“Implicit bias is the concept of hidden biases that all individuals carry from a lifetime of experiences with social groups – age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, or nationality.” Harvard psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji. has written two books on it.
https://www.harvardsquare.com/articles/what-implicit-bias-presentation-dr-mahzarin-r-banaji
Implicit Bad
On the good side, it means our brain is doing its job noticing patterns and making generalizations. On the bad side, it makes us racist, antisemitic, anti -LGBT, ageist, misogynist, etc. I am concerned here with the negative side.
Almost everyone will say they are not racist, antisemitic, homophobic, etc. But it turns out that most people are. In fact, there is a famous test, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that shows a majority of people taking this test show evidence of implicit bias (the bad kind) even if they do not think of themselves as prejudiced. But you don’t need a test to show this. You almost have to be blind not to be aware of it –– in others, that is.
I just finished reading “Bood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy.” It helped me to realize the prejudice I have for imprisoned people if not imprisoned blacks in particular. I think it should be required reading at some point. Not a fun read, but the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in History and winner of the 2017 Bancroft Prize. It changed the way I view the world.
Social psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University has tracked the implicit prejudices of millions of Americans. Her tests measure attitudes toward a number of groups. Over the last decade, there has been an eye-opening change as far as attitudes toward gays. The book and film “Milk” opened the public’s implicit eyes as far as gays. And LGBTs across the nation have moved the implicit dial from 11.6 percent as far as same-sex marriage to 68 percent in 2018. And just two years before this it was 59 percent.
Banaji and her colleagues have extended the trend lines of the data to see how long it would take for bias to be entirely eliminated. When interviewed on the podcast “Hidden Brain,” she said the forecasts show that if things go swimmingly well, in nine years, anti-gay attitudes will be all but eliminated – that we will reach neutrality.
She comments, “So the most surprising result comes from the sexuality test, what we see there on implicit attitude. I’m not talking about what people say. I’m talking about what the automatic response is on the test. We see a 33 percent drop in anti-gay bias. This is huge.”
Shankar Vedantam, host of the podcast replied, “By contrast, when it comes to race issues, the projections are it will take nearly six decades for Americans to see blacks and whites in the same way. Biases about skin tone, preferences for lighter skin over darker skin – that should take 138 years if current trends persist. Biases against the elderly – ageism? Here is Tessa Charleswork, a researcher working with Mahzarin.
“Implicit age attitudes will not reach neutrality even within the next 150 years.”
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, checkout counter girls and young women would give me a dazzling smile, not just with their mouth but eyes, too.
I wondered if they liked me or could smile like that for everyone. Today they look down at something I’ve purchased. The few that look up virtually never smile. Sometimes a teenaged girl looks at me with a nice smile. But then I think I remind her of a grandfather she likes who gives her coins now and then.
And maybe I’d just rather have it that way instead of the waitress in a restaurant who says, “Can I take your order deary?”
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
