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Special Coverage
The Mental Representation of Race (SYM16) - Special Symposium IV: Seeing Race in Cognitive Psychology
Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University)
Summary by Jonathan Caballero, Digital Content Associate Editor
This recap is part of a special series of session summaries
from the Psychonomic Society's 61st Annual Meeting. To read the rest of the series, click here.
Let's Not Short-Change Ourselves by Keeping Our Scope Narrow In this presentation, Mahzarin Banaji advocated for increasing integrating race in investigations of psychological processes at the Special Symposium "Seeing Race in Cognitive Psychology." In much cognitive psychology research, for tight experimental control, we use simplified stimuli. Banaji argues that a cost to this common approach may mask important features of cognition. She further argues that social stimuli, particularly those that include race, needs to be incorporated into our designs. Here are a few findings that support her argument: Race doesn't just impact higher-order cognition. It also influences low-level perceptual processes. For example, race affects the perception of color and luminance, and those effects are unknown without the use of social stimuli.
Findings from implicit association tests show that race may override objective knowledge. In an experiment of (American) nationality perception, participants associated non-White people with foreign symbols - even when they are known to be American! And participants associated non-American White people with American symbols - even when they are known not to be American! The figure below illustrates these findings, higher latencies imply an increased difficulty to associate the race and symbol pair at the left of the “/” as compared to the race and symbol pair on the right.
Remarkably, implicit biases, aggregated across American communities, are correlated with the community's historical proportion of enslaved people. Despite demographic changes, a more tolerant discourse, and the passage of over 100 years, historical trends still relate to contemporary biases!
Banaji concluded that we should not delegate race to a peripheral area of our investigations. It's not a fad or a way to increase the chances of getting funding. By studying race, we can improve our understanding of cognition.
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