When Mahzarin R. Banaji created a Web site to advance her scholarly research on prejudice, she had no idea it would become a cultural phenomenon. Ten years ago, the social psychologist, then at Yale University, was simply looking for bodies to take a few tests designed to expose hidden racial preferences. Well, she found them. More than three million people so far have visited Project Implicit, which has expanded to offer a buffet of interactive tests -- Banaji calls them "implicit association tests" -- that claim to reveal people's hidden biases, attitudes, and beliefs. Banaji, a professor at Harvard University, is confident in her discoveries about how prejudice and stereotypes operate in adult minds. So she has turned her attention to a new set of subjects -- children.
"There was a woman who we interviewed once, a very liberal lawyer working for the Southern Poverty Law Center, and she told a story about her 5-year-old kid. They were walking through a subway station in New York City, and he found some gum on a wall and put it in his mouth. And she said, 'How could you do that? That gum was in somebody else's mouth!' And he said, spitting it out, 'Yeah, it could have been in the mouth of a black person.' And she was just horrified by this. A child is not born into this world thinking that black is bad and white is good. But I guess I hadn't thought about just how prepared babies are to learn this stuff, how fast they can learn it.
"We created a child version of the Implicit Association Test, so that kids as young as age 5 and 6 can take the test. It's all based on sound and pictures. We were expecting to see that children that age would show no bias. That's not at all what we found. And that surprised the hell out of us. Bias is shown early and at the same magnitude as it is in adults. We did a test with 3-year-olds. To our great surprise again, the bias is not only there, it's the same level as it is in adults. We think it has to do with cultural privileging. Very early, black kids know that their group isn't 'good.' When we begin to talk about how to change our society, I tend to give an enormous amount of weight to simple awareness. Once the awareness is there, there are a million paths to change our lives. We can do it. I very much believe we can. The question is, will we?"
(Thinking in Black and White. By: Fogg, Piper, Chronicle of Higher Education, 00095982, 7/25/2008, Vol. 54, Issue 46)
- This article in Time Magazine talks about how as people age, they can be persuaded to believe either postive or negative stereotypes which can greatly impact their lives. It talks about a specific study done at Indiana University about certain stereotypes.
-This is a large paper done by a student at MIT who explored the concept of stereotypes. He concluded that there are different kinds of discrimination that are appropriate in certain situations.
Race & Ethnicity
Across 2. Evaluation of a social group and the individuals within it based on conceptions about the social group held despite facts that disprove them. 7. Group- Treated as distinct in society based on certain characteristics, some of which are biological, that have been assigned social importance. 9. Process by which a minority becomes socially, economically, and culturally absorbed within the dominant society. 10. Overt negative and unequal treatment of the members of some social group or stratum solely because of their membership in that group or stratum. Down 1. Pattern of extreme segregation. 3. Oversimplified set of beliefs about members of a social group or social stratum. 4. Perception and treatment of a racial or ethnic group as intelectually, socially, and culturally inferior to one's own group. 5. Underclass- Grouping of people who live at the absolute bottom of the socioeconomic ladder in urban areas. 6. Group- Distinct group in society that shares common group characteristics and is forced to occupy low status in society because of prejudice and discrimination. 8. Belief that one's group is superior to all other groups.
The reasoning behind why I chose this chapter is simply interest. Ever since I could remember I have been interested in segregation and prejudices and stand strongly against them. In my middle school years I started to gain a keen interest for the Holocaust, a supreme example of segregation, and ever since then I haven't been able to stop being intrigued by discrimination.
The reasons why I chose these things to appear on my blog are also simple. The main term I focused on from this chapter is stereotypes. The are one thing that really stands out to me above the rest. They are everwhere and happen to everyone throughout a lifetime. I really liked the article I chose because I thought it made a strong point about how prejudices are formed so early in life by plain examples. Next, I thought the picture that I chose really examplified how stereotypes really are so easy to form and to make a habit of. The two different internet sites I chose were a little bit more random. They still both had to do with stereotypes but they were both taking different sides against the issue which I thought was important to make note of. I love the quote that I chose because it explains stereotypes so simply. We form stereotypes because it's the easy way out and only because of that. Lastly, the video I chose really stood out to me. To hear directly from people who are segregated because how they look, act, or perform really can hit home in many people. Stereotypes are a terrible thing to get involved in, even though we all do it. We should be accepting to everyone in life because you can never be too sure on what someone can offer.
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