Yoga

Cambridge, MA (Mar 3, 2004)

Mayli, doing yoga in our house. That was last spring, before we started to do yoga with Jesse, so she may be doing something wrong in her pose. But don’t worry, she is much better now!

Today Mayli told me of an interesting research being done in Harvard. It is called the Implicit Bias Project. The tests are aimed to measure the hidden biases that may be present in all of us (even if we consciously reject them), by doing tests that you can also take online. An example of hidden bias is the “gender - science” bias, which often reveals an unconscious bias that male are better at science and female at art. Other diffuse biases are the “race” bias, “sexual identity” bias, and so on. The surprising fact is that even people that think of themselves as unbiased may still have grown up with the bias in them. People are unbiased at birth, but can acquire hidden biases due to the environment in which they live, even if they consciously reject them. Take some of the tests online, they are quite interesting. Some people say that they could “feel” hidden biases of which they were unaware as they were taking the test. This is in fact good in itself, as becoming aware of an hidden bias can prompt one to act for correcting it. For a detailed description of the research, and a “hidden bias tutorial” read this article at the site tolerance.org.