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Blind Spot
Blind Spot
In Blindspot, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald explore hidden biases that we all carry from a lifetime of experiences with social groups – age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, or nationality.
“Blindspot” is a metaphor to capture that portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. The authors use it to ask about the extent to which social groups – without our awareness or conscious control – shape our likes and dislikes, our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential.
In Blindspot, hidden biases are revealed through hands-on experience with the method that has revolutionized the way scientists are learning about the human mind and that gives us a glimpse into what lies within the metaphoric blindspot – the Implicit Association Test.
The title’s “good people” are the many people – the authors included – who strive to align their behavior with their good intentions. The aim of Blindspot is to explain the science in plain enough language to allow well-intentioned people to better achieve that alignment. Venturing into this book is an invitation to understand our own minds.- http://blindspot.fas.harvard.edu/Book
The Authors
The Authors
Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald have been collaborating for more than 30 years to understand how minds operate in social contexts. Their special focus has been on the unconscious, automatic, less reflective aspects of the mind and the decisions humans make about themselves and others in society. Their analysis has centered on social categories of gender, race, age, class, sexuality, disability, religion, politics, nationality and the many other social groupings that mark modern societies.
The two met at Ohio State University in 1980, where Tony supervised Mahzarin’s master’s and PhD degree research. Mahzarin now teaches at Harvard University, Tony at University of Washington. Both were elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the American Academy for Arts and Science. Both were recognized with a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association.
Commenting on their relationship, they say in the book: “The power of ideas is such that it cuts across age, gender, ethnicity, religion, culture, and nationality to bring minds together in the search for something larger than the limitations these categories typically afford. To each other we can simply say that we are fully aware of our good fortune in having found a kindred spirit in the other. It is not easy to imagine an alternative intellectual existence that could have been superior.”
MAHZARIN R. BANAJI received her PhD from Ohio State University and was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Washington. She taught at Yale University for 15 years, receiving the Lex Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence. She is currently Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard. She served as the first Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. At present, Banaji also serves as Cowan Chair in Human Social Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Diener Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology and is Herbert Simon Fellow of the Association for Social and Political Psychology.
Mahzarin Banaji’s website at Harvard University
ANTHONY G. GREENWALD received his bachelor’s degree from Yale University and his PhD from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Educational Testing Service. For 20 years he taught at Ohio State University (where Mahzarin was his student) and is currently Professor of Psychology at University of Washington as well as Adjunct Professor of Marketing and International Business. Greenwald has received the Thomas M. Ostrom Award from the Person Memory Group, the Donald T. Campbell Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.
More from the Authors
More from the Authors
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