On Page 105, the author states that those with “greatest education carry as strong an implicit Black=weapons stereotype as do those with least education.” This result was most shocking to me because it reveals how engrained this belief is within society. It is scary to think that just because you are black, you are more associated with violence than white people. We can see the detrimental affects of this mindset today, with mass incarceration at its highest point and the lack of change associated with this. Furthermore, it is also concerning to see how education does not even affect this. I have learned about stereotypes and structural discrimination in many of my classes. How does education not change these stereotypes and beliefs? What can we do about this?

Furthermore, it was interesting to read about the gender stereotype test. Last year, I took the Harvard Implicit Bias test about women and careers and I scored that I had an implicit bias to associate men with careers. I was shocked by this result, especially since I am a woman who is going to pursue a career and not restrict myself to the home. My results are a direct example of the stereotype threat described on page 111. I underperformed on the test, even though that is not truly how I feel or what I believe. It is interesting to see a personal connection between this idea and me.

I took the implicit bias test associated with gay and straight people. To be honest, I very much dislike these tests. I understand how they are supposed to reveal that is is easier to group one group with good and one group with bad, but I just do not think that that is indicative of my implicit bias. I actually tested that I had a stronger preference for gay people than straight people because I was faster at associating gay people with good than gay people with bad. I have taken a lot of these quizzes and I do see their value in establishing implicit bias. But I do not think that this is the strongest way to determine implicit bias. I want to take more quizzes to see my answers for different sections. I was not surprised with my results but I wonder if that would change for other tests. However, I just do not think that clicking buttons faster should determine my implicit bias. I wonder, what other ways would be better at determining implicit bias? Or is this the most effective?

What is so intriguing to me is that although there are no preset standards of what is morally correct and what is not, there is still this association with certain terms that imply and help us identify what is considered morally good or bad. Though these words are supposed to be used to help indicate a moral argument, I believe they are also valuable in demonstrating how even though morality is objectionable, there is still a common sense of conventional knowledge surrounding certain ideas. 

Further I also think that the discussion of the murky territory between values and morals is interesting and yet sort of troubling. In the article the authors include the claim that everything an individual does is dependent on moral claims and that when one partakes in a specific action it is because they value some aspect of whatever it is that they are doing. This is significant, and particularly interesting to me, for the simple fact that terms like values are so loosely interpreted and objectionable and are yet still being used in correlation with other relative terms. 

All in all, I think the article is extremely valuable and useful for the indication and interpretation of moral arguments as it pertains to critical thinking.

I thoroughly enjoyed this reading and loved how it related to psychology. I am absolutely fascinated by human behavior and the way in which the mind works. The article discussed a lot of very interesting topics but the one that stood out to me the most was false identification, impression management, and blue lies. The reason why false identification stood out to me is because it strongly relates to another psychological principle of the same race effect. In high school, we learned about this pertaining to a rape case in which a black man raped a white female. Due to the fact that African Americans are a minority group in the US, unfortunately, play into this psychological principle in which it is hard to decipher between two similar-looking black men. In the example, I learned in high school a white woman wrongfully convicted a black man or raping her. In the example they use in the text, they discuss the words hit vs. smashed to estimate speeds at which the cars were traveling. The ones who were asked what was the approximate speed of the car when it smashed into the other said that the speed at which they hit was faster than those who were asked what was the speed at which it hit? The reason why impression management stood out to me is because the example they used in the text related to implicit biases and combating them. When a black aide was in the room people said that blacks were not dumber than whites and that inter-racial marriage was most certainly acceptable. Whereas when there was a white aide in the room more people said blacks were dumber than whites and inter-racial marriage was not ok. Showing that when the black male was in the room they were trying to combat bias. The last principle that stood out to me was blue lies. Blue lies are told by people in an attempt to help themselves or their group to be seen by others as to how they see themselves.

In Blindspot, the authors discussed how favoring in-group members contributes to discrimination. This could be seen in selecting a family friend for a job application over a better applicant. Instead of someone being picked for their merit or skill, a person is picked for their relationship and similarity to the friend that is hiring. While this is done frequently in the corporate world, it would be unthinkable for doctors to choose certain people for medical treatment over others. This in-group favoritism reveals the discrepancies occurring across different industries.

This reading struck me because I was someone who benefited from this process. During last summer, I did an internship in Arlington, Virginia. Before I had applied, I had known the manager of the company since they had worked with my mom. I still submitted an application and interviewed; however, it is undeniable that I had an advantage compared to other applicants. This reading showed that while this manager showed kindness towards me, he  potentially did not hire someone who could have been better at the job than me. The issue is that this happens everyday across the world. This does not make it right, but it highlights how many of us contribute to in-group discrimination. The class of 2020 at UR most certainly has some individuals who have acquired jobs through personal connections.  In order to find a solution to this problem, we need to reflect deeper about how we are benefiting from in-group favoritism in our daily lives.

I took the Gender-Science test and was a little surprised by the results. I got a strong automatic association for male with liberal arts and female with science. According to other people’s results, I’m in the 1%, and I really thought that I would have an implicit bias towards the opposite. In trying to figure out why I got what I did, it could be because I’ve taken several philosophy and literature courses both here and in high school, and I really can’t remember ever reading texts from a female author. When it comes to STEM, my schools have always done a good job of encouraging girls to go into the sciences, so maybe my biases have changed from that. Although I think I do normally associate males with things like math and engineering, I’ve been scarred (harsh word but true) so much from those philosophy and literature courses that I may just associate liberal arts with the male authors I had to read.

For my implicit bias test, I chose to take the Gender-Career Task test. The Harvard website describes this as a test that “often reveals a relative link between family and females and between career and males,” and I was curious to test my implicit biases regarding this topic. Last semester, I took a class called Gender and Work where we spoke in-depth about gender stereotypes in the workplace, so I wanted to see if I conformed to these implicit biases.

My results were: Your result is described as an “Automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family” if you were faster responding when Career and Male are assigned to the same response key than when Career and Female were classified with the same key. Your score is described as an “Automatic association for Female with Career and Male with Family if the opposite occurred. Your automatic preference may be described as “slight”, “moderate”, “strong”, or “no preference”. This indicates the strength of your automatic preference.

I am not surprised with my results because I grew up with a pretty heteronormative, male-dominant family structure where my parents filled pretty traditional gender roles. My father is the main breadwinner for my family and my mom worked part-time after she had kids to take care of my siblings and me. While I am now well-aware that this is not the familial structure for many other families, before taking WGSS/Leadership classes at college I couldn’t envision a family structure any differently than I had it. It is often hard thinking about for women whether they want to rear children or continue on a full-time career path because they are often the ones giving up their careers to become full-time mothers (and there is nothing wrong with this!). My implicit biases show that I intrinsically associate careers with male figures and the family with female figures, but not super strong, so I figure I can continue to challenge these implicit biases in my lifetime and learn during Critical Thinking how to address stereotypes when analyzing sources/information.

Anna Marston

I found the “Blind” article by Banaji and Greewald about “mindbugs” very interesting. I have been exposed to a lot of logic puzzles and brain twisters involving things being the size, color, etc. before, so that portion did not surprise me. Neither did the fact that eyewitnesses make mistakes because I’ve heard and read a lot about the wrongful convictions and the Innocence Project specifically. What did surprise me was just how easily our brains can be led. When people talk about “leading questions,” I assumed they went something like “You were there, weren’t you?” or “Do you remember seeing this man kill this girl?”. I did not realize that very simple modifications in word choice, like smash vs. hit, or adding more descriptions can modify someone’s memory.

The portion of the article about making snap judgements based on how people look reminded me of the concept of inherent biases. There is actually a test run by Harvard University known as the Implicit Bias Test. (I tried to find the difference between inherent biases and implicit biases but struggled to find a clear distinguisher, so I am operating as if they are the same. If someone could point out the difference between them, I would appreciate it.) This test is supposed to expose your preferences between two different characteristics i.e. white vs. black, old vs. young, varying body types, etc. The end result tells you if you have a strong or light preference towards one of the options or if you are neutral; I think knowing these bits of information is very important to counterattacking these kind of “mindbugs” that Banaji and Greenwald talked about in their article because knowing the associations that you have in your head can help you a) not place an extreme amount of trust in the hands of someone you don’t know just because of their identity and b) counteract those prejudices that you hold, even if subconsciously.

I found the reading on Mindbugs fascinating, especially the idea of how our memory can heavily affect what we consider to be reality. For example, the misinformation effect is something that can have large consequences in certain situations. I am very interested in studying the structure and flaws of our criminal justice system. Considering how many people are wrongfully convicted of crimes that they did not commit, it leads me to question why we continue to rely on something as unpredictable and subjective as eyewitness testimonies as much as we do. The fact that even the smallest language change can shift our perception and reality is scary to me. I can’t even begin to count how many times my family and I will argue over details in even the most minor stories. We all have different versions of the same event and are convinced that the way we remember it is correct. Applying that idea to a larger scale, like the criminal justice system in the U.S. is very problematic, and has the ability to affect the lives of so many individuals.

I thought these readings were really interesting. I have always found the idea of moral arguments fascinating. These articles, the first one specifically, showed me some things about moral issues that I didn’t know before. I did not know that there were so many different kinds of moral arguments. I just think its really interesting how scientific it makes moral arguments. Their methods take some of the moral emotions out of the arguments. When people talk about moral issues often times it results in an extremely emotional conversation instead of a rational, calm argument. This article helps negate that issue a little bit. By calling It action A it makes it sound more scientific and less like an emotional issue. I thought the second article was also interesting to read. I’ve never heard of optical allusions and stuff like that being called mind bugs and I thought was a new way for me to look at stuff like that.