As it turns out, says Anthony Greenwald, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, we do a lot of thinking without even realizing it. Our brains are firing synapses at lightning speed, functioning far faster than we are even aware.

“We function unthinkingly in many of the things that we do,” Greenwald explained.

It’s this “unthinking” that has driven much of Greenwald’s work, and which he focused on in his recent talk, “The Psychology of Blink: Understanding How Our Minds Work Unconsciously,” which he gave as part of the Allen L. Edwards Psychology Lecture Series.

According to Greenwald, there are two levels of mental operation.

Dr. Anthony Greenwald, a social psychologist at the University of Washington, takes you on a journey through your unthinking mind in “The Psychology of Blink: Understanding How Our Minds Work Unconsciously.”

“One is a conscious, presumably rational level of operation in which we consider ourselves to be thinking, deliberate, acting intentionally and under control. And another – which I’m referring to as a second level, and which is really what [author Malcolm] Gladwell is writing about in “Blink” – is more automatic, perhaps more impulsive, less controlled and we actually can’t report very well on what we’re doing at that second level.”

“Blink” was Gladwell’s follow-up to his best-selling book “The Tipping Point” and centers around what Greenwald calls second-level thinking.

“We actually do much more at that second level than we think we do,” Greenwald said.

Consider, Greenwald offered, our everyday “scripted interactions” at the gas station, the supermarket, the bus stop, on an oft-traveled highway route.

“We’re familiar enough with what we’ve been doing so we can do it without thinking,” he said.

But operating on level two does not mean resorting to instincts.

“It’s not instinctive, in the sense that we would do it in the absence of any learning,” Greenwald said. “In fact, it might be the reverse because we do it because we have learned, and because things are so familiar and it’s something we do as a function of practice. The more we’ve practiced a certain kind of task, the more we can operate at level two.”

It was second-level thinking that spurred the creation of the Implicit Association Test, capable of measuring attitudes and stereotypes we may not consciously recognize. Gladwell refers to it repeatedly in “Blink.”

“Starting in the late ‘80s, I and Mahzarin Banaji, who was my main collaborator and has collaborated with me on a lot of this work, developed the idea that a lot of what we do socially, in our attitudes and stereotypes, our beliefs, is happening automatically. And we were looking for ways to demonstrate that,” Greenwald recalled.

In 1995 Greenwald served as the first subject for the IAT.

“I knew that it was something that had a potential for measurement that we didn’t yet have in the kind of work we were doing,” he said.“It became clear very quickly that this was a tool that was going to shed new light on prejudice and stereotypes, and indeed it has.”

IAT measures how quickly subjects can categorize images, words and symbols, revealing preferences for gender, race, age and more. Numerous IAT tests are available online through Project Implicit. For instance, the presidential candidates test requires participants to quickly classify images of John McCain, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton with words like enemy, happy, hate and pleasant.

“We call it an implicit measure of association because it shows up in your performance when we’re not asking you to tell us what your associations are,” Greenwald explained.“It sort of just intrudes itself into your performance and we can pick up and measure [that].”

The IAT is capable of assessing whether a person has a preference for white or black, thin or fat, young or old people, exposing prejudices and attitudes.

“A lot of people when they first take this test, they think, ‘No, this can’t be. It’s telling me that I have in my head something that I’m sure is not there,’” Greenwald said. “But, gradually, people are coming to understand that, yes, it is there.”

Several million IATs completed by people worldwide have indicated some interesting, and some disturbing results:

• Most people, even older people, show a preference for youth.
• More than 75 percent of white Americans show some level of automatic preference for European-American compared to African-American.
• Women have slightly stronger gender stereotypes than men do.

The first step to ensure these kinds of level-two automatic preferences don’t slip into our level-one decision making is to identify them.

“Most of us don’t think that we have this kind of potential within us, so we don’t think it’s necessary to do anything,” Greenwald said. “This is where the IAT comes in. When people take the IAT, they have the chance to discover whether they’ve got these associations.”

The next step is to use this knowledge wisely and slow down.

“If you find out you have this, then you maybe have some motivation to pause before making judgments that might be influenced by the race, or the weight, or the disability status, or the age or the gender of a person.“