Our Hidden Prejudices

Our Hidden Prejudices

Just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. His previous book, the Tipping Point, was fantastic. It was about change, rather epidemic change. Like it,
Blink has descriptions of a lot of interesting experiments and anecdotes on how this 'brain-reflex' occurs and how useful it is. We have a primitive, adaptive computing machinery in our brain that rapidly calculates and judges; of which we are rarely conscious of. This speed helped our ancestors survive in a hostile environment. Intuition - by which we rapidly judge whether we like or dislike something - which can be hard to explain to others in terms of words or reasons - can be a huge help in making snap decisions. We use it all the time; often we are not even aware of it.
But what is gained in speed is lost in objectivity. For optimization, this machinery creates stereotypes and hidden prejudices, because in times of urgency you don't want to rationalize and think through the various options - you want to act! Given enough time, we would never endorse some of these literally deep-seated prejudices, but they are stored in our primitive, unconscious and show up under stress and also on this very interesting Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT). - I would be very interested in knowing what the Harvard president got on his Gender-Science IAT - for the rest of us, our frontal neocortex saves us from such embarrassment.