This Craziness is in Our Blood
How did we get here? By letting modern manipulators work our most ancient instincts. But the good news is we've fought back before, and we can do it again.
I’ve spent much of my career covering the interplay of psychology, technology, and politics in a documentary series, a book, and my daily reporting, only to see them cause a nightmarish multi-car pileup right now in just the way I was hoping to avoid. And I’ve tried to make my peace with the idea that the forces of manipulation that I’ve spent a career covering are about to really enjoy the next few years. But I get tired. It’s especially hard to watch the last few remaining protected spaces for disagreement and exploration — universities and laboratories — come under attack in what the head of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins is calling “the Apocalypse of American science.” It all leaves me confused as to what to do.
For months, my answer was “fuck it, let’s go surfing.” But as a good friend texted me today: “you gotta report the truth.” So I’m returning this week to some of the earliest writing that formed my book about technology’s effect on the brain. For this chapter I learned from the experts that in order to be the people we want to be — equitable, loving, creative, curious — we have to fight back against literally thousands of years of hardwired instinct. And we can do that. Our history as a species is full of examples. The trouble is that when we don’t, we wind up where we are right now, with our most ancient instincts literally in charge. So try to take the long view, as I am. Here’s an excerpt from The Loop.
Chapter 4: Clusters
What about the beauty of our natural state? Shouldn’t we be striving to live as we did in ancient times, gathered peacefully around a fire, sharing our food? Considering that so much of our modern world seems to be disorienting the ancient systems we use to navigate it, shouldn’t we be steering ourselves back toward the pure, honest, sustainable ways of ancient life?
“No no,” says Mahzarin Banaji. “Our natural state is terrible, horrible. You’d never want to go back to that.”
Banaji, a professor of social ethics in the Harvard psychology department, is an electric personality, crackling with humor behind thick, colorful glasses. But her work, studying the ancient biases we don’t recognize in ourselves, is a bummer. She finds her own path to optimism, though, and often begins her speeches to large audiences with a spectacular bit of dark humor. “I’d like to congratulate you,” she’ll say, “on the sheer diversity of this crowd. You all come from wildly different backgrounds, you are drawn from different genders, ages, social status, races, religions. In the tens of thousands of years in human history, you are the first group this large and this mixed up in which no one is going to die before I’m finished speaking. There won’t be a riot, no one will be burned for being different. It’s amazing. Congratulations!”
In 1996, as a graduate student in psychology at the Ohio State University, Banaji was helping to design experiments about bias. At the time she thought very highly of herself as a fair-minded person. And if anyone’s life story suggests modern conscientiousness, an immunity to ancient prejudices, it’s Banaji’s. She’d grown up Zoroastrian in a Parsi community in India, mentoring other students from the age of five in the small school her mother and aunt ran in their home before rocketing through a series of schools and universities and winning a fellowship to study in the United States. “I figured I was about as unbiased as one could be, and I thought very little of certain parts of society and their biases,” she says.
And so she sat down one day to take an early version of the bias test she and her colleagues had designed, feeling perfectly ready to have her self-image reflected back at her. Up to that point, psychologists had largely assumed that they could measure bias by asking people to volunteer their own attitudes toward other people. But that sort of thing only revealed what people thought their biases might be. The test in front of Banaji was different. She was part of a group trying to design something that would draw out “implicit bias”: unconscious attitudes, ones of which we’re not only unaware, but we also might be horrified to discover. It’s a common term today—presidential candidates have used it on the campaign trail, and it’s the subject of countless corporate training programs—but at the time it was a revolutionary idea. The test asked Banaji to look at a series of faces, and as each appeared, press one of two keys to identify the face as Black or white. At the same time, the test asked her to use the same two keys to label occasional words as either positive or negative, one key assigned to each. The test had seven stages, during which it kept switching up which keys did what; one key would be used for both white faces and positive words, then in the next test it would be used for white faces and negative words. The other key would be used for Black faces and positive words, then Black faces and negative words. It’s laborious to describe, and it’s a dizzying test, just tedious enough to cause the subject to lose focus, and something about that, along with using the same finger to denote both a racial identification and an emotion, teases out long-held, instinctive connections we make between the two. In the end, the test told Banaji she had “a strong automatic preference for European Americans over African Americans.”
“I had two reactions,” says Banaji, now a towering figure in the study of bias. “The first was to assume that the test must be wrong. I mean, if my two fingers on a keyboard can’t produce the result I’d expect about my own attitudes, the test must be flawed! And then, when I discovered that the test wasn’t wrong, I was embarrassed! Mortified!”
Banaji and her colleagues Tony Greenwald and Brian Nosek put the test online in 1998, hoping that perhaps five hundred people might take it in the first year. Instead, forty-five thousand people took the test in the first month. That popularity raised the question of selection bias. They worried that only liberal people who consciously wanted to fight prejudice would take it, skewing the results. But that quickly faded as people of all backgrounds poured in, day after day. “I remember one day looking at it, and we noticed 400 people from Topeka, Kansas, had taken the test,” Banaji says. “And we realized, ‘Oh, it was a school that sent a large number of kids to us.’” Accounting firms, military units, museum staffs, all came through. “Neo-Nazi groups used to visit in the old days—we used to get messages from them.” And the flow of data has not slowed. “For these 22 years, thousands of people come to it every day,” Banaji says.
Taken by more than 30 million people since it first went live, the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, uses simple keyboard mechanics to measure our instinctive attitudes about gender, age, race, sexual orientation, disability, body weight. And because the test has more or less remained the same for so long, as new participants take it, the IAT at this point represents a comprehensive longitudinal survey of how attitudes have changed over the more than two decades since it began.
The good news is that certain attributes—like sexual orientation—are losing their stigma. “Perhaps it’s that people often know someone who is gay, they can relate to them personally, they’re a family member, a child,” Banaji says. Senator Rob Portman of Ohio had been, for most of his career, staunchly opposed to legalizing same-sex marriage. But then his son Will came out to him and his wife. “And that launched an interesting process for me, of rethinking my position on the issue,” he told CNN correspondent Dana Bash in a 2013 interview. “I now believe that people have the right to get married.”
Banaji waves off Portman’s change of heart. “I wouldn’t extend any kudos to Senator Portman,” she scoffs. “Apparently you need a personal experience to change!” That’s not going to make any difference in other areas of bias, she says. “Your son is never going to come back after his first semester at Yale and say to you ‘Dad, I’m black.’”
And unfortunately, Banaji’s data shows that racial bias, while it has fallen ever so slightly in the last decade, is still more or less as it was. Banaji cuts a straight horizontal line through the air with her hand. “Race is like this,” she says. “I think people would be very surprised to discover that our racial biases really haven’t changed at all.”
But what about seminal cultural and historical moments? The Cosby Show? Oprah? The election of nonwhite candidates like Kamala Harris to the highest offices? Sadly, they don’t move the needle. “The day after Obama was elected we were looking at the test results to see if anything moved,” Banaji says. “And no.” This isn’t to say that our conscious attitudes can’t be changed by a singular event. “Often people will report an individual experience with somebody of another group that changed their minds completely. This is why we encourage foreign travel. But I think for what we are talking about,”—long-term, large-scale, society-wide changes of attitude—“this bean-counting little machine”—your brain—“is saying ‘x goes with y.’”
