by Sam Sommers
OK, time to assume the position. Give the book a good, firm crease and lay it open on a table in front of you (or do the same with your e-reader, except for the crease part); you’ll need to be able to see the word list that follows once you turn the page. Remember, your instructions are to slap your right side for pleasant words and your left side for unpleasant words. If you want, you can even time how long it takes to get through the list, as that will give you a precise numerical outcome to think about later.
Ready, set, turn the page and categorize:
UNPLEASANT WORDSPLEASANT WORDS
Left Side Right Side
VACATION
HEALTH
EVIL
DEATH
RAINBOW
CANCER
HEAVEN
VOMIT
POLLUTE
CHEER
DIVORCE
FILTH
SUNRISE
LOVE
ABUSE
MIRACLE
ROTTEN
LAUGHTER
SMILE
JAIL
AGONY
TRIUMPH
JEWELRY
PLEASURE
STINK
Not too hard, right? Sure, some people have idiosyncratic responses to particular items in the list. Maybe your birth month gives “Cancer” positive zodiac connotations; maybe you’ve had bad breakfast experiences with Lucky Charms, creating correspondingly ambivalent associations with “rainbow.” For the most part, though, we can agree on whether each of these words is pleasant or unpleasant, and we do so pretty quickly.
Now, let’s kick it up a notch. This time you’ll be doing two categorization tasks at once. As before, pleasant words will get a right-hand slap and unpleasant words a left-hand slap. But now I want you to simultaneously categorize people as well. Specifically, I want you to sort people’s names by apparent ethnicity.
Say what, you ask? Please, just indulge me for a few more paragraphs. You should also slap your right side anytime you read a stereotypically white name, like Emily or Greg. And when you see a stereotypically black name—let’s say, Lakisha or Jamal—you should slap your left side.
I recognize that this may make you uneasy or even upset for several reasons. For starters, maybe your name is Emily or Greg and you aren’t white. Beyond that, I know I’m asking you to treat objects and people interchangeably. But I assure you, it’s all in the name of science.
So take a moment to remind yourself of the instructions. You should slap your right side for pleasant words or “white-sounding” names. You should slap your left side for unpleasant words or “black-sounding” names. Again, go as quickly as you can, and keep in mind that this exercise is tailored toward those who hail from a country in which you encounter names like these with some regularity. If that’s not the case, feel free to substitute another ethnic distinction that makes more sense to you—just go ahead and cross off the names on the following page and replace them with Arab/Israeli names, Korean/ Japanese names, or any other dichotomy that’s more appropriate.
Ready? Turn the page and begin:
UNPLEASANT WORDSPLEASANT WORDS
OR OR
“BLACK” NAMES “WHITE NAMES”
Left Side Right Side
GIGGLE
MEREDITH
VACATION
LATONYA
STINK
MADELINE
BETSY
DEVIL
TYRONE
SOPHIE
ASSAULT
JAMAAL
GRIEF
PLEASURE
SHANEKA
AGONY
JAKE
DESPAIR
MIRACLE
EBONY
ROMANTIC
DYLAN
MARQUIS
HEROIC
DARNELL
OK, on to the last task, I promise. Again, you’re going to categorize words and people at the same time. But now I want you to switch sides for the “white” and “black” names. That is, this time I want you to use your right hand for stereotypically black names and your left hand for stereotypically white names. So you should slap your right side for pleasant words or “black” names, and your left side for unpleasant words or “white” names.
This is a big change from the last round, and it may take your brain a second to register it. So go ahead and reread the previous paragraph and maybe even say it aloud before proceeding.
Once you’re ready, go ahead and turn the page:
UNPLEASANT WORDSPLEASANT WORDS
OR OR
“WHITE” NAMES “BLACK NAMES”
Left Side Right Side
GENTLE
POISON
WENDY
DARRYL
DISASTER
DARRYL
DISASTER
KAITLYN
AIESHA
TRAGEDY
INJURY
TREVOR
LAUGHTER
TAMEKA
AMANDA
ANGRY
ABIGAIL
JOYOUS
MOLLY
CHEERFUL
UGLY
SHANICE
PARADISE
JAZMIN
PENALTY
HEAVEN
CONNOR
More than three-quarters of people find this last word list to be the hardest one. Even if you weren’t timing it, odds are that you could feel yourself taking longer and maybe even making more mistakes. And if you did time your performance, it wouldn’t surprise me if this final set took you more than twice as long as the previous ones.
In other words, I’d predict that most of you found it far more difficult to pair pleasant words with black names than with white names. Or—same idea phrased differently—it was easier for you to link unpleasant words with black people than to do the same with white people.
(What if you are black? Would I make the same prediction? Good—and important—question. I’ll get to it shortly, I promise.)
You see, not all categories are created equal. Well, maybe they’re created equal, but we quickly come to think of them in very different ways.
I have a second prediction for you as well. I bet that right now you’re feeling a bit skeptical, indignant, and maybe even angry. You’re thinking, now, wait just a minute—any trouble I had with the final list had nothing to do with race. Instead, you simply got used to categorizing the names one way—with white on the right and black on the left—so the final switch was confusing, right?
A reasonable hypothesis. I thought the same thing the first time I did the task. But that’s not what’s going on here.
You don’t have to take my word for it—just try the three lists again, if you have the stamina for it. This time do the third set of words before the second, but start at the bottom of each list and work up so that you aren’t doing the same word order as earlier. Or, if you and your thighs are getting tired, find someone else to serve as your guinea pig, but have them do the third list earlier the second list. Go ahead, I can wait....
It turns out that order doesn’t matter as much as we expect it to. I’ve led this exercise many times in classes and diversity workshops and I vary the order of the lists. Even when I ask the audience to do list three before list two, the vast majority still has the hardest time combining pleasant words and black names on the same side. And when they go in the opposite order that you did—putting pleasant words on the same side as black names first—do you know what their initial reaction always is? They also maintain that race had nothing to do with their performance. Then they explain that they got better with practice. So it isn’t order that’s driving the effect, even though it feels like it is.
The bottom line is that categories don’t exist in a vacuum. Even when we don’t realize it—or won’t admit it—different social groups conjure in our minds different sentiments, expectations, and cognitive associations.
EVERYBODY’S GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE, INCLUDIN
G ME AND MY MONKEY
The categorization exercise on the previous pages is a low-tech version of the Implicit Association Test, or IAT.9 The IAT was devised by psychologists at Harvard, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia to assess category-based beliefs that people are otherwise unable or unwilling to disclose. You can take online versions on Harvard’s Project Implicit website: http://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/. The site lists various incarnations of the test based on gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion, and other racial groups beyond black and white.
But back to the version you completed. An uncomfortable yet unavoidable conclusion emerges: it’s an easier, more natural process for most of us to think about “pleasant” and “white” together than “pleasant” and “black.” And the other way around for “unpleasant.” I know this is an unpalatable suggestion, but alternative explanations for the changes in your word categorization speed just don’t hold up to close analysis.
It’s not list order. Order makes little difference when I use this exercise in person. More persuasively, the Project Implicit site reports that 70 percent of Web respondents are quicker to pair pleasant words with white people, regardless of list order.
It’s not something particular to the names I chose, either. Of course, not all African Americans have names like Lakisha and Jamal. And, sure, these names may very well trigger an idiosyncratic kind of stereotype not associated with the racial group at large. But using photographs of black and white faces instead of names—as the Project Implicit site does—doesn’t change the results much.
It’s not merely an us-versus-them effect. Asian Americans are neither an “us” nor a “them” in the black/white comparison. Yet Asians are just as likely as whites to have an easier time pairing pleasant words with white-sounding names. And what of the performance of African Americans? It’s not a mirror opposite of that of whites, as a strict us-versus-them notion would predict. Instead, about half of black respondents show a bias in favor of the category “black,” and half show bias in favor of “white.”
The inescapable conclusion is that most of us are quicker to pair pleasant/white and unpleasant/black than the other way around because we’ve been exposed to these associations countless times before, under circumstances both subtle and not so subtle. Once again, look no farther than the media: In movies, black female characters are five times more likely than white female characters to use profanity or engage in physical violence.10 On local news broadcasts in the United States, a criminal defendant is four times more likely to have his mug shot put on the screen when he’s black as opposed to white.11 And on prime-time TV, even fictional characters show more distant, less friendly nonverbal behaviors when interacting with black characters, according to research recently conducted in my own department at Tufts University. 12
We take some of these lessons to heart, even if unconsciously. In the Tufts television research, respondents in one study viewed a series of prime-time clips. After watching excerpts of shows in which white characters exhibited unfriendly nonverbal behavior toward black characters, respondents became even more biased in how they completed the IAT. That is, seeing TV characters interact coldly with black people made it even harder to pair pleasant concepts with African American faces.
So the Beatles got it right—everybody’s got something to hide, even if each of us is deluded into thinking that we’re the sole exception. Perhaps you’re not among the majority who has difficulty pairing pleasant words with black names. Maybe instead you carry around automatic associations about other racial or ethnic groups in the culture in which you live. Or about women. Or men. Or people of a particular religion, age, nationality, weight, skin tone, sexual orientation, social class, or geographical region.
The point is, we don’t just group people into categories and leave things at that. Social categories lead to generalizations, expectations, and particular trains of thought, all of which are shaped as well as reflected by the broader cultural messages around us. While we’re quick to explain intergroup conflict and disparity in the WYSIWYG terms of hateful people with hateful attitudes, many societal biases owe their emergence and perpetuation to more basic cognitive tendencies possessed by us all.
MOST PEOPLE HAVE HEARD of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief, the stepwise process that we supposedly go through when coping with loss. You know, Denial → Anger → Bargaining → Book Deal → Oprah. Or something like that.
In my experience, there’s also a fairly predictable progression to how people react to completing a test like the IAT. As with the grief model, first comes denial—in this case, the refusal to believe that our change in word categorization speed has anything to do with race. Again, though, other potential explanations for why list three takes most respondents so much longer than list two just don’t cut it in the end.
Eventually, then, many of us turn to a response of “so what?” As in, OK, maybe race affects word categorization, but so what? My difficulty pairing “pleasant” with “black” doesn’t reflect my personal beliefs about race but simply indicates an awareness of the biases that are out there in society, the argument goes. After all, many of us have grown up in cultures in which the good guys wear white and the bad guys wear black. Where white cake is angel’s food and black cake—though far more delicious than its pale counterpart—is the province of the devil. The different mental associations conjured by social categories like white and black don’t influence how we actually behave, right?
Ah, but they do. At the very least, you now know that such thoughts impact slapping speed, a conclusion that I don’t offer as a trivial or facetious one. You can’t dismiss the IAT as a mere cognitive parlor trick: the sentiment captured by the test impacts real behavior. And beyond simple reaction time and word categorization, our expectations about social groups shape more important judgments and behaviors as well.
Consider employment. Generally speaking, research confirms that a job applicant’s race influences how recruiters evaluate her, even on paper. Just a few years ago, economists at the University of Chicago and Harvard created and sent out close to five thousand résumés in response to employment ads in the areas of sales, customer service, and administrative support.13 Using birth records, they gave half of the résumés a white-sounding name and the other half a black-sounding name. The names they chose should look familiar to you: the title of their published paper was “Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?”
The economists set up separate voice mail boxes for their white and black fake applicants, and found that résumés with white names averaged a callback for every ten submissions. It took black applicants an average of fifteen résumés to get a call. You might think that sounds like a small difference, but try telling that to the job seeker who has to be 50 percent more proactive to get up to the same level of lukewarm response as everyone else. The researchers found that having a “white” name yielded just as many callbacks as listing an additional eight years of experience on the résumé.
How to account for this disparity? Again, the WYSIWYG response would be that human resources departments across the United States are full of hateful and intolerant people. But ponder the situation more carefully. Anyone who’s ever evaluated résumés can tell you that they all start to look pretty similar pretty quickly—it’s a subjective process in which even the most superficial of differentiating characteristics makes a big difference. Like formatting and font. Word choice. Spelling errors. Or even a name.
In fact, when you think about it, the résumé study is basically the IAT in action. It’s the same setup: individuals with too little time to make too many evaluations about too many people. Instead of research respondents bombarded with word lists, it’s managers bombarded with résumés. Under such circumstances—successive judgments made with little opportunity to scrutinize each one—our preexisting default associations make a big difference. Your thighs can already attest to that.
Alas, ev
en when we have time to weigh our decisions, we’re still not immune to category-based sentiment and expectation. Sticking to the realm of employment, disparities by race aren’t limited to the paper trail of résumé evaluation. Face-to-face interviewing also looks very different depending on the color of the faces involved.
Consider a study from Princeton in which white participants were asked to interview a series of high school students in order to identify the strongest candidate for an academic team competition. 14 Each of the interviewers was given a list of fifteen questions to use to assess two candidates, one white and one black. The order of the two interviews was determined at random. And unbeknownst to the interviewers, they were actually the ones being observed the whole time, as members of the research team assessed their verbal and nonverbal performance from behind a one-way mirror.
The differences in how these interviewers interacted with the white and black applicants were readily apparent. They spent a longer time with white candidates—33 percent longer, to be precise. They sat several inches closer to white applicants, and even leaned in more during the course of the interview. Interviewers also made fewer speech errors when talking with the white applicant, as they were noticeably less likely to repeat themselves, hesitate, or stutter than they were when talking to the black applicant.
There was nothing in the profile of these interviewers to suggest that they were hateful individuals with intolerant attitudes. These were ordinary people. But their behavior changed enough between sessions to create very different experiences for white and black candidates. Perhaps they had lower expectations for the black applicants. Or maybe they were a tad more nervous during the interracial conversations. One thing’s for sure, though: the changes in interviewer demeanor didn’t result from differences in how the candidates themselves approached the interview. We know this because the “applicants” were actually students trained by the researchers to act in a uniform, rehearsed manner, right down to the angle at which they faced the interviewer and how much eye contact they maintained.
