Dont miss this great Chris Mooney piece on the science of our racist brains. -Erika Youre not, like, a total racist bastard, David Amodio tells me. He pauses. Today. Im sitting in the soft-spoken cognitive neuroscientists spotless office nestled within New York Universitys psychology department, but it feels like Im at the doctors, getting a dreaded diagnosis. On his giant monitor, Amodio shows me a big blob of data, a cluster of points depicting where people score on the Implicit Association Test. The test measures racial prejudices that we cannot consciously control. Ive taken it three times now. This time around my uncontrolled prejudice, while clearly present, has come in significantly below the average for white people like me. That certainly beats the first time I took the IAT online, on the website UnderstandingPrejudice.org. That time, my results showed a strong automatic preference for European Americans over African Americans. That was not a good thing to hear, but its extremely common—51 percent of online test takers show moderate to strong bias. Taking the IAT, one of the most popular tools among researchers trying to understand racism and prejudice, is both extremely simple and pretty traumatic. The test asks you to rapidly categorize images of faces as either African American or European American while you also categorize words (like evil, happy, awful, and peace) as either good or bad. Faces and words flash on the screen, and you tap a key, as fast as you can, to indicate which category is appropriate. Sometimes youre asked to sort African American faces and good words to one side of the screen. Other times, black faces are to be sorted with bad words. As words and faces keep flashing by, you struggle not to make too many sorting mistakes. And then suddenly, you have a horrible realization. When black faces and bad words are paired together, you feel yourself becoming faster in your categorizing—an indication that the two are more easily linked in your mind. Its like youre on a bike going downhill, Amodio says, and you feel yourself going faster. So you can say, I know this is not how I want to come off, but theres no other response option. You think of yourself as a person who strives to be unprejudiced, but you cant control these split-second reactions. As the milliseconds are being tallied up, you know the tale theyll tell: When negative words and black faces are paired together, youre a better, faster categorizer. Which suggests that racially biased messages from the culture around you have shaped the very wiring of your brain.
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 22:49:01 +0000
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