"Blinking" fascinating!!

Malcolm Gladwell's Blink

I am currently reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, that a friend brought to me the other day because of the name of my blog. (Although the concept of my "mindBlink" is slightly different than his "blink")

I sat and read 1/3 of the book in one sitting, in my car, in the garage, when I arrived home that day. It is absolutely fascinating. I haven't had the time to pick it back up yet, but I just had to share what I've read so far with you guys. I didn't want to wait until I finished the book (who knows when that will be? Remember, I have a very strong "P" [perceiving] preference, and I very rarely finish a book all the way to the end.)

So here it goes:

In the book, Malcolm Gladwell talks about what he calls "thin-slicing," which is when we make automatic subconscious biased judgments based on what we see on the surface. (That's how I understood it.)

He points to a study called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), devised by Anthony G. Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek. It is based on an observation that we make connections much more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds.

Stephen Berger of Johns Hopkins University wrote about the IAT in his 7/25/07 article, Bias on the Brain: A Neural Basis for Prejudice, posted on The Triple Helix, as follows:

Psychological testing introduced some of the earliest evidence that certain biases may be more deeply rooted in the mind than previously thought. One way of measuring bias is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which was first described in 1998 by researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle [1]. The IAT asks subjects to associate a word, name, or image with any of a range of possible answers. To take a benign example, if the word “dog” appears on the computer screen, the subject might be asked to click on either “friendly” or “threatening.” The interesting result is not necessarily which answer was selected, but rather how quickly the subject selected it. The fundamental assumption of the IAT, which has been supported by various methods of testing, is that a more rapid association between a noun and an attribute (such as “dog” and “friendly”) indicates the subject’s actual (or implicit) belief (that dogs are friendly). The IAT is therefore able to suggest the subject’s unconscious or automatic beliefs about a particular topic.

The application of the IAT to questions of prejudice is obvious. When asked to associate a word or image linked to an individual of a different racial, ethnic, or gender group, the IAT reveals surprising degrees of unconscious bias and stereotyping. Many people will automatically associate a person who is somehow different from themselves with negative attributes.

For you skeptics out there:

You have to try it for yourselves to believe it. There's this link to the Harvard site where you will find the IAT tests, along with the Race IAT, which he says is the most famous. (Famous? This is the first time I've heard of it. I feel so out of the loop.) You will be shocked at the results. I know I was. I've always argued that everyone has a racial bias no matter how unbiased they may claim they are, but I didn't realize that I actually seemed to have no choice in the way my brCain wants to lean.

Take the IAT (a Harvard study) and challenge yourself:


Your mind will be boggled as well. I promise. Go to the site. Take the Race IAT, and enter your results on the poll I posted over to the right, right above my Astronomy Pic of the Day. Let's see how we do. C'mon! You don't have to identify yourself. We are all in the same boat. Just so you know, to my chagrin, my results said, "Your data suggest a strong automatic preference for European American compared to African American."

I know... But I'm determined to take it over and over again until I get it right. :-(

There are several other tests there on various other subjects as well.

** By the way, the test doesn't necessarily indicate that you are bigoted. It just shows that our brains store information that may influence our judgments that we may not even be consciously aware of. So don't go jumping to conclusions before you even give it a chance, okay? (that would be a case in point...)