Why aren’t we Saving the Planet: A Psycholotist’s Perspective (8 page)

Implicit social cognition overlaps with several concepts that were significant in works of previous generations of psychologists. Psychoanalytic theory’s concept of cathexis contained some of the sense of implicit attitude, and its concept of ego defense similarly captured at least part of the present notion of implicit self-esteem … At a time when the influence of psychoanalytic theory in academic psychology was declining, its conceptions of unconscious phenomena that related to implicit social cognition were being imported into behaviour theory (Dollard and Miller 1950; Doob 1947; Osgood 1957). The New Look in Perception of the 1950s focused on several phenomena that are interpretable as implicit social cognition. The developing Cognitive approach to these phenomena can be seen in Bruner’s (1957) introduction to the concept of perceptual readiness. (Greenwald and Banaji 1995:20)

But the punch line came next. Here after all was the man with all the chutzpah to correct the grammar of a fortune cookie in public.

Importantly, the psychoanalytic, behaviourist, and cognitive treatments just mentioned all lacked an essential ingredient, that is, they lacked reliable laboratory models of their focal phenomena that could support efficient testing and development of theory. The missing ingredient is now available. (Greenwald and Banaji 1995:20)

The missing ingredient was introduced in 1998 in an article published in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
and coauthored with Debbie McGhee and Jordan Schwartz. Greenwald introduced the new method with a thought experiment. Imagine being shown a series of male and female faces and having to respond rapidly by saying ‘hello’ to the male face and ‘goodbye’ to the female face. Then you are shown a series of names and this time you say ‘hello’ to the male name and ‘goodbye’ to the female name.

In that experiment subjects gave a response on a computer keyboard with the index finger of the right hand to words that named pleasant things and to names of flowers. With the left hand they were to respond to another two categories – words that named unpleasant things and insect names. This was a very easy task. Then we made one minor change: We switched hands for the flower and insect names. Now subjects had to give the same response to pleasant words and insect names and a different response to unpleasant words and flower names. Immediately the task became hugely difficult. The slowing on a response-by-response basis was on the order of 300 milliseconds, which was a magnitude of impact nobody could have expected. We certainly did not expect it.

I was the first subject in the experiment. When I experienced the slowing I found to my surprise that I could not overcome it – repeating the task did not make
me faster. If I tried to go faster, I just started making errors when I was trying to give the same response to flower names and unpleasant words. This was a mind-opener.

The very first paper reporting the Implicit Association Test (IAT) provided psychologists with a much sought-after method to measure unconscious, implicit attitudes; but perhaps even more than that, it uncovered something that was extremely unsettling for Greenwald and colleagues, and no doubt for anyone who read the paper. In today’s society we like to think that race is no longer a significant issue: I am writing this particular paragraph in the same week that America has just elected its first Black president; surely the times of racial prejudice and stereotype are far behind us all in the West. The IAT revealed that this is not necessarily the case. The basic premise behind the IAT is that when categorising items into two sets of paired concepts, if the paired concepts are strongly associated, then participants should be able to categorise items faster into these category concepts. The IAT revealed that people were consistently faster at categorising Black and White names and pleasant and unpleasant words when the target categories were grouped ‘White’/‘pleasant’ and ‘Black’/‘unpleasant’ than when they were grouped ‘White’/‘unpleasant’ and ‘Black’/ ‘pleasant’, suggesting that the former concepts are strongly associated. When compared to explicit measures, the majority of White college students who took part in the study reported that they had no racial preference between White and Black, with some even saying they had a preference for Black. However, the IAT revealed that only one of these students showed a preference for Black consistent with their stated explicit attitudes. The remaining participants all showed a White preference, suggesting that White had positive associations, whereas Black had negative associations. As such, the IAT was able to successfully reveal underlying implicit attitudes that firstly cannot be masked by social desirability concerns and secondly a person may be totally unaware of holding.

In the first web-based experiment of its kind, Project
Implicit measured implicit attitudes towards a range of social groups, including implicit measures of racial attitudes. The project collated a staggering 600,000 tests between October 1998 and December 2000, allowing for replication of the race IAT on an enormous scale using both White and Black participants, with surprising results. It found that White participants tended to
explicitly
endorse a preference for White but
implicitly
they demonstrated an even stronger preference for White names and faces. Black participants, on the other hand, demonstrated a strong
explicit
preference for Black yet remarkably in the IAT, Black participants demonstrated a weak
implicit
preference for
White
names and faces. According to Nosek and colleagues who provided this overview of the IAT results in 2002, the preference shown for White by both White and Black participants is indicative of the American culture in which Black Americans are still often depicted in a negative light. The result is that these negative associations have penetrated into underlying racial attitudes and stereotypes, leading to the creation of automatic evaluations which show an implicit preference for White over Black people. For people who show strong explicit endorsement of racial indifference, the prospect that they may implicitly hold the very attitudes they strongly condemn can be a worrying thought (see also Gladwell 2005). As Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864) wrote in his
Notes from the Underground
:

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind. (1864/1972:55)

However, the research has also suggested that implicit attitudes can be changed. In 2001, Greenwald and Dasgupta found that by exposing participants to pictures of a range of
admired Black Americans such as Martin Luther King and disliked White Americans such as Al Capone, the pro-White effect usually found in the race IAT was substantially reduced, immediately after and even twenty-four hours after the initial exposure. While this was only a temporary modification, there is the possibility that being consistently exposed to exemplars of admired Black people (particularly in the media) could lead to more permanent changes in underlying implicit attitudes.

It just so happened that Laura took the US Election 2008 IAT on Project Implicit in the week after Barack Obama was elected as the next US President. Her results speak for themselves: ‘Your data suggests a strong automatic preference for Black people over White people’ and ‘Your data suggests a strong automatic preference for Barack Obama over John McCain’. This could be an example of the malleability of implicit attitudes operating in the real world; all the positive exposure to Obama during that week, in all probability, had a significant effect on Laura’s implicit attitude. Continued positive exposures to Black role models could lead to more permanent positive associations for Black people in general.

At present there are something like fifteen versions of the IAT online at Project Implicit:

For a measure of unconscious processing, engaging on the IAT is an oddly self-conscious process. I am strangely anxious every time I do it, maybe because I think that this may reveal the uncomfortable truths about me. It is a quick test, almost too quick, and the computerised IAT flashes the results up at you without embarrassment or pause after the completion of each test. You sit nervously by the screen prepared to view your own prejudices and biases, secretly hoping that none will be revealed. Or at worst, hoping to see
just a slight prejudice in your reaction times and error rates, and the expression ‘Your data suggest a moderate preference for X over Y.’ Laura and I both sat all the tests that we thought might help produce a reasonable psychological profile for each of us, one after the other like a set of challenges. The results are given in
Table 5.1
.

Table 5.1
Our own IAT results

We discovered that we were both strongly pro-Obama, which was fine, even a little reassuring (to my conscious mind). I admit that I could never take John McCain’s voice seriously, because of its pitch and general tone and the fact that it sounded like something computer-generated by Disney, and I am sure that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hassan Nasrallah and Muqtada al-Sadr couldn’t take it too seriously either. There was not much threat in that voice and the danger would always have been that the voice would have had to be backed up with what the military, and the new head of Central Command General David Petraeus, were now calling ‘kinetics’ (a term interestingly borrowed from mainstream psychology but now being used to refer to military action rather than action in general). After that I either had no preference (age) or a series of moderate preferences, except when it came to weight, where I had a strong preference for thin people compared to fat people (Laura’s only other strong preference was for light skin over dark skin).

So what does any of this mean? Can I find any evidence from my own life that the implicit attitudes revealed by this test have any substantive or actual behavioural implications? I think that the answer with respect to my one strong prejudice (other than Obama) is probably yes. However, the behaviour is not to do with actual discrimination against fat people but behaviour directed against myself, and not dieting but something else. I have always been a compulsive runner, and compulsive here means
compulsive
, every day without fail, in any country no matter how inconvenient or difficult: through the centre of Tokyo at 5.00 a.m. because the flight back to the UK was to leave early; along a motorway in Sweden in the middle of the night in a snowstorm without a clue as to which direction led back to the centre of Gothenburg; along the Pacific Coast highway in California, just off the plane and suffering from jet lag, with no pavement for protection and with wide gaudy red and yellow trucks almost brushing my legs.

I was a child with a chubby face, never fat, but I am sure that strangers might have thought that I was fat because of my face (‘you had a face like the moon when you were a baby,’
my mother used to say proudly; ‘like the moon,’ and she would smile broadly whenever she said it, as if the memory made her happy) and I like the way that running makes my face look lean. I refuse to go on television unless I have a run first (many television producers will vouch in frustration for this fact).