Mahzarin R. Banaji

A very well researched investigation into the phenomenon of implicit racial bias and the practical effects it can have on the lives of people who are targeted by it. Although few people will publicly claim to prefer white people to Black people, many harbor a subconscious association that white=good and black=bad. This type of implicit bias is unconscious and informed by media portrayals and cultural stereotypes. However, even though this bias is unconscious it can have cumulative effects show more that can be absolutely devastating.

This book allows the reader to test themselves on their own bias and offers tips for combatting it. This is a powerful and alarming piece of knowledge to have about oneself and one's society. Although this book doesn't have all the answers, just being aware of this type of unconscious bias can be helpful in understanding the ongoing inequities we see around us and in making plans to overcome our own blindspots. show less

This is exactly what a popular psychology book should be: both extremely informative and extremely readable.

At the core of this book is a fairly new method for measuring people's hidden biases, called an Implicit Association Test (IAT). It's worth explaining this test in some detail because it forms such a central part of the book's arguments.

We're introduced to the general concept via the sorting of playing cards, and strongly encouraged to physically carry out the procedure. Imagine taking show more a deck of cards and sorting it into two piles: clubs and hearts in one pile, and spades and diamonds in another pile. Then imagine sorting in a different way: clubs and spades in one pile, hearts and diamonds in the other. The second sorting method is much easier, because the two groups are united by a common feature: clubs and spades are black, while hearts and diamonds are red. Clubs and spades are similar in a way that clubs and hearts are not.

The same sort of idea can be applied to other concepts as well: we more easily associate insects with negative words and flowers with positive words. And it turns out that most of us also also find it easier to associate black people with negative words and white people with positive words. Similarly, it's easier to associate women with home words and men with career words. Even when we don't make these associations consciously, the ease or difficulty of making certain groupings reveals that the associations do exist somewhere in our minds. These are the blindspots that the title is talking about.

Given the subtitle, the conclusions weren't quite as surprising to me as the authors seemed to expect: we know going in that supposedly good people are going to turn out to have hidden biases. But the tests are unusually persuasive. We don't just learn that there are studies showing that people in general are biased; we learn that we ourselves are biased, in a way that's apparent in the test-taking process even before tabulating the results.

In addition to bringing home this lesson in a very powerful way, the authors present other related studies and discuss the consequences of hidden biases more broadly. And they do it all in a very readable way. I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in issues of discrimination, or anyone who who just wants to gain some new insight into their own mind. show less

You’re not racist, right? I mean, if given two equally qualified candidates for a job you were hiring for, you’d be just as likely to give it to the Black person as the White person, right? And you’re in favor of same sex marriage, so you definitely don’t give any preference to straight people, right?

Not so fast. The premise of this book – which is backed up by some pretty solid science – is that we all hold biases in our unconscious minds that influence what we do. Because they show more are unconscious biases, it’s hard to imagine we have them, and even harder to figure out how to address them. I mean, it’s one thing to make it illegal to ban people of a certain race from eating in one’s restaurant; how do you fix something that is so deep in your brain you don’t even know it is there?

The concepts in the book are mostly supported by the IAT, or Implicit Association Test. The book goes into much greater detail, but here’s the basic idea: when presented with a variety of words, is it easier for you (as measure by how quickly you do it) to sort them into the category associated with positive characteristics when that category is also associated with a specific race? So, if the option is Black/Positive and White/ Negative, and the word ‘happy’ pops up on the screen, is your reaction time sorting that correctly going to be slower than if the options are Black/Negative and White/Positive? If so, you have an unconscious preference for White people.

It’s a pretty fascinating test and, like I said, has been validated many times, and expanded beyond race to measure all sorts of different possible biases – I recently took the test to see if I had an unconscious negative association regarding people with disabilities. I did not – huzzah! You can play around with it yourself – but man, be prepared to be disappointed. The vast majority of folks who take the race test show at least some unconscious preference for White people. It’s a bummer.

So, what’s the point then? How do we fix this? That’s basically the problem with this book – there isn’t a lot here by way of suggestions as to how to fix this. I can think of some that are alluded to, such as vastly increasing the positive representations of people of color in the media so that those negative associations don’t creep into our minds. But being really aware of these biases seems to be a good place to start. That, and not being so defensive about whether there really still are biases out there. Just because you live in an area where people don’t call Black people the n-word or non-straight people the f-word doesn’t mean there aren’t unconscious biases at work. show less

People, even people with the best of intentions, have biases. We say that justice is blind because we know how sight might betray us with instinctive acknowledgement of things unnecessary and detracting from the scales of equal consideration, thus deceiving the principle we hope to uphold. But what happens when that prejudice goes beyond your senses and resides in your mind, in the dark unconscious recesses that even your consciousness can't rationalize away?

These "mindbugs" are everywhere, show more Banaji and Greenwald assert. Just as our sight can fool us with optical illusions about table sizes and shades of grey on a chessboard, so can our mind trick us into pitfalls and blind areas that we consciously fail to notice most of the time. This is why people, even those who try to be "good *," often fall short of their own expectations.

Admittedly, I did not find the concept so earth shattering to my self-perception, but that could be because I immediately found evidence of my unconscious bias while reading the first few pages. When the authors were introduced, and Mahzarin was described with a female pronoun, I mentally paused. It was silly, because I know women are just as capable as men in science and higher education. I have argued with people on it extensively. Heck, my sociologist and anthropologist professors were women! But here I was, accidentally assuming at the first named author of a scientific book was male. Does this make me a bad person? A traitor to the feminist cause?

No. But, like Mahzarin said when receiving test results that showed her own bias, it made me feel like I failed somehow. And how even those who fight tirelessly for issues of social equality—even their own equality—may be susceptible to the biases that permeate the world around them.

The foundation of the book comes from the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT is so important to their thesis that they provide several examples of the test for readers to try on their own, and they exhort the importance of the results as the only way to truly comprehend the effects of unconscious bias.

Basically, the IAT works by comparing two attempts at grouping various objects and if one grouping takes a longer time to do than the other, you realize that your mind more readily associates some things with others. For example, grouping a deck of cards into hearts/diamonds and clubs/spades is likely to take you less time than hearts/spades and clubs/diamonds. They point out that it is easier to group the cards by their color and have to mentally forestall that association when doing it the other way.

Blindspot: The Hidden Biases of Good People presents many of these tests that deal with race, age, and sex related attitudes. If there is a difference between the test times, then it would be marked as bias and quantified by degrees, depending on how significant the difference in time it takes to complete them.

Thankfully, they do not rest solely on IAT for the entirety of the book, and branch out into other studies that continue to point out bias associations. Examples are not given equal time, largely in part because they mention how racial studies have the most data to discuss, that there is a better sampling of US studies than global ones, etc. Blindspots serves more as an exploratory book of the concept rather than a compendium of all related bias studies.

However, the book is not simply sociological data discussions. There is an almost informal tone for an academic book in some cases, as the authors—particularly Mahzarin—inject anecdotes of how unconscious bias can manifest itself in daily life or impact the people subjected to it. They employ famous "riddles" like the one about the son and father who get into a car accident; the father dies on the scene, and when the boy is taken to the emergency room the surgeon announces, "I can’t operate on him, this is my son." These attempts make the book easily accessible to audiences that have never taken Sociology 101, yet present the information in a way that makes even long-term academics rethink their preconceived notions.

If there is anything to really complain about in Blindspots, it would be the footnotes.* Some of them gave details on the studies briefly referenced in the text itself, explaining how the study was conducted, what the population was, and so on. Others seemed to be a a simple source citation, but sometimes the references are vague. For example, on page 114:

"Stereotypes do not take special effort to acquire. Quite the opposite—they are acquired effortlessly, and take special effort to discount. 13"

and then the footnote lists "13. Gilbert, 1991." Did the study pertain to special efforts for discounting? Is it simply a study on stereotypes and if so why this one in particular? Instead of filling in details of the text, most footnotes left me scratching my head as to why a study was listed, or frustrated at the lack of context provided.

As a whole work, Blindspots: The Hidden Biases of Good People is a book that is very relevant to our day and age. They do not end with platitudes or a ten point list of how to fix these mindbugs (although I wish they went into detail about how the spider phobia study also seemed to break certain racial discrimination!) but instead explain that awareness of these biases might be the first step to further studies in correcting them. I would highly recommend anyone who wants to gain insight into their perceptions giving this book a read.





* Good is defined in this case as “those of us who strive to align our behavior with our intentions”

* I like footnotes at the bottom of the relevant page, and the galley copy had them snuck in between the references and appendixes. As you can guess, this is highly annoying when flipping between pages. show less