Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [22]
Even more impressive, however, is how mysterious these priming effects are. When you took that sentence-completion test, you didn’t know that you were being primed to think “old.” Why would you? The clues were pretty subtle. What is striking, though, is that even after people walked slowly out of the room and down the hall, they still weren’t aware of how their behavior had been affected. Bargh once had people play board games in which the only way the participants could win was if they learned how to cooperate with one another. So he primed the players with thoughts of cooperativeness, and sure enough, they were far more cooperative, and the game went far more smoothly. “Afterward,” Bargh says, “we ask them questions like How strongly did you cooperate? How much did you want to cooperate? And then we correlate that with their actual behavior — and the correlation is zero. This is a game that goes on for fifteen minutes, and at the end, people don’t know what they have done. They just don’t know it. Their explanations are just random, noise. That surprised me. I thought that people could at least have consulted their memories. But they couldn’t.”
Aronson and Steele found the same thing with the black students who did so poorly after they were reminded of their race. “I talked to the black students afterward, and I asked them, ‘Did anything lower your performance?’ ” Aronson said. “I would ask, ‘Did it bug you that I asked you to indicate your race?’ Because it clearly had a huge effect on their performance. And they would always say no and something like ‘You know, I just don’t think I’m smart enough to be here.’ ”
The results from these experiments are, obviously, quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act — and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment — are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. But there is also, I think, a significant advantage to how secretly the unconscious does its work. In the example of the sentence-completion task I gave you with all the words about old age, how long did it take you to make sentences out of those words? My guess is that it took you no more than a few seconds per sentence. That’s fast, and you were able to perform that experiment quickly because you were able to concentrate on the task and block out distractions. If you had been on the lookout for possible patterns in the lists of words, there is no way you would have completed the task that quickly. You would have been distracted. Yes, the references to old people changed the speed at which you walked out of the room, but was that bad? Your unconscious was simply telling your body: I’ve picked up some clues that we’re in an environment that is really concerned about old age — and let’s behave accordingly. Your unconscious, in this sense, was acting as a kind of mental valet. It was taking care of all the minor mental details in your life. It was keeping tabs on everything going on around you and making sure you were acting appropriately, while leaving you free to concentrate on the main problem at hand.
The team that created the Iowa gambling experiments was headed by the neurologist Antonio Damasio, and Damasio’s group has done some fascinating research on just what happens when too much of our thinking takes place outside the locked door. Damasio studied patients with damage to a small but critical part of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which lies behind the nose. The ventromedial area plays a critical role in decision making. It works out contingencies and relationships and sorts