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what did you think of blink otherwise?
Dunno, I've not finished it yet. But I quite like something about Gladwell's approach. It's got a kind of Christmas lecture feel to it, which appeals to me. It's proper pop.
What impresses (and disturbs) me about the IATs is the fact that it doesn't just demonstrate the broad, blunt and obvious cultural prejudices. I was more concerned by my results on the black/white, old/young, fat/thin tests when I exhibited no bias in the gay/straight, white/Asian ones. That my prejudice is as nuanced as that is more distressing somehow.
deep prejudices are unconscious and hard to shift - though i believe they can be shifted. they are culturally instantiated, i think. hard to overcome the inertia of a whole society.
Well, there are some interesting notes on this, aren't there. The stuff on 'priming' is relevant here. Gladwell gives the example of a student who took the black/white test every day and consistently demonstrated a pro-white preference, until one day he didn't. Wondering what could have been different about that day, he noted that he'd spent the morning watching the Olympics. It sounds laughably trite, but there has to be something like that going on, doesn't there. At the moment I'm taking Gladwell's word for all of this.
The stuff about priming is incredible. For example, the Steele and Aronson experiment: Two groups of black college students are given the same standardized Graduate Record Exam (for entry to Grad school). One group is asked to specify their race on a pretest questionnaire, the other isn't. The group that weren't got, on average, twice as many answers right. That's just staggering, isn't it? So, actually being black seems to be no defense against the unconscious negative sterotypes. And this stuff really matters. |
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