Type Set: Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People Mahzarin R. Banaji Anthony G. Greenwald Delacorte Press, 2013 ($27)
When journalist Brent Staples walks down the street, he whistles classical music. Staples, who is African-American, does not do this to share his love of Mozart. Rather he wants to ease the fears of white pedestrians who might not realize how nervous they feel when passing a black man.
As psychologists Banaji and Greenwald discuss in Blindspot , Staples is attempting to counteract unconscious bias. Our social and cultural surroundings influence these attitudes in ways we may not notice. They argue that forming implicit biases is an innate, often helpful, ability that allows us to distinguish friend from foe and to find our place in a complex social world. Psychologists study this phenomenon using tests that force us to make rapid associations. The speed with which we connect words from two categories, such as “good” and “thin” or “good” and “fat,” reveals our underlying preferences. One study showed, surprisingly, that ambitious, professional women often prefer a male boss, for instance, and another found that people who proclaim the earth is flat unconsciously accept that it is round.
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