I took the implicit bias test about gender bias. I found myself really having to concentrate as they changed the sides around. My results said that I had “a weak automatic association between Me and Woman and a moderate automatic association between Not-me and Man. I was a little surprised that the connection between “me” and “woman” was not equally as associated as my connection between “not me” and “Man”. I think I spend a decent amount of time thinking about my female identity and women’s rights, but I guess that also plays into feeling particularly more separate from the male identity. 

I took the implicit bias test about gender bias. I found myself really having to concentrate as they changed the sides around. My results said that I had “a weak automatic association between Me and Woman and a moderate automatic association between Not-me and Man. I was a little surprised that the connection between “me” and “woman” was not equally as associated as my connection between “not me” and “Man”. I think I spend a decent amount of time thinking about my female identity and women’s rights, but I guess that also plays into feeling particularly more separate from the male identity. 

“Blindspot” by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explores the hidden reasons for our biases. I found the section about the Innocence Project especially interesting because it provided a clear example of the real world effects of hidden biases. The reading mentioned how 250 people had been exonerated through the project, and 190 of those wrongful convictions were because of incorrect eyewitness accounts. They were able to go back and correct the cases by using DNA data, but the fact that 75% of wrongful convictions were based on false eyewitness accounts makes the importance of learning about availability and implicit bias all the more important. The reading described how we tend to trust people who have features that are similar to our own more than those who don’t. It was really easy for people to assign characteristics to images of strangers even simply based on their appearance and no other information. The authors argue that it’s harder for us to refrain from split second judgments than to not assign them in the first place. 

Although I have taken an Implicit Bias Test in the past and studied why they work in other classes, I always try to push back against the answers that they give me. This time, I took the Arab Muslims vs Other people test and came out with a slight preference to Other people. When I first read that, I was actually annoyed, I thought it had to be some sort of error because I am not racist or islamiphobic. But after some consideration, I realized that the results do not make me either, it just means that I have been conditioned to associated Arab names with worse outcomes than other names. Ususally, when I hear these names they are connected to a recent terrorist attack, a fictional villan, or a dictator of some far away country. Of course I know that someone named Mohammed is no more likely to be a terrorist than someone named Mike, but the media only tells one, unflatering side of the story describing the Mohammeds of the world. I think that these bias tests should become more common to show people the biases they have that they would rather ignore so that they can fix the causes of those biases. I know that for me, from now on I will try to recognize my automatic thoughts towards others and I think others would do the same.

I took the implicit bias about age and it suggested that I have a slight automatic preference for old people over young people. This means that I linked being old with good at a quicker speed than old with bad. I was surprised by this result because the majority of test-takers revealed the opposite. Furthermore, based on my own age, I was surprised that I wouldn’t favor those closer in resemblance to my own appearance. I wonder, if my results are true, maybe because of my age the older people’s pictures stood out in my brain more as different. With the same logic, if my results are inaccurate, I wonder what the average age of this test’s sample size was because I might be on the younger spectrum. 

As Dr. Bezio mentioned in her podcast, nobody wants to be seen as biased because in our society, being biased is synonymous with being bigoted in one way or another. This was the conception that I previously had of biases, that they were broadly negative connotations that were held by a few in power and something to shy away from. However, over the past few years and as I have done more research on BLM and other social justice movements, I grew to realize how many biases I held and how they were created and reinforced by those around me. In my opinion, these can be just as harmful as true, full-blown racism and are far more common. When people are not aware of a problem they have, or cannot see the problem exists at all, there is no way to fix it and the problem gets worse.

I have spent most of my life in Massachusetts, an incredibly liberal and supposedly un-racist state that prides itself on its actions against slavery in the Civil War. In our history classes, we learn about racism as if it is something exclusive to the South and not a universal fact of life in America. But Massachusetts is also one of the most segregated and homogenous parts of the country, with many schools in Boston and throughout the suburbs consisting of 90% or more one ethnic group. My own high school, which was about an hour outside the city, was 97% white, and most of the other schools in my area shared similar demographics. This is immensely problematic because without exposure to different cultures, races, and ideologies, students have to rely on media depictions (which will always be biased) or simply regurgitate their parents’ views on the world (which will most likely also be biased). The largest issue with this homogeny is that many people do not see a problem with it and preach about equality while they hold deeply racist views. These views get perpetrated by microaggressions and seemingly innocent actions or phrases that get glossed over in daily conversations but become more problematic as they compound.  When people hold racist views and cannot comprehend that they are racists, there is no hope for them to change and we will never be able to create a more equitable society.

“Nobody wants to be accused of having a bias.”

The word “bias” has become, as Dr. Bezio pointed out in her podcast, a rather nasty word that people tend to avoid association with. I find this interesting because, let’s be honest, we all have biases. Whether it’s conscious or subconscious, we all have some sort of bias that influences our everyday choices. Like Dr. Bezio says in her podcast, we can’t really help it; our brains are designed to seek out patterns. We still have these ingrained survival mechanisms in our minds. We inherently try and relate things to other things, like the cloud example: they’re just clouds with no specific shape or pattern, yet we watch them to see if they take form as animals we can identify.

It’s this sort of instinctual pattern-making our minds do that really intrigues me. Because, if we didn’t have this natural instinct, this implicit bias, where would we be? Could we not make any connections, because the idea of making any connections implies being biased? Take the cloud example: one person says a cloud looks like a pen, another person says the same cloud actually looks like a sword. In a world without implicit bias, do both agree on one or the other, or do they avoid “matching” the cloud to a different object altogether?

So, in a way, bias is a good thing—in certain cases. Dr. Bezio goes in-depth in her podcast about how bias tends to fuel the “-isms”: racism, sexism, ableism, and so on. So how do we separate “good” from “bad” bias? Or is there any possibility of separation at all? Patterns and culture are a crucial part of growing up and developing traditions, personality traits, and decision-making skills, so how do we ensure we grow up with those characteristics and simultaneously ban implicit bias?  I think it’s an incredibly fine line to walk, and the answer may never be found.

I decided to take the Implicit Bias Test that measured my implicit bias for exercise. The end result was that I associated exercise with “good,” which is honestly what I figured. However, what surprised me was the word association part that asked me to sort particular words by clicking “i” and “e” on my keyboard. I was supposed to hit “i” if a word reminded me of having to do with exercise and the words “good” and “bad”, and “e” if it didn’t. If I got it wrong, I got a big old red “x” for incorrect. I found myself often hitting “e” when the word “sitting” came up, associating it with bad. This was incorrect, of course, because sitting doesn’t have anything to do with being inherently bad or anything necessarily to do with exercise. It made me realize that I’ve been taught that being still, sitting, and not doing something constantly was automatically “bad” because I was being lazy. I’ve been raised to believe that not doing something is doing something bad, which of course isn’t true and there are plenty of benefits to things like meditation and personal reflection.

Overall, I think the exercise was really interesting. To be honest, I had no idea how the test was going to gauge my bias towards exercise, but after it gave me my results and talked about how it timed me, it all made a lot more sense.

I took the Transgender Implicit Bias Test and received a result of a slight automatic preference for transgender people over cisgender people. I was surprised by this result, as I believe that I likely have implicit biases that follow societal norms which, historically have been biased against transgender individuals. I was glad to not receive that result saying I was biased against transgender people, however, I am slightly skeptical. After taking the test, I went back and read that this particular test requires the ability to distinguish between the faces of transgender and cisgender celebrities. As someone who knows very little about celebrities, this takes away the biases that comes with easily recognizing famous people, and so I wonder if my result also suggests that I cannot distinguish between transgender and cisgender faces. If this is true, I would be comfortable with this idea, because I don’t think it should be up to someone else’s perception to determine someone else’s identity. Both cisgender and transgender individuals have a wide range of physical appearances, and many physical attributes that we ascribe to certain identities actually can overlap greatly, so in some ways using physical appearances to determine preference of transgender or cisgender individuals may be deceptive. I am glad to have received a result that suggests I am not biased against transgender individuals, however, I am skeptical of this result, and I think I still have a long way to go in fully aligning with the my implicit bias test result.

One aspect of the reading I found very interesting is the application of knowing versus endorsing in relation to automatic beliefs. Although humans are able to reflect and determine whether or not we endorse or subscribe to a particular belief or stereotype, however, this does not always line up with how an individual reacts at an automatic level. This difference between the conscious mind and unconscious mind creates implicit biases which an individual is often unaware of, or even if they realize they hold this bias, they may not want to admit because when they consciously reflect they disagree with their implicit biases.

This concept aligns with an idea that has become more prominent in the past year about acknowledging your biases, but actively reflecting and combating them to avoid engaging in biased or harmful behaviors towards specific social groups or individuals, in particular to the ideas of anti-racism. This approach recognizes that unconscious bias based on automatic beliefs exist, but also attempts to consciously combat them, and even implies the opportunity to unlearn these biases. While the reading later says that the evidence supporting that this un-learning or re-conditioning away from formerly held automatic beliefs is not completely conclusive about its success long-term, this popular narrative accounts for this uncertainty, explaining this active reflection and re-conditioning as something to strive for as a constant practice. I think it’s interesting to see this logic in combating, racism, sexism, ableism, etc. enter mainstream media in the past year. If this idea of a constant reflective practice were taken up by the majority of the population, would we learn to be aware of our implicit biases at a younger age? Would the types of implicit biases we have change?

In the Critical thinking podcast, Dr. Bezio emphasizes how bias is viewed so negatively in our society, even though it is a somewhat natural result of the content we consume, and that the only way to change it or prevent it is to purposefully expose ourselves to culture and content that we don’t normally engage with, or that defies general expectations. After listening I decided that I wanted to take an implicit bias quiz to learn more about the biases that I might hold without realizing it, which are not necessarily bad, but are important to understand because it does affect one’s viewpoint of the world whether or not they are aware of it.

I was surprised by the results of my implicit bias quiz, because although I don’t consider myself to have an outright bias, I thought that maybe a hidden bias would show up that I did not know about. I know that I don’t have an explicit bias against black people, but because of ideas spread in mainstream culture that tend to portray black people in a negative light,  I wanted to see if I had unconsciously picked up on those biases. I took the IAT test focused on the association between race and harmless objects/weapons. My results ended up falling into the category of slight automatic association with Black Americans and Harmless Objects, and White Americans and Weapons. These are results generally shared by only 6% of the population, so I was very surprised, but also glad to see that my opinions are not popular opinions. But it is also disheartening to see that the majority of people have strong or moderate association with Black Americans and Weapons and White Americans and Harmless Objects. One thing that I thought while looking at the results was that most people who take tests like this generally want to learn more about their biases in order to do something about it, so I think that an even greater portion of the population would have a negative implicit bias against Black Americans.

I think that the difference shown in my test results could be a reflection of the fact that I have paid attention to terror attacks in the United States, and school shootings, most of which have been committed by white men during my childhood, and I think that despite the way terrorists or “bad” people are represented in popular culture, my knowledge of current events has overshadowed that in my mind without my awareness.