Okay, so let's get started.

I'm very pleased to welcome you all to today's Social Psychology Hangout.
I want to say just a few words about our guest of honor, who is Mahzarin Banaji --
somebody who is, in my opinion, not only one of the world's most
brilliant social psychologists, but also one of the kindest.
She can deny it all she wants, but it's true, and there's quite a consensus, I
think.
She is the Richard Clark Cabot Professor of Social Ethics
in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
She is a past President of the Association for Psychological Science,
which is the world's largest professional society that's
specifically devoted to psychological science.
And closer to home, she was a founding member
of the Social Psychology Network Advisory Board.
So she knows Social Psychology Network inside and out.
She's also a co-creator of the Implicit Association Test,
which I think most members of our class know well.
And she is co-author of "Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People,"
which is a book that was published just last year, and which
very skillfully summarizes the research literature on implicit bias.
So, it's designed for a general audience, and I highly recommend it.
I also cannot let this opportunity go without thanking her publicly for
something that our class has made great use of,
which is psychology-related articles in Wikipedia.
It is no accident that these articles often are excellent.
What happened is that when Professor Banaji was elected President of
the Association for Psychological Science, and began serving in 2010,
she had the foresight to take Wikipedia seriously when many people in academia
were dismissing it and thinking that is was a fad, or something like this, and
instead,
she called on colleagues and students to participate in making it better --
colleagues from around the world -- to add articles about missing articles, or
missing topics, and to improve the articles that were already there.
Since she made that call, more than 3,000 people around the world have gotten busy
improving psychology-related topics and neuroscience-related topics in Wikipedia.
So, if you find that you are making use of a really terrific article in Wikipedia,
you indirectly have Professor Banaji to thank, and I want to thank you very much
myself.
So, what I thought we would do is just begin with some very brief introductions --
even just 30 seconds each. You can let us know what your name is and where you are,
what your country is, and anything else that you'd like to briefly share, and
then we'll get to questions and answers. So, anybody like to begin?
And then, of course, we'll turn it over to Professor Banaji as well.
>> I can start. >> Okay. >> My name is Deanna and I am in British Columbia, Canada.
I am a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a full-time director of an Internet
marketing company.
>> Terrific. >> Marzia from Venice, Italy, and I'm a Director of Marketing for a
luxury goods company.
>> You have a beautiful background.
>> Hi, I'm Maria. I'm here in San Francisco, but I'm actually Filipino, like, yeah.
I'm a software developer and currently, I'm actually, like, part of my Day of
Compassion --
or, life of compassion -- I've been trying to encourage more minorities in tech,
being a double minority myself. So, yeah. >> Terrific. Great.
>> I'm Nycolle. I'm from San Pablo, Brazil. I'm a public relation for an NGO.
>> Hi, I'm Meila. I'm from Jakarta, Indonesia. I work as consultant before,
but now I'm changing my career because I wanted to work in NGO, and
I think this social psychology class is very important for me, so why I joined.
Thank you!
>> Welcome. Thank you! >> Hi, I'm Sumit from India and I'm working as Assistant
Manager,
Proposals, a top five IT company, in one of the top IT company, and I'm learning a
lot
about social psychology -- about the society as well as about, a lot about myself.
I'm really looking forward to the rest of the class.
>> My name is Sashank. I am from India, from Visakhapatnam.
>> Oh, okay -- you're not far from where I grew up.
>> Yes. So, I am presently a student -- age 20 -- studying in an engineering
college.
>> Hi! I'm Miriam, I'm from Mexico City. I'm 36 years old.
I studied business administration, and I have my own business for organization.
>> Okay, so I think, then, to our guest of honor, Professor Banaji,
I think maybe what you could do is begin just by saying a few words
to set the stage of what implicit bias is -- just to remind everybody -- and then
maybe you could talk a little bit about the IAT and "Blindspot" or any other
topics.
Just a brief introduction, and then we can open up for questions and answers.
>> Okay, sure. First of all, I should say thank you to Scott for teaching this
fabulous MOOC.
There are many, many, many MOOCs, as you know, but there are very few
who have a professor who's as caring and, and, and knows as much
about the length and breadth of social psychology, who's doing it.
So, I just want to say thank you to Scott, because, just like with the Wikipedia
project,
any attempt to get these ideas into the hands of the most number of people
is the best way we have of changing the world. So, thank you to Scott.
So, just to say a little about implicit things ("implicit" here being the opposite
of
the word "explicit"), we all know the kinds of thoughts that we have in our minds,
that we have some contact with. So, if you ask me, you know, who, you know,
which movie I recently saw that I liked, I can tell you about that.
These are easy in some ways for us, because we can grab onto whatever
is in our minds, and we can talk about them with other people.
But, most of us in psychology and in the neurosciences these days
believe that a large part of the way that our minds work is without our
conscious awareness, and to a great extent when we see harm in the world,
what we need to do is to begin to ask, "In what ways can good people be doing
harm?"
And I'm sure this has been a big theme in the course so far,
as Scott would have taught it to you. So, my little part of work has involved
trying to get at that aspect of our minds, the part of our minds that
we don't easily have any access to, but that might be affecting our behavior.
So, a simple example might be some of the doctors that we studied in Boston.
These are wonderful people. They care about the poor. They work in a hospital
that takes care of people who do not have health insurance, and so on.
So, we would say they're doing really wonderful good work.
And yet, what we see is that even in these wonderful doctors, that,
when they take our test -- the test that you may have learned about,
the Implicit Association Test, in which we measure how quickly people can associate
things that are good (words like love and peace and joy and friendship --
those kinds of words) with two groups -- White and Black -- and what we find
is that the doctors who show a difficulty in associating good things
with dark-skinned people, or Black Americans, those doctors also
don't prescribe the right medication to dark-skinned patients.
And this is, of course, is very shocking to them because they never intended to do
this.
They intend to treat everybody equally. And so we become interested
in these because we now have to set a higher bar for ourselves, right?
It's not good enough, we say, to just be consciously unbiased --
we need to reveal ourselves fully. And once we reveal ourselves to ourselves,
maybe we'll make different kinds of decisions.
So, that's at the heart of unconscious bias, and it comes from the blindspots
that are in our minds, just like there are blindspots in our eye. Is that a good
start?
>> Yeah, that's great. That really sets the stage beautifully, I think, and so I'm
sure,
I'm sure that our, our students would have questions for you.
>> I wanted to ask, because when I took the Implicit Association Test,
as soon as I finished it -- I mean, at least the first one --
I couldn't stop thinking at Benjamin Libet's experiment 30 years ago.
I mean, now that I'm aware, because I took the test, how can I handle that because
it is encoded in my neurons? I mean, I don't know how to handle it.
>> It's a great question, and I think about it a lot.
Um, and I try to think about solutions, which you're already jumping right to the
solution.
Libet did some studies in which he showed that a few milliseconds
before you have the experience, "I want to eat this chocolate cake,"
your brain had already made that decision. It's just that we didn't know that,
right?
So, what Libet showed was that there was a time difference between
a brain signal that showed that you had already made up your mind
and before you actually could subjectively experience it.
So, the point that's being raised is -- with the IAT, you see automatic kinds of
associations,
with Libet's studies, you see that the brain is, you know, a step faster
earlier than our experience of it is -- all of this leads to the question,
"So, what should we do about the fact that we don't even know what we're feeling?"
So, I would say that it's very exciting to actually be living at a time when we
have
the technologies to be able to look at what our unconscious minds are doing. Right?
So, imagine if you went back to the earlier days of medicine,
long before we knew what was happening inside our bodies.
You know, people thought that thought is happening in the stomach.
Some people had a view that thinking happens in our feet. Right?
So, before we could actually look at the body, we had all these wrong theories
about how our bodies work. But now, the body is no longer, um, you know, unknown to
us,
we know exactly what our bodies do, but if I said to you, all eight of you,
"Tell me, what is your pancreas doing right now?" you wouldn't know what it's
doing.
You may have a small sense of your heart beating.
You may have some sense of your stomach a little bit,
but you don't know what you're liver is doing or whatever, right?
So, I think if we start to think about our minds like that, and to think that
once we know what is going on in our mind -- even at levels that are
not available to conscious awareness -- then we can begin to find solutions to
the problems, much like in medicine we are doing with diseases. Right?
So, just as with a disease -- a bad disease even like cancer -- the number of ways
in
which we can now control that disease only come about because we can understand it.
So, my first answer to you is that there is an enormous benefit to simply knowing
what's going on, because you as individuals, once you realize that you are doing
things
that are harmful to other people, or even to yourself -- are you costing yourself
something?
Are you thinking, "Oh, I must work for, um what was it one of you said,
that you're thinking of shifting from one kind of a company to an NGO?
And I think Professor Plous is possibly responsible for this shift
in your being a happier person for the rest of your life.
Well, how did you make that decision, right, if only by making yourself aware
of the fact that there are alternatives. So, I'm here to say that
the first thing we can do is just by being aware, we will change our behavior.
Even if your mind doesn't change, you can change your behavior.
>> Hi, um, okay, so, over here, I'm in San Francisco right now, and apparently in
the U.S.,
the tech industry has, like, for engineering and programming, there are a lot less
women.
So, it's like around 10 to 14%, but in other countries, um, like the Philippines,
for example,
I've seen, like, at least 30 or 40% in the workforce, who are in tech positions
like programmers, DBAs, systems administrators. So, there is a big disparity,
and I was wondering if it had something to do with the collectivist societies in
Asia,
or, I don't know, um, I was wondering if you had any, um, insights regarding that
or
anything, any findings from your research. >> Yeah. You know, this idea that, um,
male is for math and engineering and technology is an idea that,
at least in the United States, people often believe is a genetic difference.
People like the president of my university have made the claim that
men are just better at math, and so on, and certainly if you look around --
>> Former president!
>> Former president of my university said that.
And so, you know, there is a strong belief, and I would always point out that
in South India, you know, it didn't matter. All of us, boys, girls we all had to do
math.
There was never any sense and so, I've often taken that kind of cultural variation
to argue that it cannot be genetic, because if it's genetic,
you should see it equally represented around the world, right?
Because, around the world, women can have babies and men cannot.
That's genetic. Okay? But if in Russia, women are becoming doctors in large
numbers,
and in other countries women are participating in technology, and other places
they're not,
then we have to believe that there must be something cultural going on.
And I think in this regard, you're absolutely right.
I'm very worried about this in the United States, um, because in an earlier
generation,
there were actually more women in the technology world.
So, when computer science first emerged as a separate discipline,
there were many, many women in it. Do you know why?
Because they could type. They were typists.
See, they had become secretaries and stuff, and because they could type, and
computers involve typing, they were seen as really good at being able to do that.
So, for a couple of generations, there were actually many more women
in computer science, and then over the years, it has become identified more and
more with engineering and so on, and as a result, women have dropped out.
So, do you know this book that was written a little while ago called "Lean In" by
Sheryl Sandberg, who is the COO of Facebook? And she wrote this book called "Lean
In,"
asking that women should demand a place at the table, that they should not lean out
--
that they should lean in, and ask to be taken seriously.
>> Marzu, could you talk a little bit about your own personal story of how you
leaned in?
I mean, it took many years, but maybe from where you grew up to where you are now?
>>Yeah.
>> You know, life for all of us is a big series of accidents. Luck plays a very
important role.
You end up in a certain place, and you think, "I did it," when in fact,
dozens of other people, from your mother or a cousin or somebody
who gave you a book at some point suddenly changes everything for you.
And so, I'm very aware of the large number of people who made this happen,
but I want to give you an example of my not having leaned in,
and I'll tell you how much now I think that that was obviously the wrong thing.
So, first of all let me give you an example of something that happened
very recently in my own department. We were running a search for a professor,
and we noticed that a lot of people who were really good had not applied for the
job.
So, we asked them. It turned out we all, we could just, off the top of our heads,
without even thinking, we could generate names of six women
who should have applied for our job, but who did not apply.
So, we called them, and asked them, "Why didn't you apply for the job?"
And all of them said exactly the same thing.
They said, "I didn't think I was good enough for Harvard,"
all of them in different ways.
One of them even said, your job advertisement said that you are looking
for people who are "exceptional," and I didn't think I was exceptional.
The same woman had applied to Stanford, you know,
but she didn't apply here because our job said "exceptional."
So I, my first response to that was one of real panic. I thought, "Oh my God,
you know, all the best people are not even applying for our job!
What are we going to do?" Because you can't make people apply.
And then I got annoyed at these young women.
I said, what can I, what can we do? You know, we advertise a job.
It's, it's your responsibility to apply for it.
If you don't apply for the job, how can we offer you the job?
>> And then I remembered, and then I remembered that, I don't know,
27 years ago, I did not apply for the job that I first took.
Scott knows my first job was at Yale University, and I did not apply for that job.
My husband applied. He sent my CV, he sent my rsum in
to Yale because I had said, "I don't think I'm good enough."
Right now, 30 years later or 40 years later, whatever, that obviously
was the wrong thing to have done. You know what, you know,
if I did not have a husband who had thought about that,
I wouldn't have had these amazing jobs that I've had.
And so, I'm here to tell all of you here, no matter whether you're male or female,
you know, whatever your ethnicity is, don't cost yourself in those early stages.
Just apply. It doesn't matter -- maybe you won't get the job,
but it shouldn't be your decision. Just apply for anything that looks remotely
good enough that you would be interested in, and don't worry about the rest.
>> Lean in. >> Lean in, yes. Or marry a feminist man!
>> And how about the story of how you came through from
your upbringing to social psychology? >> Yeah, that's a, that's a very interesting
--
I think that we have one person from India, somebody, I think, is it Sumit?
I don't know if he is on, but yeah, um, so the. >> Yes, yes. >> Yes, okay, well,
my interest, I was, Sumit, I was born and raised in Hyderabad, and --
>> Okay. >> I was, I was, I spent two years, um, at JNU (a college in New Delhi),
and I was, I was not at all certain of what I wanted to do. You know,
smart people in India are supposed to be in mathematics or physics or engineering,
and that -- I didn't want to do that, but there didn't seem to be any alternatives.
Anyway, on the way back on a train -- as you know, not all of you will know,
but train stations in India are very big things, like people will get off the
train,
and there are shops, and certainly there was a book store at one of these train
stations,
when I got off the train going from Delhi to Hyderabad, and in the bookstore
was a five-volume set of "The Handbook of Social Psychology," published in 1968,
and the only reason I bought them was because they were so cheap.
I bought them -- all five of them -- and I read the first volume,
and one of the first chapters was by a real hero of Scott's and mine
by the name of Elliot Aronson. And he had written a chapter there, on methodology.
Who can imagine a more boring chapter, you know?
And yet, I was completely mesmerized by this.
I thought, "Wow, who are these people who actually take the
real social world, and they bring it into the laboratory,
and they do these really precise experiments on social relations?"
And the answer was, in America. So I packed my bags, and I came.
My bag -- I brought one suitcase. Most of it was filled with
the five volumes of the "Handbook of Social Psychology,"
one pair of jeans, and two shirts. And I came with, I think,
about $70 in my pocket, and I knew nobody. I knew not a soul in the country.
I just landed in Columbus, Ohio, and I guess the rest of my life is history, yeah.
>> That's extreme leaning in. >> Extreme lean in. Always buy cheap books!
>> Other questions? >> Hello, Dr. Banaji? >> Yes, I have one.
>> Yes? >> Um, what do you think about the importance of the media --
>> Oh. >> and the, and the human being.
>> You know, your question is so, so great.
People often talk about the fact that there is now so much media, and they worry
about it.
But I'm very excited about it, because it now, it means that now I have both
the opportunity and the responsibility of shaping which media I listen to.
Right? I can set up all the defaults -- all the automatic stuff on my computer,
on my TV, of which shows it will tape or not tape, so I can now determine,
to a large extent, what my brain is being fed. I don't have to depend
on what the media out there is telling me. I can make my own media.
I can make my own path, picking the things that I think are important.
Sometimes there are things that I don't agree with. Right?
So, I need to know why people think a certain way, so I need to visit
new sources of a kind where I may not agree with what they say,
but I need to listen to what they're saying. But I can shape my own media,
and so I would say one of the most important things that we can all do
is not passively just receive whatever media is being sent to us,
but to shape it in some way, so that what comes into your inbox,
and what you end up setting as your defaults, are very precisely chosen by you,
so that you are shaping what you hear, and what you listen to.
>> And that also goes to the earlier question about what to do
concerning implicit bias -- >> Yes. >> because if you're exposing yourself
to things that associate certain groups with good, or certain groups with bad,
that will have an effect simply by exposure over time.
>> "Simply by exposure" is a very powerful phrase.
Sometimes you think, "Oh, I just saw a picture on a billboard."
Well, that picture can make a big difference, because it may
remind you of certain things that otherwise would not be possible.
So, one of the things that I have done -- sometimes people ask me, "Now that you
know about your own implicit bias, Mahzarin, what are you doing about it?"
And one of the things that I do do is, I make a screensaver for myself.
Every few months, I scan in certain new images that just rotate through in front of
me.
Right? I mean, most of us have the sad life that we look at a computer monitor
many more hours a day than we look at even other human beings. Right?
I certainly sit in front of a computer for many, many hours a day.
But I don't want to lose the opportunity of using that device to teach
my brain certain things that I don't have the time to do because I'm busy.
I will be affected by whatever is in front of me. So if I choose what will rotate
--
I'll give you one example. A picture that I have on my screen that rotates through
every few days is a picture of a woman. She is a construction worker. Okay?
So, she's wearing jeans and heavy boots and a hard hat -- you know,
a yellow-colored hard hat -- and she is feeding her baby on lunch break.
Now think about it, okay? Now think about it.
When I say to you "construction worker," you know,
what's the image that comes to your mind? Not this one.
But my hope is that if you see this, it becomes a possibility and, you know,
I cannot point out a study out to you, but I'd like to show some day that
when you see more images like that that, that it actually loosens up enough
in your mind that now you'll be able to imagine all sorts of things.
You'll be able to imagine a short man as the president of the country,
which is apparently nearly impossible in the United States.
If you are short, you cannot be the President. Right?
In every election, the slightly taller person wins.
So, you don't want, you don't want a country where your height is going to
determine whether you get a job or not. It should be your brain.
It should be your ideas. It should be your values.
So, so I think these are just little ways in which we can feed our brains the right
stuff.
So, if you think about media in the same way as you think about food --
so if you put healthy food into your body, you'll have a healthier body --
and the media really is like the "food" for the brain, and I think that's the way
to
think about it, just as you would want to eat organic good food, um,
"What's the equivalent of that when you think about information?" is the question.
>> Great. >> Yeah, I am Meila from Jakarta, Indonesia.
I was taking a look at the Project Implicit task website on the social attitude
task,
and I noticed that there is no Indonesia listed there. >> Yeah.
>> How do you see bias in Indonesia?
>> Yeah. Ah, we have to be very careful in how we expand the website, um...
For example, it took us years to create a Brazil website.
You know why? Because we realized that we can make the tests up,
but without knowledge about that culture, we would do a terrible job of even
posing the right questions about what ethnicity do you belong to, and so on.
So, we only create sites when we can have a collaborator from that country
who is willing to collaborate with us to do it, and so we just wait until we find
somebody,
and we say, could you please, you know, work with us on the translation, and so on.
So, if you know of a good psychologist who is from Jakarta
and who is willing to collaborate with us, we will do it.
>> There you go -- some new ground broken today! >> Yeah.
>> Before we go, Marzu, there's one thing that we haven't talked about,
and that is your book, so maybe we could close, just say a few words,
because I think that a lot of students might be interested in learning more about
this.
So, maybe, what is in the book or what led you to write the book -- some
background.
>> Yeah. Right. You know, as Scott may have already told you,
you know, people in my field, we don't write books much.
We write articles that go into research journals, and then they are read by
you know, five other people besides ourselves, if we're lucky.
And so, the book was written as a way of giving people outside our field --
the book is really useless for Scott, because Scott already knows all this.
But for anybody who is not from the field, the book is almost like a manual.
It's not boring like a manual, but it basically tells you all the steps of how
we made these discoveries, how we came to see that we ourselves were biased,
even though we have not a shred of bias in our own minds consciously, and still,
I, too, was showing bias in the White-Black case, in the male-female case, and so
on.
And so, that led us to write the book in order to get this idea out to large groups
of people.
And so, you know, the price is falling on Amazon, even as we are talking.
So, yeah, if you, if you're interested, please feel free to read it.
I am always kind of shy to push the book, but I think it's the best description of
what we talked about today, with a lot more examples and a lot more of the
research.
>> It's a fun book. It's a fun read. I enjoyed it. I did get a lot of out of it.
>> Thank you. >> Thank you so much for your time!
Everybody, I guess we can virtually give a round of applause.
>> Aw, no -- it's great to talk with you all.
Have a wonderful rest of the semester -- how many more weeks?
Or is this just the start, or the end? >> Just one last week of material.
>> Oh, fabulous! Well, good luck to all of you.
>> Thank you! >> Thank you! >> Thank you!
>> Thank you for participating as well.
>> Thank you all, thank you all!