Advance Reader’s Copy — Not for Sale BLINDSPOT: HIDDEN BIASES OF GOOD PEOPLE Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald Delacorte Press This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book. Tentative On-Sale Date: February 12, 2013 Tentative Publication Month: February 2013 Tentative Print Price: $27.00 Tentative eBook Price: $13.99 Please note that books will not be available in stores until the above on-sale date. All reviews should be scheduled to run after that date. Publicity Contact:
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This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book. Copyright © 2013 by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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[Permissions acknowledgments to come.] ISBN: 978-0-553-80464-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-440-42329-4 www.bantamdell.com Book design by Susan Turner
For Bhaskar and Jean Revealers of blindspots
The sailor cannot see the North —but knows the Needle can— EMILY DICKINSON, in a letter to a mentor, T. W. Higginson, seeking an honest evaluation of her talent (1862)
CONTENTS Cover eBook Information Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Epigraph Preface 1 Mindbugs 2 Shades of Truth 3 Into the Blindspot 4 “Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That!” 5 Homo Categoricus 6 The Stealth of Stereotypes 7 Us and Them 8 Outsmarting the Machine Appendix 1 Are Americans Racist?
Appendix 2 Race, Disadvantage, and Discrimination Acknowledgments Notes References About the Authors
PREFACE LIKE
ALL VERTEBRATES, YOU HAVE A BLIND SPOT IN EACH EYE.
THIS is a small
region where the optic nerve attaches to the retina. Because there are no light-sensitive cells in this region, light reaching your blind spot (scotoma) has no path to visual areas of your brain. Nevertheless, you can “see” your own blind spot by looking at the plus sign in the middle of the rectangle below with just one eye open. (You may need to take your glasses off.) Starting with the page about a foot in front of your nose, bring it closer while focusing on the plus sign. One of the black discs (the one on the same side as your open eye) will disappear at some point when the page is about six inches away, and will reappear as you bring the page closer still. The moment of disappearance tells you when light from that disc is falling on your open eye’s blind spot. Here’s a bonus: If you shift your open eye to look at the still-visible disc on the other side, the plus sign will disappear! You may have also noticed a strange occurrence at the spot where the disc lies. When the disc disappeared, it left no blank spot in the grid background. Your brain did something interesting—it filled in the scotoma with something that made sense, a continuation of the same grid that you could see everywhere else in the framing rectangle.
A much more dramatic form of blindness occurs in the pathological condition called blindsight, which involves damage to the brain’s visual cortex. Patients with this damage show the striking behavior of accurately reaching for and grasping an object pla