A recently published book by renowned social psychologists Dr. Mahzrani R. Banaji from Harvard University and Dr. Anthony G. Greenwald from the University of Washington, Blindspots: The Hidden Intentions of Good People, reveals the role of implicit bias, or what they identify as “mindbugs,” in people’s daily lives. Mindbugs are “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions” which hinder us from perceiving objects, people, and situations as they are.¹ Banaji and Greenwald begin to uncover the presence of these mindbugs first through uncanny visual illusions. How is it that two figures which appear incongruous are actually the same shape and size?

Or that two colors that appear different are actually the same shade?

Blindspots reveals that humans are biologically predisposed to certain biases regarding the way we interact with the world. When these adaptive processes first appeared as resources for our ancestors, they helped promote social cohesion among community members while attempting to mitigate both the frequency of impending physical dangers and their intensity.  “[A]nthropological research suggests that, because humans spent much of their evolutionary history in small tribes in competition for scarce resources, they have a natural tendency to view out-group members with distrust and hostility.”²

The human mind has an automatic propensity to fill in gaps, as we constantly receive partial information from the world. In addition, “the conscious, reflective processes of the mind accept the illusion unquestioningly.”³ Even when the viewer becomes aware that the seemingly variant figures are actually identical, Banaji and Greenwald demonstrate that this information does not change how the viewer perceives the figures—they still remain visually distinct from each other. By using visual illusions as a point of entry into the phenomena of implicit bias, various biases constantly occurring in our minds are uncovered. These social biases are critically relevant to the topic of interreligious work.

So, with what implicit biases should we be aware? While they cannot all be exhaustively unpacked here, I point to a recurring bias which bears significant consequences for our ability to encounter a religiously different other, from mundane daily interactions to newsworthy and even unfortunately tragic events. People come to conclusions about another person’s character, personality, and values largely based on external factors. When we are constantly required to make decisions about people under consistently less than perfect circumstances, “we rely on the social group to which the person belongs as the basis for predicting success.”⁴ With frightening speed and automaticity, we arrive at conclusions regarding a person’s trustworthiness, intelligence, and temperament based on external looks and their social group membership. In other words, we don’t see people as individuals but as representatives of categories to which we think they belong on account of implicit bias as an evolutionary product. We justify people’s behaviors according to the categories we place them in, such as gender, religion, sexuality, or physical attractiveness. Implicit biases fundamentally disclose the limits of reasoning and rational capacities.

For example, “a face whose features are similar to our own may evoke a feeling of trust when we are deciding to hire a job applicant or choosing a candidate to vote for.”⁵ Feelings of trust or mistrust toward a person, because of what we believe they represent, emerge in part out of implicit biases; gaps in the partial information we receive are filled in with conclusions gleaned not from actually having relationship with the person. Recognizing how implicit biases affect how we live and engage with people matters more now than ever, especially since we live in an increasingly globalized world. Surely, we need the voices of leaders from religious, academic, and political spheres to aid us in this journey toward building bridges and relationships in interreligious terms. Simultaneously, doing this work requires urgent attention to biological obstacles that need surmounting. Along with moving rhetoric is a biological terrain that must be first recognized before it can be traversed.

The many forces that comprise globalization continue to transform our contexts. The stakes are much higher when implicit biases are unrecognizable and unidentifiable hurdles to cooperation and mutual embrace between various communities. To this issue, I propose that religious traditions can potentially function as a well-spring of resources, among many, from which religious adherents can draw in order to evaluate critically implicit biases. The identification and evaluation of these unspoken biases are of primary importance to realize greater cooperation and trust between different religious communities and religious traditions.

(To be continued…)

1. Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, “Mind Bugs,” in Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People (New York, NY: Delacorte Press, 2013), 17.
2. Yudkin, D., Rothmund, T., Twardawski, M., Thalla, N., & van Bavel, D. (2016). Reflexive intergroup bias in third-party punishment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000190
3. Banaji and Greenwald, 17.
4. Banaji and Greenwald, 27.
5. Banaji and Greenwald, 26.