Our racist, sexist selves - Kristof, NYTimes

Our Racist, Sexist Selves
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
NY Times Published: April 6, 2008

To my horror, I turn out to be a racist.

The University of Chicago offers an on-line psychological test in which you
encounter a series of 100 black or white men, holding either guns or
cellphones. You’re supposed to shoot the gunmen and holster your gun for the
others.

I shot armed blacks in an average of 0.679 seconds, while I waited slightly
longer — .694 seconds — to shoot armed whites. Conversely, I holstered my
gun more quickly when encountering unarmed whites than unarmed blacks.

Take the test yourself and you’ll probably find that you show bias as well.
Most whites and many blacks are more quick to shoot blacks, no matter how
egalitarian they profess to be.

Harvard has a similar battery of psychological tests online (I have links to
all of these from my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground, and my Facebook page,
facebook.com/kristof). These “implicit attitude tests” very cleverly show
that a stunningly large proportion of people who honestly believe themselves
to be egalitarian unconsciously associate good with white and bad with
black.

The unconscious is playing a political role this year, for the evidence is
overwhelming that most Americans have unconscious biases both against blacks
and against women in executive roles.

At first glance, it may seem that Barack Obama would face a stronger
impediment than Hillary Clinton. Experiments have shown that the brain
categorizes people by race in less than 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a
second), about 50 milliseconds before determining sex. And evolutionary
psychologists believe we’re hard-wired to be suspicious of people outside
our own group, to save our ancestors from blithely greeting enemy tribes of
cave men. In contrast, there’s no hard-wired hostility toward women, though
men may have a hard-wired desire to control and impregnate them.

Yet racism may also be easier to override than sexism. For example, one
experiment found it easy for whites to admire African-American doctors; they
just mentally categorized them as “doctors” rather than as “blacks.”
Meanwhile, whites categorize black doctors whom they dislike as “blacks.”

In another experiment, researchers put blacks and whites in sports jerseys
as if they belonged to two basketball teams. People looking at the photos
logged the players in their memories more by team than by race, recalling a
player’s jersey color but not necessarily his or her race. But only very
rarely did people forget whether a player was male or female.

“We can make categorization by race go away, but we could never make gender
categorization go away,” said John Tooby, a scholar at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, who ran the experiment. Looking at the challenges
that black and female candidates face in overcoming unconscious bias, he
added, “Based on the underlying psychology and anthropology, I think it’s
more difficult for a woman, though not impossible.”

Alice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, agrees:
“In general, gender trumps race. … Race may be easier to overcome.”

The challenge for women competing in politics or business is less misogyny
than unconscious sexism: Americans don’t hate women, but they do frequently
stereotype them as warm and friendly, creating a mismatch with the
stereotype we hold of leaders as tough and strong. So voters (women as well
as men, though a bit less so) may feel that a female candidate is not the
right person for the job because of biases they’re not even aware of.

“I don’t have to be conscious of this,” said Nilanjana Dasgupta, a
psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “All I
think is that this person isn’t a good fit for a tough leadership job.”

Women now hold 55 percent of top jobs at American foundations but are still
vastly underrepresented among political and corporate leaders — and one
factor may be that those are seen as jobs requiring particular toughness.
Our unconscious may feel more of a mismatch when a woman competes to be
president or a C.E.O. than when she aims to lead a foundation or a
university.

Women face a related challenge: Those viewed as tough and strong are also
typically perceived as cold and unfeminine. Many experiments have found that
women have trouble being perceived as both nice and competent.

“Clinton runs the risk of being seen as particularly cold, particularly
uncaring, because she doesn’t fit the mold,” said Joshua Correll, a
psychologist at the University of Chicago. “It probably is something a man
doesn’t deal with.”

But biases are not immutable. Research subjects who were asked to think of a
strong woman then showed less implicit bias about men and women. And
students exposed to a large number of female professors also experienced a
reduction in gender stereotypes.

So maybe the impact of this presidential contest won’t be measured just in
national policies, but also in progress in the deepest recesses of our own
minds.

The test can be found at this link:  http://backhand.uchicago.edu/Center/ShooterEffect/

The article at this link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/opinion/06kristof.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Nicholas+Kristof%2C+April+6%2C+2008&st=nyt&oref=slogin