This class’s readings really opened my eyes to the way “mindbugs” begin, how we can become more aware of them, and how we can combat them. A few things stuck out to me as being particularly interesting. First, I thought the reading did a great job of outlining different types of mindbugs and how they start. For example, it titled the mind as an “automatic association making machine”. In doing this, it shed light on two types of mind bugs: availability and anchoring. The discussion about the words participants read that impacted their moods was eye opening for me. When I read it the first thing I thought about was “If my head is stuck in my phone all day, is this what I want to be anchoring my instinctive reactions to?”<\/p>\n
Next, I was especially interested in the difference in knowing and endorsing stereotypes. I thought the reading did a great job of highlighting the differences between the two. Yes, most of us know about stereotypes and biases, but this reading opened my eyes to how much we really endorse the stereotypes even though we aren’t aware of their presence in our minds and the effect they have on our thoughts, opinions, and behaviors. I had heard about the Amadou Diallo tragedy before, but in reading in in this context, anchored to biases and implicit reactions, I immediately turned introspective. What biases do I not even know I hold, and how will they affect not only my conscious decisions, but more importantly my split second decisions that occur in my subconscious mind where my conscious mind doesn’t have time to intervene?<\/p>\n
Lastly, I appreciated the way the reading offered examples and ways to combat these biases. The most interesting example to me was the blind audition for the Boston Symphony. It seems amazing to me that at the end of the day, music is music, but it truly took literally blindfolding themselves for decision makers here to be more open to female musicians. As the reading mentioned, knowing we have biases is not enough. We have to actively combat these biases with counter stereotypes. Whether it is in our cultures, or our individual choices, as Dr. Bezio mentioned on the podcast, we have to expose ourselves to situations that contradict our deep biases that dictate our outlook on the world. Being open minded and working to gain attention for counter stereotypes is the only real way to make a change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This class’s readings really opened my eyes to the way “mindbugs” begin, how we can become more aware of them, and how we can combat them. A few things stuck out to me as being particularly interesting. First, I thought the reading did a great job of outlining different types of mindbugs and how they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4775,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6174","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\/6174","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\/4775"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6175,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6174\/revisions\/6175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}