Implicit learning and race 

 Since Martin Luther King Day was somewhat recent (okay - a month ago; stil...), I thought I'd blog about  human statistical learning and its possible implications for racism.  Some of this is a bit speculative (and I'm no sociologist) but it's a fascinating exploration of how cutting-edge research in cognitive science has implications for deep real-world problems. 


 In today's society racism is rarely so blatant as it was 50 or 100 years ago.  More often it refers to subtle but ubiquitous inconsistencies in how minorities are treated (or, sometimes, perceive themselves to be treated).  Different situations are probably different mixtures of the two.  Racism might often be small effects that the person doing the treating might not even notice -- down to slight differences in body language and tone of voice -- that could nevertheless have large impacts on the outcome of a job interview or the likelihood of being suspected of a crime. 

 One of the things studying statistical learning teaches us is that almost everyone has subtly different, usually more negative, attitudes to minorities than to whites - even minorities themselves.  Don't believe me?  Check out the online  Implicit Association Test , which measures the amount of subconscious connection you make between different races and concepts.  The premise is simple and has been validated over and over in psychology: if two concepts are strongly linked in our minds, we will be faster to say so than if they are only weakly associated.  For instance, you're faster to say that "nurse" and "female" are similar than "nurse" and "male", even though men can be nurses, too.  I'm oversimplifying here, but in the IAT you essentially are called upon to link pictures of people of different races with descriptors like good/bad, dangerous/nice, etc.  Horrifyingly, even knowing what the experiment measures, even taking it over and over again, most people are faster to link white faces with "good" words, black with bad.   

 Malcolm Gladwell's book "Blink" has an excellent chapter describing this, and it's worth quoting one of his paragraphs in detail: "The disturbing thing about this test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated values.  As it turns out, for example, of the fifty thousand African Americans who have taken the Race IAT so far, about half of them, like me, have stronger associations with whites than with blacks.  How could we not?  We live in North America, where we are surrounded every day by cultural messages linking white with good." (85) 

 I think this is yet another example of where learning mechanisms that are usually helpful -- it makes sense to be sensitive to the statistical correlations in the environment, after all -- can go devastatingly awry in today's world.  Because the media and gossip and stories are a very skewed reflection of "the real world", our perceptions formed by those sources (our culture, in other words) are also skewed.   

 What can we do?  Two things, I think.  #1: Constant vigilance! Our associations may be unconscious, but our actions aren't.  If we know about our unconscious associations, we're more likely to watch ourselves vigilantly to make sure they don't come out in our actions; as enough people do that, slowly, the stereotypes and associations themselves may change.  #2: This is the speculation part, but it may be possible to actually change our unconscious associations: not consciously or though sheer willpower, but by changing the input our brain receives.  The best way to do that, I would guess, is to get to know people of the minority group in question.  Suddenly your brain is receiving lots of very salient information about specific individuals with wholly different associations than the stereotypes: enough of this and your stereotype itself might change, or at least grow weaker.   I would love to see this tested, or if someone has done so, what the results were.