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May 9, 2008 Carnival of Allies: Prologue 
(Edited to add the link, which is working now.) I don't have a lot of time to go into the detail I'd wanted to, so I'm hoping to come back and finish this one over the next few days. In the meantime, as ABW was planning on doing this this week, I wanted to get something up. In the Scientific American Mind issue I mentioned in the Blog Against Disablism Day post, there was an interesting article on implicit (or unconscious) bias. (It looks like the article is supposed to be publically accessible, but the link was broken when I tried it this morning.) The basic idea is simple: implicit biases are all those prejudices that you learned without meaning to from a society full of biases of every kind, while also learning that biases and prejudices are wrong, so shoved them into your unconscious. The authors of one particular study looked at how implicit biases governed behaviour. They did this by administering implicit bias tests to hospital doctors and then looking at the care they gave to various patients. (Detail to be fleshed out later, when I have time and brain cells.) Unsurprisingly (to me, anyway) those doctors who showed a large implicit bias against, say, black people also showed a significantly lower standard of care for black patients, and were less likely to give the appropriate treatment or medications to them. If the doctors were unaware of the purpose of the study. This is where I think it gets really interesting: If the doctors were made aware of the purpose of the study, those doctors with large implicit biases then provided more equal care to their patients--thus demonstrating that a conscious acknowledgement of previously unconscious prejudice can work to overcome it. Doctors with less implicit bias, presumably, assumed that their standard of care was already equitable and adequate and so did not work to overcome it, and ended up performing worse. In one sense, it's bad news: implicit biases are meaningful, people act on them without intending to in ways that are harmful and wrong. In another sense, it's good news: just by becoming aware of our implicit biases, we can change our behaviour for the better in significant ways. In a third sense, then, each of us has a personal responsibility to become aware of our implicit biases instead of assuming that because we are good people, we must not have any; or if we do it can't possibly affect how we actually treat people. You can find your own level of implicit bias in a range of areas by taking tests such as the ones at Harvard's Project Implicit. Posted by Andrea at May 9, 2008 10:04 AM under Change Addict EMAIL this entry (comments fields are below this section) Comments I think so much comes down to this problem of good = non-prejudiced. Most people see themselves as good people, and everyone knows that racism, sexism, disablism etc. are bad. Therefore, alas, many people who are unaffected by these issues feel that it simply isn't their problem. Or at least that it is out of their hands. Posted by: The Goldfish at May 13, 2008 2:21 AM
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