Brain Buys (6 page)

The next part of the test is the same, except that you should check the left column if it is an insect or a positive word, and the right column if it is a flower or negative word. (If you are timing yourself, also measure the time it takes to complete the next twelve words.)

A real implicit association test is slightly more involved than the task you just performed but even in our simplified version you may have observed that overall you were a bit slower on the second list.
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Studies show that on average people are significantly slower, and make more errors, when the assigned responses are grouped incongruously (in this case, counter to most people’s view that flowers are pleasant and insects are unpleasant.

One of the first studies to investigate the effects of implicit associations examined whether Korean Americans and Japanese Americans differed in response times as a result of different cultural stereotypes. The psychologist Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues reasoned that Korean and Japanese Americans might have mutually opposed attitudes (and implicitly different associations in their semantic networks) toward each other due to Japan’s occupation of Korea in the first half of the twentieth century (in addition to the natural affinity we have toward our compatriots). Subjects were asked to press one key on a computer keyboard when Japanese names were presented and another key when Korean names were presented (the “category” words). Interspersed with the names were adjectives or common nouns that could be classified as being pleasant or unpleasant such as
happy
,
nice
,
pain
, or
cruel
(“attitude” words). Two keys on a computer keyboard were always assigned a category and an attitude: for example, Japanese names or pleasant words were assigned the same key, and Korean names and unpleasant words the other key (in another trial, the converse pairing was used). On average, Japanese subjects had slower reaction times when the Japanese and unpleasant responses (and Korean and pleasant responses) were assigned to the same key.
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Likewise, Korean subjects were slower when the Korean and unpleasant responses were assigned to the same key.

Why would it take more time for people to decide whether a fly is an insect when it shares the same response with positive words than when the appropriate response is grouped with negative words? Similarly why would some Japanese Americans be quicker to recognize Japanese names when the response is paired with pleasant words as opposed to negative words? If a task requires you to respond to the words
concave
and
convex
by pressing a button on the left, and the words
stalagmite
and
stalactite
by pressing a button on the right, you’re brain doesn’t have to go through the trouble of distinguishing between concave versus convex or stalagmite versus stalactite—it can quickly assess the correct response based on whether the word corresponds to spherical things or things found in caves. But if the task is structured as “concave” and “stalagmite” to the left, and “convex” and “stalactite” to the right, the brain is forced to parse the difference between closely related concepts, and the more two concepts have in common, the more overlap between the nodes representing these concepts—or, perhaps more accurately, between the neurons representing the nodes. The same holds true in other domains: given a pile of beads of four different colors—black, brown, blue, and cyan—it is much easier to separate them into two piles of black/brown versus blue/cyan beads than into two piles composed of black/cyan versus brown/blue beads.

The implicit-association effect is a product of both nature and nurture. Nature, because no matter what we learn, it is stored as a web of associations. Nurture, because the specific associations we learn are a product of our environment, culture, and education.

To explore the effect of culture on our implicit associations Anthony Greeenwald and colleagues asked more than 500,000 people to perform a gender-science implicit association test online.
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The test required people to classify words as “science” words (for example, physics, chemistry) or “liberal arts” words (history, Latin), and intermixed male (boy, father) or female (girl, mother) words according to gender. During one-half of the test the response keys were grouped as science/male versus liberal arts/female, in the other half they were grouped as science/female versus liberal arts/male. In countries in which boys, on average, performed better than girls on a standardized math test, people tended to take longer to respond when the female and science words were assigned the same key—capturing the stereotypical association that men are better in math and physics. In a few countries, such as the Philippines and Jordan, it was the girls who out-scored boys on the standardized science test; in these countries reaction times were less dependent on whether “female” shared the response key with “science” or “liberal arts” (yet the reactions were still a bit slower in the female/science condition). The authors of the study suggest that implicit associations—which is to say how information is laid out in our neural circuits—contribute to the gender differences on standardized tests.

The above studies raise the question of whether the way information is stored in our brain merely influences the speed with which we can access this information, or whether it actually influences the way we think and behave in the real world. The question is tricky if not impossible to answer. Research by the psychologist Bertram Gawronski and his colleagues explored this issue by testing Italian citizens living in the city of Vicenza, which is home to a U.S. military base.
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The volunteers were asked their views as to whether the government should allow the United States to expand the base, and given an implicit association test in which one-by-one “positive” (joy, lucky) or “negative” (pain, danger) words or pictures of the U.S. base were presented on a computer screen. When a word was presented, subjects had to decide if it was “positive” or “negative,” and when a picture of the U.S. base was shown, they simply had to respond by pressing the assigned key (in half the trials the picture key was shared with the positive words and in the other half with the negative words). For example, the positive word
joy
might require pressing the left button, and the negative word
pain
the right, and pictures of the American base could be assigned to the left (positive). The difference in reaction time between when the pictures shared the positive or negative button were taken as a measure of implicit associations—and so presumably reflected whether the military base was more strongly linked to “positive” or “negative” words within an individual’s neural networks. If someone had a strong implicit bias against the expansion of the base it would be expected that his reaction time to the photographs would be longer when the key assigned to pictures was shared with that of the positive words. Here is where things get interesting: some subjects fell into an undecided group during the initial questionnaire, but, one week later, during a second study session, had made up their minds. In this subset of subjects, the implicit association measured during the first test was a reasonable predictor of the opinion reported one week later. These results indicate that the unconscious and automatic associations within our neural networks could in effect reveal someone’s opinion before they were consciously aware of it. The results also support the notion that the structure of our associative nets may indeed influence our opinions and decisions.

PRIMING BEHAVIOR

Suppose I’m doing a crossword puzzle and I ask a friend for a thirteen-letter word for “nice,” and he offers “compassionate.” Could this innocuous exchange alter my friend’s behavior, making him a better person for the next few minutes? Would this be a good time to ask if he could lend me money? In short, is it possible to prime someone’s behavior? The cognitive psychologist John Bargh, currently at Yale University, has examined this question by surreptitiously studying people’s behavior after priming them with certain concepts.
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In one study, subjects were asked to perform a task that they thought was a test of language skills. The test consisted of making four-word sentences from five scrambled words.
They
,
her
,
send
,
usually
, and
disturb
, for example, could lead to, “They usually disturb her.” In one group the words were weighted toward sentences that reflected rude behavior; in the other group the sentences were biased toward polite phrases (
they
,
her
,
encourage
,
see
, and
usually
would lead to “They usually encourage her”). Because the subjects were engaged in making many different sentences, they were probably not consciously aware that they were being subliminally primed with rude or polite words.

On finishing the word task, the subjects were instructed to seek out the experimenter in a nearby room for further instructions. Unbeknownst to the participants, this request was the key to the entire study. When the subjects approached the doorway of the office, they found the researcher engaged in a conversation. The measure Bargh and his colleagues were interested in was one we have all encountered: how long do we wait before interrupting? Presumably the answer depends on a complex mix of factors, including whether we are patient or impatient by nature, our mood that day, whether we have another appointment, and if we need to go pee. The fascinating results revealed that activating the neural nodes associated with the concept of rudeness or politeness altered the behavior of the participants in the experiment in a predictable fashion. Ten minutes was the maximum time the experimenter would carry on her rehearsed conversation while the subject waited. In the “polite” group, only about 20 percent of subjects interrupted the conversation before 10 minutes had elapsed, whereas 60 percent of subjects primed with “rude” sentences interrupted the conversation within 10 minutes. We have seen that words can prime what people think of (“Africa” primes “zebra”), but this study shows that words can prime the way people feel and behave. It seems that
behavioral priming
takes place when the activity of nodes not only spreads to other nodes within our semantic nets, but to the parts of the brain governing our decisions and behavior.

The same adjectives that describe physical characteristics about the world are sometimes also used to characterize people’s personality traits. In English,
warm
and
cold
are used to describe whether someone is friendly or unfriendly, respectively. Because we associate hot temperatures with warmth, and in turn associate warmth with being friendly, John Bargh and his colleagues wondered whether hot temperatures might influence whether we judge people as being friendly. They asked volunteers to read a description of someone, and then rate that person’s personality on different traits including some related to being “warm” (generous, social, caring). There were two groups, and the only difference between them was that subjects were asked to hold a cup of hot or iced coffee in the elevator ride up to the experimental room. One would have hoped that our judgment of other people would not be so arbitrary as to be influenced by the physical temperature of a cup held for 20 seconds. Yet the subjects holding the hot coffee did indeed rate the person being profiled as friendlier than did those holding the iced cup.
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I do not want to give the impression that our behavior and decisions are hopelessly at the mercy of irrelevant factors, such as whether we are holding a hot or cold cup of coffee. Behavioral priming effects are often fairly weak and unlikely to be the major determinant of how people behave. Nevertheless, at least in some situations the effects are reproducible and significant. This fact allows us to conclude that merely accessing information about some concept can influence someone’s behavior, which lends some support to the mainstay of self-help books: the importance of positive thinking and the contribution of attitude on performance.

Our brain consists of an unimaginably complex tangle of interconnected neurons. Like the links of the World Wide Web the patterns of connections between neurons is anything but random. If we could disentangle our neural circuitry we would see that it has been sculpted by a lifetime of experiences. The structure of these circuits stores our memories, and influences our thoughts and decisions. It follows that manipulating our experiences provides a means to influence our opinions and behavior. Long before Donald Hebb put forth the notion of associative synaptic plasticity, some people implicitly understood that the associative nature of human memory was a vulnerability to be exploited. The simple act of associating the name of a politician with a controversial or negative statement—through massive repetition and media exposure—remains one of the most abused and effective political campaign strategies.
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A single spurious and slanderous headline such as “Is Barack Obama a communist?” will certainly grab your attention but because you already have many links associated with your “Barack Obama” node, that single headline is unlikely to exert much influence on the structure of your neural nets and thus on your opinions—memories that have multiple strong associations in place are more robust. But imagine for a moment that the headline was about a politician you were unfamiliar with, perhaps a long-shot presidential candidate: “Is Jonathan Hazelton a pedophile?” You have no previous associations formed in your memory banks for Jonathan Hazelton, but now one of the first ones is with the word
pedophile
. Even if the report concluded that he was definitely not a pedophile, Hazelton’s long-shot presidential bid just got much longer. Slander by association—sometimes disguised as journalism—is commonly used to mold public opinion, and it works because it exploits the associative architecture of the human brain. That same architecture, though unparalleled in its ability to store and organize information about a diverse and dynamic world, also sets the stage for our susceptibility to marketing and propaganda, and our proclivity to make irrational decisions, as we will see in the upcoming chapters.