“Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People” by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald

The focus of this book is on the unconscious biases, called “mindbugs” by the authors, that we all possess and affect our activities. The authors describe how they developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to test for these associations, and also the implications that their results have for how to look at our lives. (You can take the test for yourself at implicit.harvard.edu)

While they discuss discrimination on the basis of gender, age, weight, among others, the vast majority of their efforts go towards discussing race (hence the two appendices discussing it). This is largely because most scientific research has gone into race discrimination. But it is also important to note that this book was published after the US elected Obama as president, when there was a wave of thought claiming that we now lived in a post-racial society. Their evidence shows that we have a long way to go before we reach that point, and claiming anything else is truly unproductive.

One of the more interesting findings that they had (in my opinion) was that we are more likely to forgive members of the in-group. This was demonstrated using shock responses on people, and causing them to associate the shock with a face. Individuals were more likely to lose the shock response when the face was a member of their own race. Applied more broadly, this demonstrates that we are more likely to disregard terrorist acts when they come from a member of our own race. And when you think about society as it currently stands, this is all too real. The white racists of Charleston, or the white shooter at Las Vegas, have all been forgiven by the masses a little too easily for my liking. Contrast that with the prejudice we have against black men, and it’s easy to see how this leads to issues.

Combating our unconscious biases is more important now than ever before, and this book presents a good start for doing just that. I would highly recommend taking their test, and reading this for background information. We like to think that we know what is going on in our heads, but recent scientific studies have demonstrated that, in fact, we may not know the first thing about ourselves. It is essential to know the research being done in order to try and correct this, and make the world a better place in the process.