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Biased about Biases - Welcome to the Reactionary Human that Thinks They Think
I'm am officially worked up about this.
Newsweek just posted an article titled "The Secret Haters", subtitled "Some experts argue that even the most politically correct among us may harbor unconscious prejudices against ethnic groups, women, gays and others. Can these dark impulses shape our actions?"
First off: no shit, sherlock, the unconscious mind directing our conscious decisions? No freaking way! Like, that's totally, like, wow - you know? You mean I think things I don't even think? That's way blowing my mind!
Secondly: Anyone with one-and-a-half ounces of self-understanding already figured this literally self-evident "revelation" out sometime during (or shortly after) their college years. "Secret" haters? Hardly. But thanks for mythologizing basic reality for all those who really need to stop mythologizing basic reality just to spice up a concept to sell more magazines. Classy.
But that's not even the bit that's got me riled. Apparently, psychologists developed a test called the Implicit Association Test (IAT), wherein they record - to the millisecond - minute hesitations in sorting words and images into associative grouping. For instance, one person might group the words "light" and "joy" and "happiness" into one group, and "dark" and "horror" and "awful" into another. However, when given images of different sorts of people and/or objects, the unconscious mind hesitates (in frickin' milliseconds, mind you) in ordering them as neatly. This hesitation, according to those psychologists who "brain"stormed this test (I'll grant them "storm", but I dunno about "brain"), reveals biases, and these biases are likley to lead to outbursts of aggression, viloence, or unjust behavior toward those people and objects so biased against.
Of course, this assumes that hesitation to CATEGORIZE...into NEAT LITTLE ASSOCIATIVE PILES...PEOPLE AND LIVING THINGS...and that NOT CATEGORIZING PEOPLE AND LIVING THINGS FAST ENOUGH...means you're BIASED.
Is it just me, or is that the most biased definition of "bias" you've ever heard? Wouldn't it be biased to categorize people sans thought? Three cheers for those unconsciousnesses that hesitate a few extra milliseconds to figure out how they frickin' feel about people. How do I feel about "destruction"? Uh...pretty bad, dude. "Destruction" has a clear-cut definition. How do I feel about "gays"? About "blacks"? About "women"? What, the gender or the sex? A mean average of all individual women I've ever met or my knee-jerk reaction to the collective gender (or sex?) as a whole, to which I shouldn't hold an opinion about at all because to do so would be a bias in its own right? Who are "blacks"? Just dark skinned men and women? How dark? American blacks? African blacks? European blacks? All blacks? Have I even met all the different nationalities of "black" people?
These are just the top-of-my-head questions I have imagining someone handing me a picture of a "black" and telling me to lump it into an associative pile. Actually, my first question (and therefore hesitation) would be: are they serious? I'd doubt the test, I'd doubt what was meant by the picture, by the directive of categorizing, by pretty much everything. Which is GOOD. That's the LACK of bias. That means I don't HAVE a category to toss every "black" into. I hesitate, I don't know this person or people they're showing me in a photo. What am I supposed to think? I don't think anything, or else I'll compare to maybe some I do, but then those aren't the same. Ergo: I hesitate. I can categorize a word without pause. But a living creature? Not so easy. Which...should it not be? Really?
The article does state this opposing argument: "Critics respond that what the test measures is not prejudice at all but simply a lack of familiarity with blacks or whites or lesbians or heroin addicts. They argue further that even if the test is tapping into unconscious fears or animosities, it does not mean that people will actually act on those impulses."
So yes, regarding standpoint theory, who am I, a white straight man, to say where women, blacks, and gays go categorically? Sure, I have to have an opinion, because it's impossible not to, so yes, the unsonscious mind, at the very least, must harbor these opinions. But that's human nature, you can't not judge, you can't not "learn" from experience, from living. But does that mean one "has an opinion"? Self-delusion aside, I have to agree with the critics that this is more due to unfamiliarity than anything else. I don't like shellfish because I've rarely ever eaten then, so I'm unaccustomed. But that's exposure and familiarity pure and simple. I'm "biased" but I'm aware of why, and therefore aware of what this bias is and where the reasoning lay. If I am, then it isn't "secret" or a "dark hidden impulse". Those are out there, sure, but this test doesn't unconditionally test for those and those alone, event though that's the claim.
More importantly: language is not absolute. The reason a man or woman lumps a particluar word or image into a category that's headed by some other word or image, is because they have to define both what they're defining and the definition of the category before they go through with it. When one person says "dark", and means it in a particular way, visualizing and associating very specific moods, feelings, etc. to the word, the person hearing the word likely holds an entire cesspool of opposite associations, meaning we think we've communicated when really we've just heard what we're most accustomed to hearing. Now that in itself is a bias, but it's a bias of literal language, of definition, and not a bias toward the object being defined, just the word. I might feel exactly the same as another person about a book, or a new gadget, but by trying to describe it in a certain way (which makes sense and seems perfectly to the point to me), another might decide I'm saying (through his associations with the words I'm choosing) that we opposites, and that he needs to take a stand and countermand what I've said. This is a purely linguistic issue, not an objective one, though it could take months of mud-slinging at one another (if ever and at all) to figure out we actually THINK and FEEL precisely the same. We just can't communicate this worth a hill of beans.
For example, above I claimed that "destruction" had a clear-cut definition, but...actually it doesn't. What about destruction in video games? In comics and action movies. I love it, love it to pieces. As long as it's perfectly fictional, I revel in it. It's kick-ass. But when real people die horribly or lose their possessions to a fire or a monument is torn down? I feel terrible about those things. But which are we talking about? Are we talking about both? So do I have an option to answer in a way that isn't a lump categorization? No. So is any answer I give an honest or thorough one that can be properly judged? Again, no.
When a psychological exam to test a person's take on specific objects require all people to respond to specific words and directions and what-have-you in exactly the same way, or rather, a test that sets off with the foundational understanding that WE ALL UNDERSTAND WORDS IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY AND IF YOUR FEELINGS ON A WORD ARE DIFFERENT THAN THE NORM YOU'RE BIASED AGAINST THE OBJECT is missing an innate understanding of the human mind entirely.
Even worse, to test the test, they tested nurses who worked with drug addicts - difficult patients to be sure. The test revealed (surprise, surprise) an "unhealthy" bias many nurses held toward the patients. These nurses swore they "cared" for their patients, but were also likely to say they planned a career change soon. This, according to the psychologists, meant they harbored the "secret hatred".
Now, you work with difficult people, you can care, like you care for your 13 year old daughter, but you fucking HATE having to deal with them in their more trying moments. That'd be natural and not at all something the IAT awesomely revealed to the shock of the world. You would stab yourself in both eyeballs if your 13 year old daughter perpetually remained a 13 year old and never progressed or got the #&$^ out the house to leave you to age with a little grace. Wanting an eventual end to nursing difficult people doesn't mean you don't care about them. It means you have limits, some more than others. When you care for someone in their worst moments, you gain biases agianst them. Not "secret hatred", but simple, everyday bias that you deal with and conquer and care for the person while also, with you bias, learning about the extremes of human behavior and what you yourself can handle and deal with.
For example, here's an outrageous paragraph from the article:
"That in itself may not be shocking, but here's where it gets interesting. The psychologists then asked all these nurses about their career plans, specifically whether they planned on sticking with the substance abuse field or switching to another kind of nursing. When they crunched all the data, their findings were strong and unambiguous: as reported in the journal Psychological Science, nurses with an unconscious bias against addicts were much more likely to be planning a career change within the year, regardless of their professed feelings for their unfortunate clients. What's more, the stress of working with difficult clients was not in itself driving people away; they could tolerate the workaday stress. It was only the hidden animosity that was causing these dedicated workers to abandon their own do-gooder commitments."
I like that. "The stress of working with difficult clients was not itself driving people away...". This is derived from what exactly? From "no" and "where", that's what. "It was only the hidden animosity causing these dedicated workers to abandon their own do-gooder commitments." The worst is, that's not wrong, it's just not right. Yes, the biases do drive them away. The biases are MADE DIRECTLY DUE TO THE STRESS OF WORKING WITH DIFFICULT CLIENTS. It's blaming the effect and not the cause. The "hidden animosity" (nice wc there, by the way, Mr. article writer man, nice and objective) is a thing NATURALLY culled from having to deal with the stress of the situation. We have a bad experience or series of them - BAM! Instant bias. You get shit service at a restaurant, you dislike that restaurant, you dislike the whole CHAIN, likely. It happens again, you want it closed down, like, yesterday, because you're offended. You now have a bias. The bias isn't magically gestated from nothing. It isn't taught as a child like a lesson plan. It's learned from EACH INDIVIDUAL'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCES AND ABILITIES (to cope, some stronger and more resistant than others).
The idea that caring for others and suffering for it = growing a bias that disallows you from continuing is "harboring hidden animosity" that causes "workers to abandon their own do-gooder commitments" being a problem is ludicrous. Shitty people, however troubled, give people shit, then those people who take the shit are allowed to fizzle and eventually "abandon" their "do-gooder" ways, yes, of course they are. We don't need to stamp out the fucking "hidden animosities". They're considering a career change, that means they're, at least on some level, AWARE of how they feel. It's NOT outright animosity, and so to ask if they harbor "hidden animosity", they should rightly say "no". They don't. They harbor a not-at-all-hidden, growing weariness. This could crest and break into something that resembles animosity, but it isn't, in any way, the same thing.
Gah, this is the most biased take on biases I have ever encountered. It's small minded, reeks of cheap theatrical language and presentation, and simply isn't logical, doesn't take any of psychology's actual minutiae into account, and is therefore, not psychology. It's armchair, at best.
Oh, the best part of the article: "The test has sparked a heated controversy among both psychologists and legal scholars, some of whom are arguing for a radical rethinking of antidiscrimination law to accommodate such hidden prejudice. Stereotypes are as robust as ever, they say, and more insidious because they are not overt." Legal scholars and psychologists are already rallying for how they can ^&ck everyone with the law just for "harboring unconscious discrimination".
As Oingo Boingo said, referencing the classic Orwell novel: "WAKE UP, IT'S 1984! WAKE UP, BUT WE'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE...." Seriously, though, this is scary policing-the-subconscious desires-of-citizens shit here. It's looking bad for humanity as humans.
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