132: How implicit bias affects my child (Part 2)
57 min•21 mars 2021
Do we really know what implicit bias is, and whether we have it? This is the second episode on our two-part series on implicit bias; the first part was an interview with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test. But the body of research on this topic is large and quite complicated, and I couldn't possibly do it justice in one episode. There are a number of criticisms of the test which are worth examining, so we can get a better sense for whether implicit bias is really something we should be spending our time thinking about - or if our problems with explicit bias are big enough that we would do better to focus there first. Jump to highlights:
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[accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of Respectful Parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Jen 00:59 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to take a minute to thank you for being a part of this parenting journey with me and to share a quick update on where things stand with the podcast after four and a half years now. What is that saying? The days are long and the years are short? It certainly seems to be the case here. And well for some of you listening, this may be the very first episode that you're listening to, there are many others who have been with me for the entire 132 plus episodes that I've created to date. We're close to surpassing a million and a half downloads from all around the world, and my goodness, it's a bit strange to even say those words aloud given that I started the show with basically no idea whether anyone would be interested in listening. And it's such an honor to me when you recommend the show to your friends and to other parents at your daycare or preschool. When you share specific episodes that have helped you to find the answers that work with your family and your online communities. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that developing Your Parenting Mojo, which is now the podcast episodes, blog posts, courses, workshops, membership content is more than a full-time job. I have a very small team that helps me to keep my own sanity and my husband is now involved as well. Maybe one day he'll even listen to as many episodes as some of my most dedicated listeners have. Even my daughter now signs off on her videos at home with the brought to you by YourParentingMojo.com. And as the word continues to spread, more and more parents are making transformative lasting change using the methods that we talked about here on the show. We are big cohort in the current Taming Your Triggers workshop who are supporting each other and understanding the sources of their triggered feelings. And just a week or two in they were already reporting the ability to create space for responses to their children that fit with their values, where that just hadn't seemed possible before. And I'm very happy to share that the Parenting Membership open enrollment is just around the corner and will run from May 2 through May 12 in time for celebrating Mother's Day, while the learning membership is going to reopen later in the summer. The community of parents that have already enrolled in the Parenting Membership continues to grow and it's a great resource of knowledge and support and community to help anyone who's looking to apply the ideas and strategies that you hear on the podcast in your own family at home. So I'll share more as we get closer to open enrollment. But for those of you who want to learn more or to join the waitlist, feel free to go to YourParentingMojo.com/ParentingMembership. And thanks again to each and every one of you who have joined me on this parenting journey over the last four and a half years. I learn and I grow every day as a parent and it's amazing to share all this with you. Jen 03:38 So let's get into our real topic of the day, which is part two of our miniseries on implicit bias. Today we're going to continue to open a real can of worms that's already half opened, and that I had no idea that I was about to open when I started researching this episode. So I've been interested in the connection between the brain and the body for some time now, and I'm planning a series of episodes to explore this topic in some depth. And one aspect of this is related to knowledge that we hold in our bodies rather than in our brains. And as I started to explore that idea, I was thinking about intuition, which we often experience as a felt sense in our bodies rather than a decision that we make in our brains. And that led me down a path toward understanding the role our gut plays in what we know. But another branch of this path led me to the topic of implicit bias because I was thinking, Okay, if we start relying on our brains a bit less and trusting our bodies a bit more, how can we know that this will lead us in a direction that's actually aligned with our values? What if implicit bias means that listening to our bodies actually takes us away from living our values because our bodies have implicit bias baked in so deeply? Jen 04:43 Now I've read the book Blind Spot: The Hidden Biases of Good People by doctors Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald some years ago, but I hadn't dug into the research behind it at the time. The book's premise is that we have visual blind spots, which are places where visual information is missing, but our brains fill in the gaps without us realizing it, which can be seen when a person whose visual cortex has been damaged and they can't see an object like a hammer in front of them, but if you ask them to reach out and grasp it, then they'll be able to do it. The author state that a parallel idea exists with non-visual stimuli as well, they say and I'm going to quote "Rather than an effective visual perception, this book focuses on another type of blind spot, one that contains a large set of biases and keeps them hidden just as patients who can't see a hammer can still act as if they do. Hidden biases are capable of guiding our behavior without our being aware of their role. What are the hidden biases of this book's title? They are for lack of a better term bits of knowledge about social groups. These bits of knowledge are stored in our brains because we encounter them so frequently in our cultural environments. Once lodged in our minds, hidden biases can influence our behavior towards members of particular social groups, but we remain oblivious to their influence. In this book, we aim to make clear why many scientists ourselves very much included, now recognize hidden bias blind spots as fully believable because of the sheer weight of scientific evidence that demands this conclusion. But convincing readers of this is no simple challenge. How can we show the existence of something in our own minds of which we remain completely unaware?" The book goes on to describe a test called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, which was designed by Dr. Greenwald and modified by both authors over the years, starting when Dr. Banaji was Dr. Greenwald’s graduate student. Jen 06:27 And so I'd known about what is the Race IAT for a number of years, there are actually now quite a few of them on topics ranging from age to religion to body weight. The landing page at implicit.harvard.edu, which is where these tests are housed, doesn't say much about the purpose of these tests. You have to click into the About the IAT page to see the description that "The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts, for example, Black people, gay people, and evaluations, for example, good and bad, or stereotypes, for...
- (03:38) Is implicit bias baked into our bodies?
- (06:27) About the Implicit Association Test (IAT)
- (08:13) Criticism of the IAT and Dr. Banaji’s response
- (12:48) Blindspot and the inception of the IAT
- (13:41) We make judgements about individuals based on how they look
- (14:12) We often say things that aren't true, even if we think we are truthful
- (16:01) The premise of the IAT and how it works
- (18:13) Conflicting definition of what implicit bias is
- (19:40) Meta-analysis of implicit bias
- (33:16) Implicit bias on the decline in recent years
- (35:37) The persistent problem with IAT
- (42:59) From macro-issues to the micro-issues of IAT
- (53:54) My takeways
Resources:
[accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of Respectful Parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Jen 00:59 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to take a minute to thank you for being a part of this parenting journey with me and to share a quick update on where things stand with the podcast after four and a half years now. What is that saying? The days are long and the years are short? It certainly seems to be the case here. And well for some of you listening, this may be the very first episode that you're listening to, there are many others who have been with me for the entire 132 plus episodes that I've created to date. We're close to surpassing a million and a half downloads from all around the world, and my goodness, it's a bit strange to even say those words aloud given that I started the show with basically no idea whether anyone would be interested in listening. And it's such an honor to me when you recommend the show to your friends and to other parents at your daycare or preschool. When you share specific episodes that have helped you to find the answers that work with your family and your online communities. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that developing Your Parenting Mojo, which is now the podcast episodes, blog posts, courses, workshops, membership content is more than a full-time job. I have a very small team that helps me to keep my own sanity and my husband is now involved as well. Maybe one day he'll even listen to as many episodes as some of my most dedicated listeners have. Even my daughter now signs off on her videos at home with the brought to you by YourParentingMojo.com. And as the word continues to spread, more and more parents are making transformative lasting change using the methods that we talked about here on the show. We are big cohort in the current Taming Your Triggers workshop who are supporting each other and understanding the sources of their triggered feelings. And just a week or two in they were already reporting the ability to create space for responses to their children that fit with their values, where that just hadn't seemed possible before. And I'm very happy to share that the Parenting Membership open enrollment is just around the corner and will run from May 2 through May 12 in time for celebrating Mother's Day, while the learning membership is going to reopen later in the summer. The community of parents that have already enrolled in the Parenting Membership continues to grow and it's a great resource of knowledge and support and community to help anyone who's looking to apply the ideas and strategies that you hear on the podcast in your own family at home. So I'll share more as we get closer to open enrollment. But for those of you who want to learn more or to join the waitlist, feel free to go to YourParentingMojo.com/ParentingMembership. And thanks again to each and every one of you who have joined me on this parenting journey over the last four and a half years. I learn and I grow every day as a parent and it's amazing to share all this with you. Jen 03:38 So let's get into our real topic of the day, which is part two of our miniseries on implicit bias. Today we're going to continue to open a real can of worms that's already half opened, and that I had no idea that I was about to open when I started researching this episode. So I've been interested in the connection between the brain and the body for some time now, and I'm planning a series of episodes to explore this topic in some depth. And one aspect of this is related to knowledge that we hold in our bodies rather than in our brains. And as I started to explore that idea, I was thinking about intuition, which we often experience as a felt sense in our bodies rather than a decision that we make in our brains. And that led me down a path toward understanding the role our gut plays in what we know. But another branch of this path led me to the topic of implicit bias because I was thinking, Okay, if we start relying on our brains a bit less and trusting our bodies a bit more, how can we know that this will lead us in a direction that's actually aligned with our values? What if implicit bias means that listening to our bodies actually takes us away from living our values because our bodies have implicit bias baked in so deeply? Jen 04:43 Now I've read the book Blind Spot: The Hidden Biases of Good People by doctors Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald some years ago, but I hadn't dug into the research behind it at the time. The book's premise is that we have visual blind spots, which are places where visual information is missing, but our brains fill in the gaps without us realizing it, which can be seen when a person whose visual cortex has been damaged and they can't see an object like a hammer in front of them, but if you ask them to reach out and grasp it, then they'll be able to do it. The author state that a parallel idea exists with non-visual stimuli as well, they say and I'm going to quote "Rather than an effective visual perception, this book focuses on another type of blind spot, one that contains a large set of biases and keeps them hidden just as patients who can't see a hammer can still act as if they do. Hidden biases are capable of guiding our behavior without our being aware of their role. What are the hidden biases of this book's title? They are for lack of a better term bits of knowledge about social groups. These bits of knowledge are stored in our brains because we encounter them so frequently in our cultural environments. Once lodged in our minds, hidden biases can influence our behavior towards members of particular social groups, but we remain oblivious to their influence. In this book, we aim to make clear why many scientists ourselves very much included, now recognize hidden bias blind spots as fully believable because of the sheer weight of scientific evidence that demands this conclusion. But convincing readers of this is no simple challenge. How can we show the existence of something in our own minds of which we remain completely unaware?" The book goes on to describe a test called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, which was designed by Dr. Greenwald and modified by both authors over the years, starting when Dr. Banaji was Dr. Greenwald’s graduate student. Jen 06:27 And so I'd known about what is the Race IAT for a number of years, there are actually now quite a few of them on topics ranging from age to religion to body weight. The landing page at implicit.harvard.edu, which is where these tests are housed, doesn't say much about the purpose of these tests. You have to click into the About the IAT page to see the description that "The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts, for example, Black people, gay people, and evaluations, for example, good and bad, or stereotypes, for...
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