Have you ever sat next to the smelly guy? Did you ever wonder why nobody tells him that he smells, or why he can't smell himself? Doesn't he notice people getting up and changing seats when he sits down? How can he live his whole life being unaware of a flaw that is readily apparent to a total stranger 10 seconds after they've met?

5 We Are More Racist Than We Think

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Here's something that doesn't make sense: On one hand, we know that racism is still a big deal (you can't argue with it -- studies show it still turns up in everything from jury decisions to hiring practices), but how many outright racists do you actually know? How many people at your office fling the blankets aside each morning and scream, "TODAY I SHALL OPPRESS A BLACK MAN!"?

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Only a small one today, though. Maybe one day he'll aspire to insult Kobe Bryant's mother.

Probably not that many. So we have the seemingly impossible situation of a world with a lot of racism and not many racists (and no matter how anonymous you make the poll, you can never find significant numbers of people admitting to being racist). Science suggests it's because all of us are a little more racist than we think.

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"I'm not racist; I totally love cosplay girls."

For instance, in one somewhat hilarious experiment, researchers just set up a bunch of conversations -- some between members of the same race, some between different races. Then, to liven things up, they had the conversations take place over a closed-circuit camera system and intentionally inserted awkward pauses into the conversations by adding a one-second delay. No, the participants didn't realize they were doing it.

When a white person was talking to a white person, the pauses were basically unnoticed. But in the interracial conversations, the awkward pauses caused the anxiety levels of the participants to go off the charts -- far more than in control conversations held face-to-face. No matter how nonracist and open-minded the participants thought they were, one second of awkward silence was all it took for a whole bunch of subconscious racial tensions to bubble up. "Goddamn it, I just can't connect with this person! He's different from me!"