Sway

March 16, 2020
In a well-researched and cogent work, behavioral scientist Agarwal reveals the many ways implicit or unconscious bias influences one’s decisions, worldview, and interactions with others. Elucidating recent neuroscience developments, she shows unconscious bias isn’t as cognitively hardwired as previously believed, and is shaped throughout a lifetime by society, upbringing, and environment. Having been learned, Agarwal writes, biases can be unlearned. She covers a variety of biases, including those based in gender, race, age, accent, and appearance, drawing on evolutionary theory and neurological and psychological studies to illustrate how these prejudices form and how they can be recognized and addressed. Agarwal highlights how pervasive bias is and how it impacts employment, health care, and interactions with police and the courts. She also examines implicit bias in technology, noting that programmers’ biases are reflected in software, in turn reinforcing bias in the real world. Though the bulk of the work is scientific, Agarwal also delves into relevant personal experiences, such as those of growing up in her native India’s patriarchal society, or of encountering racial stereotyping while working and raising children in England. Despite a generally scholarly tone, this relevant work accessibly reveals the insidious nature of stereotyping and does much to encourage readers to examine—and take responsibility for—their own implicit biases.

April 1, 2020
A serious exploration of the neuroscience and psychology of bias. According to Agarwal, bias is simply a neutral term for prejudice, which is usually but not invariably a bad thing. Reaching back into prehistory, she identifies tribalism as a precursor. Early man had no doubt that his tribe was superior to all others, and this had a Darwinian survival value because it was undoubtedly safer to assume a stranger was dangerous than not. The author divides biases into conscious and unconscious but emphasizes the second, which seems innate and is thus often called "instinct." However, writes Agarwal, "when it comes to making important decisions about people or situations, we cannot always rely on instinct. Darwin defined instinct as independent of experience, but more recent research...has shown that it is continually being honed. It is fluid and malleable." Indeed, many biases are formed throughout life. By age 6 or 7, humans begin stereotyping according to race and gender. The author turns up a genetic disorder, Williams Syndrome, that produces children who are extremely friendly because they lack a fear of strangers; a study showed that they were also much less biased about racial issues. In the first half of the book, Agarwal reviews studies on bias and the debates over their findings; these sections will be a tough slog for general readers. Matters improve when the author, a British citizen born in India and no stranger to gender and racial bias, describes her own experiences as well as the specific biases of gender, race, beauty and age, and speech, along with many dismal statistics--e.g., 14% of whites have been wrongly accused of shoplifting compared with 38% of ethnic minorities. Although Agarwal has been a TED speaker, her writing lacks a similar charismatic appeal, but 400 pages of academic prose, dense with footnotes, reveal important insights. Solid, definitely-not-dumbed-down popular science.

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