"A little boy and his father are in a car crash. They are both seriously injured and need to have operations. After an ambulance races them to the ER, they are rushed into operating rooms. The attending surgeon comes out of the little boy’s room, shaking their head, and says 'I can't do this...he's my son.' How is it possible that the surgeon is the little boy’s parent?"

Most people are confused by this word puzzle at first. And then, after a moment’s thought, they realize that the surgeon is the little boy’s mother.

Nearly everyone automatically associates the word “surgeon” with a male figure. It’s not that they don’t think women or mothers can be surgeons, it is simply an automatic association — surgeon and male — that comes to mind, without thinking.

These unconscious, instant connections are implicit associations, and we make them all the time, every day. But research suggests that they can clash with our conscious decisions and the values we embrace – notably our goals for leading fair and unbiased lives.

The same voice that said “male” when you read “surgeon” is also likely to be prejudging people based on race. Your unconscious could be biased, and you might not know.

Harvard researchers developed the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, to investigate the role that unconscious associations have on our beliefs and daily behavior. The test clocks participants’ responses as they associate positive and negative words and various pictures with certain categories. In the "Race IAT," test-takers are asked to associate words and images with good, bad, African-American, and European categories.

“In general what is most familiar or congruent with our expectations allows us to make decisions faster and respond faster than what seems different,” says Professor James Newton, a Social Psychologist at SF State, explaining the general theory behind timing test takers' responses. Likewise, things that register contrary to our expectations make us pause and consider them for a moment before moving on.

In a poll of just over 80 SFSU students, 74 percent of them had pro-white associations when they took the IAT. Their response times were fastest when associating positives with the white European category. The poll's 74 percent is slightly smaller than the entire test's nine-year average, which reports over 80 percent resulting in pro-white associations. The test has received millions of responses.

Even non-white ethnic groups make pro-white associations. Of about fifty thousand African-Americans who have taken the IAT, almost half of them have stronger positive associations with whites than they do with blacks. This doesn't mean they are self-hating, but it does seem to further the idea that these instant connections are not reflections of our own values.

In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell explores the far-reaching genius, and betrayal, of implicit associations. Gladwell, who is half-Jamaican and half-white, writes that he was unnerved when his initial IAT responses placed him in the pro-white 80 percentile.
"I took the test a second time, and then a third time, and then a fourth time, hoping that the awful feeling of bias would go away. It made no difference," he writes.

He writes that the IAT is based on a simple, but profound observation: “we make connections much more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between pairs of ideas that are unfamiliar to us.” But these links between ideas are not something that we get to pick. Our unconscious learns them from our environment, even though our personal values may directly contradict them.

“We are deluged with lightness whiteness good, darkness blackness bad: everything from black magic and the white fairy princess,” says Newton. “And you remember The Fellowship of the Ring…it was Gandalf the Gray initially, and after he’d gone through strenuous experiences he became Gandalf the White – white is better than gray.”

So if your unconscious has come to associate dark with danger and unknown, and light with safety and familiarity, then your mind will travel those more familiar routes unless consciously stopped. And it isn't your fault that your brain makes those connections. It seems to be the fault of the society we live in.

The fuel for learning these connections is hard to eliminate. In the case of advertising and media, “what violates…our understanding of how things go in the world feels bizarre,” says Newton. “And if you’re in marketing, you don’t want to do ads that feel bizarre to people.”

While we have seen changes in these trends over the past decade or so, Newton notes that a great deal of what influences our behavior – everything from newspaper stories to cartoons, images on our currency, and music on the radio – is consistent with prevalent stereotypes. That is what we are most comfortable with. And keeping us comfortable is how businesses make money. After a while, people eventually assume that these unconscious beliefs are how the world is actually organized.

“We don’t even think they’re beliefs, we just think they’re part of the natural order of things,” Newton says.

However, these spontaneous judgments that go on inside our heads may not always be a negative thing. Take, for instance, the scenario that Blink’s author, Malcolm Gladwell, gives in his blog. While spending some time in Texas and Oklahoma, Gladwell found himself in situations where he had to make conversation with strangers – white, male businessmen strangers. And when he needed to come up with something to say, he realized in retrospect that he tended to choose the subject of college football.

“I don’t assume that every stranger I meet wants to talk about college football,” Gladwell writes. “But I drew an inference about my conversational partner, based on his membership in the ‘white-male-businessmen of Texas and Oklahoma group’ and used that inference to direct my behavior.”

In other words, he stereotyped.

Gladwell goes on to explain why this worked for him: he had some great conversations about college football, but his unconscious made quick connections about what the white, southern strangers might be interested in.

"The fact that I was in Texas and Oklahoma mattered a lot,” he explains. “I wouldn’t have assumed that I could talk about college football with a similar group of white male business types from, say, Silicon Valley.”

In one of the most biting critiques of Blink, Judge Posner, a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and a judge on the seventh circuit court of appeals, points out that sometimes it is useful to make assumptions about someone based on their obvious characteristics, including race.

“It may be sensible to ascribe the group's average characteristics to each member of the group,” Posner writes, “Even though one knows that many members deviate from the average.”

Not every assumption about an individual is completely inaccurate. As in Gladwell’s case, it sometimes yields a great conversation. But, Gladwell continues, the accuracy or inaccuracy of a stereotype depends on how specific it is.

“The fact that they were men and not women mattered, and I know from experience that if I’m choosing a sports topic for conversation with any black male businessman, I’ll probably guess basketball," he explains. “If you have to depend on a quick, broad judgment, the more information you can use to build a generalization, the better off you are.”

It is possible to override these instantaneous associations, if you pay attention. Most people don't even know they exist and are therefore powerless to stop them. But once you know they're present, you can consciously keep them at bay. And, as Gladwell put it in his book: "It is possible to learn when to listen to that powerful onboard computer and when to be wary of it."