+0000c31obeMon, 19 May 2008 16:01:13 +0000 5, 2006...10:00PMay
RAISE YOUR HAND IF YOU ARE BIASED
Bias in the crossfire May 19, 2008
Yet Smith, a 20-year-old of Korean descent, and Shikunov, a 21-year-old with Russian ancestry, admit that despite their egalitarian values, bias occasionally rears its ugly head.
For example, if a stranger approaches when they’re walking down the street, “when the guy is black you feel more threatened than if it’s a white guy,” Shikunov said. Smith said he feels the same way.
The students say they might have that gut reaction because security advisories about campus assaults often feature descriptions of black offenders, or because black men are portrayed as criminals in movies and in the news more often than whites.
“It’s not right,” Smith said, “but it’s something in your subconscious.”
The discomfort cuts both ways.
When Drew Hurt moved to Chicago from Detroit a year and a half ago to study audio engineering at Columbia College, he found himself “really uncomfortable” interacting with whites. Growing up in a mostly black community, Hurt, who is black, said he hadn’t had much exposure to white people and had been raised with a distrust of them.
“I didn’t know how I was being perceived,” said Hurt, 20, who lives in Hyde Park. He said that’s changed since he has spent more time with white peers.
Blatant racism is roundly condemned as a despicable social scourge, and few people would readily admit to being prejudiced against any group. But even the most well-meaning people harbor biases, researchers say–and the best way to overcome them is to acknowledge they exist.
Long before Barack Obama delivered his speech about race, in which he challenged the nation to confront its enduring prejudices so that it might rise above them, several computerized tests were developed to help people detect biases they may not even be aware they have.
At Project Implicit, a virtual lab that offers more than a dozen “implicit attitude tests,” participants are asked to rapidly sort positive words (”joy,” “heaven”) and negative words (”evil,” “nasty”) with pictures denoting black vs. white, gay vs. straight, old vs. young, fat vs. thin. The idea is that the more strongly a person associates a word with a certain category, the quicker they will do the sorting.
Taken more than 4.5 million times since they were developed a decade ago, the tests show that most people have an easier time pairing positive words with white, straight, young and thin than with black, gay, elderly and fat. The results can be unsettling to people who believe themselves to be unprejudiced.
Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and one of the creators of the tests, said he was troubled when the test showed him to have a strong race bias against blacks.
“I spent some time staring at my hands because I couldn’t really believe that they did that,” said Nosek, who is white. “We don’t know our own minds as completely as we think we do.”
Almost 80 percent of white and Asian respondents show an automatic preference of white over black in the tests. Black respondents are split 50-50 in their automatic preferences for whites and blacks.
While biases are a natural consequence of upbringing, experience and cultural stereotypes, the danger of subconscious biases is that they might influence people’s behavior without them realizing it, Nosek said.
In everyday life, implicit bias can manifest itself in body language, revealing discomfort in interactions with certain groups.
“You can be saying all the right things, but you can have your arms crossed, be leaning back and failing to engage in eye contact in ways that indicate you may not be comfortable,” said Joshua Correll, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Chicago who created another implicit bias test that has found participants are likely to shoot at black targets more quickly than white targets.
Brain scans have shown that white people’s brains experience a surge in activity in the regions that control thoughts and behavior when they interact with blacks, perhaps because they’re trying hard not to appear prejudiced, according to research by Jennifer Richeson, associate professor of psychology and African-American studies at Northwestern University. Blacks and other minorities, meanwhile, tend to try especially hard to behave well for fear of being the target of prejudice, she said.
Those efforts can be exhausting and cause people to avoid interracial interactions, she said.
It is possible to overcome subconscious bias, researchers say. Interacting with people of different groups is one way.
Exposure to positive experiences or role models also has been found to reduce people’s propensity to make snap judgments, according to the University of Virginia’s Nosek. If Obama or Hillary Clinton wins the White House, he said, it could shift our automatic associations.
“If Obama becomes president, how will that change our associations when it comes to blacks?” Nosek said. “If Clinton becomes president, how will that change our association of leadership and competence when it comes to women?”
The simplest way, Nosek said, is for people to be aware of their biases so that they can fight them.
“If you have transparency in your decision making, you can prevent biases from influencing your judgment,” Nosek said.
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