Otherness, Career, and Gender

So in class today, we came up with a long list of some characteristics of the Other.  We said that the Other was: weak, an object, private, mysterious, sentimental, domestic, uncontrolled, ignorant, sensual/seductive, immanent, aesthetic, exotic, and so on.  I'd like to look at Otherness and contemporary views on tolerance--particularly gender-tolerance--based a contemporary psychological study.  I’m reading a book right now called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell (great read; Alan Mikkelson gave me the recommendation) in which the author discusses the Implicit Association Test (IAT).  This test, devised by a group of psychologists in 1998, and is based upon the idea that “we make connections much more quickly between pairs of ideas that are already related in our minds than we do between pairs of ideas that are unfamiliar to us” (77).  The test measures the speed with which you associate terms or pairs of terms.

Try taking the test now.  It takes about ten minutes total.  Granted, half of that is annoying surveys, but let’s face it, you’re on the Internet.

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The test starts out with easy associations; it’ll ask you to put male names on one side and female names another side.  People fly through this.  Then the test gets trickier: it then asks you to associate names with paired options: (male or career) and (female or family).  Most people slow down her.  Finally, the test asks you to associate names with (male or family) and (female or family).  Here’s where things break down: most people slow down remarkably on the third test.

There’s no reason to do so.  There is no inherent connection between females and careers, or incompatibility between males and families.  But that what we tend to think.  On the graph below, the two tall black bars in the middle indicate the tendency of the majority of people, who carried a strong association for men-career and women-family, respectively.

Gladwell, however, comes to the rescue here and breaks down the results.  He asks, “does this mean I’m a [sexist]? … Not exactly.  What is means is that our attitudes toward things like [sex] and gender operate on two levels.  First of all, we have our conscious attitudes.  This is what we choose to believe … but the IAT measures something else.  IT measures our second level of attitude, our [sexual] attitude on an unconscious level – the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we’ve even had time to think … we may not even be aware of them … the disturbing thing about this test is that it shows that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values” (84-5).

Gladwell goes on to say that “the IAT is more than just an abstract measure of attitudes.  It’s also a powerful predictor of how we act in certain kinds of spontaneous decisions” (85).

At this point, we might have cause to think.  “So what,” we might ask.  “Who cares if we have a fleeting, initial bias toward male superiority?  Those feelings are fleeting, and they can be overcome.  Isn’t that the point of an education, reason, and rational thought?”

So we might think.  But Gladwell goes on to frame this experiment in the overall context of this book, and here’s what’s scary: we put a lot more weight into initial, unconscious, and irrational assertions than we tend to think.  That’s why he calls the book “blink,” because we make a great deal of our assessments within the first two seconds.  It’s what you might call gut instinct: we tend to act first and then justify later.  “Beliefs follow actions,” as Cialdini put it. And here’s the thing: if we can’t choose our unconscious attitudes, as Gladwell suggests, then what’s the point of rational argument?  Better yet, what’s the point of feminist theory?  Shouldn’t we be acting to change culture, rather than talking about it?

And by the way, if you think this one is eye-opening, try taking the race test.  A list of general test can also be found here.