The Hidden Brain

Shankar Vedantam reveals that your conscious mind is a passenger, not the pilot. From Melissa Bateson's watchful-eyes experiment in Newcastle to the fusiform face area's hardwired preference for familiar faces, the hidden brain steers decisions you believe are rational. Tony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji's research exposes how 88 percent of white Americans harbor unconscious pro-white bias, while Latané and Darley's smoke-filled room study shows why bystanders freeze when others do. The availability heuristic, diffusion of responsibility, and oxytocin-driven in-group empathy operate beneath awareness.

You'll learn:

- Why easily pronounced company names outperform by 11.2 percent

- How group size predicts paralysis during emergencies

- What transgender wage gaps reveal about hidden sexism