Blindspot: Micro Review
Blindspot is my second book on the topic of diversity and inclusion. First one being “Inclusify”.
This was a great read from a perspective of understanding the psychology and research behind where unconscious bias comes from. And the book delves into how that bias directs our actions without our knowledge.
The authors delve into the psychology of unconscious bias (or as they call it “mindbugs”) — unconscious reference, retroactive interference, availability heuristic, white lies, gray lies, color less lies, blue lies and many more. They back it up with related research studies, examples, tests and findings.
A lot of the book is based on the Implicit Association test run by Harvard. Its a very interesting tool that might surprise you and show if you have implicit bias. I would recommend trying it out. The authors go into many findings from the test as well as corresponding statistics and research to show the prevalence of implicit bias.
The book itself is a quick read and has a lot of reference and appendix material. Its a great book for understanding how implicit bias can affect the decisions we make and impact the people affected by it. It offers little in terms of solutions but the greatest solution is awareness so it does succeed on that count. Another must read on the D&I topic.
Here are few nuggets from the book:
“Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky named and described the generic version of this mindbug, calling it the availability heuristic. When instances of one type of event (such as death by murder rather than suicide) come more easily to mind than those of another type, we tend to assume that the first event also must occur more frequently in the world.”
“Without recognizing it, we automatically pose and answer questions such as: Are people like him trustworthy or not? Is the group she comes from generally smart or dumb? Are people of his kind likely to be violent or peace-loving?
“First, we now know that automatic White preference is pervasive in American society — about 75 percent of those who take the Race IAT on the Internet or in laboratory studies reveal automatic White preference.”
“Stereotyping achieves the desirable effect of allowing us to rapidly perceive total strangers as distinctive individuals.”
“Imagine a person who walks past you while you wait to board an airplane. Five identifiers will almost always be immediately available — sex, age, race, height, and weight. Clothing may permit us to add multiple other identifiers, perhaps including income, social class, religion, ethnicity, and occupation. Each of these identifiers has stereotypical traits associated with it. When our minds automatically activate all these stereotypes at once we get a rich, complex perception of the person, even though the passerby we are contemplating is a total stranger.”
“The stereotypes applied to a group are sometimes self-applied by members of the group to themselves, and in that case the stereotypes may act as self-undermining and self-fulfilling prophecies.”
“We now need to give the idea of dissociation a twist. Remember that dissociation represents a state in which a person possesses conflicting attitudes, one reflective, the other automatic”
“Our thesis is that at the automatic level, unlike the reflective level, the distinction between knowing and endorsing is meaningless because there’s no capacity for endorsing.”
“We do not yet know how to go about either eliminating or outsmarting self-directed mindbugs. However, they may prove modifiable by exposure to role models — this was found in Dasgupta’s study of women college students whose male = math stereotype was weakened when they took math courses taught by female faculty members.”
