RTI/CCP/ELL
Professional Development
With
UW-Eau Claire and the Eau Claire Area School District
“The Power of the Subconscious Mind: How people can
inadvertently alter outcomes for other people”
June 16, 2009
Aram deKoven
UW-Eau Claire
Objectives:
 To reveal that racism is alive and well in the United States
today
 To demonstrate that the subconscious is a powerful cognitive
force
 To show how subconsciously held biases can effect how you
treat others
 To explain how the effects of subconscious biases can change
outcomes for others
FBI Data on hate crimes in the U.S.
 Incidents
 Fewer hate crimes now since the 50, 60, and 70s but
 2005……..7,163
 2006……..7,722
 2007……..7,624
 *The FBI numbers only reflect reported acts of violence and
aggression
Southern Poverty Law Center
 “The Southern Poverty Law Center has documented 926 hate
groups operating in our country — a more than 50%
increase since 2000.”
 http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/intrep.jsp
 “Impossible to accurately record the number of hate crimes”
Mark Potock, SPLC
The reporting of hate crimes in the
media
 Only the most egregious of hate crimes get reported
 Many don’t even make headlines
 Leaving the public, especially white members of the public to
believe that hate crimes are down or done with altogether
 The election of President Obama
Subconscious
Acts of Racism
Conscious
Acts of Racism
What is consciousness?
 Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded
to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness,
sentience, and the ability to perceive the relationship
between oneself and one's environment.
Control
 When the thought is subconscious then you can’t modify or
control for its effects
 Once it becomes conscious then you can work with it (if you
want to)
 If you can talk, write, or think about “it” then it is conscious
What do you see here?
What do you see here?
Psychological tactic called: Priming
 Five words sets: Make a grammatical sentence out of each:
“Scrambled sentence test”.
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him was chocolate she always
from are Florida oranges temperature
ball the throw time bread
Wendys give replace old the
he observes occasionally ice cream
Priming
 Students thought they came to take a simple word test
 In fact they were tricked and “primed” to feel what?
 a) Old
 b) Sleepy
 c) Hungry
 d) Pretty
John Barge Experiment
“Priming”
 Two groups of undergraduates used as subjects
 All received scrambled sentence tests
 Two groups with words mixed in like:
 A) Rude, impatient, interrupt, aggressive, bother
 B) Respect, considerate, yield, polite, courteous
John Barge Experiment
 After subjects took the word puzzle they where then told
to talk to someone else in another office down the hall to
get the next steps in the study
 In all cases, that someone else that subjects were to talk
with was always busy talking to someone else
 A confederate (an actor) recorded how subjects in each
of the two groups behaved while waiting to speak to the
person they had to speak with
 What do you think they found?
What do you think?
 How did subjects act while waiting to speak to the person
they were “told to speak with”
 Group
 A) Primed with: Rude, impatient, interrupt, aggressive, bother
 B) Primed with: Respect, considerate yield, polite, courteous
Results
+Primed with rude words:
interrupted on average before 5 minutes
+Primed with polite words:
82% never interrupted at all (experiments ended after ten
minutes)
How Powerful Is Our Subconscious Mind?
 I can make you less likely to fight by changing the color of the
walls
 I can make you more productive at work by changing the
brightness of the lights
 I can make you spend more money by playing certain music
 I can guess who you will hire for a job based on the name of
the applicant
Let us make a connection…
 You now know that subtle and subconscious messages are
able to affect your thinking and behavior (these effects can be
seen in very short periods of time)
 Now think about what the cumulative effect is for feeling,
seeing, and hearing messages about a group of people
 Where in society do these implicit and explicit messages
come from?
Hidden Racism
 “Yeah I just found out the Cleopatra was actually a Black woman.”
 “What?”
 “That can’t be true, Cleopatra was beautiful!” (p124)
 85-90% of the white population say that they are not racially
biased but Dovidio and Gaertner are concerned that they may be
acting in another way, a way that is not supportive of diversity.
(page 133)
More evidence for the fact that what we say doesn’t always
translate into what we do!
 Dating…..
 On popular dating sites like match.com about 50% of white
women and 80% of white men state that “race is not important”
 However, 90% of these men sent e-mails only to white females
and of the white females 97% sent e-mail only to white men
o
S.D. Leveitt and S. J. Dubner
Are environmental and social factors
a kind of priming?
 Yes!
 The mind silently crunches all the data we take in from all
the books, the TV shows, music we hear, people we meet,
lessons we have learned, movies we have seen, and from the
places that we have been and this information is used to
form an opinion or a feeling.
 From these sources we learn about the people of this world
and about ourselves.
 In some cases we do not know that these opinions even exist
in our minds, and in some cases we do not know how they
play out in the way we act toward others.
Now Lets Connect All the Parts….
 Do all people have subconscious thoughts?
 Yes
 Are these thoughts powerful enough to change your behaviors?
 Yes ( Especially so when pressed for time…the brain automatically
reverts to the subconscious when stressed or pressed for time)
 Subconscious biases can impact the way one treats people, without
even knowing it
 Social and environmental factors can act as a sort of “priming” that
send people messages about who they are and how much they are
valued by society
Why do teachers especially need to be in
contact with their subconscious?
 Education holds (some of) the keys to breaking free from poverty
and oppression….. “The Good Life”
 Teachers are one of the first gate keepers
 Teachers can inadvertently suppress the creativity, productivity,
and intellect of a student
 How can they do that?
Self Fulfilling Prophecy
 Study Done By: Jacobson and Rosenthal
 “Harvard Acquisition of Knowledge”
 Teachers told who did well and who did not
 Results were bogus, actually subjects were randomly assigned a
group
 Actual test at the end of the year produced significant and real
differences in actual learning
What did the researchers observe?
 Teachers held higher expectations and demanded more of
students who they thought were smarter
 Teachers treated students differently who they thought were
smarter
 Climate: warm and supportive
 Input: taught more material
 Response: given more air-time in class
 Feedback: more detailed feedback
If a teacher’s first impressions are positive, then this will help
the student succeed. However, if the teacher has negative first
impressions then the student will suffer.
 If teacher’s treatment of the student is consistent over time, then the student’s
behavior will reflect the teacher’s expectations
 Teachers form first impressions of students almost immediately, causing some
students to start at an advantage over other students.

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Gender
Race
Dialects
Body build
Physical attractiveness
Beauty
Socio economic status
Language skills
It is simply not enough to say that we are
“not racist”, we need to be “actively anti
racist”.
–B. Tatum
 The hints of unchecked prejudice and racism can be seen in
much more subtle acts like:
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Posture
eye contact
laughter
Hesitation
fidgeting
Silence and/or wait time
Arms crossed
 This in turn effects the person you are communicating with and they
then feel uncomfortable or undervalued…and they may then treat you
differently…and cycle continues.
What can you do?
 Acknowledge the power of the subconscious
 Acknowledge that it is difficult to be in touch fully with
your subconscious
 Admit that people have biases
 Seek to be “color conscious” not “color blind”
 Try to know your biases
 With others or on your own seek to understand where
these hidden biases originated
 Simply knowing your biases is a good start
…..more you can do
 Remember, once you know you are being “primed” it doesn't
work anymore
 Meet, work with, play with, and get to know people from a
wide variety of backgrounds
 Be reflective and contemplative
 Turn off the emotional and intellectual autopilot
Questions