Carla Kaplan's boyfriend rushed her to the emergency room at Yale-New Haven Hospital after she accidentally sliced her hand open in the kitchen. She had an important hand, her boyfriend explained in the ER. She was an avid quilter. She was also a young professor in her late twenties at Yale University at the time.
The physician was about to stitch up the gash in her hand when a student volunteer called out, "Professor Kaplan! What are you doing here?"
With those words, the fate of her hand changed entirely. It created an impetus to do the best possible thing, explained her friend and then-colleague Mahzarin Banaji, PhD, as she recounted her friend's story to a full house at the annual Association of American Medical Colleges meeting in Chicago earlier this month. Dr. Banaji is now a professor of social ethics at Harvard University and recently co-authored a book called Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Her work examines how unconscious biases affect social behaviors.
"You do not harm people in your groups," Dr. Banaji said. "You help people in your groups a little more, and that is modern discrimination."
The emergency room physician seemed surprised and Dr. Kaplan was quickly taken to the surgery department. Her hand was operated on for four hours and she still doesn't have full feeling in it, according to Dr. Banaji.
When people think about others they perceive to be similar to them, they use a different part of their brain than they use when they think about people who they perceive to be different, Dr. Banaji said. "We have no clue we are doing it."
She pointed to the thousands of studies that tested individual biases. Across all affinity groups tested — gender, socioeconomic status, race — treatment is not equal, according to Dr. Banaji.
These hidden biases, called implicit social cognition, surface in the most unexpected ways. Take hurricane names for example. Female-named hurricanes statistically take more lives than male-named hurricanes. Yet storms are given male and female names alternately. Why does this occur?
We are not as scared of female-named hurricanes, so we do not take the proper precautions, Dr. Banaji explained. Hurricane Bruce will get more people to take action than a hurricane named Wilma. Once people know this, they can protect themselves, Dr. Banaji said.
Implicit social cognition can have significant implications in the world of medicine, as the story of Dr. Kaplan's hand proves. When admissions officers look at resumes, both male and female officers tend to choose male applicants over female applicants, according to Dr. Banaji. Talented doctors who have no intentional race bias are still able to associate white with good and black with bad in psychological tests, she said. The key is to bring hidden biases into consciousness in order to reduce adverse impact.
"Our job is not just to change our minds, but to make sure our minds do not change our behavior."
Learn more about implicit social cognition at implicit.harvard.edu.
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