Sorting Bias

HAND THE SUBJECT a deck of cards. Ask her to sort them into suits, red together and black together. Then ask her to resort, hearts and spades together, clubs and diamonds. This time, she slows down, just a wee bit. Mixing colors is a tad harder, takes more thought, more effort, more time. Now, substitute a stack of photos of white men and a stack of photos of black men for the cards. make a stack of cards with words on them, one stack with positive words like "love" "peace" "fun" and "beauty". Form a stack of bad word cards: "kill", "dirt", "bad", "crap". You know where I'm going with this by now. She'll sort and stack good words with white people faster, just a bit faster, but faster, than she will combing black faces with good words. This happens every time, in the Harvard psychology lab, and everywhere else. its been repeated too many times to ignore the pattern, which is how science works. In video games, white guys shoot the black guys faster than they shoot the honkies. This experiment has been conducted tens of thousand of times, just for good measure. It happens every time.its just a game, you say, and means nothing in the real world. lay people are good at making such objections, but so are trained scientists. They control for all factors, and it turns out that the cards games do indeed predict human behavior in the real world. We are, all of us, trained and conditioned by our traditionally racist country's culture to be racists, even those who don't think of themselves as racists. Actually, the very fact of dividing the human race into a few distinct colors "racist" in a sense. In reality, skin color is a vast continuum; we all have a unique skin color, even if we seem to be the same, there are more colors in the rainbow than we can conceive of. Just like we are trained to like certain foods and to wear certain clothing and hair style, so we are trained to harbor certain attitudes about other people, about everything. fortunate are those who escape their training, who rebel against social indoctrination, and dress however in hell they want.