The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality
This post was originally published at Restructure!
People who consider themselves fully rational individuals are ignorant about basic psychology and their own minds.
It is easy for white men in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields to perceive themselves as more rational than other groups, because our society associates rationality with whites, men, and STEM professionals. When white men in STEM fields believe in this stereotype, they might assume that bias is more common in non-white people, women, and people in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. After all, these other groups seem to want to discuss bias more often, and unexamined associative “reasoning” would link bias to those who bring up the topic of bias. Under logical scrutiny, however, it does not follow that the act of thinking about bias makes one more biased.
Blue Purple Red Green Purple Green
the Stroop effect refers to the fact that naming the color of the first set of words is easier and quicker than the second.
A basic tenet of contemporary psychology is that mental activity can be unconscious. Unconscious simply refers to any mental activity that is “not conscious”, and it is not equivalent to the unscientific New Age concept of the Subconscious. A good example of unconscious mental activity interfering with conscious intentions is the Stroop effect (right). If you try to name the colours of the colour words aloud, the first set of colours will be easier to name than the second set of colours, because you unconsciously read the words. This means that you do not have full control over your thoughts and behaviour, and your willpower or logical reasoning cannot overcome the unconscious cultural bias of being able to read in English. Of course, there are other unconscious cultural biases aside from English literacy bias.
If you are a white person and you take Project Implicit®’s Race IAT (Implicit Association Test), you will probably discover that you implicitly/unconsciously prefer white faces to black faces, despite your explicit/conscious belief that white and black people are equal. (The test is called Race IAT, and it is located in a random position in the list of IATs.) If you are black, your results are less predictable, but on average, Posted in Uncategorized | 23 comments