The Life Unconscious: Psychologist Brian Nosek

For the last 15 years, Brian Nosek has been studying the hidden biases, preferences and thought patterns that lurk just below the threshold of self-awareness. Those unconscious attitudes are often at odds with our conscious account of ourselves, yet they may influence our outlook, our choices and even our actions. One of the tools Nosek and colleagues have used to expose latent racial preferences and other forms of bias is a simple online test, the Implicit Association Test, or IAT. In this edition of the show, I take the test myself and talk to Brian about implications of his research for our understanding of the mind, decisionmaking, politics and society.