While listening to the podcast, I started to think about the specific cultures that affect me. Culture is not something that I ever put an extreme amount of thought into because it is something that I was always surrounded by. I grew up in a multi-cultural household speaking multiple languages. I traveled abroad when I was extremely young and was constantly exposed to different cultures. Biases on different religions, ethnicities, or races are not something I thought about in-depth till I got to Richmond. Until last year, diversity is something I took for granted. I went to the “white” public high school in my area, which was only 50% white. Even then, street culture dominates in Fairfax County, and everyone’s mannerism and slang are extremely similar regardless of ethnic background. Almost everyone I knew went to a public school and the few that went to private went so because they were extremely religious. When comparing that experience to here, it’s a different world. I remember times in my freshmen year where I honestly felt like a foreigner on this campus. It’s ridiculous.

The part that stood out for me the most in the podcast was when Dr. Bezio mentioned the importance of cultural exposure and the impact it plays in deterring bias. I can’t speak on the impact of deterring other’s biases because it is not something that I believe I can speak for. However, the importance of culture exposure is. Exposure to other cultures is not only important for detering bias but for diversification of thought. From LDST 102, we learned that diversification of thought brings forth the best solutions. Interacting with other cultures is vital in seeing different perspectives which leads to new ideas. Another approach of diversification, is something I learned in my current Political Science class where we are discussing Democracy in America by Toqueville. In this book, Toqueville writes that Americans dismiss ideas that do not allign with their own beliefs, and will only to listen foriegners or those with hightened levels of experience. This correlates with diversification because it points out the inherit biases that we dont typically see in ourselves. It takes a point of view from someone completely different to ourselves to see these qualities. In order to see these qualities, we must broaden our own exposure to different cultures and then look at ourselves realisitcally in a differently light. Diversification is not only important for societal outlook, but also for personal growth.

As humans, we always want to think the best of ourselves and our in many cases blind to our flaws/mistakes whether intentional or unintentional. When I saw my results I was ashamed to see that I did in fact have a slight bias on one of the tests, but I am not entirely surprised. Although I do always try and educate myself on various topics in order to be more aware of other people and injustices in general, it is easy to remain extremely sheltered as a white straight female in a comfortable living situation with my family. For me these biases are very subconscious and I don’t believe that they are very apparent to others. But I hope that by being aware of the biases I have through tests like these and by having conversations with others, I will be able to become as unbiased as possible when it comes to people that are similar or not similar to me. I don’t know if it is possible to entirely get rid of these biases, but I hope that by educating myself and others that they can be limited as much as possible and willy potentially allow for more equality for all.

So I took the IAT for the association for American with European American and Foreign with Asian American. Originally, I thought I was going to associate American with European American heavily. Although I’m mixed race, my father is a white American, while my mom is a Japanese foreigner; so for me, I was expecting heavy favoritism. However, I was proven wrong with this test. I only had a slight automatic association for American with European American and Foreign with Asian American. I was honestly surprised about my results and was not expecting them at all. I grew up in an extremely diverse area and was raised in a very diverse manner, so although I wasn’t expecting a slight association it doesn’t seem out of the question to me.

I have never taken an IAT test before, and honestly, I thought I could be biased, but not to the extent that the test said I was. I have taken concussion tests and honestly gotten good at learning the system after a few rounds. The last round in the 2 tests I played was what the game wanted you to be the best at, and since I have seen all the words/pictures six other times, you unknowingly start to recognize features in pictures and lengths of the different words. I am most defiantly not trying to say I’m not biased, and the game is completely wrong, but I think there has to be a better way to go about the process of seeing if you are biased.

While listening to the podcast I began thinking about just how much of what I view online is a result of algorithms and machine learning. I don’t think, though, that algorithms are always bad. For example, I’ve been on Tiktok, Twitter, and Instagram long enough to where I’ve interacted with enough of the rights posts so that my feeds generally only include things that I’m genuinely interested in, with the exception of some ads and whatever branches of new content get snuck in. I do a lot of hiking, so I like when I see hikes and hike-related content pop up in my feed. I selectively choose to interact with those things that I like in hopes that the algorithms will provide me with similar content. I do think that algorithms can, however, be very dangerous or harmful when scrolling with the wrong mindset or lack of education on a subject. This is why I think that social media is very problematic for children and young people. Without prior knowledge of a subject, it can be very easy to believe something that you haven’t heard of before. If those initial experiences can spiral out of control and be difficult to change a mindset if a foundation has been built upon it. There isn’t a doubt that there is harmful content on every social platform, but I think we also have to be careful with censoring. I’m under the belief that censoring is fine in the case of children, as they have less critical thinking skills and experiences to relate things to, but I think harmful/negative content can also provide insight into how biases are created and why people think the things that they do and that censorship should generally be avoided for those that are not children.

One of the bigger problems with social media is that you’re almost always in an echo chamber, being fed content that you are likely to agree with, making it all the more difficult to change opinions in the future. This is why I see travel as being so important. The best way to learn about a culture or topic is to be immersed in it, ideally as much as possible and from a wide range. By no means, however, is travel a perfect solution to eliminate bias. If you’re going somewhere as a tourist, then you will only be gaining the perspective of a tourist. Oftentimes tourism involves exaggerated aspects of a culture, and limited interactions with locals can lead to further biases if you try to apply them to everyone from that culture. Travel is also inaccessible for many, as it is very expensive and takes up a lot of time. Books and education are other potential solutions, but even then bias is still present.

At the end of the day, there isn’t really anywhere you can go to truly escape bias. I think the best counter-measure to having biases is to listen to as many different opinions as possible before making a decision. Although this is technically an original blog post that I have personally written, I even question myself as to where these thoughts originated from. Sure I may be expressing myself in an original way, but I would wager that 99% of all my thoughts are based on the thoughts, concepts, and ideas of others.

In Chapter 6 of “Blindspot,” the authors talk about the cost of stereotypes, and I think that it’s something really important to note. Everyone says that stereotypes are bad, but nobody really dives into what makes them inherently bad. An example of this could be seen in the Trolley Problem we talked about in class last week. When we got to the situation that included the overweight man on top of the bridge, and scenarios became more and more intricate, some said “he may have diabetes,” or that he may have some other medical condition that would lessen his quality of life. Although someone brought up that “We shouldn’t use stereotypes,” we didn’t really go into what that could mean for the overweight man, not just in the Trolley Problem, but even mentally, after he heard us talking so bad about him (stay with me here).

There are physical and emotional consequences to stereotypes, but after the incident or situation is said and done, why don’t we dive into the long-term mental effects of stereotypes rather than naming them as bad, and ending the discussion there? I think that the authors’ attempt to dive deeper into stereotypical incidents in the U.S. was smart, and I would even argue that they could have dug deeper. There are Black men that walk around scared for their lives because of the assumption that they’re dangerous. There are Asian Americans that are constantly burdened by the stereotype that their citizenship isn’t valid. These groups are in danger in more ways than one, and I think it’s important to address all aspects if we expect to overcome these automatic stereotypes.

I decided to do an IAT Test on whether I not I implicitly associate good taste with healthy or unhealthy foods because among my friends, a lot of them keep bringing up the need to eat healthier and lose weight. My results indicated that I had a “weak” automatic associate between good or bad tasting food and healthy or unhealthy food. In fact, the results said I was “slightly faster to respond when “Good Tasting” + “Healthy Food” and “Bad Tasting” + “Unhealthy Food” were paired together than when “Bad Tasting” + “Healthy Food” and “Good Tasting” + “Unhealthy Food” were paired together.”

This was really surprising to me because as much as I like to keep my eating habits under control by “eating a salad every once in a while,” as some of my peers say, I feel like I gravitate towards unhealthy foods as a result of them tasting better (and probably much more often). I actually told my boyfriend about my results, and when I made him take it, his said the same thing.

One thing I think is that the way people eat food is always evolving. There’s have vegan soul food. There’s meatless burgers. There’s oat milk lattes (even though I still think there’s a lot of sugar but I’m not complaining). I think that people are always finding better ways to present healthy foods, and it’s taking down the common association that “healthy foods” don’t taste as good as unhealthy ones.

find it very interesting to analyze our minds. Our minds are “automatic association machines” and therefore, many thoughts come to mind when we are relating information. Due to our minds functioning in this way, we tend to misremember things. We call these errors mindbugs or “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive.” The question is, are mindbugs less common when we are thinking in our interest. Does the selfishness of a human decrease their risk of error? Mindbugs are interesting because they come in many forms whether it is visually or mentally. It is interesting to evaluate, when are mindbugs crucial within humanity and when are they not?

After taking an implicit bias test, my results are a little expected. I think all humans have a sense of bias within themselves. Bias is how society works and is what our foundation of success is built on. While bias can be harmful it is not preventable. Many people have preferences and there is no way to make all humans neutral on topics. This is interesting because it is what makes society work but what also makes society harmful.

For the Implicit Association Test, I did the Race IAT. My results were what I expected, in the middle with little-no automatic preference, but what surprised (disappointed) me was in the data summary at the end. 24% of participants had a strong automatic preference for European Americans compared to African Americans, with 24% of participants having a moderate preference for European Americans compared to African Americans. This is obviously problematic for many reasons, but what I think about most is how much that must impact the unconscious decisions of people across America. This could be the difference between getting a job or promotion for someone, or even something as mundane as saying hello to someone on the street. I would be curious to see the age demographics, which unfortunately are not provided. I think that they would provide some insight into how biases are across generations, and if they are slowly fading away or still evenly distributed across age. There is also a disclaimer on the site about how this data fluctuates and shouldn’t be used for serious decisions, but I think that the data is relatively accurate based on my experiences and things I’ve learned.

I took the Gender/Career IAT test, and the results I received are exactly what I initially expected (which was that I had “little or no automatic association between female and male with career and family). I think this is due to  not only the fact that I strongly believe in gender equality, but that either Male/Female can be successful in the home with family and/or in a career, and both should live their lives how they choose, not determined by their gender. This is my first time ever taking an IAT test, and to be honest I do not know if this is a good way to test implicit bias. This seems more like a memory test (to remember which word is on either side) rather than to see if you are biased one way or the other. For example, when they switched the sides of “family” and “career”, I started getting a few more answers wrong, but this was not due to implicit bias; it was due to the fact that I kept forgetting the words switched sides.