when we do things that other people are not giving. some of the old connections were drawling will back to the 89th floor. cliff, he said, it's in the other building. the news of the explosion occurred in the north tower came as a complete surprise to cliff. i thought it was in our building, he said, no, it's in the other building, he insisted. to connections sneaking back to

the 89th floor tugged at will. if it turned out this wasn't a big deal and no one else had run rich and brad would have a field day. this was the kind of episode that would ensure a full amount of jokes at wiltz's expense, something minor happened and crisis boy had taken off like a rabbit. will persuaded quiff to wait and see if others can 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 89th floor appeared. will and cliff sheepishly started climbing back up the stairs donner as ever by the cables that connected them to their comrades. they climbed two floors and they were right at the edge of the zone of the impact of the coming plant. it was yet another decisive moment. what saved the day with people from other floors were now coming down the stairwell. they were strangers and formerly weak connections with will's hidden brain but there were many of them. besides it is getting difficult to climb against the tide of

people climbing 15 stories against that kind of traffic was crazy. will and quick turn around and went with the flow. the results 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 stair well. we are going to go back and get left out so much, he fretted. well and cliff were in the stairwell on the 54th floor when they received the ultimate confirmation that the overreacted. building officials made the announcement 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 shushed 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 well was resigning himself to the weeks of humiliation at the hands of his jokester friends, the united air

plane crashed into the south tower. the stairwell shook. it actually undulated like a snake. will recall seeing people on the landings three or four floors above him. he clutched cliff. this is it, he thought, the north tower took 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 actively supreme the lucky. the cables connecting him with friends and strangers had conspired to spring him from the track in which he had been encased. his hidden brain extricate him from the zone of impact. the south tower would stand long enough for him to get out. nearly everyone from the office on the 89th four who survived a state within the first moments after the explosion of the north tower. those who stayed behind would have found it increasingly difficult to leave because the hid and brann were anchored to other people who were staying put. it would have required enormous delivered if ever for an individual to overcome the strength of the ties or for the group as a whole to reach a

consensus. many of the victims who stayed behind of the 89th floor were not tracked by the kind of self doubt that plagued will. once the united airlines planes struck at 9:03 a.m. they have less than an hour to live. thank you. [applause] i am happy to take any questions. usually is at this stage where another side of the hidden brain kicks in which is that nobody puts up their hand. but the moment one person puts their hand, others will join an, which is a small and trivial example of the phenomenon i just read to you in this chapter. >> where were you wanted to agree with ed? >> i was in washington, d.c.. i was just hitting in to work on that morning and i lived at the

time in arlington and so the impact i don't know if it was the fourth or fourth panora pentagon could be felt in my home, i wasn't home at the time. then i went and worked all day at the post. it was a surreal experience. yes. >> [inaudible] >> the question was to talk a little bit about what the new research has found about the hidden brain and suicide bombers. when we think about suicide terrorism, invariably we think of the individual personalities of the suicide bombers. we ask what is it about these individual people that promise them to be willing to kill themselves for a cause. every 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 the intuition is not supported by the evidence. it turns out that religious belief is not only not a necessary cost for suicide terrorism, it is not even a sufficient cause either. there are many silicide bombers going back 50 or 100 years who came from entirely secular background or even atheist and had nothing to do with religion. and a lot of the research that is looked up the phenomenon of suicide terrorism from a scientific perspective has looked once at the psychological makeup of the people and the specific elements of their ordeal local background and looked at what is common between suicide bombing across the ages, if you look at what the japanese did on the closing days of world war ii against the allies or with the sri lanka in tigers did in the 1980's or if you look at the use of suicide her bosom and

a variety of theaters today, what we find is the process by which people become suicide bombers is common across the different cultural and national context. suicide bombers tend to be in situations where they are largely cut off from the outside world for a variety of different factors. some liberal, some not deliberate and is small group psychology, the ability of small groups to leave right to the norms of human behavior that makes the phenomenon of suicide to durham some possible. when we ask how is it people can do these abominable things what we are doing is examining the phenomenon from the outside of the tunnel. we are often not able to understand is that within the tunnell 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 deprived, they are 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 then the spotlight and attention. the norms have been turned upside down in the suicide bombers tunnell and once you turn them upside down you have to do very little to go out and recruit people because they will come to you. >> does a person act differently or changed to different behavior if the workings of his or her hidden brain as pointroll? >> not necessarily. inside is an important first step dealing with his brain. it is a necessary condition but i don't think it is a sufficient condition so there are people who are aware. for example to because my daughter again, the fact that i mentioned this, the fact we talked about why nurses can be women, don't have to be women or can be men it doesn't mean that the unconscious associations picked up from the time she was very young disappear from her mind so it's not as of 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 the conventional way we have to approach prejudice is preached to people to tell them the 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 have an argument with people all about whether prejudice makes sense or doesn't make sense but when the prejudice is on conscious going out to someone and say and 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 on prejudice and what it produces is defensiveness. in the chapter where i describe the experiments that were conducted in the 2008 election looking at how you can dibias people, one of the things that has come out of that is actually it shows that will be obama campaign did in the election i don't know whether they'd 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 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 the never drew attention to the fact people were using race as a metric of voting. the obama campaign always said america has transcended race. we are better people, we have moved past this. we have had a long and difficult history but we are better than we are and better than we used to be. so rather than confronting the bias directly with the obama campaign it is called people to their better angels and a lot of what the research suggests and is counterintuitive is you might be less successful at calling people out on their body is precisely for this issue which is that even when you are conscious of the unconscious bias within you would doesn't necessarily change behavior. in the back, yes. >> i'm curious about moving this to a different look about scott

brown for example and kind of what the redials about the human brain and how massachusetts most liberal state in the union [inaudible] what's that about? [laughter] >> the short and honest answer is i don't know. i think in some ways this becomes a parlor game where you would try to apply the bias to the situations and i can toss out hypotheses and give you my impressions but i should start by saying we are doing right now this is not scientific. we are theorizing. i think for many people, democrats included felt that martha didn't care enough to run a very hard campaign and it didn't really tell you the vote hard enough to want to campaign for it. i know a lot of people who are not republicans who understand

why people would have voted republican and so at some level people in some ways want to have their ego stroked and the sense politicians are speaking to you. i think it interesting dimension of the human brain when it comes to politics as we often seek to have personal connections with politicians and is 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 to be someone who would be fun to have a beer with is irrelevant because we are never going to have a beer with them and yet when it comes to our decision making we often w. and overvalue the personal connection we feel with people or the disconnection we feel with people and so in ways when it comes to politics, one aspect of bias that cuts across not just the city election but many elections is the over reliance replace on personal relationships with these people with whom we actually do not share a personal relationship at all. you have a question, sir.

>> there are two surgeon and local concept [inaudible] are these concepts woven into this notion of the hidden brain or are they a distinctive category not much related to this notion of the peter connected [inaudible] >> my book is not a book about 40 in psychology but it's in for my think by the center inside of the freudian psychology which is that the unconscious plays a role in our lives. so, where freud may have spoken of defensiveness, the new research would talk about the phenomenon of motivated reasoning which is when we are asked to make a judgment about something we tell ourselves we are carefully weighing out the issues and making a judgment when in reality what often happens is we have preconceived opinions and we look for the

evidence the would back up the preconceived opinions. i mentioned an interesting experiment that may be tangentially related to what you're asking about. in the course of the 2008 election people conducted this experiment where they asked where they measured peoples on consciousnesses seasons between barack obama and whether they felt he was american. and they found that an unconscious level people thought barack obama was less american than was tony blair. in other words people fought tony blair was more american than was barack obama. what is striking about this research is if you asked people at a conscious level with the barack obama were 20 blair was american they would look at you funny because they would say obviously tony blair is a british competition and barack obama is an american. and the reason this research is interesting is that it found that when people who were more likely at an unconscious level, not conscious level the unconscious level to think of obama as being four men are much less likely to support him in the democratic primary and the

generally election even if they agree completely on all of the policy issues so it speaks to the idea of the motivated reason that we think of ourselves as being detached information processors when in reality we have these factors that are the back of our mind that prompt us to go out looking for evidence that essentially backs of our preexisting views. ischemic but the language of the defensive where they don't use that terminology. is that a fair statement? >> i think it is probably a fair statement and in some ways the reason i chose the term hidden brain and i didn't choose the unconscious mind flexible is that the unconscious has so much baggage from freud psychology and as i said i don't disagree completely with the freudian psychology whereas it meshes with what the experiment and empirical evidence has found i'm happy to call myself a freudian

psychologist but where it parts with empirical evidence might bias is to go with empirical evidence. >> the time for one or two more questions. >> go ahead. >> what percentage do you get two free will if any? >> it is quite powerful and plays a strong role. one of the questions that often comes up after the book has come out is if i am saying that the hidden brain does all these things does that mean that there is the end to personal responsibility because i can say i didn't do it, my hidden brain made me do it and i try to make the po -- several points in the book when it's true we will always have control over our unconscious mind we are still always responsible for our actions and behavior regardless of the association's positive for negative four in our mind we are ultimately judged on what we do and how we act so in other words whenever the algorithms may be in the auto pilot

function it's finally flying the plane for which we have personal responsibility so when the responsibility of tritium conscious mind where they are deliberately or not we are responsible for that action. we can't turn over the control to the all the pilot and say i'm not responsible for crushing the plan. i tried to show several techniques and ideas in the book about these people can become aware of there by as he's and what they can do once they become aware of their biases. koret symbol to the back to my daughter when of the things i do when i read stories but now is to try to pay more attention to the choice is the author of the story but we have made and i try to say well why did the author of the story but make the streets? why is this a man or a woman? why does this person have to be black? could the story have turned out differently? and the goal was not so much to get my daughter to agree with me as much as to try to move more of the conversation from the level of the unconscious assumption to the level of conscious dialogue.

.. because there were many things that was said about hillary clinton that were explicitly sexist. many of them on right wing talk radio. >> such as? >> rush limbaugh once said would we really want hillary clinton growing old before our eyes. as if she's on television every day as president, would we

really want to see this woman growing old before our eyes? tucker carlson, i think, on msnbc every time on hillary clinton on hillary clinton on tv i cross my legs and everyone equated her everyone's first wives standing outside of probate court. they were overtly sexist things that were said about hillary clinton. at the same time it's not clear to me what effects this actually has on the outcome of an election. this sort of goes to your question which is that if i'm a democrat and i'm hearing rush limbaugh saying these things are 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 think be more inclined to vote for hillary clinton. now, that doesn't account for the fact what my unconscious biases might be about sexism. so that's why i try to come back at all times of the idea of the unconscious. in some ways i personally have

less of a problem with overtly prejudice things. because it's out there. i have much more of a problem when the conversation is unspoken. when people feel they are making decision entirely based on policy, entirely based on the merits of the candidate and then they're coming to a conclusion that is actually unconsciously bias. and the reason it is powerful it's not just that it's insidious. 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 ask a question before? >> there was a recent article in the globe about something that was called cognitive fluency. and it has to do with the fact that people like things that are simple. that they can process easily.

the headline was easy equals simple. so i'd like you to speak a little bit about that in terms of the unconscious brain. is that really the way it is? that basically sound bites include us in ways that we don't know? because our brain is constructed to like those? >> sure. i think you can find any number of examples actually that our brain is wired to find -- to find simplicity appealing. one of the early chapters i write one of the experiments that was conducted on the new york stock exchange where the researchers looked at companies with easy to pronounce names. and easy to pronounce stock ticker codes. so the stock ticker codes such as k.a.r. is easy to pronounce and a code like r.d.o. is difficult to pronounce. obviously the name has obviously no bearing on what this company

does and how they will perform. what the experiment found easy to pronounce names vastly outperformed companies with difficult to pronounce names for the first year when these companies were new entrants into the stock market. at an unconscious level people use the fluency with which they were able to say the company's name or the stock ticker code on a purely unconscious level. and they associated this ease of pronouncibility with the riskiness or nonriskiness of the company. you had a question. >> you compared the hidden brain to the auto pilot. and i can't listen to you speak in reading the book in which the author is counseling us not to believe in our theories of causation. in other words, we too perform a scenario we think we understand what's going. -- going on.

would you in general say we should have a lot less on the pilot and more on the pilot? >> i think it depends on the context. i think there's times in our lives where the auto pilot serves us well. in the blog posting that heather mentioned on the blog, the hiddenbrain.org. i write about new research conducted where people in love usually overestimate the qualities of their partners. they idealize their partners and they think their partners are better than they are. they think their partners more closely match their own vision of the ideal person and the estimate of the partner is much better than the partner's own estimate of himself or herself. in other words, people in love do not see reality accurately. 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, okay? 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 increasing the divorce rate because we would see our partners as they are. [laughter] >> what you're saying is true where there's an nefairious effect of the hidden brain. i think it's really contextual. i'm not arguing that we should live all our lives consciously or unconsciously but try to make more of the decision about whether to do something consciously and unconsciously at a conscious level. >> do you think we're entering a historic time where we ought to -- cede less control to the automatic pilot and start thinking in a -- in more broad paradigms? >> my personal sense is that these biases have probably been with human beings as long as there have been 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 biases are no longer just a fact ourselves and

those in our immediate vicinity they affect people in distant lands as i talk in the final chapter which look at, you know, how we make

>>. >> i'm gregg craig, i'm here with ken gormley and we're talking about his n