The Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam Part 1

This book is subtitled: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wages Wars and Save Our Lives.

Unfortunately, the book's subtitle is far from describing its actual contents, which are more along the lines of "Why a Journalist Thinks Psychology Supports the Democratic Party."

That we have unconscious (or subconscious) minds that influence our behavior in ways we often don't recognize or acknowledge is nothing new. Freud wrote about it explicitly in modern times. Artists and marketers have long known how to push our internal buttons without us understanding how.

The first sections tell some interesting stories which help to make the author's case that we're far more influenced by our unconscious than we wish to believe. Again, nothing really new.

Then he moves into tests showing that North American preschoolers are unconsciously prejudiced against blacks and for whites, despite all efforts by parents and teachers to eliminate such bias. And the author makes the case that their hidden minds, despite everything adults tell them, pick up on the fact that in their communities white people are the majority.

This raises lots of questions. Is it true of black children growing up in black neighborhoods where nearly everybody they meet is black?

And how about some cross-cultural studies? The author comes from India which, as he knows better than he admits, has far more diversity and cultural, racial, ethnic, caste and religious divisions -- and corresponding bias -- than the United States.

And then he moves into really dangerous ground -- asserting that science shows that political conservatism is positively correlated with unconscious racial bias. And he goes into depth on this issue as it related to the presidential race of 2008.

He tries to be careful, but he doesn't consider all the factors. Perhaps he has his own unconscious biases?

For example, he claims that white male union members supported Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 because of innate racism. After all, he was against their economic interests.

Therefore, he assumes that the class warfare rhetoric of the Democratic Party is correct. He does not consider that Americans may prefer -- for rational reasons -- free enterprise to socialism.

While spending many pages on the racism of white people toward Barack Obama, he takes only one long paragraph to dismiss the argument that black people showed more racial bias in 2008 than whites, because they voted overwhelmingly for Obama, while whites split their votes between Obama and McCain. If millions of whites hadn't been willing -- despite what the author claims is their manifest unconscious racism -- to vote for Obama, he would have lost. The truth is, they considered the issues, and some decided Obama was the better candidate, not because or in spite of being black, but because of his stands.

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