Sway

 Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias - Pragya Agarwal

Intro

- 13th c french, biais - at an angle or crosswise

- english 16th c, oblique or slanting line, bowling balls that were weighted on one side

Chp 1 Gut Instinct

- Antoine Bechara, USC, studying people w/ brain damage not able to use intuitions, decision making very difficult and time consuming

- satisficing

- Herbert Simon: scissors metaphor: one blade task environment and other blade computation capabilities (context and cognition)

- inattentional blindness - lack of attention b/c focused on something else

- cognitive illusion - unconscious inferences

- conformity: informational, normative, internalized

- confirmation bias

- default bias

- association and affiliation, category membership, in-group/out-group

Chp 2 - dawn of time

- affordances - what the environment offers the individual

- out-group bias stronger than in-group favoritism

- more reliance on cognitive shortcuts when uncertain

- smoke alarm analogy

- three theories of how implicit biases formed

    - heuristics, shortcuts, kahneman and tversky

    - error management theory (haselton and buss), judgments about opportunities and threats consistently deviate toward extreme response; in case of threat, false negative highly costly, while false positive not that costly

        - propensity for false negatives may be root

    - artefact theory, biases are product of applying wrong strategy in wrong context, these are artefacts of hunter-gatherer days, etc

- easier to process hierarchical relationships more fluently than egalitarian

- implicit egotism theory - favor objects that they associate with self

- name-letter effect (Jozef Nuttin) - tendency to like appearance of first letter in name

- normative determinism, aptronym, name-is-fitting bias

Chp 3 - all in your head

- us vs them

-study of kids with Williams Syndrome (tend to be friendly and have less fear of others

-damaged amygdala, less likely to do risk assessments, more likely to trust and approach

-parochial altruism - more likely to help ingroup

-different brain patters when reacting to ingroup member in pain vs outgroup member

-more regret from negative result of non-default actions as opposed to routine actions

-default bias

-negativity bias - react more strongly and remember negative info

    -negative info processed more quickly

-truth bias - more likely to believe statements as truthful compared to actual

-people are better at recognising own race faces and own-gender faces

-halo effect and horn effect

-different process for people (global) vs object (local) recognition; women more often perceived as objects

    -objectification theory

-stereotype threat - fear of being stereotyped, impairs performance, increased anxiety, etc

-social fear not necessary for gender stereotypes but impt for racial stereotypes

-frequent contact, exposure may decrease salience of racial stereotypes

-accent bias

-affective processing theory - positive bias exhibited toward others who speak with own accent

-partisan bias

-reflective system (2) vs reflexive system (1)

Chp 4 - back in your box

-constantly assigning people membership

-more likely to rely on stereotypes when cognitive load is high

-kernel of truth hypothesis

-stereotype endorsement, activation, categorisation, application

-out-group homogeneity effect - tendency to see out-group members as more alike than in-group

    -even in gender stereotypes, so exposure not necessarily issue

-higher in the hierarchy more likely to stereotype lower

-Patricia Devine, UW-Madison

-more likely to remember info that confirms our stereotypes

-intersectional invisibility model - less likely to recognize people with multiple identities as full members of groups

-"Indianness is a national heritage...everyone owns them...right to use Indians"

-perpetual foreigner

-Bhabha and Chow - stereotypes work through repetition and ambivalence, easily shifting b/w contradictory meanings

-positive stereotypes - create competition and division between groups

    -create misconception that negative stereotypes have been neutralized

    -tend to lead to stronger negative stereotypes

    -tend to be prescriptive

-Double-bind bias

-stereotype lift - improve performance based on denigration of out-group

-stereotype boost - improved performance based on activation of positive stereotypes

-resume of a mother rated less competent than father

-self-objectification theory - women and girls internalize sexual objectificationa

Chp 5 - Bobbsey Twins

-confirmation bias

-Schelling segregation model, or tipping model

    - small preferences lead to large effects (segregation)

-disconfirmation bias (denigrating arguments counter to our own)

-social contagion theory

-more likely to act on biases and prejudices when surrounded by others with same

-social media fostering homophilic environments / echo chamber

-filter bubble (Pariser)

-availability cascade

-position bias (pay more attention to things at beginning and end)

-frequency bias (Baader-Meinhof phenomenon)

-association of nationality and social category membership

-threat and fear: more deference to authority, aggression toward out-group, more rigid hierarchical view of world

-political parties more identity than policy

-partisan political bias based on morality, more socially acceptable to be biased/prejudiced, etc.

-representation and role-models

Chp 6 - Hindsight is 20/20

-present bias, procrastination, delayed gratification with a hyperbolic curve

-loss aversion bias

-endowment effect

-choice can be demotivating

-familiarity bias, mere exposure effect

-evaluation of trustworthiness precedes eval of competence

-happpiness makes novelty attractive, saddness prefers familiarity

-accumulated advantage - high status evaluated more positively

    -the Matthew effect (rich get richer, poor get poorer)

    -higher status pitchers getting more calls

    -halo effect

    -hindsight bias, false memory, recall bias

        -believe that it appeared more likely after the fact

        -Roese and Vohs (memory distortion, inevitability, foreseeability): myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) as well as general overconfidence in the certainty of one's judgments')

-hindsight bias greater when outcome negative

-just deserts bias

-conjunction fallacy, also have inherent bias that detailed statements more likely than general ones

-narrative fallacy

Chp 7 - Sugar and Spice

-gender stereotypes formed very early on

-binary bias, cultural or biological, or both?

-solve stereotype inconsistent riddles with more difficulty

-male-firstness bias

-linguistic determinism

-"she" only once in hobbit!

-very minor differences in number of words boys and girls speak

-women speak less than men in mixed groups, interrupted more

    -interruptions associated with dominance

-ambivalent sexism, positive stereotypes

-implicit sexist bias in women as well as men

-more ingroup difference in spacial abilities than between group

-creeping determinism, connecting the dots

-women in e.r. less likely to be taken seriously or given same amount of pain med

-most trials carried out on male mice or human males

Chp 8 - It's not black and white

-2015 guardian study - 102 people of 464 killed by police unarmed, black Americans twice as likely to be unarmed while killed

-black people way more likely to be arrested for drug crimes despite similar rates of use

-study of when to shoot/not shoot in video game setting, different results black vs white priming info

-implicit bias in language of judicial process

-young boys of color perceived as older and less innocent

-black patients receive less pain medication

-minority ethnic maternal mortality rates increased in us 2000-2014

-"snow capping" organization white at top and black at bottom

-Claire Jean Kim - racial triangulation theory

-model minorities

-colourism, especially prominent at intersection of race and gender

-using white actresses to calibrate lighting, color, contrast in media, "Shirley card"

-aversive racism (?)

-imposter syndrome

-those who believe they are not racist or sexist more likely to show implicit bias

-hypodescent rule - designated the status of subordinate group in lineage

Chp 9 - Swipe right for a match

-beauty bias, halo and horn effects

-physical attribute stereotypes

-associate of attractiveness and intelligence

-mate choice theory

-attractiveness a perpetual anchor

-effects of attractiveness on infant gaze/attention

-faces evoke trust

-man can be competent but not likeable, women need to be likeable to be competent

-weight bias, size and shape bias, weight discrimination, more socially acceptable

-internalized negativity, shame, bias

-heightism, verticality and power

-ageism, harder on women

-assign positive or negative evaluation of a cue within seconds

-metaphors we live by

-out-group favoritism (old favoring young)

Chp 10 - I hear you, I say

-besides faces, often react to accents first

-voice like a second signature, linguistic first impressions

-language association with nationality starts earlier than race

-villains with foreign accents

-trust and belief

-standard language ideology, native-speakerism

-associated with education, honesty, intelligence, criminality

-linguistic accommodation, chameleon effect, convergence or divergence

-code-switching, bi- or multi-dialecticism

-gender stereotypes and voice

-names playing into racism, sexism, ethnocentrism (familiarity and name bias)

-ease of name pronuciation

Chp 11 - I'd blush if I could

-technology often being developed by and for white men (tested mostly on whites and men)

    -voice recognition, facial recognition, virtual reality games

    -algorithms, trained on biased data sets, or data sets not representative of population

    -risk assessments, medical assessments

    -default settings for cameras, media equipment, set up for whites or lighter skin tones

    -Joy Buolamwini, Algorithmic Justice League, the "coded gaze"

Chp 12 - Good intentions

-diversity does not equate to inclusivity or equality or equal opportunity

-some criticisms of the IAT

    -hard to show connection between IAT scores and specific behaviors

    -doesn't show test-re-test reliability

    -hard to prove that it's measuring implicit biases

Epilogue - De-biasing 101

-taking more time

-awareness

-criticize behavior rather than person

-reduce essentialist tendencies and stereotypes

-name and gender blind reviewing (technique)