Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

Those studies showed that White Americans consistently received more help than Black Americans. The only harm done to Black Americans in those studies was the consequence of inaction—the absence of helping. This left them without advantages that were received by the White Americans who were, by contrast, helped. We can call this hidden discrimination, in the same way that the discrimination displayed in the story of Carla’s hand surgery is hidden. Discrimination is hard to perceive because it does not present itself in obvious comparisons, where we must decide in a single moment whether to help one or the other. These behaviors happen in sequence, allowing the fact that one was helped and the other not to remain in our blindspot.

A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene and the son, badly injured, is rushed to the hospital. In the operating room, the surgeon looks at the boy and says, “I can’t operate on this boy. He is my son.” How cant his be? If you’re immediate reaction is puzzlement, that’s because automatic mental associations caused you to think “male” on reading “surgeon”. The association surgeon = male is part of a stereotype.

Like the late United States senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, we believe that people have a right to their own opinion but not a right to their own facts.

If you are at all skeptical about the idea that in forming these mental pictures we use default characteristics to flesh out and go far beyond the basic information we’ve been given, then think about it this way: The default attributes that we add are so taken for granted and so automatic that, without thinking about why we do this, we are usually careful to specify a different set of attributes when the default ones don’t apply.

One camp, guided mainly by the responses to questions such as Q1 and Q2, believes that Americans’ racial biases have largely disappeared.

Blindspots hide both discriminations and privileges, so neither the discriminators nor the targets of discrimination, neither those who do the privileging nor the privileged, are aware. No small wonder that any attempt to consciously level the playing field meets with such resistance.

As psychologists, we have learned that if we study hidden bias by the traditional method of looking for expressions of negativity or hostility directed against out-groups, if we measure it by counting the number of out-group churches or mosques that are burned down, we may fail to see the far more pervasive ways in which hidden biases maintain the status quo, depriving those on the bottom rungs of society of the resources available to the more privileged by birth and status.

the hidden race bias revealed by the Race IAT is unwelcome news to many who receive an automatic White preference result from the test, and it is probably also distressing to these same people to learn now that the Race IAT is a moderate predictor of racially discriminatory behavior. Included