Subliminal

seethed with lust and anger; it was hallucinatory, primitive, and irrational,” while the new unconscious is “kinder and gentler than that and more reality bound.”¹² In the new view, mental processes are thought to be unconscious because there are portions of the mind that are inaccessible to consciousness due to the architecture of the brain, rather than because they have been subject to motivational forces like repression. The inaccessibility of the new unconscious is not considered to be a defense mechanism, or unhealthy. It is considered normal.

If there are times when a phenomenon I discuss sounds vaguely Freudian, the modern understanding of that phenomenon and its causes won’t be. The new unconscious plays a far more important role than protecting us from inappropriate sexual desires (for our mothers or fathers) or from painful memories. Instead, it is a gift of evolution that is crucial to our survival as a species. Conscious thought is a great aid in designing a car or deciphering the mathematical laws of nature, but for avoiding snake bites or cars that swerve into your path or people who may mean to harm you, only the speed and efficiency of the unconscious can save you. As we’ll see, to ensure our smooth functioning in both the physical and the social world, nature has dictated that many processes of perception, memory, attention, learning, and judgment are delegated to brain structures outside conscious awareness.

SUPPOSE YOUR FAMILY vacationed in Disneyland last summer. Looking back, you might question the rationality of having braved the crowds and ninety-five-degree heat to watch your little daughter spin in a giant teacup. But then you might remember that when you planned the trip, you assessed all the possibilities and concluded that her big smile would be all the payoff you needed. We are usually confident that we know the causes of our behavior. And sometimes that confidence is warranted. Yet if forces outside our awareness play a great role in our judgment and behavior, then we must not know ourselves as well as we think we do. I took the job because I wanted a new challenge. I like that fellow because he has a great sense of humor. I trust my gastroenterologist because she lives and breathes intestines. Each day we ask and answer many questions about our feelings and our choices. Our answers usually seem to make sense, but nonetheless they are often dead wrong.

How do I love thee? Elizabeth Barrett Browning felt she could count the ways, but chances are, she couldn’t accurately list the reasons. Today we are beginning to be able to do just that, as you’ll see when you have a look at the following table. It shows who has been marrying whom in three states of the southeastern United States.¹³ One would think that both the who and the whom married for love, and no doubt they did. But what is love’s source? It can be the beloved’s smile, generosity, grace, charm, sensitivity—or the size of his biceps. The source of love has been pondered for eons by lovers, poets, and philosophers, but it is probably safe to say that none of them has ever waxed eloquent about this particular factor: the person’s name. This table, however, shows that a person’s name can subtly influence your heart—if the name matches your own.

Listed along the horizontal and vertical axes are the five most common U.S. surnames. The numbers in the table represent how many marriages occurred between a bride and a groom with the corresponding names. Note that the largest numbers, by far, occur along the diagonal—that is, Smiths marry other Smiths three to five times as often as they marry Johnsons, Williamses, Joneses, or Browns. In fact, Smiths marry other Smiths about as often as they marry people with all those other names, combined. And the Johnsons, Williamses, Joneses, and Browns behave similarly. What makes the effect even more striking is that these are the raw numbers—that is, since there are almost twice as many Smiths as Browns, if all else were equal, you’d expect Browns to marry the ubiquitous Smiths far more often than the rarer Browns—but even so, by far the greatest number of marriages among Browns is to other Browns.

What does this tell us? People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and we therefore have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits similar to our own, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names. Scientists have even identified a discrete area of the brain, called the dorsal striatum, as the structure that mediates much of this bias.¹⁴

Research suggests that when it comes to understanding our feelings, we humans have an odd mix of low ability and high confidence. You might feel certain you took a job because it presented a challenge, but perhaps you were really more interested in the greater prestige. You might swear you like that fellow for his sense of humor, but you might really like him for his smile, which reminds you of your mother’s. You might think you trust your gastroenterologist because she is a great expert, but you might really trust her because she is a good listener. Most of us are satisfied with our theories about ourselves and accept them with confidence, but we rarely see those theories tested. Scientists, however, are now able to test those theories in the laboratory, and they have proven astonishingly inaccurate.

An example: Imagine you are on your way into a movie theater when a person who appears to be an employee of the theater comes up to you and asks if you will answer a few questions about the theater and its concessions in exchange for a free tub of popcorn and a drink. What that person doesn’t tell you is that the popcorn you will be given comes in two sizes, one smaller than the other, but both so huge that you could not possibly finish the contents—and in two “flavors,” one that subjects will later describe as “good” and “high quality,” and another that will be described as “stale,” “soggy,” and “terrible.” Nor will you be told that you are actually participating in a scientific study to measure how much you eat of the popcorn and why. Now, here’s the question the researchers were studying: What will have a greater influence on the amount of popcorn you eat, its taste or the amount you are given? To address that question, they handed out four different popcorn-and-box combinations. Moviegoers were given either good popcorn in the smaller box, good popcorn in the larger box, bad popcorn in the smaller box, or bad popcorn in the larger box. The result? People seemed to “decide” how much to eat based on box size as much as taste. Other studies support this result, showing that doubling the size of a container of snack food increases consumption by 30 to 45 percent.¹⁵

I put quotation marks around “decide” above because that word often connotes a conscious action. It’s unlikely that these decisions fit that description. The subjects did not say to themselves, This free popcorn tastes awful, but there’s plenty of it, so I may as well gorge. Instead, research such as this supports what advertisers have long suspected—that “environmental factors” such as package design, package or portion size, and menu descriptions unconsciously influence us. What is most surprising is the magnitude of the effect—and of people’s resistance to the idea that they could have been manipulated. While we sometimes acknowledge that such factors can influence other people, we usually believe—wrongly—that they cannot possibly affect us.¹⁶

In truth, environmental factors have a powerful—and unconscious—influence not only on how much we choose to eat but also on how the food tastes. For example, suppose you don’t eat just in movie theaters but sometimes go to restaurants, sometimes even restaurants that provide more than just a menu board listing various types of hamburgers. These more elegant restaurants commonly offer menus peppered with terms like “crispy cucumbers,” “velvety mashed potatoes,” and “slow-roasted beets on a bed of arugula,” as if at other restaurants the cucumbers are limp, the mashed potatoes have the texture of wool, and the beets are flash-fried, then made to sit up in an uncomfortable chair. Would a crispy cucumber, by any other name, taste as crisp? Would a bacon cheeseburger, presented in Spanish, become Mexican food? Could poetic description convert macaroni and cheese from a limerick to a haiku? Studies show that flowery modifiers not only tempt people to order the lyrically described foods but also lead them to rate those foods as tasting better than the identical foods given only a generic listing.¹⁷ If someone were to ask about your taste in fine dining and you were to say, “I lean toward food served with vivid adjectives,” you’d probably get a pretty strange look; yet a dish’s description turns out to be an important factor in how it tastes. So the next time you have friends over for dinner, don’t serve them salad from the store down the street; go for the subliminal effect and serve them a melange of local greens.

Let’s go a step further. Which would you enjoy more, velvety mashed potatoes or velvety mashed potatoes? Nobody has yet done a study on the effect of fonts on the taste of mashed potatoes, but a study has been done on the effects of font on attitudes toward preparing food. In that study participants were asked to read a recipe for creating a Japanese lunch dish, then to rate the amount of effort and skill they thought the recipe would require and how likely they were to prepare the dish at home. Subjects who were presented with the recipe in a difficult-to-read font rated the recipe as more difficult and