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The Hidden Brain: How Ocean Currents Explain Our Unconscious Social Biases





Underpinning his exploration isn’t a pointed finger but a compassionate understanding that our flaws make us not bad but human — and give us the opportunity to be better humans. Vedantam puts it beautifully:



Illustration from the 1970 book ‘I’m Glad I’m a Boy!: I’m Glad I’m a Girl!’ Click image for more.

Vedantam cites the case of a woman who sued her employer for pay discrimination after finding out through a tip from an anonymous colleague that male managers who held the same position as her were paid significantly more. She was earning 79 cents to the dollar of her male peers, a difference that had consequences not only on her annual salary but also on how much she got paid for overtime, how much she could set aside in her 401K, and even how much pension she would one day receive. It was estimated that if she had been compensated fairly, her income in retirement would be double her actual one.

What made the case extraordinary wasn’t just that it made it to the Supreme Court, but that it was ultimately dismissed, despite the blatant evidence. In fact, the ruling was so controversial that it elicited a historic incident: Legendary Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at the time the only woman on the court, issued a vocal dissent along with three other Justices — a rather unusual move. Ginsberg stated:


Ginsberg herself should know more than most about the issue at stake. Her personal history in light of the case ruling, Vedantam reminds us, is both a testament to how far we’ve come and how much further we have to go:

When the Supreme Court justice went to law school at Columbia in the 1950s, there were no women’s bathrooms in the building. “If nature called, you had to make a mad dash to another building that had a women’s bathroom,” she recalled… It was “even worse if you were in the middle of an exam. We never complained; it never occurred to us to complain.”


Vedantam traces this back to our ongoing predicament and one cultural area where these issues persist most prominently — leadership:

When a woman assumes a leadership role, our unconscious stereotypes about leadership come into conflict with our unconscious stereotypes about women… Our hidden brain makes women leaders appear ruthless and dislikeable for no better reason than that they happen to be women leaders.

More than cultural mythology and proverbial anecdotes, however, these biases have shown up again and again in experimental settings. Vedantam cites one particularly striking study:

Madeline Heilman at New York University once conducted an experiment in which she told volunteers about a manager. Some were told, “Subordinates have often described Andrea as someone who is tough, yet outgoing and personable. She is known to reward individual contributions and has worked hard to maximize employees’ creativity.” Other volunteers were told, “Subordinates have often described James as someone who is tough, yet outgoing and personable. He is known to reward individual contributions and has worked hard to maximize employees’ creativity.” The only difference between what the groups were told was that some people thought they were hearing about a leader named Andrea while others thought they were hearing about a leader named James. Heilman asked her volunteers to guesstimate how likeable Andrea and James were as people. Three-quarters of the volunteers thought James was more likeable than Andrea. Using a clever experimental design, Heilman determined which manager each volunteer preferred: Four in five volunteers preferred to have James be their boss. Andrea seemed less likeable merely because she was a woman who happened to be a leader.

But perhaps the most stride-stopping example comes from a unique “experimental design” that takes place not in a lab but in life. Vedantam points to two successful biologists at Stanford, Joan Roughgarden and Ben Barres, who each transitioned from one gender to another late in life. Ben, once Barbara, didn’t transition to being a man until he was fifty. Barbara had spent many years oblivious to sexism, even scoffing at the rhetoric of the second wave of feminism. Exceptional at math, she had ignored her high school counselor’s advice to aim lower and had gotten admitted into MIT in 1972. It was there that she had her first brush with extraordinary sexism, though she didn’t realize it at the time:

During a particularly difficult math seminar at MIT, a professor handed out a quiz with five math problems. He gave out the test at nine A.M., and students had to hand in their answers by midnight. The first four problems were easy, and Barbara knocked them off in short order. But the fifth one was a beauty; it involved writing a computer program where the solution required the program to generate a partial answer, and then loop around to the start in a recursive fashion.


Fast-forward a few decades and, as Vedantam puts it, “things changed in large and subtle ways after Barbara became Ben.” He gives one particularly telling example, in which after Ben had delivered a lecture at the prestigious Whitehead Institute, someone in the audience, unaware that Barbara and Ben were the same person, remarked:


The differences also percolated through everyday life as Ben began to notice he was listened to more attentively, serviced more respectfully at stores, and generally made to feel more visible, more like he mattered.


Joan Roughgarden, meanwhile, experienced the exact opposite. She arrived at Stanford more than a quarter-century before making her male-to-female transition, landing into a “career track [that] is set up for young men” where “you are assumed to be competent unless revealed otherwise.” After the transition, however, Joan began noticing the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which people were treating her and her work differently, taking her ideas less seriously. When she proposed a controversial theory, she was gobsmacked to see it dismissed not on scientific grounds but on social. She told Vedantam:

When I was doing [my earlier] work, they did not try to physically intimidate me and say, ‘You have not read all the literature…’ They would not assume they were smarter. The current crop of objectors assumes they are smarter.

Vedantam writes:




Vedantam’s point, of course, isn’t to urge the less chromosomally privileged of us to change genders. It’s to shed light on an often invisible current of cultural advantage — on what it might be like to be the privileged player in a rigged game, or be the opposite. His most poignant illustration of that rig comes from an allegorical anecdote from his own biography, a beautiful and unsettling read. Vedantam recounts vacationing with his family on a tiny island in Mexico, where he got to experience a phenomenon that gave him profound perspective into how such biases work. He writes:


After several dips, I decided to take one final excursion — this time around the edge of the bay. I felt happy and wonderful and fit; the water was calm. I suspected some of the best snorkeling lay around the edge of the rocks, two hundred fifty feet away. There were no signs posted that warned of any danger. With a good lunch in my stomach, I felt I could easily swim around the edge of the bay and back. I briefly thought about donning a life jacket and flippers, but decided against it. The life jacket would slow me down, and flippers don’t allow for the kind of maneuverability I like when I am snorkeling over a shallow reef.

The moment I got into the water and headed for the edge of the bay, I knew I had made the right decision to swim without a life jacket or flippers. I felt strong and good. I had done a lot of swimming that day already and was surprised at how smoothly I was kicking through the water. The trip would be child’s play; the way I was feeling, I knew I could easily swim well past the edge of the bay. I struck out purposefully to the lip of rocks. I imagined seeing myself from the deck chairs back on land, disappearing from view around the rocks.


Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton from ‘Meanwhile.’ Click image for more.

When he eventually decided to turn around, he quickly became aware of a chilling trick that his brain, conspiring with the ocean, had played on him:





Somehow, carried by an image of his two-year-old daughter on the shore, he mustered the seemingly impossible strength and fought his way back to land, arriving on the verge of collapse. More than a staggering reality check of his athletic capacity, however, the experience provided a perfect and chilling metaphor for how our cultural biases that produce privilege work. Vedantam writes:





Published April 9, 2014




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