experiences stored in an individual attic vary greatly from person to person, the general patterns of activation and retrieval remain remarkably similar, coloring our thought process in a predictable, characteristic fashion. And if these habitual patterns point to one thing, it’s this: our minds love nothing more than jumping to conclusions.
Imagine for a moment that you’re at a party. You’re standing in a group of friends and acquaintances, chatting happily away, drink in hand, when you glimpse a stranger angling his way into the conversation. By the time he has opened his mouth—even before he has even quite made it to the group’s periphery—you have doubtless already formed any number of preliminary impressions, creating a fairly complete, albeit potentially inaccurate, picture of who this stranger is as a person. How is Joe Stranger dressed? Is he wearing a baseball hat? You love (hate) baseball. This must be a great (boring) guy. How does he walk and hold himself? What does he look like? Oh, is he starting to bald? What a downer. Does he actually think he can hang with someone as young and hip as you? What does he seem like? You’ve likely assessed how similar or different he is from you—same gender? race? social background? economic means?—and have even assigned him a preliminary personality—shy? outgoing? nervous? self-confident?—based on his appearance and demeanor alone. Or, maybe Joe Stranger is actually Jane Stranger and her hair is dyed the same shade of blue as your childhood best friend dyed her hair right before you stopped talking to each other, and you always thought the hair was the first sign of your impending break, and now all of a sudden, all of these memories are clogging your brain and coloring the way you see this new person, innocent Jane. You don’t even notice anything else.
As Joe or Jane start talking, you’ll fill in the details, perhaps rearrangingsome, amplifying others, even deleting a few entirely. But you’ll hardly ever alter your initial impression, the one that started to form the second Joe or Jane walked your way. And yet what is that impression based on? Is it really anything of substance? You only happened to remember your ex–best friend, for instance, because of an errant streak of hair.
When we see Joe or Jane, each question we ask ourselves and each detail that filters into our minds, floating, so to speak, through the little attic window, primes our minds by activating specific associations. And those associations cause us to form a judgment about someone we have never even met, let alone spoken to.
You may want to hold yourself above such prejudices, but consider this. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures the distance between your conscious attitudes—those you are aware of holding—and your unconscious ones—those that form the invisible framework of your attic, beyond your immediate awareness. The measure can test for implicit bias toward any number of groups (though the most common one tests racial biases) by looking at reaction times for associations between positive and negative attributes and pictures of group representatives. Sometimes the stereotypical positives are represented by the same key: “European American” and “good,” for instance, are both associated with, say, the “I” key, and “African American” and “bad” with the “E” key. Sometimes they are represented by different ones: now, the “I” is for “African American” and “good,” while “European American” has moved to the “bad,” “E” key. Your speed of categorization in each of these circumstances determines your implicit bias. To take the racial example, if you are faster to categorize when “European American” and “good” share a key and “African American” and “bad” share a key, it is taken as evidence of an implicit race bias. 2
The findings are robust and replicated extensively: even those individuals who score the
Imagine for a moment that you’re at a party. You’re standing in a group of friends and acquaintances, chatting happily away, drink in hand, when you glimpse a stranger angling his way into the conversation. By the time he has opened his mouth—even before he has even quite made it to the group’s periphery—you have doubtless already formed any number of preliminary impressions, creating a fairly complete, albeit potentially inaccurate, picture of who this stranger is as a person. How is Joe Stranger dressed? Is he wearing a baseball hat? You love (hate) baseball. This must be a great (boring) guy. How does he walk and hold himself? What does he look like? Oh, is he starting to bald? What a downer. Does he actually think he can hang with someone as young and hip as you? What does he seem like? You’ve likely assessed how similar or different he is from you—same gender? race? social background? economic means?—and have even assigned him a preliminary personality—shy? outgoing? nervous? self-confident?—based on his appearance and demeanor alone. Or, maybe Joe Stranger is actually Jane Stranger and her hair is dyed the same shade of blue as your childhood best friend dyed her hair right before you stopped talking to each other, and you always thought the hair was the first sign of your impending break, and now all of a sudden, all of these memories are clogging your brain and coloring the way you see this new person, innocent Jane. You don’t even notice anything else.
As Joe or Jane start talking, you’ll fill in the details, perhaps rearrangingsome, amplifying others, even deleting a few entirely. But you’ll hardly ever alter your initial impression, the one that started to form the second Joe or Jane walked your way. And yet what is that impression based on? Is it really anything of substance? You only happened to remember your ex–best friend, for instance, because of an errant streak of hair.
When we see Joe or Jane, each question we ask ourselves and each detail that filters into our minds, floating, so to speak, through the little attic window, primes our minds by activating specific associations. And those associations cause us to form a judgment about someone we have never even met, let alone spoken to.
You may want to hold yourself above such prejudices, but consider this. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures the distance between your conscious attitudes—those you are aware of holding—and your unconscious ones—those that form the invisible framework of your attic, beyond your immediate awareness. The measure can test for implicit bias toward any number of groups (though the most common one tests racial biases) by looking at reaction times for associations between positive and negative attributes and pictures of group representatives. Sometimes the stereotypical positives are represented by the same key: “European American” and “good,” for instance, are both associated with, say, the “I” key, and “African American” and “bad” with the “E” key. Sometimes they are represented by different ones: now, the “I” is for “African American” and “good,” while “European American” has moved to the “bad,” “E” key. Your speed of categorization in each of these circumstances determines your implicit bias. To take the racial example, if you are faster to categorize when “European American” and “good” share a key and “African American” and “bad” share a key, it is taken as evidence of an implicit race bias. 2
The findings are robust and replicated extensively: even those individuals who score the
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