In Banaji and Greenwald’s book “Blindspot”, they discuss the different types of lies individuals can tell, organizing them into “shades of truth”.  This in itself was interesting to me because lies and truth are often viewed as opposites.  However, the authors use this play on words to discuss certain lies as manipulations of the truth.  In other words, lies are distortions of the truth.

For me, I found the section “Colorless Lies” to be intriguing. The section discussed a quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, addressing the things individuals experience that they are not willing to admit to themselves, let alone to others.  These things that people keep to themselves are considered “colorless lies” because they are not acknowledged by the individual himself or others, by extension; they are invisible.  I thought this was an interesting inclusion because it isn’t necessarily distorting the truth, but it is omitting some truth from being known; that, in itself, is an untruth.  The authors go on to express how these untruths affect the teller as much as the listener, which is what makes them unique from other types of “lies”.

The different types of lies in Shades of Truth were fascinating to me, especially how they can relate to voting. I am very passionate about politics, and as a result, I sometimes ask friends and family about their political beliefs and for whom they voted or plan to vote. Just like with exit polling, especially in such a polarized political climate, this can result in a fair amount of lies. Take, for example, someone who voted for Trump, who is perceived as a distasteful person by many, especially liberals. If that Trump voter had a liberal family, he might lie. It might be a gray lie, when he’s trying to spare himself the discomfort of having that conversation with his family. It might also be a blue lie, when he believes he is not the stereotypical “Trump voter,” but rather hated the other candidate and was forced to vote for Trump.

Noncognitivists are incorrect in claiming that one can’t make moral arguments. Noncognitivists claim that since it is impossible to make a true or false moral claim, that therefore it is impossible to make a moral statement or argument. However, this isn’t a good argument. Their argument is based on the assumption that one can’t make a true or false moral statement. While that may be true in the absolute scientific sense, people still can absolutely believe that moral claims are true or false. And because they can believe that, they can make arguments for or against those moral claims. Whether that claim can be proven true or false in an absolute sense in irrelevant. Arguments about them can still be made.

I found the Mindbug reading very interesting, especially on page 9-10, where the authors discussed retroactive inference and the misinformation effect. I read a famous book called “Picking Cotton” which is about a man who was wrongfully convicted for rape, yet the woman who was raped identified the man in a line up and was certain it was that man who had raped her. It turns out that the police was swaying her (using specific language and gestures) to get her to convict Ronald Cotton, even though he was not the man who raped her. This is a direct example of the misinformation effect; the police were using selective language to try and compel a witness testimony, which ultimately led to Jennifer “relying on mistaken information” (10) as the truth.

Furthermore, the reading goes on to say how detrimental and dangerous this can be for our criminal justice system because the misinformation effect has led to many cases of wrongful conviction. In Ronald’s case, he spent over ten years in prison for a crime he did not commit. I found this section of the reading the most interesting because this book is one of my favorite books and I immediately saw this as a real life example of the misinformation effect. I wonder, how could we try and reduce this problem in the criminal justice system? This seems like a major problem, since not only are these people sent to jail for a crime they did not commit, but then they have to face the challenges when they get out (no voting rights, hard time getting a steady job/home, poverty…) when they did nothing wrong in the first place.

Additionally, one question that I have for the authors is what they would think about the idea of evolutionary mismatch. Evolutionary mismatch is the idea that we still have traits and we still view certain things as advantageous, because they once were advantageous for small scale societies throughout history, when they are not that beneficial/important in a large scale society. For example, why are we scared of spiders (when they pose no harm) and not cars (where your chance of dying is immensely higher than dying from a spider)? On page 19, the authors state that our social world would be unrecognizable to our ancestors. I very much do agree with this statement and what they had to say about it. However, I wonder what the authors would have to say about evolutionary mismatch and how this applies to mindbugs.

I had never heard of the term mind bug before, but I’ve been exposed to these types of illusions before. On the first day of my 7^th grade woodshop class, my teacher spent the whole period showing us illusions and assigning each one a deeper meaning of why we got it wrong in the first place. I hope he reads this someday because the metaphorical reasons he came up with are not true the reasons our minds trick us. It is interesting to me that mindbugs are a product of evolution. Our brain does this because it helps of survive in the world. However, there are times that this automatic evaluation hurts us and there is no way to turn it off.

The idea of false memories is especially frightening. When it comes to remembering things, I think it is safe to say that a person is going to trust their own memory compared to someone else’s most of the time. But this specific mindbug seems to say that this instinct is wrong. In fact, both people are probably remembering wrong. Differing memories are usually pretty harmless. For example, when two people are arguing over who found a song first or which person agreed to take out the trash the correct answer is not going to have an important effect. However, Blindspot shows that there are very real consequences to faulty memory, like when a person is a witness for a trial. Mistakes are bound to be made when a person’s memory is the only thing to rely on. It makes me happy that we are living in a world of constant videotaping and surveillance because, if nothing else, at least there is a tape to fact check ourselves with some of the time.

Banaji and Greenwald define mindbugs as, “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions.” (4) These habits occur when our retina takes in an image and processes it two-dimensionally instead of three-dimensionally. This misinterpretation of information can have large consequences, as our brain can take in information and apply implicit biases largely due to societal enforced stereotypes without even recognizing them. 

The issues with mindbugs have a much larger scope when there are legal implications. In criminal court cases, eyewitness testimonies can be incredibly convincing to juries, yet, it is difficult to determine how accurate these testimonies are due to the implicit biases that are inherent in our minds. This reminds me of a research study I participated in for my Psychology class last year. In the study, I was placed in a group that was shown a video of a man running away in a dark alley and then cut to a shot of his face for a second and then cut back to the man running away. After viewing this clip, there were six pictures of men on the screen, and the class had to record which man they thought was in the video. The responses were fascinating; as each of the six men was selected by at least one person in the class, and none of the suspects were picked by more than 30% of the class. In both cases, it illustrates how we cannot fully trust our brains to always accurately process information, either due to our ingrained habits or lack of context. This study along with our reading this week demonstrated to me that eye-witness testimonies should not always be given such high consideration, as they do not give insight into what kind of mindbugs the individual may have. Although we may not be able to control our mindbugs, being cognizant of their presence and their implications can at least make us think more critically about how we perceive our surroundings.

As I was reading the pages from Blindspot, the examples being used seemed eerily familiar to me. I felt as though I had read the book before. In high school, I get through a two year time period where I read a couple nonfiction books on how the mind works. The pages from these books, or at least the examples they used, kept popping up everywhere, from the AP Language and Composition exam to lectures in college. Particularly, the first example used in the passage from Blindspot, the table example, is also used in Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph T. Hallinan. Likewise, the various wordings of the car crash example is also used in Bounce by Matthew Syed. Many of the memory examples used in Blindspot had similar examples in both of these other books. 

While I have continued to notice these examples being used in different contexts around me, I do not think that the way I perceive the world has changed much. I have not thought that I experience the same memory issues as shown with the “mindbugs.” I have not actively thought about the perceptions I make have just because my mind is unable to comprehend the entire picture. However, in seeing the examples and explanations pop up again, I think I should actually begin taking it to heart. In my daily life but also in my academic life. I should actively realize the mind fills in pieces of information when reading articles and, therefore, the information I remember may not be the information that was actually presented to me. Ultimately, I believe that I have experienced these arguments too many times to not see the merit behind them. 

I absolutely hate mindbugs! It’s kinda scary that memory mindbugs can cause us to have false memories. When the reading was discussing how the memory mindbugs can affect us when being interrogated about a crime, it reminded me about a show I had watched a while ago. In the show, the cops were interrogating a girl who had come to report a sexual assault and there was very little physical evidence to support her claim and she kept mixing up the order of small details in her story. Clearly, this was the work of her memory mindbugs and the trauma from what had just happened to her, but the cops were not taking this into account and got her to recant her statement. Later that day her friends encouraged her not to be intimidated by the cops so they took her back to the station so she could remake her statement but the cops were yelling at her again and were making her memory mindbugs even worse so she once again recanted her statement and the cops warned her not to come back again. 8 years later some evidence came up and proved that the cops wrong but this was a clear case of memory mindbugs and this was based on a true story which makes me so mad because cops should be trained to know that mindbugs exist and know the times that our brains are most vulnerable to them. I think this also exemplifies how mindbugs can be activated by the way that the questions are being phrased or asked to you. My aunt also works for child protective services and we were talking about polygraph tests one day since we had learned about them in my LDST 102 class and she was telling me that the results don’t only depend on how the person being tested is responding but the results can also be skewed depending on how the interrogator is phrasing the questions. I thought it was very interesting that mindbugs are so much more prevalent in our lives than we think they are because I usually only think of them in terms of mind games and visual illusions but really they affect us almost every day of our lives.

Katelyn Inkman

In the Blindspot reading, the “Mindbugs” chapter was so interesting as I had never heard of this concept before. Mindbugs, or “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions” certainly pertains to this course (4). In becoming effective consumers of information, we need to be wary of these mindbugs. In understanding these errors, Hermann von Helmholtz describes the “unconscious inference” by which our visual system is tricked (6). I did not even think of this in how we process words– as for my classes pretty much all I do is read books and empirical articles! Now I wonder if I have ever fallen victim to mindbugs when processing information. Mindbugs also have the power to “produce greater recollection of things that didn’t occur than of things that did occur” and I have definitely been susceptible to this on exams that required me to pull from my short-term memory, such as a vocabulary quiz, where I tried to pull more information than was actually needed (9). While a quiz is not a big deal, the author mentions that mindbugs can come into play in criminal cases; I am taking a child development class right now and we discuss child eyewitness testimony was at times, children false report things they did not see. This can have extreme behavioral impacts on the witness’s reporting and can even lead to punishments to occur (like the death penalty) for someone who may have been falsely convicted…

Anna Marston

“Mindbugs – ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions” 

Mindbugs are reminiscent of another trick of the brain; implicit biases. Implicit biases “refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner” . Implicit biases are mindbugs on a higher scale of how the brain can negatively perceive a situation. In the article’s case, all that was at stake was misjudging the equal size of two shapes, but what about when it comes to the equal rights of two humans? We are all created equal but our society enforces stereotypes to build the implicit biases that some races are superior to others. This is a major issue especially  when it comes to the label and biases of criminality. For example, the identification of a criminal as the “dangerous black criminal”. Criminality is not a label created by existing behind the bars of a cell, but a label that can be given to individuals before they are even born. It is the predetermined conception of who these individuals are supposed to be, ultimately shaping who they become. Mindbugs or implicit biases exist are not correct responses but rather automatic responses to the world being filtered in. Our job is not to take in the world without speculation but to relentlessly question without hesitation.