My Memory Did It: Is Your Memory to Blame for Your Biases?
By Sussana Machinga
Imagine walking to your house from the nearest gas station and seeing two black men walking towards you. You walk to the other side of the road without thinking; you just do it. This is something I am guilty of. I was biased towards those two black males without even being aware of it and how it affected my walking behavior. I was probably afraid, in one way or another, that they were dangerous.
Where does this bias come from? Can we blame our memory for it? Well, you partly can.
There is a phenomenon that explains how your semantic memory works called spreading activation (Anderson, 1983). Semantic memory refers to general world knowledge (the kind of stuff you are quizzed about on Jeopardy) that we have accumulated throughout our lives. Spreading activation is a brain process in which neurons activate other related neurons leading to information (thoughts) becoming available in your short-term memory. Let me break it down for you. The spreading activation model is the idea that once you see or hear something, you organize your knowledge based on accumulated information from your past and personal experiences. Cognitive Psychologists have diagramed knowledge activation through these models that look like (Fig 1).
Looking at the figure, the concept “black man” is at the center of the model. If you are asked to think of a black man, spreading activation would occur as this concept leads to activation of related ideas in your memory. Note, this occurs outside of our conscious awareness. Your actual experiences and understanding of black males leads to what we call implicit bias. Depending on your personal experience, that bias can be more positive or negative. Many have been made aware of implicit bias through something called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The test originated as a research experiment. Participants taking the IAT to detect race bias sorted words more quickly when negative words were paired with the concept of being black, compared to a when the association of blackness was paired with positive words. For a more complete explanation, you can read IAT test creator Mahzarin Banaji’s book, Blindspot.
How is memory responsible for bias? When I encountered the black men described above, my past related interactions or ideas became activated in memory. There are many potential influencers to how I have been exposed to people.
Media is one of the main influencers. The things that we see, hear and watch on all types of media platforms from television to pod casts, to newspapers, to Facebook, vastly change the way we think about things. My fear of black men could have come from the abundance of tv shows and movies wrongly portraying these people as criminals, gang members, and drug dealers. My own background and culture has vastly shaped how I think and behave in situations. Growing up in an African culture I was always specifically discouraged from associating with black men. My family focused on painting a negative picture of black men as having loose morals, a lack of manners, and sagging pants. All these things contributed to how I reacted when I was faced with two innocent black men who were just minding their own business and going their own way.
The general knowledge that we attain and store in our long-term memory plays a huge role in forming our biases. These biases are what form common misconceptions. Africans are poor. All Asians are extra smart. Blacks like watermelon, fried chicken, hot sauce and corn bread. White people have no culture. These are all misconceptions. As you can see, they are all false. Not all Africans are poor and not all Asians are extra smart.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
We have to make the decision to go out and learn knew things and experience new things with people who we may not typically interact with. Try a food you have not tried before, talk to someone of a different nationality or who has a different culture than yours. Learn a new dance. Question everything. Do the research and do not just believe everything you hear or watch. By doing this, you are filling your memory with a variety of knowledge that will help you react a little different than you would have yesterday. Maybe instead of running away from black men, you will smile at them and say hi as you pass by. Changing what you store in your memory or better yet expanding on what you store in your memory can be the key to getting rid of a lot of biases you might have.
References
Anderson, J. R. (1983). A spreading activation theory of memory. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 22(3), 261-295. http://act-r.psy.cmu.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/66SATh.JRA.JVL.1983.pdf
Banaji, Mahzarin R. (2013). Blindspot : Hidden Biases of Good People. New York : Delacorte Press.
Project Implicit. Harvard University. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html
Wikipedia contributors. List of common misconceptions. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (2020). https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_common_misconceptions&oldid=961844053