Implicit Cognition
Implicit cognition is “thinking” that we do without consciously thinking. It is what we often call instinct or listening to our gut. It’s unconscious and based on our lifetime’s accumulation of experiences, which starts even before we’re born.
Our brain, by some accounts, receives about 11 million pieces of information a second. But our conscious brain is only able to process about 40 because it’s slow and inefficient … because you have to consciously think.
You handle the other 10,999,960 pieces of information thanks to your unconscious brain, which is habit- and intuition-driven and, therefore, is really fast. One of the reasons why it’s able to be so fast is that it places everything we encounter into schemas and categories; we are hard-wired to make automatic judgments about everything and those judgments get reinforced over time. Schemas and categories allow us to function in the world. But they form the basis of our biases. It has also been scientifically demonstrated that humans have affinity bias; we are naturally drawn to those like us (same location of origin, same college, same preference in fast food, same age) and wary of those who are not. Studies across disciplines reveal that regardless of education, expertise or background, we all use cognitive processes that are socially conditioned through experience and that affect our conscious decision making and unconscious actions and judgments.