November 10, 2018 • 38 mins
How deep-seated are today's racial issues? In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Julie Douglas explore how something so abstract - like unconscious racial biases - can have real-world implications. (Originally published March 31, 2015)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
It's time for a vault episode. So I think today
we're running an episode that you and Julie did back
in When was this one? Yeah, this would have been March.
And you know it's a pretty serious and sober episode
titled The Gordian Knot of Race. The deals with a
(00:27):
lot of issues related to unconscious racial bias. So this
episode is obviously a few years old at this point,
but the content holds up really well. I think it's
just as relatable today as it was. Alright, well, I
guess let's jump right into the episode. Welcome to Stuff
(00:48):
to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Julie duck List. And as promised,
this episode is all about race. That's right, we promised
to bring you the Gordian Knot of race and Gordian Knot.
(01:09):
We use that phrase because in Greek and Roman mythology,
the Gordian knot was an extremely complicated knot tied by
Gordius a king in Asia Minor. And this knot has
come to symbolize a complicated and seemingly unsolvable problem. But
here's the crux here. If you want to solve it,
it requires novel and bold actions. And we're trotting out
(01:33):
this metaphor today because we're discussing the Gordian knot of
race as it exists here in the United States. Yes,
here in the United States where we have a black president.
And as will discuss how I just framed, the problem
is in itself a slippery slope of logic that leads
to questions like, well, how can racial inequity exist in
(01:56):
a country with a black president? Right? Because this is
the idea that, after all this outward evidence of racism,
isn't there anymore? Right, that we feel like maybe racism
has receded into the shadows and something like the klu
Klex Klan. They're not hanging out visibly anymore at least,
and that leads us to something even more pernicious, and
(02:20):
it's called racism without racists. Yeah. You know, you mentioned
the bold actions of solving the Gordian not earlier. Uh,
And of course the classic example of that is that
Alexander the Great shows up and just cuts it in
half and says, hey, I solved or not? And you
know that works in the Greek myth. But with with
with racism, you see some you see a number of
(02:41):
different false uh solvings of the of the riddles, of
false unravelings of the knot. For instance, the sort of
Alexander the Great move of cutting it in half is
sort of like saying, hey, well, look, there are no
overt racist in my immediate sphere of influences, there are
no overt race this in my workplace. Um. And and
(03:02):
then in this leads to people saying such kind of
stupendous things as, oh, we live in a post racist world,
a post race world. And of course all of that's
uh completely false, um. Because even if you do not
have overt racism, if you don't have uh, you know,
hate groups in your immediate midst um with you know,
(03:22):
outright and open discrimination in your workplace, etcetera, you still
have the reality of unsuspecting people who see the world
through a racially biased lens. That's right, because you have
subtler forms of racism, and it persists within the cultural fabric.
As we'll discussed today. Sun Heel Milanovon is a professor
(03:43):
of economics at Harvard, and in an opinion piece for
The New York Times, he articulated this problem of racism
without racist quote ugly. Pockets of conscious bigotry remain in
this country, but most discrimination is more insidious. The urge
to find and call out the biggot is powerful, and
doing so is satisfying, but it is also a way
(04:05):
to let ourselves off the hook. Rather than point fingers outward,
we should look inward and examine how, despite best intentions,
we discriminate in ways big and small. So while there
may be good intentions behind this notion of sin no color,
it actually does a disservice to trying to achieve equality. Yeah,
and I think that Stephen Colbert always did a great
(04:26):
job of that on the Colbert Report. Um he had
the recurring bit where he would say, I don't see race.
People tell me I'm white because X, and then there
would be some sort of punchline that implied the the
the the innate racism of Stephen Colbert, the character um
because yet to say that you don't see race, that
race doesn't factor into your uh, into your daily life
(04:49):
even into your perception of those around you. It is ludicrous,
uh because when you when is we're going to discuss
in this episode, when you when you look below the surface,
there is there is a lot going on there. Um,
there's there is a tremendous amount of a scientific research
that shows that people do uh notice race, gender, wealth, weight, etcetera.
(05:11):
That we see all of these things, even if we
don't want to believe that we see these things, we
see them and we factor them into our judgments of others.
Right now, according to psychologist Daniel Kahman, we think both
fast and slow, fast meaning that we rely on patterns
that determine unconscious decision making that we call sometimes intuitive
(05:32):
judgment and slow meaning the couple of factors that were
actively consciously weighing when we're making a decision. And within
this configuration there is something called implicit bias and that
plays directly into fast thinking. Now, the National Center for
State Courts Rights that, unlike explicit bias, which reflects the
(05:54):
attitudes or beliefs that one endorses at a conscious level,
implicit bias is the bias and judgment and or behavior
that results from subtle cognitive processes so implicit attitudes and
implicit stereotypes, and that they often operate at a level
below conscious awareness and without intentional control, And that these
sort of implicit biases they develop over time, and usually
(06:18):
it's because of some sort of social connection. This can
be your family and the sort of implicit bias that
they may have that you have assumed for yourself. It
can be your friends, it can be um, just people
that you even look up to and what their views are. Now,
you could also have it from an accumulation of personal experience,
(06:39):
and um, I'm talking about experiences that connect certain racial
groups with fear or other negative effects. The National Center
for State Courts talks about a study in which white
individuals who scored highly on measures of implicit racial bias
also reacted to images of unfamiliar black faces with stronger
(07:00):
amygdala activation. So we've talked about this before. The amygdala
is associated with emotional learning and fear conditioning. So you
see implicit bias played out in that way, those kind
of associations which played directly into brain processes. And then
you know that people share a common social understanding of stereotypes.
So again here is implicit bias kind of leaking into
(07:23):
the cultural fabrics. So maybe you don't subscribe to that
particular stereotype, but the fact that it's in our culture
and it may be bandied about means that you may
be passively absorbing it into your own worldview. Yeah, I mean,
they're like symbols, which we've discussed at length before. The
symbol is out there, and the symbol is is informing
(07:45):
your mind uh at times at a subconscious level. And
the same can be said of any of these, uh,
these various stereotypes for different racial groups. Again, patterns at
the subconscious level. And then there's something called implicit egoism,
which is basically we that we tend to prefer people
like ourselves, however we define that, and at the surface
(08:05):
level that tends to be how we look. So there
there are those different ways that implicit bias begins to
seep into our lives. Now, when it comes to measuring
implicit bias, we have a very handy and uh and
proven tool at our disposal. Um. It comes to us
from University of Washington psychology professor Anthony Greenwald created the
(08:29):
Implicit Association Test or the I A T. And and
he and a few associates. Uh, they put it out there.
They they continue to develop it. And since they initially
rolled it out, the test has been used in more
than one thousand research studies around the world, and more
than ten million versions of the tests have been completed.
UM at an internet site that we're gonna have a
(08:50):
call out for later. UM with the I A t
and and I encourage everyone to take it. We we
both took it and it's a very it's a very
interesting experience. Uh. And you'll see wines I explain it here. Um.
You have to categorize a sequence of words or images
such as a black face or a white face, and
words uh as such as good bad by pressing one
(09:14):
of two labeled buttons. So, for instance, you might be
instructed to press the left button when you see a
black face or whenever a negative word appears. Okay, So, um,
you know, black face shows up, push that left button.
The word distrustful shows up, you push that left button,
then the right button, then you press the right button
when you see a white face or a positive words
(09:35):
a white face, trustworthy or some word of that nature.
But then they flip it around. Okay, so you have
to press one button for black positive and one for
white negative. Um. And then and this is where the
the interference effects come into play. Individuals who associate black
with bad will respond much more slowly when black and
(09:56):
good share the same response button. Now, UM, I don't
know if you have the same experience when you were
taking this online, but uh, and again I was coming
into this after reading about how it works. But you
really do kind of feel your mind being pulled in
half on some of these where you're having to to
stop and think, all right, wait, which which side am
I am I associating this word with versus versus the
(10:18):
other side. Yeah, it's kind of like the Stroop test
in that way because it really, uh, it really takes
a lot of attention because you already have that pattern
down and so they begin messing with the pattern. And
that's where they find that space where they can kind
of ferret out your the delay time, right, and also
your choices because sometimes you'll get it wrong and it
(10:39):
would tell you, right, give me the wrong choice. Um,
And it gives you a bit of insight, but there
also gives you, I think about five ten questions about
just your general feelings about politics. Right. And then later
on more specifically about how you feel about UM Europeans
(11:02):
versus African Americans and so on and so forth. So
some of it you do have to try to bring
a bit of awareness to what your feelings are and
you have to be really honest about it too. Yeah,
and it doesn't take long at all to to fill
it out. But it's amazing how much depth it has,
especially you know, if you're just comparing it to you know,
which X men are you tests on on on the internet. UM. Now, again,
(11:26):
since this was initially rolled out, UM has been used
a lot, and the and the status really back up
its effectiveness. UM. In fact, when it comes to race,
seventy percent of those who took a version of the
test that measures racial attitudes have an unconscious or implicit
preference for white people compared to blacks. And you can
compare that to a twenty percent self reporting percentile. So
(11:47):
the individuals who who took this particular version of the
test of them are are are self reporting that they
prefer the white uh faces, that they have a preference
for the white faces, but seventy or actually proving that
out based on their delay times, so the reporting isn't
adding up to what their actual actions are, right, and
this shows how they're really cutting into with this test.
(12:10):
They're really cutting into that implicit bias, to that level
of bias that we're not aware of in our daily life,
that's just going on under the surface of our conscious cognition. Now,
a two thousand nine meta analysis headed by Anthony Greenwald,
who of course UH invented the thing. UH, looked at
one and twenty two published and unpublished reports of a
(12:31):
hundred and eighty four different research studies, and they found
that in socially sensitive areas, especially black white interracial behavior,
the test had significantly greater predictive value than self reports. Again,
that's seventy verses twenty and we mentioned overall UH. This
meta analysis study looked at numerous uses of the I
A T including consumer preference, black white interracial behavior, personality differences,
(12:56):
clinical phenomena, alcohol and drug use, non racial inner group ahavior,
gender and sexual orientation, close relationships, and political preferences, and
across all nine of these areas, measures of the test
were useful in predicting social behavior. Now, it's worth noting
that in consumer and political preferences, both self reporting and
implicit measures effectively predicted the behavior, but self reports had
(13:21):
significantly greater predictive validity. So again, this test kind of
serves to to prove out how much of our decision
making and judgment UH is taking place below the surface.
I mean, the good news is that implicit by us
is malleable to some degree, and it's responsive to the
person's motives and environments. And we'll talk about that more later. Yeah,
(13:49):
let's talk about empathy, which is, of course is one
of the most important factors in untying and unraveling that
hideous knot. Yeah, and and also an important factor in
just being one of the cornerstones of humanity, right, Like
that's part of the whole cooperative where we're all signing
into this agreement that we're going to try to help
and support each other as much as possible. Well, not
(14:10):
all of us have signed that, but you know, generally
that's the idea in trying to survive as a species.
So you would think that empathy would be hardwired in
all of us into some degree. It is, but it
maybe that levels of empathy exist now. In a two
thousand and thirteen study called Racial Bias and Perceptions of
(14:32):
Others pain by try Walter at all. This idea of
the racial empathy gap was explored. The researchers as participants
to rate how much pain they would feel in eighteen
different scenarios. We're talking about anywhere from stubbing your toe
to getting shampoo in your eye. Yeah, the worst is
the worst. Uh. Then they rated how another person a
(14:56):
randomly assigned photo of an experimental target would feel in
the same situation. And sometimes the target was white, sometimes black,
and each experiment, the researchers found that white participants, black participants,
and nurses and nursing students assumed that blacks felt less
pain than whites, and the researchers were really interested in that,
(15:20):
particularly like why why other black people might think that
black people experience pain less and so um. They did
some follow up studies trying to drill down a bit
more as to the cause here, and they found that
the more privilege assumed of the target, the more pain
(15:40):
the participants perceived for that person. So this is very
closely tied to race because we're talking about privilege and um,
you know, the socio economic status of that person and
the reason for this misperception of pain. This idea that
black people could endure more pain or have less pain
(16:04):
was directly related to this assumption that that because black
people face more hardships, they wouldn't feel as much pain.
This was their conclusion. So basically, at the subconscious level,
the brain is saying that person has experienced more pain
in their life probably and therefore they're a little more
used to pain. They can they can handle it right.
(16:25):
And again they bring up the semantics here because they're
talking more about privileged people versus nonprivileged people. But they're
also seeing the racial bias here because the assumption with
the stereotype also is that the less privileged person would
be the black person. Gotcha. Now, Additional studies have looked
into this situation, including a two thousand ten Italian study
(16:50):
from Seppends University in Rome. And this study took both
Italians and UH and and black Italians Italians of African descent,
and they watched short films depicting needles penetrating a person's
hand or a Q tip gently touching the same spot
UH and then they measured their their in their their
(17:12):
their empathetic response to that bit of footage. So the
results which line up with what we've been discussing here,
people watching the painful episode responded in a way that
was specific to the particular muscle they saw being stimulated.
When the film character was of the same race, but
those of a different race, uh, it didn't it didn't
evoke the same senseo motor response. Now, they conducted further
(17:35):
studies where the researchers tested individuals responses to pain inflicted
on models with violet hands. Now that I read this
is violent ones initially in the study, which really threw
me off, but violet colored hands. So they essentially are
throwing in a third non existent race of violet colored
people here. Okay, So in and in these cases, the
(17:56):
participants empathetic response was restored. So in other word, since
they have no script for what violet colored people would,
uh would deal with in terms of pain in their life,
they just revert to normal. They're like me, which is
an interesting and interesting fact to it. And then there's
a two thousand and fourteen University of Virginia psychology study
(18:17):
that looked at children. Specifically, they looked at American children
between seven and ten, and specifically they looked at American children,
and they found that children between seven and ten reported
that black children feel less pain than white children. Uh
So here we see explicit bias emerging um in early childhood. Now,
(18:37):
there's zero evidence for racial bias in this study among
study participants at the age of five and younger, but
the bias began showing up among participants at the age
of seven and then became prominent at the age of ten.
So this is this is an area that the researchers
are still exploring because obviously, as we've discussed, we have
the the explanation that well, it's based on on what
(18:59):
you you think the the personal history for an individual
of this race is and where they fall on the
socioeconomic spectrum. But it's uh, you know, it's kind of
a lot to expect that level of of judgment going
on with children that are seven to ten, Right, So,
to what extent is that going on, or to what
extent is this tied to explicit egoism. It's a good question.
(19:21):
It's just it's a pretty stunning study because to know
that children that young would be developing those ideas and
expressing them, at least unconsciously or even overtly, is really
disturbing and I think kind of parts the curtain of
the curtains of the brain to give us more insight
(19:42):
into how things are working under cover. Jason Silverstein and
his article on this very topic wrote, quote, the racial
empathy gap helps explain disparities and everything from pain management
to the criminal justice system. But the problem isn't just
that will disregard the pain of black people. It's somehow
(20:03):
even worse. The problem is that the pain isn't even felt.
In other words, empathy is not being engaged. And when
empathy isn't being engaged, then you're objectifying that person. And
that's that's where your your cornerstone of humanity is crumbling. Yeah, so,
I mean, I mean it plays into everything from you
(20:23):
see a story about some sort of misfortune happening to
an individual of another race on television, and you're less
involved in the story. Uh. It plays into your just
your your ability to interact with everyone around you, like,
are you engaging with the same level of empathy? Are
you on the same page? Are you giving the same
value to everyone in your surroundings? No? And that's what
(20:46):
was so interesting about that implicit association test that I
a t that I took, is that Yeah, I uh
suspected that I would have some racial biases, but and
I came out as slight on the test. They don't say, hey,
you're a racist, say that you have a slight preference
for European Americans. Um, but still like that's it's unsettling
(21:07):
to think that this may have been playing out in
different ways that I operate in the world. And so
that's why I think it's so important for people to
try to to drill down a bit into themselves and
figure out how it might be playing out, because this
would make the difference. You have searched for a house before, yes, yes,
(21:29):
a couple of times. Yeah, the grueling work of trying
to find some sort of housing. And it turns out
that again, the racial bias exists here in the housing market.
John Taylor, the president and chief executive the National Community
Reinvestment Coalition, which helps improve housing and underserved communities, told
(21:50):
The New York Times in an interview that polling shows
that many Americans think financially stable customers have the same
opportunities to obtain good housing regard lists of race. Again,
this is the c no color logic, right, and this
just isn't so because there is a two thousand and
thirteen national study that was commissioned by the Federal Department
(22:11):
of Housing and Urban Development, and they found some startling inequities. Um.
They had eight thousand tests. Here, they had one white
and one minority tester of the same gender and age,
posing as equally well qualified renters or buyers, visiting the
same housing provider or agent, and in more than half
(22:33):
of the test cases, both testers were shown the same
number of apartments or homes, but in cases where one
tester was shown more homes or apartments, the white tester
was usually favored, leading to a higher number of units
shown to whites and overall, black perspective, runners were presented
eleven percent fewer rentals than whites, Hispanics about twelve percent
(22:56):
fewer rentals, and Asians about ten percent fewer rentals, and
as person spective buyers, blacks were presented presented seventeen percent
fewer homes and Asians fewer homes. So UM, what's interesting
about this is that it plays out in individual scenarios,
and you can look at that information if you want.
You can see these individual scenarios where UM, once the UH,
(23:19):
the real estate agent found out that this person was black,
or Hispanic they would actually cancel the appointments, so there
were canceled appointments and so on and so forth. But
what they also found is that white testers were more
frequently offered lower rents, told that deposits and other moving
costs were negotiable or were quoted a lower price, and
(23:40):
taking into account fees, deposits from rents, apartments were more
likely to cost white slightly less in the first year
rental than blacks might pay. So it's not it's it's
it's an issue of access to housing, but it's also
an issue to the cost of housing as well. And
by the way, these tests were performed in twenty eight
metropolitan areas with no substantial difference across cities or regions.
(24:05):
And it's not just housing. There was a study by
Ian Iris and Peter Siegelman, and they found that more
than three hundred paired audits at new car dealerships revealed
that dealers quoted significantly lower prices to white males than
to black or female test buyers, and they were using
the identical scripted bargaining strategies for the same model of car. Okay,
(24:28):
so there was no variation in here because they were
trying to do the exact UH replicated scenario over and
over again. The only difference, of course was gender and race,
and the black test buyers were offered initial prices roughly
seven hundred dollars higher, and they received far smaller concessions.
So you know, this sort of bells and whistles that
(24:49):
a dealer might throw in on a car for you.
You know, and we, of course we also see implicit
bias come into play in the workplace, whether one gets
a job or not, whether one is paid an appropriate
amount and amount that is on the level with other
individuals with the same skill set, expertise, etcetera. UM. For instance,
(25:13):
just to look at us, some quick census stats from
two thousand thirteen U S Census stats, UM, black men
were paid seventy of what white men were paid. White women,
by the way, we're paid seventy eight percent of what
white men were paid, and UH African American women were
paid sixty of what white men were paid. But that's
(25:33):
once the paycheck is actually in play. When it comes
to even just getting a job and having the chance
to have a fair shot at a position, UM, the
bias comes into play in some some really startling ways. Uh.
There are a couple of studies that look at this. One.
It's a two thousand three study titled are Emily and
Greg more Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment
(25:54):
on labor market discrimination. This was published in American Economic Review,
and it casts some in resting light on all of this. Now,
what they did. The researchers mailed out thousands of resumes
to employers with job openings and and measured which ones
were selected for callbacks for interviews. Some of these were
randomly tagged with stereotypically African American names, such as the
(26:15):
title suggests Jamal or Lakisha, and some with stereotypically white
names like like Emily or Greg. Okay, So what they
found was that the same resume was roughly fifty percent
more likely to result in a callback for an interview
if they had a white name. And then, in two
(26:36):
thousand nine, another study actually tried this out in person.
They sent in actual people for low wage job interviews,
identical resumes, identical interview training, and yet they found that
African American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs
at the at a rate as low as white applicants
with a criminal record. Now, in terms of discriminating against
(27:00):
African American names, we can also look to healthcare and
we see a study supporting this bias. At two national conferences,
when seven and twenty doctors were shown patient histories and
asked to make judgments about heart disease, they were much
less likely to recommend cardiac catholization, which would be a
(27:21):
really helpful procedure to black patients, even when their medical
files were statistically identical to those of white patients. Now,
there's another study about racial bias in healthcare, and this
one that takes more of a generational approach, and it's interesting. Um,
there were two d two first year medical students at
(27:44):
Johns Hopkins who participated in implicit association tests. All right,
that was the test that we talked about earlier. Sixty
had an unconscious biased toward whites and four innately favored blacks.
They also determined the eighties six percent of the students
had subconsciously favored upper class people. Again, there's that that
(28:05):
privileged bias there, while just three percent showed a preference
for those of a lower cap class. So here's the
thing about the first year med school students. They found
that the unconscious preferences of students did not affect how
they assessed or treated patients of various races and incomes
depicted in the scenarios. And this is good news because
what this is saying is that this generation may have
(28:29):
been exposed to educational curriculum focused on cultural competency and
that helped them to improve their awareness in the management
of their unconscious preferences. So while the racial bias existed,
their behaviors stemming from it, uh, we're not affected, which
is a bit of a bright spot in all of
(28:50):
this information. Yeah, I mean that's that's definitely a bright spot.
But yeah, when you start breaking down like all the
ways that that racial bias explicit and implicit um disadvantage
an individual, I mean, it's really staggering because we've talked
about studies that have looked into how it affects the
(29:11):
purchase of a vehicle, the renning of an apartment, acquiring
a job, but other studies have looked at how it
negatively impacts a person of of colors ability to get
a response from their legislator. Here back about research opportunities
at a university received fair treatment from a jury. Uh.
One study even found that a white hand holding an
(29:32):
iPod received more offers than a black hand holding the
same iPod on eBay. So yeah, it ends up impacting
like pretty much every area of your life, you know, healthcare, schools,
every and interaction comes with a potential handicap. All the
little things we in life that we take for granted,
(29:52):
and as well as the big things like dealing with
employment and and uh and and and law enforcement. It's
it's staggering. Well. And the housing thing I thought was
particularly unsettling because not only are people given less choices,
they were sometimes shuttled into different communities. And so you know,
the real estate agents or the real estate companies were
(30:15):
actually trying to get you know, the their black clients
to go into black neighborhoods. And so this begins to
affect what your choices are in schools as well. And
so you see that play out as you say, all
these these little um, all these little choices combined with
the big choices that are essentially stacked against you, at
(30:36):
the end of the day, that stacked just becomes massive
and overwhelming. Yeah, I mean, I I can't help but
think of things like this in Dungeons and Dragons terms,
it's like having a character sheet with all your stats
and then someone says, oh, just go ahead and knock
you know, five off of all your stats, you know,
all your your your your abilities, and your potential. That
would be grossly unfair in any you know, micro reality
(30:59):
of a game. But it's the kind of inequality that
is everywhere in the real world. Yeah, it's like that
dollar a bill analogy that we talked about in the
school to prison pipeline. You know, if you're if everybody's
at the starting line initially, and then you have to
keep taking steps back because you you're being handicapped, then
you're not going to get to that dollar bill as fast.
Right in that dollar bill represents your future. And moreover,
(31:22):
you have to then shoulder if you're a person of color,
you have to shoulder those stereotypes that are put upon you.
So there's also this expectation um that's an albatross psychologically,
and then it's playing itself out in these real world scenarios.
So it would seem that to change this, to have
(31:42):
a paradigm change in racial biases, to try to get
to a place of equality, it would all hinge on
empathy again, the willingness to empathize, and nothing is a
greater motivator of empathy than someone trying to imagine what
it would be like for themselves. And of course we've
got to study for this, and of course it has
(32:05):
to do with a rubber hand. Again, I feel like
the rubber hand study just keeps popping up. Two thousand
and thirteen study conducted by the European Research Console and
published in Cognition used this rubber hand illusion to get
participants in the mindset of one another, and it's really effective.
(32:25):
We've talked about it before. It plays into something called
pro pre aceptive drift, and that's where your mind essentially
adopts the fake limb as its own and then reacts
to it when the fake hand is touched, while at
the same time the experimenter is touching the participant's own hand,
which is hidden out of you. So that's how this
set up this illusion works. Now using Caucasian participants, the
(32:48):
researchers in this case tested the participants implicit attitudes towards
people with dark skin. Then they used a dark skinned
rubber hand to make them feel as if was their
own hand afterwards, They tested participants racial attitudes after the experiment,
and the results, well, the more intense the participants illusion
(33:11):
of owning the dark skin rubber hand, the more positive
their racial attitudes came or became afterward. And it's because
this illusion created an empathy overlap, creating less differences in
the mind of the non white participants, getting them to
that place of empathy that they needed to be in. Yeah,
(33:31):
I mean so much of what we're talking about here
just brings me back to the the admittedly tired and
worn out analogy. Uh, don't judge a book book by
its cover, right, But yet, as we've discussed, that's that's
what our brain does. Our brain has a certain economy
to it. It has to process all of the stimuli
at at a pretty fast rate. So it ends up
(33:52):
judging books on covers because that is it sometimes an
effective way of figuring out what's inside of a book.
But but if we can act really stop to consider
what's behind the book, to consider to at least flip
it over to read the back, right, Uh, you have
a lot more empathy. You I'll have a lot more
understanding of what's going on, and you have even a
potentially a better ability to just distinguish um. We see
(34:15):
a lot of this in law enforcement um and and granted,
the whole it's the whole discussion of law enforcement and
race is an entire topic unto itself, but you do
see a lot of research coming out of that area.
Two thousand nine, Brown University and University of Victoria researchers
developed a new measurement system and protocol, which they call
it Effective Lexical Priming Scores or ALPS, to train Caucasian
(34:39):
subjects to recognize different African American faces um and it's uh.
It's has a certain amount of common with the I
T that we we already discussed. It's a lot of
looking at faces and then teaching the individual to sort
of stop and look beyond uh, their initial judgment call
of that face. Essentially, in other words, teaching people to
notice the different between the beneath or behind the all
(35:02):
too easy classification of race, which is again, yes, looking
beyond the cover of that book. And it's as you said,
there there is a kind of pattern recognition that works
behind the scenes. Again, it's that fast, slow thinking that
we can't necessarily help because that's that's how our brains work,
but we can help it in slowing down and recognizing
(35:25):
that our racial biases exists, so that the next time
that we go through that process, we've tagged it and
there's there's an awareness there. Yeah, I feel like this
is a common theme that comes up in the in
the podcast. Is that, Like, so a mere awareness of
how you're thinking and why you're thinking is not, you know,
a cure all, but it's so often the first step
(35:47):
in addressing the situation. Just realizing how you're dealing with
the situation, how you're judging a situation, how you're processing
the information that's coming into your brain. Well, especially if
you consider it as a behavior, because we can change
our behaviors. Right. If you think that you're just inherently
going to be uh racially biased, then you're probably not
(36:09):
going to change your behaviors, right, because you think that's
a part of who you are. But if you realize
that some of it is just this uh background noise
that you've absorbed culturally, maybe within your family, then you
understand that to be a sort of behavioral loop in
the brain that can be changed. Um we or did
everybody go and test your hidden bias? Uh? You can
(36:30):
do this at tolerance dot org. They're actually a bunch
of different kinds of biases that you can test against gender, race, religion.
It's fascinating, um, and it will help you to come
to a better understanding of how you operate in the world. Yeah. Plus,
just the the process of taking the test is just
(36:51):
kind of it's a little mind blowing. Um. It's an
interesting experience, So I recommend it even if you're just
into tests. Yeah, on a meta level, right, you can
see it because like I see the pattern, I see
you messing with my brain and then they mess with
your brain and you're not quite sure if it happened.
It's a it's nice trickery and test taking. Also, um,
(37:11):
check out the excellent Radio and Love podcast episode called
silver Dollar. It's really fine storytelling. It is first person
narrative about what it is to be a subject of
racial bias and how one man dealt with it. So
I can't recommend that enough. It's great And if you
(37:33):
want to check that out, if you want to go
to that tolerance dot orga link that we mentioned. Both
of those will be included on the landing page for
this podcast episode at Stuff to Blow your mind dot com.
That's also where you will find all of our blog posts,
all of our videos, all of our stuff that we've done.
That's the mothership. And want to reiterate to that again,
(37:55):
we did not cover law enforcement or the legal system
when it comes to racial bias. This is a topic
unto itself. Um So, if you have any thoughts on
this topic or any future ones that you would like
to recommend to us, you can do that by emailing
us at below the Mind at how staff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(38:18):
Does it how staff works dot com
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
It's time for a vault episode. So I think today
we're running an episode that you and Julie did back
in When was this one? Yeah, this would have been March.
And you know it's a pretty serious and sober episode
titled The Gordian Knot of Race. The deals with a
(00:27):
lot of issues related to unconscious racial bias. So this
episode is obviously a few years old at this point,
but the content holds up really well. I think it's
just as relatable today as it was. Alright, well, I
guess let's jump right into the episode. Welcome to Stuff
(00:48):
to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Julie duck List. And as promised,
this episode is all about race. That's right, we promised
to bring you the Gordian Knot of race and Gordian Knot.
(01:09):
We use that phrase because in Greek and Roman mythology,
the Gordian knot was an extremely complicated knot tied by
Gordius a king in Asia Minor. And this knot has
come to symbolize a complicated and seemingly unsolvable problem. But
here's the crux here. If you want to solve it,
it requires novel and bold actions. And we're trotting out
(01:33):
this metaphor today because we're discussing the Gordian knot of
race as it exists here in the United States. Yes,
here in the United States where we have a black president.
And as will discuss how I just framed, the problem
is in itself a slippery slope of logic that leads
to questions like, well, how can racial inequity exist in
(01:56):
a country with a black president? Right? Because this is
the idea that, after all this outward evidence of racism,
isn't there anymore? Right, that we feel like maybe racism
has receded into the shadows and something like the klu
Klex Klan. They're not hanging out visibly anymore at least,
and that leads us to something even more pernicious, and
(02:20):
it's called racism without racists. Yeah. You know, you mentioned
the bold actions of solving the Gordian not earlier. Uh,
And of course the classic example of that is that
Alexander the Great shows up and just cuts it in
half and says, hey, I solved or not? And you
know that works in the Greek myth. But with with
with racism, you see some you see a number of
(02:41):
different false uh solvings of the of the riddles, of
false unravelings of the knot. For instance, the sort of
Alexander the Great move of cutting it in half is
sort of like saying, hey, well, look, there are no
overt racist in my immediate sphere of influences, there are
no overt race this in my workplace. Um. And and
(03:02):
then in this leads to people saying such kind of
stupendous things as, oh, we live in a post racist world,
a post race world. And of course all of that's
uh completely false, um. Because even if you do not
have overt racism, if you don't have uh, you know,
hate groups in your immediate midst um with you know,
(03:22):
outright and open discrimination in your workplace, etcetera, you still
have the reality of unsuspecting people who see the world
through a racially biased lens. That's right, because you have
subtler forms of racism, and it persists within the cultural fabric.
As we'll discussed today. Sun Heel Milanovon is a professor
(03:43):
of economics at Harvard, and in an opinion piece for
The New York Times, he articulated this problem of racism
without racist quote ugly. Pockets of conscious bigotry remain in
this country, but most discrimination is more insidious. The urge
to find and call out the biggot is powerful, and
doing so is satisfying, but it is also a way
(04:05):
to let ourselves off the hook. Rather than point fingers outward,
we should look inward and examine how, despite best intentions,
we discriminate in ways big and small. So while there
may be good intentions behind this notion of sin no color,
it actually does a disservice to trying to achieve equality. Yeah,
and I think that Stephen Colbert always did a great
(04:26):
job of that on the Colbert Report. Um he had
the recurring bit where he would say, I don't see race.
People tell me I'm white because X, and then there
would be some sort of punchline that implied the the
the the innate racism of Stephen Colbert, the character um
because yet to say that you don't see race, that
race doesn't factor into your uh, into your daily life
(04:49):
even into your perception of those around you. It is ludicrous,
uh because when you when is we're going to discuss
in this episode, when you when you look below the surface,
there is there is a lot going on there. Um,
there's there is a tremendous amount of a scientific research
that shows that people do uh notice race, gender, wealth, weight, etcetera.
(05:11):
That we see all of these things, even if we
don't want to believe that we see these things, we
see them and we factor them into our judgments of others.
Right now, according to psychologist Daniel Kahman, we think both
fast and slow, fast meaning that we rely on patterns
that determine unconscious decision making that we call sometimes intuitive
(05:32):
judgment and slow meaning the couple of factors that were
actively consciously weighing when we're making a decision. And within
this configuration there is something called implicit bias and that
plays directly into fast thinking. Now, the National Center for
State Courts Rights that, unlike explicit bias, which reflects the
(05:54):
attitudes or beliefs that one endorses at a conscious level,
implicit bias is the bias and judgment and or behavior
that results from subtle cognitive processes so implicit attitudes and
implicit stereotypes, and that they often operate at a level
below conscious awareness and without intentional control, And that these
sort of implicit biases they develop over time, and usually
(06:18):
it's because of some sort of social connection. This can
be your family and the sort of implicit bias that
they may have that you have assumed for yourself. It
can be your friends, it can be um, just people
that you even look up to and what their views are. Now,
you could also have it from an accumulation of personal experience,
(06:39):
and um, I'm talking about experiences that connect certain racial
groups with fear or other negative effects. The National Center
for State Courts talks about a study in which white
individuals who scored highly on measures of implicit racial bias
also reacted to images of unfamiliar black faces with stronger
(07:00):
amygdala activation. So we've talked about this before. The amygdala
is associated with emotional learning and fear conditioning. So you
see implicit bias played out in that way, those kind
of associations which played directly into brain processes. And then
you know that people share a common social understanding of stereotypes.
So again here is implicit bias kind of leaking into
(07:23):
the cultural fabrics. So maybe you don't subscribe to that
particular stereotype, but the fact that it's in our culture
and it may be bandied about means that you may
be passively absorbing it into your own worldview. Yeah, I mean,
they're like symbols, which we've discussed at length before. The
symbol is out there, and the symbol is is informing
(07:45):
your mind uh at times at a subconscious level. And
the same can be said of any of these, uh,
these various stereotypes for different racial groups. Again, patterns at
the subconscious level. And then there's something called implicit egoism,
which is basically we that we tend to prefer people
like ourselves, however we define that, and at the surface
(08:05):
level that tends to be how we look. So there
there are those different ways that implicit bias begins to
seep into our lives. Now, when it comes to measuring
implicit bias, we have a very handy and uh and
proven tool at our disposal. Um. It comes to us
from University of Washington psychology professor Anthony Greenwald created the
(08:29):
Implicit Association Test or the I A T. And and
he and a few associates. Uh, they put it out there.
They they continue to develop it. And since they initially
rolled it out, the test has been used in more
than one thousand research studies around the world, and more
than ten million versions of the tests have been completed.
UM at an internet site that we're gonna have a
(08:50):
call out for later. UM with the I A t
and and I encourage everyone to take it. We we
both took it and it's a very it's a very
interesting experience. Uh. And you'll see wines I explain it here. Um.
You have to categorize a sequence of words or images
such as a black face or a white face, and
words uh as such as good bad by pressing one
(09:14):
of two labeled buttons. So, for instance, you might be
instructed to press the left button when you see a
black face or whenever a negative word appears. Okay, So, um,
you know, black face shows up, push that left button.
The word distrustful shows up, you push that left button,
then the right button, then you press the right button
when you see a white face or a positive words
(09:35):
a white face, trustworthy or some word of that nature.
But then they flip it around. Okay, so you have
to press one button for black positive and one for
white negative. Um. And then and this is where the
the interference effects come into play. Individuals who associate black
with bad will respond much more slowly when black and
(09:56):
good share the same response button. Now, UM, I don't
know if you have the same experience when you were
taking this online, but uh, and again I was coming
into this after reading about how it works. But you
really do kind of feel your mind being pulled in
half on some of these where you're having to to
stop and think, all right, wait, which which side am
I am I associating this word with versus versus the
(10:18):
other side. Yeah, it's kind of like the Stroop test
in that way because it really, uh, it really takes
a lot of attention because you already have that pattern
down and so they begin messing with the pattern. And
that's where they find that space where they can kind
of ferret out your the delay time, right, and also
your choices because sometimes you'll get it wrong and it
(10:39):
would tell you, right, give me the wrong choice. Um,
And it gives you a bit of insight, but there
also gives you, I think about five ten questions about
just your general feelings about politics. Right. And then later
on more specifically about how you feel about UM Europeans
(11:02):
versus African Americans and so on and so forth. So
some of it you do have to try to bring
a bit of awareness to what your feelings are and
you have to be really honest about it too. Yeah,
and it doesn't take long at all to to fill
it out. But it's amazing how much depth it has,
especially you know, if you're just comparing it to you know,
which X men are you tests on on on the internet. UM. Now, again,
(11:26):
since this was initially rolled out, UM has been used
a lot, and the and the status really back up
its effectiveness. UM. In fact, when it comes to race,
seventy percent of those who took a version of the
test that measures racial attitudes have an unconscious or implicit
preference for white people compared to blacks. And you can
compare that to a twenty percent self reporting percentile. So
(11:47):
the individuals who who took this particular version of the
test of them are are are self reporting that they
prefer the white uh faces, that they have a preference
for the white faces, but seventy or actually proving that
out based on their delay times, so the reporting isn't
adding up to what their actual actions are, right, and
this shows how they're really cutting into with this test.
(12:10):
They're really cutting into that implicit bias, to that level
of bias that we're not aware of in our daily life,
that's just going on under the surface of our conscious cognition. Now,
a two thousand nine meta analysis headed by Anthony Greenwald,
who of course UH invented the thing. UH, looked at
one and twenty two published and unpublished reports of a
(12:31):
hundred and eighty four different research studies, and they found
that in socially sensitive areas, especially black white interracial behavior,
the test had significantly greater predictive value than self reports. Again,
that's seventy verses twenty and we mentioned overall UH. This
meta analysis study looked at numerous uses of the I
A T including consumer preference, black white interracial behavior, personality differences,
(12:56):
clinical phenomena, alcohol and drug use, non racial inner group ahavior,
gender and sexual orientation, close relationships, and political preferences, and
across all nine of these areas, measures of the test
were useful in predicting social behavior. Now, it's worth noting
that in consumer and political preferences, both self reporting and
implicit measures effectively predicted the behavior, but self reports had
(13:21):
significantly greater predictive validity. So again, this test kind of
serves to to prove out how much of our decision
making and judgment UH is taking place below the surface.
I mean, the good news is that implicit by us
is malleable to some degree, and it's responsive to the
person's motives and environments. And we'll talk about that more later. Yeah,
(13:49):
let's talk about empathy, which is, of course is one
of the most important factors in untying and unraveling that
hideous knot. Yeah, and and also an important factor in
just being one of the cornerstones of humanity, right, Like
that's part of the whole cooperative where we're all signing
into this agreement that we're going to try to help
and support each other as much as possible. Well, not
(14:10):
all of us have signed that, but you know, generally
that's the idea in trying to survive as a species.
So you would think that empathy would be hardwired in
all of us into some degree. It is, but it
maybe that levels of empathy exist now. In a two
thousand and thirteen study called Racial Bias and Perceptions of
(14:32):
Others pain by try Walter at all. This idea of
the racial empathy gap was explored. The researchers as participants
to rate how much pain they would feel in eighteen
different scenarios. We're talking about anywhere from stubbing your toe
to getting shampoo in your eye. Yeah, the worst is
the worst. Uh. Then they rated how another person a
(14:56):
randomly assigned photo of an experimental target would feel in
the same situation. And sometimes the target was white, sometimes black,
and each experiment, the researchers found that white participants, black participants,
and nurses and nursing students assumed that blacks felt less
pain than whites, and the researchers were really interested in that,
(15:20):
particularly like why why other black people might think that
black people experience pain less and so um. They did
some follow up studies trying to drill down a bit
more as to the cause here, and they found that
the more privilege assumed of the target, the more pain
(15:40):
the participants perceived for that person. So this is very
closely tied to race because we're talking about privilege and um,
you know, the socio economic status of that person and
the reason for this misperception of pain. This idea that
black people could endure more pain or have less pain
(16:04):
was directly related to this assumption that that because black
people face more hardships, they wouldn't feel as much pain.
This was their conclusion. So basically, at the subconscious level,
the brain is saying that person has experienced more pain
in their life probably and therefore they're a little more
used to pain. They can they can handle it right.
(16:25):
And again they bring up the semantics here because they're
talking more about privileged people versus nonprivileged people. But they're
also seeing the racial bias here because the assumption with
the stereotype also is that the less privileged person would
be the black person. Gotcha. Now, Additional studies have looked
into this situation, including a two thousand ten Italian study
(16:50):
from Seppends University in Rome. And this study took both
Italians and UH and and black Italians Italians of African descent,
and they watched short films depicting needles penetrating a person's
hand or a Q tip gently touching the same spot
UH and then they measured their their in their their
(17:12):
their empathetic response to that bit of footage. So the
results which line up with what we've been discussing here,
people watching the painful episode responded in a way that
was specific to the particular muscle they saw being stimulated.
When the film character was of the same race, but
those of a different race, uh, it didn't it didn't
evoke the same senseo motor response. Now, they conducted further
(17:35):
studies where the researchers tested individuals responses to pain inflicted
on models with violet hands. Now that I read this
is violent ones initially in the study, which really threw
me off, but violet colored hands. So they essentially are
throwing in a third non existent race of violet colored
people here. Okay, So in and in these cases, the
(17:56):
participants empathetic response was restored. So in other word, since
they have no script for what violet colored people would,
uh would deal with in terms of pain in their life,
they just revert to normal. They're like me, which is
an interesting and interesting fact to it. And then there's
a two thousand and fourteen University of Virginia psychology study
(18:17):
that looked at children. Specifically, they looked at American children
between seven and ten, and specifically they looked at American children,
and they found that children between seven and ten reported
that black children feel less pain than white children. Uh
So here we see explicit bias emerging um in early childhood. Now,
(18:37):
there's zero evidence for racial bias in this study among
study participants at the age of five and younger, but
the bias began showing up among participants at the age
of seven and then became prominent at the age of ten.
So this is this is an area that the researchers
are still exploring because obviously, as we've discussed, we have
the the explanation that well, it's based on on what
(18:59):
you you think the the personal history for an individual
of this race is and where they fall on the
socioeconomic spectrum. But it's uh, you know, it's kind of
a lot to expect that level of of judgment going
on with children that are seven to ten, Right, So,
to what extent is that going on, or to what
extent is this tied to explicit egoism. It's a good question.
(19:21):
It's just it's a pretty stunning study because to know
that children that young would be developing those ideas and
expressing them, at least unconsciously or even overtly, is really
disturbing and I think kind of parts the curtain of
the curtains of the brain to give us more insight
(19:42):
into how things are working under cover. Jason Silverstein and
his article on this very topic wrote, quote, the racial
empathy gap helps explain disparities and everything from pain management
to the criminal justice system. But the problem isn't just
that will disregard the pain of black people. It's somehow
(20:03):
even worse. The problem is that the pain isn't even felt.
In other words, empathy is not being engaged. And when
empathy isn't being engaged, then you're objectifying that person. And
that's that's where your your cornerstone of humanity is crumbling. Yeah, so,
I mean, I mean it plays into everything from you
(20:23):
see a story about some sort of misfortune happening to
an individual of another race on television, and you're less
involved in the story. Uh. It plays into your just
your your ability to interact with everyone around you, like,
are you engaging with the same level of empathy? Are
you on the same page? Are you giving the same
value to everyone in your surroundings? No? And that's what
(20:46):
was so interesting about that implicit association test that I
a t that I took, is that Yeah, I uh
suspected that I would have some racial biases, but and
I came out as slight on the test. They don't say, hey,
you're a racist, say that you have a slight preference
for European Americans. Um, but still like that's it's unsettling
(21:07):
to think that this may have been playing out in
different ways that I operate in the world. And so
that's why I think it's so important for people to
try to to drill down a bit into themselves and
figure out how it might be playing out, because this
would make the difference. You have searched for a house before, yes, yes,
(21:29):
a couple of times. Yeah, the grueling work of trying
to find some sort of housing. And it turns out
that again, the racial bias exists here in the housing market.
John Taylor, the president and chief executive the National Community
Reinvestment Coalition, which helps improve housing and underserved communities, told
(21:50):
The New York Times in an interview that polling shows
that many Americans think financially stable customers have the same
opportunities to obtain good housing regard lists of race. Again,
this is the c no color logic, right, and this
just isn't so because there is a two thousand and
thirteen national study that was commissioned by the Federal Department
(22:11):
of Housing and Urban Development, and they found some startling inequities. Um.
They had eight thousand tests. Here, they had one white
and one minority tester of the same gender and age,
posing as equally well qualified renters or buyers, visiting the
same housing provider or agent, and in more than half
(22:33):
of the test cases, both testers were shown the same
number of apartments or homes, but in cases where one
tester was shown more homes or apartments, the white tester
was usually favored, leading to a higher number of units
shown to whites and overall, black perspective, runners were presented
eleven percent fewer rentals than whites, Hispanics about twelve percent
(22:56):
fewer rentals, and Asians about ten percent fewer rentals, and
as person spective buyers, blacks were presented presented seventeen percent
fewer homes and Asians fewer homes. So UM, what's interesting
about this is that it plays out in individual scenarios,
and you can look at that information if you want.
You can see these individual scenarios where UM, once the UH,
(23:19):
the real estate agent found out that this person was black,
or Hispanic they would actually cancel the appointments, so there
were canceled appointments and so on and so forth. But
what they also found is that white testers were more
frequently offered lower rents, told that deposits and other moving
costs were negotiable or were quoted a lower price, and
(23:40):
taking into account fees, deposits from rents, apartments were more
likely to cost white slightly less in the first year
rental than blacks might pay. So it's not it's it's
it's an issue of access to housing, but it's also
an issue to the cost of housing as well. And
by the way, these tests were performed in twenty eight
metropolitan areas with no substantial difference across cities or regions.
(24:05):
And it's not just housing. There was a study by
Ian Iris and Peter Siegelman, and they found that more
than three hundred paired audits at new car dealerships revealed
that dealers quoted significantly lower prices to white males than
to black or female test buyers, and they were using
the identical scripted bargaining strategies for the same model of car. Okay,
(24:28):
so there was no variation in here because they were
trying to do the exact UH replicated scenario over and
over again. The only difference, of course was gender and race,
and the black test buyers were offered initial prices roughly
seven hundred dollars higher, and they received far smaller concessions.
So you know, this sort of bells and whistles that
(24:49):
a dealer might throw in on a car for you.
You know, and we, of course we also see implicit
bias come into play in the workplace, whether one gets
a job or not, whether one is paid an appropriate
amount and amount that is on the level with other
individuals with the same skill set, expertise, etcetera. UM. For instance,
(25:13):
just to look at us, some quick census stats from
two thousand thirteen U S Census stats, UM, black men
were paid seventy of what white men were paid. White women,
by the way, we're paid seventy eight percent of what
white men were paid, and UH African American women were
paid sixty of what white men were paid. But that's
(25:33):
once the paycheck is actually in play. When it comes
to even just getting a job and having the chance
to have a fair shot at a position, UM, the
bias comes into play in some some really startling ways. Uh.
There are a couple of studies that look at this. One.
It's a two thousand three study titled are Emily and
Greg more Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment
(25:54):
on labor market discrimination. This was published in American Economic Review,
and it casts some in resting light on all of this. Now,
what they did. The researchers mailed out thousands of resumes
to employers with job openings and and measured which ones
were selected for callbacks for interviews. Some of these were
randomly tagged with stereotypically African American names, such as the
(26:15):
title suggests Jamal or Lakisha, and some with stereotypically white
names like like Emily or Greg. Okay, So what they
found was that the same resume was roughly fifty percent
more likely to result in a callback for an interview
if they had a white name. And then, in two
(26:36):
thousand nine, another study actually tried this out in person.
They sent in actual people for low wage job interviews,
identical resumes, identical interview training, and yet they found that
African American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs
at the at a rate as low as white applicants
with a criminal record. Now, in terms of discriminating against
(27:00):
African American names, we can also look to healthcare and
we see a study supporting this bias. At two national conferences,
when seven and twenty doctors were shown patient histories and
asked to make judgments about heart disease, they were much
less likely to recommend cardiac catholization, which would be a
(27:21):
really helpful procedure to black patients, even when their medical
files were statistically identical to those of white patients. Now,
there's another study about racial bias in healthcare, and this
one that takes more of a generational approach, and it's interesting. Um,
there were two d two first year medical students at
(27:44):
Johns Hopkins who participated in implicit association tests. All right,
that was the test that we talked about earlier. Sixty
had an unconscious biased toward whites and four innately favored blacks.
They also determined the eighties six percent of the students
had subconsciously favored upper class people. Again, there's that that
(28:05):
privileged bias there, while just three percent showed a preference
for those of a lower cap class. So here's the
thing about the first year med school students. They found
that the unconscious preferences of students did not affect how
they assessed or treated patients of various races and incomes
depicted in the scenarios. And this is good news because
what this is saying is that this generation may have
(28:29):
been exposed to educational curriculum focused on cultural competency and
that helped them to improve their awareness in the management
of their unconscious preferences. So while the racial bias existed,
their behaviors stemming from it, uh, we're not affected, which
is a bit of a bright spot in all of
(28:50):
this information. Yeah, I mean that's that's definitely a bright spot.
But yeah, when you start breaking down like all the
ways that that racial bias explicit and implicit um disadvantage
an individual, I mean, it's really staggering because we've talked
about studies that have looked into how it affects the
(29:11):
purchase of a vehicle, the renning of an apartment, acquiring
a job, but other studies have looked at how it
negatively impacts a person of of colors ability to get
a response from their legislator. Here back about research opportunities
at a university received fair treatment from a jury. Uh.
One study even found that a white hand holding an
(29:32):
iPod received more offers than a black hand holding the
same iPod on eBay. So yeah, it ends up impacting
like pretty much every area of your life, you know, healthcare, schools,
every and interaction comes with a potential handicap. All the
little things we in life that we take for granted,
(29:52):
and as well as the big things like dealing with
employment and and uh and and and law enforcement. It's
it's staggering. Well. And the housing thing I thought was
particularly unsettling because not only are people given less choices,
they were sometimes shuttled into different communities. And so you know,
the real estate agents or the real estate companies were
(30:15):
actually trying to get you know, the their black clients
to go into black neighborhoods. And so this begins to
affect what your choices are in schools as well. And
so you see that play out as you say, all
these these little um, all these little choices combined with
the big choices that are essentially stacked against you, at
(30:36):
the end of the day, that stacked just becomes massive
and overwhelming. Yeah, I mean, I I can't help but
think of things like this in Dungeons and Dragons terms,
it's like having a character sheet with all your stats
and then someone says, oh, just go ahead and knock
you know, five off of all your stats, you know,
all your your your your abilities, and your potential. That
would be grossly unfair in any you know, micro reality
(30:59):
of a game. But it's the kind of inequality that
is everywhere in the real world. Yeah, it's like that
dollar a bill analogy that we talked about in the
school to prison pipeline. You know, if you're if everybody's
at the starting line initially, and then you have to
keep taking steps back because you you're being handicapped, then
you're not going to get to that dollar bill as fast.
Right in that dollar bill represents your future. And moreover,
(31:22):
you have to then shoulder if you're a person of color,
you have to shoulder those stereotypes that are put upon you.
So there's also this expectation um that's an albatross psychologically,
and then it's playing itself out in these real world scenarios.
So it would seem that to change this, to have
(31:42):
a paradigm change in racial biases, to try to get
to a place of equality, it would all hinge on
empathy again, the willingness to empathize, and nothing is a
greater motivator of empathy than someone trying to imagine what
it would be like for themselves. And of course we've
got to study for this, and of course it has
(32:05):
to do with a rubber hand. Again, I feel like
the rubber hand study just keeps popping up. Two thousand
and thirteen study conducted by the European Research Console and
published in Cognition used this rubber hand illusion to get
participants in the mindset of one another, and it's really effective.
(32:25):
We've talked about it before. It plays into something called
pro pre aceptive drift, and that's where your mind essentially
adopts the fake limb as its own and then reacts
to it when the fake hand is touched, while at
the same time the experimenter is touching the participant's own hand,
which is hidden out of you. So that's how this
set up this illusion works. Now using Caucasian participants, the
(32:48):
researchers in this case tested the participants implicit attitudes towards
people with dark skin. Then they used a dark skinned
rubber hand to make them feel as if was their
own hand afterwards, They tested participants racial attitudes after the experiment,
and the results, well, the more intense the participants illusion
(33:11):
of owning the dark skin rubber hand, the more positive
their racial attitudes came or became afterward. And it's because
this illusion created an empathy overlap, creating less differences in
the mind of the non white participants, getting them to
that place of empathy that they needed to be in. Yeah,
(33:31):
I mean so much of what we're talking about here
just brings me back to the the admittedly tired and
worn out analogy. Uh, don't judge a book book by
its cover, right, But yet, as we've discussed, that's that's
what our brain does. Our brain has a certain economy
to it. It has to process all of the stimuli
at at a pretty fast rate. So it ends up
(33:52):
judging books on covers because that is it sometimes an
effective way of figuring out what's inside of a book.
But but if we can act really stop to consider
what's behind the book, to consider to at least flip
it over to read the back, right, Uh, you have
a lot more empathy. You I'll have a lot more
understanding of what's going on, and you have even a
potentially a better ability to just distinguish um. We see
(34:15):
a lot of this in law enforcement um and and granted,
the whole it's the whole discussion of law enforcement and
race is an entire topic unto itself, but you do
see a lot of research coming out of that area.
Two thousand nine, Brown University and University of Victoria researchers
developed a new measurement system and protocol, which they call
it Effective Lexical Priming Scores or ALPS, to train Caucasian
(34:39):
subjects to recognize different African American faces um and it's uh.
It's has a certain amount of common with the I
T that we we already discussed. It's a lot of
looking at faces and then teaching the individual to sort
of stop and look beyond uh, their initial judgment call
of that face. Essentially, in other words, teaching people to
notice the different between the beneath or behind the all
(35:02):
too easy classification of race, which is again, yes, looking
beyond the cover of that book. And it's as you said,
there there is a kind of pattern recognition that works
behind the scenes. Again, it's that fast, slow thinking that
we can't necessarily help because that's that's how our brains work,
but we can help it in slowing down and recognizing
(35:25):
that our racial biases exists, so that the next time
that we go through that process, we've tagged it and
there's there's an awareness there. Yeah, I feel like this
is a common theme that comes up in the in
the podcast. Is that, Like, so a mere awareness of
how you're thinking and why you're thinking is not, you know,
a cure all, but it's so often the first step
(35:47):
in addressing the situation. Just realizing how you're dealing with
the situation, how you're judging a situation, how you're processing
the information that's coming into your brain. Well, especially if
you consider it as a behavior, because we can change
our behaviors. Right. If you think that you're just inherently
going to be uh racially biased, then you're probably not
(36:09):
going to change your behaviors, right, because you think that's
a part of who you are. But if you realize
that some of it is just this uh background noise
that you've absorbed culturally, maybe within your family, then you
understand that to be a sort of behavioral loop in
the brain that can be changed. Um we or did
everybody go and test your hidden bias? Uh? You can
(36:30):
do this at tolerance dot org. They're actually a bunch
of different kinds of biases that you can test against gender, race, religion.
It's fascinating, um, and it will help you to come
to a better understanding of how you operate in the world. Yeah. Plus,
just the the process of taking the test is just
(36:51):
kind of it's a little mind blowing. Um. It's an
interesting experience, So I recommend it even if you're just
into tests. Yeah, on a meta level, right, you can
see it because like I see the pattern, I see
you messing with my brain and then they mess with
your brain and you're not quite sure if it happened.
It's a it's nice trickery and test taking. Also, um,
(37:11):
check out the excellent Radio and Love podcast episode called
silver Dollar. It's really fine storytelling. It is first person
narrative about what it is to be a subject of
racial bias and how one man dealt with it. So
I can't recommend that enough. It's great And if you
(37:33):
want to check that out, if you want to go
to that tolerance dot orga link that we mentioned. Both
of those will be included on the landing page for
this podcast episode at Stuff to Blow your mind dot com.
That's also where you will find all of our blog posts,
all of our videos, all of our stuff that we've done.
That's the mothership. And want to reiterate to that again,
(37:55):
we did not cover law enforcement or the legal system
when it comes to racial bias. This is a topic
unto itself. Um So, if you have any thoughts on
this topic or any future ones that you would like
to recommend to us, you can do that by emailing
us at below the Mind at how staff works dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(38:18):
Does it how staff works dot com
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