Offered a choice of books to read for faculty development, choosing Shankar Vedantam's The Hidden Brain was for me a no-brainer. I know Shankar's papery voice and affable manners from his reports on sociological research for NPR's Morning Edition. So I was shocked to hear mostly negative reactions from colleagues who didn't share my personal connection.
Our group discussion didn't go too deep, so I can only guess that the response was defensive, because the book attacks a belief at the core of our whole political system. Hamilton, Madison, and the other founders trusted that free debate, plus balance of regional economic interests, minus prejudice from religion or caste, would equal reasonable decisions in legislatures and juries. Free marketeers have the same faith in reasonable self-interest. Vedantam leads us gently to the conclusion that we humans choose first, reasoning second, only to justify our choices.
I first heard this critique of enlightened self-interest from Jerry Herbert, a political scientist at Duke University. He represented an evangelical political organization now known as the Center for Public Justice. In his seminar, he led us from Isaiah and Jesus to The Federalist Papers, to then-current events of the Carter - Reagan - Anderson election, to show how our system sidelines those outside the mainstream unless they become "reasonable" by denying their core faiths and cultural identifications.
The fiction writer Robert Olen Butler made the same observation from another angle. A veteran of the Vietnam War, he denied that his writing was "political" in the sense of pushing policies and party. Our political beliefs, he said, are established very early in life and run much deeper than party. (See my reflection Anticipation and Dread in Butler's fiction.)
Vedantam anticipated the blowback, announcing early that he would save the "hard" chapters for last. He front-loaded the book with anecdotes about unconscious bias on a more personal level. Even black children attributed bad qualities to the black character in a story, though he rescues his white friends; and managers evaluating job applicants were much less likely to choose subjects who merely sat near an obese person in the waiting room. Unconscious forces accounted for the fateful choices at the doomed World Trade Center; people on one floor escaped together, their friends on the next floor stayed and died.
Vedantam saved for last the stickier kinds of unconscious bias that have partisan implications, drawing ire of my Republican colleagues because those unconscious, unreasonable biases seem to favor banner Republican policies. The party of individualism naturally favors the "common-sense" belief that individuals are safer when they are in control of their own lives, despite facts and figures that show the opposite. That bias explains my own dislike of ceding control to a pilot, though I'm much more likely to be hurt driving myself. And owning a gun makes us feel like we're in control, but Vedantam provides extensive numbers and dramatic anecdotes to show that a family's firearms are much more likely to be used on a member of the family than on any invader.
The story of a puppy illustrates our bias towards the particular. At the very same time that tens of thousands of Rwandans were massacred by their neighbors, the world was focused on saving a puppy marooned on a derelict tanker in the Pacific. The generalized, long-distance threats such as climate change don't get our attention, because of that same kind of bias.
For me, Vedantam's rare personal anecdote was the most memorable part of the book. Long afraid of water, he learned to swim, and was proud to swim at the beach, feeling the power in his expert strokes. Turning back, he recognized that he had been carried along by a current, and he could not make any headway against it. It's his analogy for the way some Americans fight their whole lives against the current of unconscious bias, while the rest of us believe that we ourselves are responsible for our successes. The phrase "white privilege" is a red flag around my community; Vedantam's anecdote, taken with the rest of his book, gives me a sense of how this white blogger's privileges, like politics, are deeper and broader than mere party and policy.
(Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller Blink covers a lot of the same ground as The Hidden Brain. Read my reflection How Words Distort Vision.)
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