We all have biases that we should try to be aware of. Our implicit prejudices may be at odds with our explicit attitudes. One problem when discussing issues such as racism and sexism especially is that surprisingly many people seem to think that such things have been largely dealt with in the 20th Century and are now of minimal importance.
https://implicit.harvard.edu has several tests designed to measure our implicit biases. As with any scientific test, there could be issues with methodology etc and, in addition to discussion of implicit biases (e.g. the psychology of them, how they affect our skepticism), that also seems an appropriate topic for discussion here.
Thank you for starting this topic — I was going to start something similar but kept putting it off, on account of “real” work.
One bit of associated philosophy is the notion of an “alief.” The term was coined in 2008 by Tamar Gendler. Briefly, an alief functions similarly to a belief — e.g. one can attribute an alief to oneself or others based on behavior, and they causally explain behavior — but they are not usually explicitly represented in the person’s model of their own mental states, and they can be in tension with expressed beliefs.
I’ve known about the concept for a few years but only last week did I come across something in my own line of research that bears on aliefs and beliefs. I’ll post more in a day or two.
“Alief” is an extremely useful concept. I don’t know how I ever did without it.
I don’t agree there is such things as racism, anti-semitism, sexism homophobiaism, thatguyism.
This is inventions by the left wing or people carelessly following activists.
Its all just to discredit conclusions people have about other people groups.
people simply have conclusions or opinions that they sincerely believe or carelessly assent to without deep reflection. it may include malice but it may not and it changes nothing about whether the conclusions are true.
This is why if one changes the identities thee is no problem.
you can say men are keeping women down but not women keeping men down in the workplace. The former is a legitimate opinion while the latter isn’t ACCORDING to a present establishment. The latter is a sexist opinion.
i believe all human babies are perfectly equal intellectually at birth. A blank slate.
Yet i don’t believe in the past or present that women are intellectually equal to men.
they should fail in any competition of smarts beyond mere memorization .
Actual intelligence inferiority.
yet i say this is because of the manly motivation to be accomplished as the bible says.
Women are less motivated even in these days of society pushing them to be accomplished.
Yet i would be called sexist and this meaning wrong/immoral for this sincere and true opinion.
there are no ‘ism’s.
just conclusions/opinions that are right or wrong and may include malice or not.
In origin issues bias are simply conclusions/opinions interfering with careful thinking and investigating of nature.
So creationists accuse evolutionists of fixed opinions that interfere with proper scientific investigation of origins.
Creationists are right. Evolutionists say stuff about creationists. Largely wrong with serious investigators ID or YEC.
is everyone under the influence of opinions/conclusions and not thinking as someone who isn’t??
How would I or you know?
What in science is needed is a bias busting methodology.
Some kind of scientific method!!!
Prove you obey the method and you are better then the side not doing it.
I say evolutionists don’t do the method and never did on main points.
I watch carefully and no bias is influencing ME this time.
Robert Byers:
That made my day.
I took that Harvard test. FWIW, I think it’s ridiculous. They describe one group as fabola (really nice, caring, generous, etc., etc.) and another as going grocery shopping. They then ask you whether you think the people in each group are nice.
Then, if you tell them you think the group they described as nice sounds nice, but you don’t know anything about the other group because they didn’t tell you anything about them except that they drive or go to the grocery store, they basically call you a biased ignoramus and suggest you engage in some serious self-reflection.
I guess either we shouldn’t have believed them when they described each group, or should have assumed at the outset that the questioner is a biased ignoramus.
Anyhow, really really annoying crapola.
Most of what professional philosophers do is, I’ll admit, mostly useless — but every once in a while, one of us makes a genuine contribution to the intellectual culture as a whole.
I’m not sure what test you did, but there are some tests at the site in which if you put something in the wrong category you have to correct it before continuing. Those tests are simply based on response times, I think. When “family” and “men” were on the same side I found it harder to perform categorization than when “family” and “women” were on the same side.
Incidentally, the tests you can do when you access on a touch screen device such as a phone are slightly different.
From the Harvard site:
They all seem to be the same kind of test I was talking about. With that in mind, I can’t make any sense of your comment, walto.
The tests simply don’t work on my tablet.
davehooke:
Which test did you take, walto?
Agree there is a lot of hollow and useless talk by ‘professional philosophers,’ especially naturalistic ones.
The term ‘alief’ sounds as appealing as ‘memes.’ Will they start a Journal of Aliefs that will likewise crash into oblivion within a few years?
Feelings.
Gregory,
Well, that settles it, then.
Well I don’t believe in belief, but I believe in Aleve, but it may be a placebo.
In the sixties we didn’t have aliefs, but we had hangups. Our parents had complexes.
I haven’t yet done any reading on aliefs beyond KN’s post, but it’s evident that aliefs are not equivalent to feelings (or hangups, or complexes).
Not sure “alief” is a distinct category allowing much of a conclusion either way.
Perhaps we are just talking of a varying capacity to over-ride our “hard wiring”.
keiths,
The first one, regarding “implicit biases.” I’m still kind of angry about it. It’s insulting.
Also, whoever designed it seems to me confused about connections and non-connections between such items as the effects of biology on personality, inferring personality traits from limited observations, and whether something either has a property or does not. They’re happy to ask the same question three or four times in slightly different forms in an attempt to catch the respondent in self-contradiction, but I don’t think they actually understand their questions very well themselves. I’m wondering how much of that thing was put together by a freshman.
I impulsively wrote a (no doubt implicitly biased) email to the contact provided. Let’s see if I get a response.
Grrrrrr.
I started one test that asked me to associate some common first names with either family or career. That doesn’t make any sense to me. The test said to go fast, but I don’t know of any reasonable way to associate names with either category , so I just quit.
The test I took compared two fictional groups, Laaps and Nifs. We are given a bunch of information about each, like Laaps will go out of their way to pick you up at your office late at night if you need a ride, and Nifs go grocery shopping. Then after a bunch of annoying tests which try to get you to associate evil with Nifs, they simply ask you whether you think of Laaps as nice, so-so or mean, and whether you think of Nifs as nice, so-so or mean. The answers don’t include “No idea, I haven’t been told a single thing about whether Nifs are nice or not.” You have to pick something on the niceness continuum.
They also ask the same questions numerous times, evidently in an attempt to get inconsistent answers from the respondents. However, as indicated, I have some doubt that the designers fully understand what their questions actually mean. E.g., the belief that some traits of human beings are at least partially a function of genetics does not necessarily a bigot make. I mean, I’m red-green color blind: that’s going to affect my regularly clashing sock choices. They also confuse ratio essendi with ratio cognoscendi (being with being known).
It is, IMHO, just result-oriented garbage that will, no doubt, nevertheless have its results loudly displayed on the front page of the NY Times and get several people some tasty academic appointments.
Being asked to associate things that have no association scores pretty high on my annoyance meter. I just walked away.
It reminds me of Gregory’s approach. You already know somethng about people, and anything they do or say will confirm it.
petrushka,
The test is trying to uncover implicit biases, not explicit, reasoned opinions. That’s why they asked you to go fast.
In Kahneman’s terms, they wanted to get at System 1 (“fast, instinctive, and emotional”) rather than System 2 (“slower, more deliberative, and more logical”).
Robert Byers:
And yet many (and probably most) of the women you encounter are intellectually superior to you. How do you explain that?
Some interesting commentary on the IAT:
Does the Implicit Association Test (IAT) Really Measure Racial Prejudice? Probably Not.
Alan,
It’s more than that. Here is Gendler’s paper introducing the concept:
Alief and Belief
Alan,
I think that “alief” is useful because it’s catchy, evocative, and fills a vacuum. It was much harder to describe aliefs before Gendler coined the term.
Consider:
As a child, I had a beloved stuffed Snoopy. When I eventually outgrew him and decided it was time to get rid of him, I hesitated. Rationally, I knew that “he” was just an inanimate object, nothing but thread and fabric and stuffing. Yet part of me could not help seeing him as alive and sentient. I didn’t want him to feel rejected. Rationality won out and I tossed poor Snoopy, but not without some irrational pangs of guilt.
Even if I were to pare that description down to its essence, it requires a lot of verbiage. So much simpler to say
I’m not the standard or mean as they say!
So men are smarter than women, except when they’re not?
I found Keith’s initial comment pretty funny but I laughed out loud at your response. So thanks to both of you.
But now I have to wonder how much of that sense of humor underlies the rest of your posts, Robert.
Or is it Roberta?
Ha! I think you’re on to something, Bruce.
“Robert” is probably a liberal black French Jewish lesbian professor of evolutionary biology, and she’s laughing her ass off after writing things like this:
I wasn’t complaining about the need for speed. I was complaining that it asked me to associate things that have no possible basis for association.
Good luck with that. New words have a live and death that is independent of efforts to promote or contain them.
I personify things. I think most people do. I rescue old stereo components, particularly those designed and manufactured in the U.S., and particularly those associated with a known designer. My wife rescues old sewing machines. I cringe at the tought of beautiful things being crushed and melted down, or winding up in a landfill.
I will roll this new word around and see if it comes to rest anywhere, but so far it doesn’t have a home in my vocabularly.
petrushka,
In addition, at least in the test I took, the designers work very hard to INSTILL a bias. Suppose they are successful in this–which I believe they were not in my case, though I could be wrong about that–you have to be careful making inferences about such a success, I think. It would show that we may be susceptible to unconscious biases. But then there’d be questions about whether some belief ought to be called a bias if it’s both based on credible evidence and is true.* E.g., I think birds are better than lizards at flying. I would trust a bird to get where it wants to go faster than a lizard could. I understand that there are exceptions to this (maybe iguanas are faster than emus, e.g.) , but I still think it’s a pretty good generalization. Suppose the designers of such a test try to get us to associate birds with speed and lizards with slowness and they are successful in doing this, basically by repeating it 100 times and asking us to respond quickly to various stimuli. Have they inculcated a bias? I guess I might unfairly and falsely assume that this lizard will be slower than that bird in some trial. But I might not, and it’s not clear that this is appropriately called a bias, anyhow. I mean, my background information is the sort of stuff that would be useful to, say, a sports bettor, even if it does not always result in a correct prediction. If somebody thinks that Florida is likely to beat Connecticut, but, in the actual event, the Gators lose, was this person biased against Connecticut?
*The reason I call the evidence “credible” and what it is evidence for “true” in this case is that the designers don’t say, e.g., “Everybody says that Laaps are really nice.” or “Laaps are said to give half their money away to the needy.” They say, rather, “Laaps are nice and give away half their money to the needy.” Are we not supposed to believe them when we take this test? Why not?
petrushka,
You described the test earlier:
I’d wager that they were testing to see if you implicitly associate male names with careers and female names with family.
petrushka,
Sure, but I think “alief” has a better chance than most new coinages. It’s short, the word itself is evocative of its meaning, and it describes a phenomenon for which there is no pre-existing term..
I don’t expect Joe Sixpack to start using it, but it might catch on as a philosophical and psychological term of art.
Right, but personification is just one kind of alief. I think there is a need for a general term.
walto,
I think that’s just in the test you took. In the ones I’ve looked at, they are looking for pre-existing biases. They ask you direct questions to establish your explicit beliefs about the topic, and then they test for implicit associations.
Here’s a list of the topics they’re looking at:
HPSS has spoken! Greg should team up with Joe: Joe can measure the information by counting the letters, Greg can tell us how appealing the concept is through , erm, Gregstuff.
Thanks for that list, Keith. It does seem like I got the strangest test in the bunch. I might take another one based on that info, although, based on the one I took, I’m guessing they’re all somewhat irritating to get through. The speed biz I get, but, as indicated, there’s also a lot of asking questions with nearly–but not quite–the same words, with the obvious intent being to get respondents to contradict themselves. The thing is that I found that (i) sometimes none of the allowed responses are very good; (ii) the answers–“slightly agree” “moderately agree”, etc. –don’t have bright lines between them, I don’t think; and (3) the subtle alterations of the words may actually change the meanings a bit more than the designers realize (in fact, some of what I infer to be their positions on the significance/meaning of these questions in some of their forms is just wrong).
So I at least have to wait until I stop being pissed off. But again, thanks.
That’s the one I took. I quit because it made no sense.
I might add that growing up, I didn’t know any adults who didn’t have jobs.
As for the other prejudices and biases, I don’t need a test to tell me I have twitchy responses to some groups and some behavior. I also note that I see people on this forum having automatic aversive responses to some things that are as much of me as sexual preference or skin color. That seems to be an inescapable part of life. We all spend part of our time as an out group.
petrushka,
But you were exposed to the Father Knows Best/Leave it to Beaver ethos, right? Some of that could have seeped in.
The point isn’t to tell you that you have implicit biases — we all do. The point is to show you what they are.
As Dave put it in the OP:
walto,
Heh. I think that anger must be a common reaction, since they force you to click on this statement before allowing you to take a test:
But I already know what they are. I am acutely aware, and frequently embarrassed by my prejudices. But I’m not sure convinced that people who have no self-awareness are going to be convinced by this kind of test. The methodology strikes me as dishonest. I tend to agree with their premises, but the test pissed me off.
A bit of background. My daughter, until a few months ago, was a construction manager in Manhattan. My son is a stay-at- home parent.
petrushka,
The point of the IAT is that people aren’t always aware of their implicit prejudices.
No test is going to convince everybody, but these tests are useful if they can identify true biases.
What do you see as the dishonest part?
I think most of us here, except perhaps for Robert, see no explicit, rational reason to associate women with families and men with careers, and I’m sure you don’t either. But the test isn’t looking for explicit biases like Robert’s.
It’s possible for even the most enlightened person, through no fault of his or her own, to harbor an implicit bias.
ETA: No explicit, rational reason other than history.
That would be my criticism of the Gender – Career test. The ‘bias’ they’re detecting might not be a bias at all, but merely a reflection of a person’s experience.
The gender test tried to associate first names with family or career. I can’t even figure out what this means. I’ve thought about it, and the only thing I can come up with is that a biased person might associate male names with career and female name with family.
This doesn’t make any sense to me. For most of my employment I’ve had female bosses. Most of the people in any office I’ve worked in have been female.
The test just stunned me. I was in a timed test and I really had no basis for responding.
One good way to become aware of implicit biases is to marry someone who likes to point them out.
petrushka,
Um, I mentioned that four hours ago:
petrushka:
Again, the question is not whether you are explicitly biased against women in the workplace. You obviously are not. The question is whether there is any implicit bias, and the test is supposed to reveal that.
It may not do that, as I pointed out earlier, because even if you subconsciously associate of women with family and men with career, you don’t necessarily do so because of bias. You might have grown up in a time or culture in which men worked and women tended to stay at home.
petrushka,
🙂