Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People - Softcover

Banaji, Mahzarin R. R.; Greenwald, Anthony G.

 
9780345528438: Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345528433 ISBN 13: 9780345528438
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

“Accessible and authoritative . . . While we may not have much power to eradicate our own prejudices, we can counteract them. The first step is to turn a hidden bias into a visible one. . . . What if we’re not the magnanimous people we think we are?”—The Washington Post

I know my own mind.
I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way.

These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality.

“Blindspot” is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. Writing with simplicity and verve, Banaji and Greenwald question the extent to which our perceptions of social groups—without our awareness or conscious control—shape our likes and dislikes and our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential.

In Blindspot, the authors reveal hidden biases based on their experience with the Implicit Association Test, a method that has revolutionized the way scientists learn about the human mind and that gives us a glimpse into what lies within the metaphoric blindspot.

The title’s “good people” are those of us who strive to align our behavior with our intentions. The aim of Blindspot is to explain the science in plain enough language to help well-intentioned people achieve that alignment. By gaining awareness, we can adapt beliefs and behavior and “outsmart the machine” in our heads so we can be fairer to those around us. Venturing into this book is an invitation to understand our own minds.

Brilliant, authoritative, and utterly accessible, Blindspot is a book that will challenge and change readers for years to come.

Praise for Blindspot

“Conversational . . . easy to read, and best of all, it has the potential, at least, to change the way you think about yourself.”—Leonard Mlodinow, The New York Review of Books

“Banaji and Greenwald deserve a major award for writing such a lively and engaging book that conveys an important message: Mental processes that we are not aware of can affect what we think and what we do. Blindspot is one of the most illuminating books ever written on this topic.”—Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D., distinguished professor, University of California, Irvine; past president, Association for Psychological Science; author of Eyewitness Testimony

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, collaborators for more than thirty years, are kindred spirits in their search to understand how the mind operates in social contexts. Banaji teaches at Harvard University, Greenwald at the University of Washington. With their colleague Brian Nosek, they are co-developers of the Implicit Association Test, a method that transformed them, their research, and their field of inquiry. In this book, for the first time, research evidence from their labs and from the more than fourteen million completed tests at implicit.harvard.edu is made available to the general reader.

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1

Mindbugs

It is an ordinary day on a college campus. Students and professors of experimental psychology have filed into a lecture hall to listen to a distinguished visiting scientist explain how our minds perceive the physical world. Nothing about his tweed jacket and unkempt hair suggests the challenge he is about to deliver. A few minutes into the lecture, he says matter-of-factly, “As you can see, the two tabletops are exactly the same in shape and size.”

Shuffling in their seats, some in the audience frown while others smile in embarrassment because, as anyone can plainly see, he is dead wrong. Some tilt their heads from side to side, to test if a literal shift in perspective will help. Others wonder whether they should bother staying for the lecture if this nonsense is just the start.

The nonbelievers are caught short, though, when the speaker proceeds to show the truth of his audacious claim. Using an overhead projector, he takes a transparent plastic sheet containing only a single red parallelogram, lays it over the tabletop on the left, and shows that it fits perfectly. He then rotates the plastic sheet clockwise, and places the parallelogram over the tabletop on the right; it fits perfectly there as well. An audible gasp fills the hall as the speaker moves the red frame back and forth, and the room breaks into laugher. With nothing more than a faint smile the speaker goes on to complete his lecture on how the eye receives, the brain registers, and the mind interprets visual information.

Unconvinced? You can try the test yourself. Find some paper thin enough to trace the outline of one of the tabletops, and then move the outline over to the other tabletop. If you don’t find that the shape of the first tabletop fits identically onto the second tabletop, there can be only one explanation—you’ve botched the tracing job, because the table surfaces are precisely the same.

But how can this be?

Visual Mindbugs

You, like us, have just succumbed to a famous visual illusion, one that produces an error in the mind’s ability to perceive a pair of objects as they actually are. We will call such errors mindbugs—ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions.1

The psychologist Roger Shepard, a genius who has delighted in the art of confounding, created this illusion called Turning the Tables. When we look at the images of the two table surfaces, our retinas do, in fact, receive them as identical in shape and size. In other words, the retina “sees” the tabletops quite accurately. However, when the eye transmits that information to the brain’s visual cortex, where depth is perceived, the trouble begins.

The incorrect perception that the two tabletops are strikingly different in shape occurs effortlessly, because the brain automatically converts the 2-D image that exists both on the page and on the retina into a 3-D interpretation of the tabletop shapes as they must be in the natural world. The automatic processes of the mind, in other words, impose the third dimension of depth onto this scene. And the conscious, reflective processes of the mind accept the illusion unquestioningly. So much so that when encountering the speaker’s assertion that the tabletop outlines are the same, the conscious mind’s first reaction is to consider it to be sheer nonsense.

Natural selection has endowed the minds of humans and other large animals to operate successfully in a three-dimensional world. Having no experience in a world other than a 3-D one, the brain we have continues to perform its conscious perceptual corrections of the tables’ dimensions to make them appear as they would in the traditional 3-D world.2

Contrary to expectation, this error reflects not a weakness of adaptation but rather a triumph, for Shepard’s tabletops highlight the success of a visual system that has adapted effectively to the combination of a two-dimensional retina inside the eye and a three-dimensional world outside. The mind’s automatic understanding of the data is so confident that, as Shepard puts it, “any knowledge or understanding of the illusion we may gain at the intellectual level remains virtually powerless to diminish the magnitude of the illusion.” Take a look at the tables again. The knowledge you now have (that the tables have identical surfaces) has no corrective effect in diminishing the illusion!3

Disconcerting as this experience is, it serves as a vivid illustration of a signal property of the mind—it does a great deal of its work automatically, unconsciously, and unintentionally. Mention of the mind’s unconscious operation may summon up for you a visual memory of the bearded, cigar-smoking Sigmund Freud, who rightly gets credit for having brought the term unconscious into everyday use. However, an understanding of the unconscious workings of the mind has changed greatly in the century since Freud’s pathbreaking observations. Freud portrayed an omniscient unconscious with complex motives that shape important aspects of human mind and behavior—from dreams to memories to madness, and ultimately to civilization itself. Today, however, Freud’s arguments, detached as they have remained from scientific verification, have a greatly reduced impact on scientific understanding of unconscious mental life.

Instead, the modern conception of the unconscious mind must be credited to another historical figure, one far less known than Freud. A nineteenth-century German physicist and physiologist, Hermann von Helmholtz, offered the name unbewußter Schluß, or unconscious inference, to describe how an illusion like Shepard’s tabletops might work.4 Helmholtz aimed to describe the means by which the mind creates from physical data the conscious perceptions that define our ordinary and subjective experiences of “seeing.” Our visual system is capable of being tricked by a simple 2-D image, because an unconscious mental act replaces the 2-D shape of the retinal image with a consciously perceived 3-D shape of the inferred object it suggests.

Now try this: Read the following sixteen words with sufficiently close attention so that you can expect to be able to recognize them when you see them again a few pages hence:

Ant

Spider

Feelers

Web

Fly

Poison

Slimy

Crawl

Bee

Wing

Bug

Small

Bite

Fright

Wasp

Creepy

In the meantime, here’s another striking example of unconscious inference in the form of a checkerboard and cylinder to confound us further. When we tell you that the squares marked A and B are exactly the same in their coloring, you will doubtless believe us to be wrong. But take a thick piece of opaque paper, one large enough to cover the entire picture, mark with a point the two squares labeled A and B, and make a circular hole just a bit smaller than the checkerboard square on which each sits. When you look only through the holes and without the rest of the image, you will see that they are indeed identical in color.

Again the culprit is an unconscious inference, a mindbug that automatically goes to work on the image. What causes this remarkable failure of perception? Several features of this checkerboard image are involved, but let us attend to the most obvious ones. First of all, notice that B is surrounded by several dark squares that make it look lighter than it is, merely by contrast; likewise, just the opposite, A is surrounded by adjacent lighter squares that make it seem darker than it actually is. Second, notice the shadow being cast by the cylinder. This darkens the squares within the shadow—including the one marked B—but the...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345528433
ISBN 13 
9780345528438
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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