Members in the Media
From: NPR

How The Concept Of Implicit Bias Came Into Being

NPR:

Implicit bias – that term has been used a lot lately after several high-profile shootings of black men by police.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

And it’s also become a divisive topic in this presidential election. The term refers to how attitudes or stereotypes can affect what we say and do without a person being conscious of it.

MONTAGNE: To find out more about where this concept comes from, we turn to Mahzarin Banaji. She and another psychologist, Anthony Greenwald, wrote a book called “Blindspot,” outlining a theory they came up with 20 years ago known as implicit bias. And she told us about the moment she realized our decisions are guided by forces we’re not even aware of.

MAHZARIN BANAJI: So just to go back a little bit to the beginning, in the late 1990s, I did a very simple experiment with Tony Greenwald in which I was to quickly associate dark-skinned faces – faces of black Americans – with negative words. I had to use a computer key whenever I saw a black face or a negative word, like devil or bomb, war, things like that.

Read the whole story: NPR

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