yeah, I know, this post IS pretty long...

So Slate has this interesting article about testing for bias. According to the researchers, it's impossible to lie on the test because it measures unconscious responses, and even a test taker who implicitly tries to throw the test will only marginally change the results because the test rejects time scores that are too low (which would indicate the test subject is thinking about the answers and trying to override unconscious associations).

The results are extremely interesting. The researchers found that

88 percent of the white subjects who take her test show some bias against blacks. The majority of all subjects also test anti-gay, anti-elderly, and anti-Arab Muslim. Many people also exhibit bias against their own group: About half of blacks test anti-black; 36 percent of Arab Muslims test anti-Arab Muslim; and 38 percent of gays show an automatic preference for heterosexuals.

The Slate article focuses on race bias, but if you follow the link to the test site itself, there are many more categories (14 in all) including sexuality, weight, gender-career, and even weapons bias. So I got curious and took a couple.

I found my results interesting:
You have completed the Gender-Science IAT.

Your data suggest little or no association between Female and Male with Science and Liberal Arts.

Your result, reported above, is already corrected for the order in which you took the parts of the IAT. The interpretation shown above is described as 'automatic association between Science and Male' if you responded faster when Science and Male words were classified with the same key as opposed to Liberal Arts and Male items. It is marked 'automatic association between Liberal Arts and Male' if you were faster when giving the same response to Liberal Arts and Male items. Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic preference may be described as 'slight', 'moderate', 'strong', or 'little to no preference'.

You have completed the Race-Weapons IAT.

Your data suggest a moderate association of African American with Harmless Objects and European American with Weapons compared to European American with Harmless Objects and African American with Weapons.

Your result, reported above, is already corrected for the order in which you took the parts of the IAT. Racial profiling as a term, has been introduced in recent years to capture an old practice among law enforcement agents, especially police and immigration and customs officials: the selective stopping, searching, and interrogating of individuals who hold membership in groups that are believed to be more likely to commit particular crimes. In a sense, when psychologists study the nature of stereotypes, they are studying exactly this process in general terms: the degree to which knowledge about a group influences judgments of individual members of the group.

The various mental abilities that underlie the function of identifying that x is a member of category X, and remembering what Category X does and represents are vital – the ability to perceive and categorize, to learn and remember are essential features of human intelligence. But these very same processes so fundamental to our daily mental functioning can be implicated in the denial of equally fundamental rights to people who are innocent bearers of markers of their social group. The many instances of people who are wrongly suspected and accused is too great to mention. We point to only one case that has come to represent the sad consequences of well-intentioned profiling. Police officers in New York, shot and killed a citizen, Amadou Diallo, who they believed was reaching for a weapon. In fact, Amadou Diallo, was reaching for his wallet to provide identification to the police officers.

Our position, perhaps an unpopular one, is that the unconscious roots of profiling lie in every mind. In the Race-Weapons test you completed, we provide the occasion for recognizing the automatic association between racial groups and weapons relative to harmless objects. The result of this test probably underestimates the true extent of this association. In order to give every benefit to obtaining the alternative association (African American and harmless objects), we explicitly included examples of weapons that are not associated with that group (e.g., bayonets, swords, bombs, axes). When we demonstrate the bias nevertheless, we are revealing the strong association between African Americans and harmful weapons.

Racial profiling is first and foremost a mental act that can, given a supportive environment, result in errors that were unintended by those who perform them. The protections against such errors, given its automatic nature, will need to be more serious than requesting individual citizens and especially agents of the state to "just say no" to profiling

The second one I was really surprised by! The first - between gender and science - didn't surprise me. I figure that since I did science and I have a daughter interested in a science-based career as well as a husband in the sciences, that I wouldn't have any specific gendered associations with one or the other.

But the second one, the one where I associate (slightly) European Americans with weapons is interesting, since it seems to go against representations of bias in the media. The only thing I can figure is that because they used some images of weapons that traditionally aren't associated with African Americans (a canon, bayonetted rifle, hand grenade, mace) that I was drawing upon my enjoyment of medieval stories and movies rather than MTV in making my associations. I guess if I didn't like movies about chicks with swords, I might have scored differently!

All this thinking and reading about bias got me thinking about something that happened yesterday. (It might also be my opportunity to redeem myself, at least slightly, for that rambling post last week)

I went to lunch with several other grad students and a candidate for a Chair that our department is trying to fill. The candidate was curious about us and asked what we were doing, which meant I had to give a pithy one-sentence-in-ten-seconds kind of description of my potential dissertation. Not having thought through what it would sound like to other people, I described it as 'cyborgs and clones' - which doesn't really do it justice. As a shorthand in my own thinking, it works, because I know what I want to talk about, but to others it just sounds... what's the word for it?... oh, yeah, "crazy".

Certainly when I begin to think about who I will work with, it does sound crazy, but I'm starting to see some possibilities that I wasn't seeing last week when I rambled depressively about not knowing how I could pull this off.

If I had to answer that question now, I would say something like 'effects of late twentieth century technological developments on embodied identity in science fiction' which would at least get a bit closer (and sounds a bit more valid as a field of study).

Embodiment has long been a staple of literary criticism and discussions of gender, race, or disability in literature and culture inevitably at some point draw attention to the way our bodies are markers for these categories. This is what bias draws upon as well - associations of particular characteristics with particular visual images. When it is applied to people, it is often the visual image of the body that is half of the equation. Our bodies go a long way toward creating our identity and the identity other people ascribe to us. Some postcolonial theorists point to the way the body is used as a site on which categories of 'otherness' are imposed (as do feminists and anti-racism activists etc).

Cyborgs and clones have different bodies than we like to imagine humans as having - cyborg bodies are often marked by intrusions of machines
- think Star Trek borgs, which of course are very creepy, but that's the point, it's all about the anxiety produced by the "close coupling" of machines with our flesh - but can also have their marks of difference hidden - think Keanu Reeves character in Johnny Mnemonic (based on the short story written by the creator of cyberpunk, William Gibson who also wrote the screenplay).

Clones are more like Johnny Mnemonic in that the technology they incorporate - genetic engineering - isn't always visible. To put it simply (too simply perhaps), clones are threatening because they look like us, just like fair skinned African Americans who were able to "pass" for white even though their genetic heritage was different.

Both clones and cyborgs then represent figures onto which we can project our fears about the destruction of the body, the question of what makes a human a human, about fears of contamination, and fears of categorization. This is the kind of thing I want to work on.

I know my description here is very loose, and doesn't do justice to the complexities of some of the issues I've only briefly mentioned, but it's the kind of project I could see myself working on for at least two years, and the kind of project that I'd like to showcase when shopping myself around when it comes time to hit the job market. I haven't decided yet if I want to pigeonhole myself into the 'literature and science' field, but there certainly is plenty of overlap between what I'm envisioning and the kinds of projects that fall within its scope.

You can wake up now.