Your Racism Is In Your Reaction Time

Perhaps the most persistent myth of human nature is that our true self, that is who we really are, is our conscious self. It's persistent for precisely the reason that it is just a myth: because we don't think about it, it's just there, it is the self we notice, because it's what noticing is for us. We aren't aware of the 95% of our mental lives that take place below the level of conscious awareness because, if we were aware of it, it wouldn't be below the level of conscious awareness.

Because we hold this myth, and hold it at such a fundamental level, it is not surprising that we do not believe that we think certain things at all if we don't think them consciously. Put differently, we may think many things unconsciously that rarely, if ever, enter our consciousness, but because they don't enter our consciousness, we don't think we think them. Regardless of whether we're aware of them, though, they affect our behavior (in fact, they determine, to a large extent, what we are aware of consciously). This is true in every area of our lives, and so it is true when it comes to our processing of race.

I won't go into a long literature review of the evidence for the existence of implicit attitudes, and implicit stereotypes or prejudices in particular, because so much has been written about it already (just Google "Implicit Association Test" and "Race," if you don't believe me; hell, there was even a King of the Hill episode about it). I'll simply say this: what the evidence from that research reveals is that we generally display at least a preference for members of our own race, if not a prejudice against others. Developmentally, these implicit prejudices start showing up as early as six years, they've been shown in children at several ages, in college undergraduates, even in physicians.

Now, under ordinary circumstances, or at least under circumstances of a relatively normal cognitive load, that is, when our minds aren't overly taxed (when they are, stereotypes tend to start to pop up pretty clearly), we may not recognize these biases in individual behaviors. But they're there, and they can affect everything from our evaluations of job candidates to how we, as jurors, view defendants in criminal cases. Or they may just determine whether we like a TV show, or a product that uses a black person or a white person in its commercials. Or, over time, what our social circle looks like. And they're all the more dangerous because we can't see them.

This means that it's important to be aware that they're there, even if we can't see them, and to do our best to avoid letting them affect our behaviors whenever possible. In some cases, perhaps in most of them, this will be impossible. The title of this post, a play on the sorts of experiments researchers use to measure implicit associations, isn't too far off. Sometimes the difference between my evaluation of a black person and a white person might be measurable in milliseconds, and in individual cases, there's probably nothing I can do about that. But in the aggregate, over the course of our lives, and over the course of our many interactions, those milliseconds add up, and it may be that the only thing we need to do to counter it is to try, over time, to remain aware that it's going on.