Hey, how many biases do YOU have?

If someone asked you how deeply you subscribe to biases- based on race, age, sex, sexual orientation, or religion- what would you say? The more open-minded of us usually try to avoid prejudice at all costs, to the extent that we reject our natural tendency to generalize. But even if we don’t accept it, society exposes us to a barrage of prejudiced perspectives on a daily basis.

How many times do you see a black criminal at large on the local news? How often do household cleaning product commercials center on women? How does the teenage character behave on prime-time sitcoms? These small, frequent examples spread a variety of stereotypes, and impact the way we perceive others, even if we feel loath to recognize such bias.

Since most people don’t want to admit upholding prejudice, Harvard psychologists devised the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT tests whether an individual has a preference for certain ideals of gender, race, and other categories, all of which indicate bias. The test works like this:

Below I’ve provided a list of words, and four categories. The IAT asks you to group the words provided into one of two columns. Each column represents two categories- in this case, Male & Career, and Women & Family. Go down the list and tap the appropriate column on your screen for each word as quickly as you can without making any mistakes:
iat1

You probably found that test fairly simple. Now try it with two of the …

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Why do people engage in religious rituals? 

In keeping with suggestion of ethologist Niko Tinbergen, this question is actually four separate “why” questions.  Rather than dealing with the first three Why questions (Phylogeny, Ontogeny or Function), I’d like to consider only the fourth Why, Proximate Cause, with regard to the practice of engaging in religious rituals.  In other words, this post will consider the bodily machinery that leads people to attend religious rituals: the immediate payoff to the human animal.

Many believers would answer this question by introspecting.  Believers have often told me that they go to church because they “experience God.”  [How strange that God doesn’t so often hang out in the home, at cocktail parties or in Las Vegas!].  Many believers thus think that you can simply think about thinking to figure out why they do things.  Numerous and repeated experiments have proven introspection to be woefully unreliable, however.

For instance, in 1977, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson published “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes.” [Psychological Review 84, pp. 231-259.]  They allowed female subjects to examine and select stockings.  The subjects offered lots of reasons for why they selected the stockings they selected (they spoke of such things as texture and sheerness).  Unbeknown to them, the stockings were identical.  This and numerous additional experiments robustly demonstrate that people, though they always gave reasons for their choices, are often mistaken. “Inner workings of important aspects of the mind, including our own …

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