Blindspot ended up in my Kindle cue after I took a course in “unconscious bias” at work. The course was incredibly interesting and through a few exercises, I discovered that I one of my unconscious biases was “Tall people have bad balance”. Looking back, I have no idea why I think/thought tall people had bad balance, but it was something applied to every tall person encountered, regardless of whether or not I’d seen them demonstrate poor balance.
Digging deeper, I’m sure we all have biases we can’t explain and Blindspot promised to be a good excavation tool into understanding the hows and whys of those unconscious biases. Based on the expectation that this book would provide the psychology or explanation behind bias, the true content of Blindspot ended up as a bit of a surprise.
First off, it read more like a long article than a book, with the purpose of each chapter to explain the experiments and results the authors achieved when testing subjects for various unconscious biases.
Secondly, I was very wary of what felt like finite conclusions reached by the authors that they were bias this way or that way, or that subjects maintained particular biases when the later chapters demonstrated that positive exposure prior to the experiments significantly impacted the results of the bias.
Leading into this, it was incredibly unsettling to read elsewhere that some employers were actually using experiments similar to those in Blindspot to vet potential employees for hire-ability. For one thing, the experiments only measured a preference or an association of X against Y, without any way to account for “real life conditions” like previous experience, context, location, morals, upbringing, and personal values.
If anything, Blindspot was eye-opening in just how much previous experience can alter the bias, leading me to conclude that while we all have biases, they can change over time and experience. It was also interesting to note that we didn’t have to actually be being attention to the experience of something (like a commercial or magazine ad) for it to imprint in our brains. This led to an internet rabbit hole of research down the path of marketing tactics and how they are used to influence us to feel and buy. While I wasn’t overly bowled over by Blindspot, kudos to them for providing a pathway into interesting conversation topics on social engineering.
Until next time, happy reading friends!
-R
Hops & Lit 