CM 056: Mahzarin Banaji On The Hidden Biases Of Good People
48:15 Share

Do good people discriminate more often than they think? That is exactly what a team of researchers found when they analyzed the thoughts and reactions of millions of people around the world.  

Harvard University Professor of Social Ethics, Mahzarin Banaji, author of the book, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, shares surprising findings from Implicit Association Tests taken by over 18 million people from over 30 countries. What she reveals may surprise you.

Banaji is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, as well as the Radcliffe and Santa Fe Institutes. She and her co-author Anthony Greenwald, Professor at Washington University, have spent their careers uncovering the hidden biases we all carry when it comes to issues like race, gender, age, and socioeconomics.

In this interview, we talk about:

	How knowing our blindspots can help us innovate
	How we can measure the extent of our biases with the Implicit Association Test
	How the implicit association test can launch a dialogue around bias
	Who we say is American versus who we really believe is American
	How our tendency is to be curious and to want to learn about ourselves
	How much we want to know is a measure of our smart we are
	The role competition and social knowledge play in motivation to learn and grow
	Why we need to get beyond learning about it to doing something about it
	The importance of what we are willing to do to address our biases
	Knowledge of bias helps us rethink hiring, law, admissions, medicine, and more
	Bias in our minds hurts us, too
	The fact that implicit bias starts as young as 6 years old
	Disappointing differences in explicit vs implicit love of our ethnic or racial group
	What is not associated with our groups in society gets dropped from our identities
	Bias and discrimination can come from who we help
	How referral programs can reinforce bias and lack of diversity
	A tip on how to ensure referral programs cultivate diversity
	The fact that we all like beautiful people and how that harms us
	Ways to outsmart our biases
	What symphony orchestras can teach us about overcoming bias in hiring
	The fact that good people can and do have bias
	How we will be perceived by future generations if we can address our biases
	Whether Mahzarin likes science fiction

Episode Links

@banaji

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~banaji/

Anthony Greenwald

Implicit Association Test

Fitbit

Inclusion Conference 2016

What Works by Iris Bohnet

Social imprinting

Group identity

Stanley Milgram

Abu Ghraib

My Lai Massacre

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!