Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova Page A

absolute lowest on self-reported measures of stereotype attitudes (for example, on a four-point scale ranging from StronglyFemale to Strongly Male, do you most strongly associate career with male or female?) often show a difference in reaction time on the IAT that tells a different story. On the race-related attitudes IAT, about 68 percent of over 2.5 million participants show a biased pattern. On age (i.e., those who prefer young people over old): 80 percent. On disability (i.e., those who favor people without any disabilities): 76 percent. On sexual orientation (i.e., those who favor straight people over gay): 68 percent. On weight (i.e., those who favor thin people over fat): 69 percent. The list goes on and on. And those biases, in turn, affect our decision making. How we see the world to begin with will impact what conclusions we reach, what evaluations we form, and what choices we make at any given point.
    This is not to say that we will necessarily act in a biased fashion; we are perfectly capable of resisting our brains’ basic impulses. But it does mean that the biases are there at a very fundamental level. Protest as you may that it’s just not you, but more likely than not, it is. Hardly anyone is immune altogether.
    Our brains are wired for quick judgments, equipped with back roads and shortcuts that simplify the task of taking in and evaluating the countless inputs that our environment throws at us every second. It’s only natural. If we truly contemplated every element, we’d be lost. We’d be stuck. We’d never be able to move beyond that first evaluative judgment. In fact, we may not be able to make any judgment at all. Our world would become far too complex far too quickly. As William James put it, “If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.”
    Our way of looking at and thinking about the world is tough to change and our biases are remarkably sticky. But tough and sticky doesn’t mean unchangeable and immutable. Even the IAT, as it turns out, can be bested—after interventions and mental exercises that target the very biases it tests, that is. For instance, if you show individuals pictures of blacks enjoying a picnic before you have them take the racial IAT, the bias score decreases significantly.
    A Holmes and a Watson may both make instantaneous judgments—but the shortcuts their brains are using could not be more different. Whereas Watson epitomizes the default brain, the structure of ourmind’s connections in their usual, largely passive state, Holmes shows what is possible: how we can rewire that structure to circumvent those instantaneous reactions that prevent a more objective and thorough judgment of our surroundings.
    For instance, consider the use of the IAT in a study of medical bias. First, each doctor was shown a picture of a fifty-year-old man. In some pictures, the man was white. In some, he was black. The physicians were then asked to imagine the man in the picture as a patient who presented with symptoms that resembled a heart attack. How would they treat him? Once they gave an answer, they took the racial IAT.
    In one regard, the results were typical. Most doctors showed some degree of bias on the IAT. But then, an interesting thing happened: bias on the test did not necessarily translate into bias in treating the hypothetical patient. On average, doctors were just as likely to say they would prescribe the necessary drugs to blacks as to whites—and oddly enough, the more seemingly biased physicians actually treated the two groups more equally than the less biased ones.
    What our brains do on the level of instinct and how we act are not one and the same. Does this mean that biases disappeared, that their brains didn’t leap to conclusions from implicit associations that occurred at the most basic level of cognition? Hardly. But it does mean that the right motivation can counteract such bias and render it beside the point