Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Pious said, "No one capable of human thought and speech is immune from harboring prejudice; it often takes deliberate effort and awareness to reduce prejudice; with sufficient motivation, it can he done." (Pious, 2003, p. 38).
I find myself guilty of passing prejudice thoughts, not necessarily negative, but thoughts that derive from what I know about cultures. I see a man walking down the street with a turban and automatically I assume he is from Iran or I see someone sitting under a tree at the park with dreadlocks and I assume he is high. Sometimes, I don't even realize I'm thinking these things until after I've left and assess how I treated the person or think about what just happened. Sometimes I don’t notice it at all and someone I’m with points out that I was acting “funny” or different towards that person.
In the book "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell, he talks about two different attitudes towards things like race or gender after taking the IAT (Implicit Association Test). The first attitude being the conscious attitudes—what we choose to believe and direct our behavior deliberately and the second being our unconscious attitudes—what we've learned, books we read, movies we watch, and dominate groups that surround us, forming an opinion underneath what we actually state and choose to believe.
The IAT test is usually done on a computer screen with two columns, for example "Male" and "Female" and then down the center a list of names like, "Holly" "Brad" "Jane" "Derek" "Dan" "Erica" and so on. The names will flash on the computer screen and if the name belongs on the right column (say "Dan" flashes and "Male" is on the right) you would hit the letter 'e' and if it belongs on the right (for "female") you would hit the letter 'i'. The advantage of doing the IAT on a computer is that the responses are measured down to the millisecond, which is used to assign the test takers score. Your score evaluates your word association with a certain subject. There are multiple types of IATs and subjects will pair with other subjects, for example: "Male and Career" and "Female and Family" and will give you several nouns like, "Sarah, Babies, Office, Domestic" etc.
During the "Race IAT" it will ask you what your attitudes towards blacks and whites are. Gladwell, as most I assume would answer, said, "I think of the races as equal." As the test begins, a series of faces flash on the screen, both black and white and you divide them into their own columns. Easy enough.
Next, they pair "European American or Bad" and "African American or Good" and the list of nouns are: hurt, evil, glorious, a picture of a black man, a picture of a white man, and wonderful. Gladwell says that, "Immediately something strange happened...the task of putting the words and faces in the right categories suddenly became more difficult and I found myself slowing down...I had to think."
Next "European American" and "Good" were paired and "African American" and "Bad" were paired with the exact same list of nouns. This time, Gladwell tells us that he was having no trouble at all putting the words and faces in the right category.
Gladwell argues against Pious' quote above that we actually have no control and don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes and even more astonishingly, we may not even be aware of them. Gladwell also tells us that, “the IAT is a good predictor of how we act in certain kinds of spontaneous situations.” There is evidence that if your associations are strong pro in on direction that that will affect how you behave in the presence of a white or black person.
So my question is which is more true? Our conscious opinions that we form ourselves or our unconscious opinions that have been formed for us?
(If you’d like to try a computerized IAT and try and break the construct that I’ve formed about your unconscious attitudes, visit www.implicit.harvard.edu, I’d love to hear your responses.)
Carol P. Harvey, M. June Allard. (2008). Understanding and Managing Diversity. Pearson Prentice Hall.
Malcolm Gladwell. (2005). Blink. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company.