STREET DOGS

Ever felt an irrational distrust of a stranger on a bus? It could be because your unconscious is constantly making fast judgments — often accurate.

In the early 1990s Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal at Stanford University asked volunteers to rate teachers on traits such as competence, confidence and honesty after watching 2-, 5- or 10-second silent clips of their performance. The scores successfully predicted the teachers’ end-of-semester evaluations and 2-second judgments were as accurate as those that took more time. Other experiments have shown similar accuracy on economic success and political affiliation. Unfortunately, no one has yet worked out what to do to pass yourself off as a winner. It seems to be an overall body signal that is both given out and picked up unconsciously, and is greater than the sum of its parts. This makes it very difficult to fake.

Our subconscious mind spends a great deal of time analysing the world, looking for patterns and relationships that help us navigate through life. The conclusions it comes to are called implicit assumptions — subtle prejudices about people and events. “Everybody has implicit assumptions,” says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia. “They’re a necessary part of how the brain operates and they generally serve us very well.”

But not always. Because we are not in control of our implicit assumptions, and are seldom aware of them, it is possible to develop unconscious prejudices that your conscious mind would find unappealing or even abhorrent — such as associating men with science and women with the arts, preferring thin people to fat people, assuming racial superiority. “You may think you’re egalitarian, yet your associations are often quite different,” says Nosek. —