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the most sophisticated reading of their customers’ character. But the decisions they made on the spur of the moment as each customer walked through the door was of another sort. This was an unconscious reaction. They were silently picking up on the most immediate and obvious fact about Ayres’s car buyers — their sex and their color — and sticking with that judgment even in the face of all manner of new and contradictory evidence. They were behaving just like the voters did in the 1920 presidential election when they took one look at Warren Harding, jumped to a conclusion, and stopped thinking. In the case of the voters, their error gave them one of the worst U.S. Presidents ever. In the case of the car salesmen, their decision to quote an outrageously high price to women and blacks alienated people who might otherwise have bought a car.

Golomb tries to treat every customer exactly the same because he’s aware of just how dangerous snap judgments are when it comes to race and sex and appearance. Sometimes the unprepossessing farmer with his filthy coveralls is actually an enormously rich man with a four-thousand-acre spread, and sometimes the teenager is coming back later with Mom and Dad. Sometimes the young black man has an MBA from Harvard. Sometimes the petite blonde makes the car decisions for her whole family. Sometimes the man with the silver hair and broad shoulders and lantern jaw is a lightweight. So Golomb doesn’t try to spot the lay-down. He quotes everyone the same price, sacrificing high profit margins on an individual car for the benefits of volume, and word of his fairness has spread to the point where he gets up to a third of his business from the referrals of satisfied customers. “Can I simply look at someone and say, ‘This person is going to buy a car’?” asks Golomb. “You’d have to be pretty darn good to do that, and there’s no way I could. Sometimes I get completely taken aback. Sometimes I’ll have a guy come in waving a checkbook, saying, ‘I’m here to buy a car today. If the numbers are right, I’ll buy a car today.’ And you know what? Nine times out of ten, he never buys.”

5. Think About Dr. King

What should we do about Warren Harding errors? The kinds of biases we’re talking about here aren’t so obvious that it’s easy to identify a solution. If there’s a law on the books that says that black people can’t drink at the same water fountains as white people, the obvious solution is to change the law. But unconscious discrimination is a little bit trickier. The voters in 1920 didn’t think they were being suckered by Warren Harding’s good looks any more than Ayres’s Chicago car dealers realized how egregiously they were cheating women and minorities or boards of directors realize how absurdly biased they are in favor of the tall. If something is happening outside of awareness, how on earth do you fix it?

The answer is that we are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious — from behind a locked door inside of our brain — but just because something is outside of awareness doesn’t mean it’s outside of control. It is true, for instance, that you can take the Race IAT or the Career IAT as many times as you want and try as hard as you can to respond faster to the more problematic categories, and it won’t make a whit of difference. But, believe it or not, if, before you take the IAT, I were to ask you to look over a series of pictures or articles about people like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela or Colin Powell, your reaction time would change. Suddenly it won’t seem so hard to associate positive things with black people. “I had a student who used to take the IAT every day,” Banaji says. “It was the first thing he did, and his idea was just to let the data gather as he went. Then this one day, he got a positive association with blacks. And he said, ‘That’s odd. I’ve never gotten that before,’ because we’ve all tried to change our IAT score and we couldn’t. But he’s a track-and-field guy, and what he realized is that he’d spent the morning watching the