Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People
Mahzarin R. Banaji
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0345528433
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
I know my own mind.
I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way.
These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality.
“Blindspot” is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. Writing with simplicity and verve, Banaji and Greenwald question the extent to which our perceptions of social groups—without our awareness or conscious control—shape our likes and dislikes and our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential.
In Blindspot, the authors reveal hidden biases based on their experience with the Implicit Association Test, a method that has revolutionized the way scientists learn about the human mind and that gives us a glimpse into what lies within the metaphoric blindspot.
The title’s “good people” are those of us who strive to align our behavior with our intentions. The aim of Blindspot is to explain the science in plain enough language to help well-intentioned people achieve that alignment. By gaining awareness, we can adapt beliefs and behavior and “outsmart the machine” in our heads so we can be fairer to those around us. Venturing into this book is an invitation to understand our own minds.
Brilliant, authoritative, and utterly accessible, Blindspot is a book that will challenge and change readers for years to come.
Praise for Blindspot
“Conversational . . . easy to read, and best of all, it has the potential, at least, to change the way you think about yourself.”—Leonard Mlodinow, The New York Review of Books
“Accessible and authoritative . . . While we may not have much power to eradicate our own prejudices, we can counteract them. The first step is to turn a hidden bias into a visible one. . . . What if we’re not the magnanimous people we think we are?”—The Washington Post
“Banaji and Greenwald deserve a major award for writing such a lively and engaging book that conveys an important message: Mental processes that we are not aware of can affect what we think and what we do. Blindspot is one of the most illuminating books ever written on this topic.”—Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D., distinguished professor, University of California, Irvine; past president, Association for Psychological Science; author of Eyewitness Testimony
“A wonderfully cogent, socially relevant, and engaging book that helps us think smarter and more humanely. This is psychological science at its best, by two of its shining stars.”—David G. Myers, professor, Hope College, and author of Intuition: Its Powers and Perils
“[The authors’] work has revolutionized social psychology, proving that—unconsciously—people are affected by dangerous stereotypes.”—Psychology Today
“An accessible and persuasive account of the causes of stereotyping and discrimination . . . Banaji and Greenwald will keep even nonpsychology students engaged with plenty of self-examinations and compelling elucidations of case studies and experiments.”—Publishers Weekly
“A stimulating treatment that should help readers deal with irrational biases that they would otherwise consciously reject.”—Kirkus Reviews
From the Hardcover edition.
deceitful language? Evolutionary theorists believe that selection pressures can produce significant genetic changes in as little as thirty generations—which is less than a thousand years for our species. If lying produces a selection advantage that allows the liar to live longer and to produce more offspring than a non-liar, there could indeed have been enough time for natural selection to promote genes that predispose us to lie.3 One obvious example of this skill in action is the person who
completed at implicit.harvard.edu yielded three important results: First, the automatic Black = weapons association is much stronger among all groups who took the test—White, Asian, Hispanic, and even African American—than is suggested by surveys that asked questions about this association. Second, the size of this automatic stereotype varies noticeably by groups—it is largest in Whites and Asians, next largest in Hispanics, and smallest in African Americans. But even African Americans show a
when a single cell changes, can teach us much about their nature, and this is a primary reason scientists look at developmentally rudimentary forms of life to grasp the nature of their fully formed state. The infants and children of a species become quite interesting for this purpose, because in them we might see the unvarnished and immature form of the behavior, and this may give insight into why an organism grows the way it does, and turns into the thing we know and recognize in its more mature
happens to be of a different religion. If you are a school administrator, you would be seen as discriminating if you promote a teacher of your own race while not promoting a teacher of another race who has an equivalent or superior performance record. The examples in the last two paragraphs were the easy ones. More challenging are situations falling between those that are obviously not discrimination (such as parental helpfulness toward children) and those that obviously are (such as nepotistic
described these in Chapter 5.) The latter set of stereotypes is widely believed to be an influence that guides Blacks and Latinos away from academic pursuits.12 We do not yet know how to go about either eliminating or outsmarting self-directed mindbugs. However, they may prove modifiable by exposure to role models—this was found in Dasgupta’s study of women college students whose male = math stereotype was weakened when they took math courses taught by female faculty members. At the University