the room and down the hall, they still weren’t aware of how
their behavior had been affected. Bargh once had people play
board games in which the only way the participants could win
was if they learned how to cooperate with one another. So he
primed the players with thoughts of cooperativeness, and sure
enough, they were far more cooperative, and the game went far
more smoothly. “Afterward,” Bargh says, “we ask them
questions like How strongly did you cooperate? How much did
you want to cooperate? And then we correlate that with their
actual behavior — and the correlation is zero. This is a game
that goes on for fifteen minutes, and at the end, people don’t
know what they have done. They just don’t know it. Their
explanations are just random, noise. That surprised me. I
thought that people could at least have consulted their
memories. But they couldn’t.”
Aronson and Steele found the same thing with the black
students who did so poorly after they were reminded of their
race. “I talked to the black students afterward, and I asked
them, ‘Did anything lower your performance?’ ” Aronson said.
“I would ask, ‘Did it bug you that I asked you to indicate your
race?’ Because it clearly had a huge effect on their performance.
And they would always say no and something like ‘You know, I