How Biased Are We, Really?
A FAMOUS SONG FROM Avenue Q, the celebrated Broadway puppet musical, nicely sums up what we’ve been told about racism for the last two decades or so: “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist.”
This notion, which escaped from the confines of academic social psychology and other fields in the 1990s, has dominated the national debate about racism ever since. When it comes to psychology’s treatment of the subject, that’s largely because of the runaway popularity of the implicit association test (IAT), a computerized quiz that supposedly reveals your level of unconscious bias against marginalized groups. It also reflects a broader infatuation with “social priming” research, which is centered on the idea that human behavior can be powerfully influenced by subtle cues, even ones we aren’t consciously aware that our mind has processed.
Social priming hit its stride at John Bargh’s New York University lab in the late 1990s (he’s way for sophisticated people to talk about race in America.
