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>>Hello and welcome to Scientific American Frontiers,
I'm Alan Alda.
we all like to think that we understand our own minds.
That we carefully weigh the pros and cons when we make a decision.
And that after we've made it,
even if we have cause to regret it, we know why we decided the way we did.
Oh sure we know some choices are more emotional than rational,
but even then, we think we're conscious
of all the conflicting arguments that run through our minds as we make a choice.
Well, in this program we'll find out how utterly deluded we are,
as we join in experiments revealing just how sneaky and underhanded our brains can be.
[music]
>>I've always thought of myself as a feminist,
so I'm pretty sure I know how I'll do in this test of my reaction
to women in the work place.
I am ready to begin.
Women, in fact like Mahzarin Banaji, who's a professor here at Harvard University.
The test is called the "implicit association test"
and it begins simply enough.
I have to pair the word in the center,
with one of the words above by pressing the "e" key with my left hand
or the "i" key with my right.
Well, that could be either way.
Mahzarin has told me to do this as fast as I can
because it's the time I take to make the associations that's critical to the test.
Now the target words have changed, but the task remains the same;
to quickly decide whether the new words belong to the left or the right.
But things are about to get trickier.
>>It's the same thing except now any one of these four will show up,
and when it's "career" or "male" you'll press the left key,
when it's "family" or "female" you'll press the right key.
>>"Career" or "male" >>Yes.
>>So now the categories are described by two words,
making it harder to decide where the new words belong.
But since historically, "male" and "career" have gone together....
This is like, reinforcing this stereotype. >>Yeah, that's it exactly.
>>The point of the test is to discover if lurking beneath my feminist convictions,
I actually harbor a hidden bias against women in the work place
based on all the associations between "man" and "career" and "women" and "family"
that bathed the culture I grew up in.
"Family or "male", "career" or "female". Okay, now you're testing me.
The implicit association test is designed to ferret out any bias
by seeing if it takes me fractionally longer to figure out where a word belongs
when the pairing of the target words, in this case: "family" and "male" together
and "career" and "female", is slightly more difficult for my brain to except.
Corporation - "family" or...[breaks off in laughter]
"brother", "management"...
and we're done.
>>Slight. I could tell he has a slight. This is very good.
You are...so let's see, you're showing a slight,
automatic association between male and career,
and the...only 12% of the population that takes this test
shows this bias. What you're seeing is that you're,
you're showing a much smaller bias then what many other people show.
I'm up here. I make a strong association between
"male" and "career" and "female" and "family" even though that's not what I
consciously express.
>>Even though that's not what you live, huh?
>>And that's not what I live, but in my world.
And I don't know, I'd be interested to know. Maybe
many years of working in feminist causes made you show this lesson.
>>So all those years of working in feminist causes
didn't manage to totally eliminate my lingering association between "female" and "family"
and "male" and "career".
What's astonishing though is that Mahzarin is far worse,
and she's not only enjoying a very successful career-
she designed the test!
Another of its designers is Brian Nosek,
who personally developed the test he's taking now,
intending to reveal hidden racial prejudice.
>>These are the same faces you've seen many, many times.
>>Many times, many times. In fact I helped create the faces, so...
>>The heart of this test is to see whether it's easier for Brian to match words
or pictures to the pairing of African American with bad,
and European American with good.
Then when the pairings are reversed,
European Americans with bad and African Americans with good.
[quiet]
>>I can predict. >>Yeah [chuckle]
What do you think?
>>Moderate. Moderate to strong.
>>Yeah, I'll say moderate as well. >>Yeah.
>>Strong preference for white. [exclamation of laughter]
>>You've taken this for the umpteenth time,
and you still haven't caught on to the fact that you're a little biased?
[laughter]
>>I think part of that is the insistence that my conscious beliefs still matter.
It isn't that-- that fact that I keep showing these implicit biases
mean that I'm a biased person so I should just accept that and move on,
it's that-- no, I don't agree with those, I do have them
and I will admit to having those implicit biases
but I'm not going to let that rule what I would consciously want to have.
>>It really is remarkable that here I am in Cambridge, Massachusetts--
perhaps the liberal capitol of the country--
with two academics who pride themselves on their enlightened attitudes,
only to discover that they have latent within in them
biases they would fervently deny if their own test hadn't revealed them.
But all may not be lost.
>>We found in research, and also in testing of myself,
that if I put myself in a situation where I think about positive black exemplars--
I think about Michael Jordan and Colin Powell and people...
Martin Luther King who have had a very positive impact and who are also African American,
I show much less bias immediately after thinking about those exemplars
then if I hadn't thought about them before.
>>Even simple things, like the presence of an African American experimenter,
reduces race bias. That the presence of a competent woman,
makes women's attitudes to math become more positive.
Those kinds of studies
sit, I think, in contradiction the ways in which people like I thought about this-
we thought they were learned over long periods of time,
that they were entrenched, they were rigid, inflexible--
and that does not appear to be the case,
and I think that that's where the room for optimism is.
On the one hand, I would like people to take these data seriously
when we can show the vast numbers of people who show the bias,
I think we need to contend with that.
On the other hand, what this work is showing is that it might be
not that hard to shape environments that can change these,
even automatic kinds of attitudes.
>>You can find out if you harbor unconscious biases you would deny even to yourself,
by logging on to the Project Implicit website.
There you'll find tests of attitudes towards such things as age and religion,
as well as lighter fair like the Harry Potter movies versus Lord of The Rings.
Give it a try. You may be in for a shock.