Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

This book is an examination of implicit bias—what it is, where it comes from, how it affects us, and how we can address it.

scientists have been documenting the fact that people are much better at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of other races—a finding dubbed the “other-race effect.”

By the time babies are three months old, their brains react more strongly to faces of their own race than to faces of people unlike them.

race might influence basic brain functioning.

hippocampus, the part of the brain that plays a critical role in spatial memory and navigation.

the fusiform face area, buried deep near the base of the brain, helps us distinguish the familiar from the unfamiliar, friend from foe.

we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.”

People tend to seek out and attend to information that already confirms their beliefs. We find such information more trustworthy and are less critical of it, even when we are presented with credible, seemingly unassailable facts that suggest otherwise. Once we develop theories about how things operate, that framework is hard to dislodge.

Race influenced the judgments of black and white study participants alike.

As we predicted, the stereotypic association between blacks and crime influences not only how we see black people but how we see guns. Stereotypes can determine which objects we see in the world and which we don’t.

The “invisible gorilla” reminds us of how selective our social perception may be.

to claim that we are not fixed but an evolving species responding to the demands of our physical environment.