I found the \u201cBlind\u201d article by Banaji and Greewald about \u201cmindbugs\u201d 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\u2019ve 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 \u201cleading questions,\u201d I assumed they went something like \u201cYou were there, weren\u2019t you?\u201d or \u201cDo you remember seeing this man kill this girl?\u201d. I did not realize that very simple modifications in word choice, like smash vs. hit, or adding more descriptions can modify someone\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmindbugs\u201d 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\u2019t know just because of their identity and b) counteract those prejudices that you hold, even if subconsciously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I found the \u201cBlind\u201d article by Banaji and Greewald about \u201cmindbugs\u201d 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\u2019ve heard and read a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}